Porcelain dolls dance down the streets; are here,

Joggling high-shoes flap, flap; and to an urgent rap

Overlord of the musak ruling in the Shopping Malls

A persistent present’s peak-post-modern Music Hall

Plaintiff, acknowledges suffering in the race for cool

Here the precocious ladies lordly revel; extroverted

Comperes at modelling, advertising, solo dainty fashion

Pictures to stare at; polish, lash, foundation; soundly sunk

Much money, from their fortunes into looking good

Wears here the escalator stair, fares up and down, and slowly

Rolls. Toilsome machine; no lunch; no toilet breaks,

Echoes the way survivors live out in the nasty bits

Clinging afar mayday to a war-demolished gettings-by,

Likewise who gives a thought to scraping escalators?

Mechanic machines not living, service operators,

Passenger-shoppers sliding upward, downward, passing

Blank one another like as non-persons frigid by

Missing all otherness as if within an alien world

Portraying them thus a paradigm well-tailored to the life

Hid-hearts behind the breath in every soul

Young guns unforeseeing, optimistically bucolic grope

The upward stair, and rare they think tomorrow,

Arising stood statuesque and astride their feeded futures

Elderlies half-unseen, alive-inside, within containing

Elbows of aches and pains, consort forebodings seen

Chasing the mind like Furies after a little supper

Boils in the belly for having flesh too rich, too sweet,

And unseeing users glowing up and humbling down,

Theirs only the next lift level indicator stop

Their guide, approximation, to proposed developments

Whether the thin-spun life with horrid shears will cut?

Whether the Attic stage was truly prescient or not?

Pray to the Lord, dissemble not, be humble

Broken reed shall not bruise, nor contrite stumble