This piece is a Free-Verse, which was based around the motif of the old playground rhyme that was sung to the tune of the ‘Snake-Charmer Song’. There’s several versions of it that are known to exist, including:

There’s a Place in France, where the ladies wear no pants,
and the men don’t care, ’cause they wear no underwear,
and the kids don’t mind, ’cause they’re naked all the time…

or:

In the Land of Oz, where the ladies wear no bras…

The version I’m most familiar with is:

In the Land of Oz, where the ladies smoke cigars,
every puff they take, is enough to kill a snake.
When the snakes are dead, they put roses in their heads,
when the roses die, they put diamonds in their eyes.
When the diamonds break, it’s the end of 1968.

I had an odd inspiration, courtesy of some depression, and some Finlandia vodka, that that particular motif could be worked into a Free-Verse, which discussed some of the degradation of our modern culture, and which also follows up on a few of my previous pieces, namely ”Generation Y was Born in Merseyside”, “When the Parasites Kill the Host”, and a few others.

Just as I had the idea that the Jamie Bulger case was almost like a Heralding event for Gen Y coming into its own, I feel that the Herald for Gen X may have been split between a few events stretching from about 1966-1991.
In the Chinese Zodiac, 1966 was also the year of the Fiery Horse.

’Sick of living/unwilling to die’ refers to the Zodiac Killer, and the Clock Tower refers to Charles Whitman’s massacre, both in 1966. The third event from that year that I’ve obliquely touched on was Richard Speck’s killing of eight nursing students in Chicago on a single night. Events from 1968 include the Kennedy and King assassinations.

I also mention three infamous murder cases involving female perpetrators, namely Aileen Wuornos, Dorothea Puente, and Marlene Olive (1975 ‘Barbecue Murders’).

I also mentioned two other mass killings, which captured the public imagination at the time, simply because in both cases, they briefly broke the ‘record body-count’. The first of these was the McDonald’s Massacre perpetrated by James Oliver Huberty in 1984, and the second was the Luby’s Cafeteria Massacre carried out by George Hennard in 1991.

As for the rest of it, I’ll leave it up to you, the reader to decipher.