I don’t hear the clappers clapping any more?

Back to that knocking nurses down and doctors to the floor

On drunken Saturday nights

Back to the headstrong swearing loudly into mobile phones

Walking the streets in held-in-public altercations

Back to the stacks of only booze; no foodstuffs in the trolley

To the slash and burn of coping in The Wild West shopping alley

And the serried beggars bodyguarding lard the city streets

With their ripe and pissed-in sleeping bags

Then there’s Shangri-la, a vaccine vamps for science-factor wags

The bottled saviour in its phial of no reserve price tag

Here is prestige, unprecedented incidental greed, up to be had

Then are the demographic troughs and highs to home delivery

Gold flaky snowshake Christmas spirits, courtesy M&S

The bad neglect of families in Barnsley, Redcar

Whose clamour for bare food packs sent them cauterises

The knowledge of the mountebanks’ think-tanks of self-appointees

Bringers of High Byzantine tiers; and tears for many hungry

Back comes the jolly bellied tum, from a Covid convalescence

Hospital lessons learned, turned into pickles, puddings

His minister’s portfolio solo holds his tuckshop trousers

Happy content to skip events because of last night’s night-jars

And a government of misspent time remands imprisoned ignorant

Inbred, embraced, embedded and impounded sympathies

For scotch, thick steaks, and distancing the sorry smelly poor

Their money comes hospitably to public houses,

Hotels; skilled dignitaries and competent to lobby

Of standing heavy economic clout; not anybodies

The woes in private houses stow behind closed doors

The same lame blaming by-lanes surface here their scores once more

The party players claiming one another’s native errors

The buttons on their elevators all depressed

There’s one will lift initiates; but decline the rest

And jolly roadshow media, who would see their own throats cut

Serve curved dress-shirts to seniors who wear them all jizzed-up

Integrities and guarantees, good faiths, turn inside out

Winged subtleties in vainglories, their pragmatic roundabouts

As deals with friends and neighbours on protective clothings

Re-enters this regale again - was ever it away? – its true insanity

These various bees, corruptions of a spent-out nation

Which will not be deprived in its depraved last moiety

Let shops close, clothes halls fail; and malls turn vacant wasteland

Yet still the machinations of this circus must persist

Those flagrant base enjoyments to the well-heeled easy few

The poor are with us always, that’s a principle, their cue

Like little children chidden turn at first their sins away

Amending selves a time, but rise to flout another day

Here’s dogs regarding vomit, if you will; we are come back

To modes we had disposed of on a precious old prayer mat

Itself now on a junkpile at the tip , cast off, departed,

Comes votes around again, and vaunted hearts again case-harden