Ode to the Goths

I used to see Goths all around my town – Folkestone. 
I’m talking about the 1980’s here.
Especially in the bus station and Town Centre.
Emos? Goths? There’s a difference, I was told.
That’s “People who express strong emotions”
Looking pale and sickly-their ghostly – white look shaded out by black make-up and dark clothes.
The angst of teenage.years made manifest?
Though huddled in groups still isolated.
Making any parent fear their darkest thoughts are real and the menace of possible self-harming likely.
Drinking with disregard for the future writ large.
Probably like a lot of parental concerns it’s just a overreaction.
Hopefully more a projected fear/shock horror imagining -being stoked up by a sensationalist media
than a reality.
Punks the Establishment just wanted to lock up
or send to a ‘bootcamp’.
Goths /Emo’s to Social Services or the local Mental Health team.
To save them from the dark carrion of their own feelings of hopelessness and despair.
The future seen through a kaleidoscope of black.
The ultimate dark glass.
Where did they all go? 
Just evaporated?
They got coloured in?
Head hunted by the local small businesses? 
Superstores?
Are they running craft shops now?
From the newspapers we learn there is a revival!?!
I wouldn’t go as far as saying ‘Renaissance’.
No, you wouldn’t go that far.
The names here in the newspaper we recognise.
The journalist, writers and music critics.
The people who lived that life now back from the ‘frontline’.
Their life of escape as a Goth is now over.
Do they have Goth weekends at Butlins? 
Along with ‘Rock and Roll’ and ‘Elvis’.
Are there graveyard reunions? 
Maybe hope and positivity triumphed, and the ‘unkindness’ of ravens metamorphosed mid- flight 
into birds of paradise listening to Bach’s ‘Ode to Joy’? Adele rather than the anthems of the ‘sex criminal’ Marilyn Manson now rattling handcuffs and chains.
Or the plaintive cry of ‘it’s just not fair’.
It’s a ‘cruel world’ they say.
The whining of the Cure as they sing ‘Killing an Arab’.
Who knows? Who cares? As dusk falls on the town.
Goths like a sort of distant relative (think cousin/nephew), who you know has had ‘problems’ now discussed sotto voce.
Having not been heard about lately you hope for the best but fear the worst.
I’m sure there is a story to tell here.
Goths played their part in the evolution of culture subcultures-musically and existentially.
Chroniclers of an age, pallbearers for a genre.
But my bus station Goths have been washed away by coastal rain and sleet. 
They were moved on by Council Redevelopment + ‘Ghostbuster Cops’ doing their job of clearing the streets of juvenile delinquents?
No park benches or dark staircases going nowhere to sit and hide.
Where the Schopenhauerian misery can be washed down with White Lightening to the tune of the fatalistic drum and bass lines.
Gotterdammerung dirges sound as familiar ghosts slip out of bus shelters into the night slick with rain.
Where are you my ‘unkindness’ of lost souls? 
May you be happy whatever you are doing.
Wherever you are now.
Perhaps chasing Ravens up the steps to the Abbey at
Whitby* (I learn)
Or at home feet-up watching TV with your partner and the kids.
Eating a takeaway 
Who knows I think as I dim the gas-light at bedtime.

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Malcolm Paul

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