Were tougher
than me,
they had to be.
Most could shut
a pub to silence.
All could talk
‘til the Monopoly
boot came home.
The blue of
Levi jackets
and jeans
echoed
india ink
tattoos.
Their eyes
the same green
as the liquor
gracing their
double double.
On Saturday night
I heard ‘Ali Baba’
and I wanted
my dream last
night last night.
Her monkey boots
scraping my shin,
the stick
of cinema carpet
as the adverts
finish
and the action begins.
Tim Wells
Creases Like Knives 
Nice one.
I was alerted to this site and this post by a friend. I was about 13 in 1970, I lived in London and really got into skinhead fashion just as it was going out here – it was cool, Trevira suits, tights, clumpy shoes and so on. Anyhow, fast forward to 2009 when I’m an established poet and author; the poetry magazine Mslexia was looking for poetry on the subject of ‘skin’, so In wrote three poems for them, one was a love poem about my lover’s skin, one was about a Rabbi and a lampshade made from the skin of a holocaust victim, and the third was the following one, written from the point of view of a 1969 skinhead boy:
Skin
I was young and I was fearless
in the spring of sixty-nine,
There was me and fifty bovver-boys
down by the old shoreline,
In their Crombies and their Sta-Prests,
I was wearing my sheepskin –
I was proud to be a Skin’ead,
I was proud to be a Skin!
People said that we were racists,
people said that we were yobs,
Bollocks! We were kids just out of school,
or stuck in dead-end jobs,
So this stepping out and feeling good
was one way we could win –
I was proud to be a Skin’ead,
I was proud to be a Skin!
All you teachers, all you parents,
all you coppers, and the rest –
We are brothers, we are sisters, right?
To fuck with second best!
We’re the barmy mohair army at
the heavyweight weigh-in,
And I’m proud to be a Skin’ead,
yes I’m proud to be a Skin!
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