Flared Pants, Mini Skirts and Mr Eliot

How like Eliot it is in tone. Even the landscape has the grime of London in each line. I must have been no more than nineteen when I wrote the poem caught in the spell of his hypnotic rhythm and rhymes. The bright, clean air of my home was seen through the filter of a foreign fog, his soulful exhaustion washed a gray tide across my youth. He stood as a monument in whose shadow nothing could grow. Prufrock haunted the back alleys of my mind, a rebel almost in the guise of a comic. He was hardly me in a world of pub rock and cold beers on lazy, sun drenched Aussie afternoons - no rolled up trousers but instead, reefers, flared pants and mini skirts and a future balanced on the whim of a conscription ballot hanging over my head.