Look! that’s a shooting! Drive by

Pick up the currency @ 0% commission

Who is the highest bidder; whose purse wants us most

Ramp up the gangplank into the the cadaverous

Ravenous creature’s entrails

Digestive bowels; sit here, think on your rare

Half-grand that’s free. Spendsies aboard

Where advocat trades in at 700 counts of fraud

Per litre bottle

Vehicle safe in hold, can’t wait to press the throttle

Go tour ashore, take in, be taken in by sliding sights

Rushed past the safety glass that sets apart

A parked reality, beyond the big-draw bolt-hole

Native sojourners, earners, doing natural normal things

How very interesting!

The claim of the coffee grower, the grain of winnowing

Gathering up life against a death, as they have come to know it

No sideshow

No picaresque intriguing off the wall ‘the other half’

A crumb from dawn to dusk

Move on, we’re easily bored, those chores of lowly folks

Can’t hold us long; break out a wacky smoke, begone

Black and Moroccan resin; it’s six guineas an ounce

In avoirdupois

Ah, yes, we do go back, pre-metric times our salad days

That’s why we spend so much, and hours, on tribute guys

Pretending; pretending has its place, in shadow lives

Goes better than golden olden days of slave housewives

And men shoehorned into employment aged 14

Sempiternal platitudinous heavy grafting

Flight-hopping, dropping gin and truffles down mouth-hole

Taking the sights in, sailing seas on shopping boats

Casinos, pools, and restaurants; frigging built in entertainments

Where else but Heaven could muster such a great arrangement?

Dosh is no problem – just us – we’re flush – alas, no justice

Bankrupts of amity, nor no resonance except with plenty

As for the zoological gardens, they pass the moving glass

Caught up in sundry parking places in our revels

The yes-sirs, and no-sirs, men and women bearing crosses,

Knapsacks, and families back home as baggage

These are discard facilitators of unwaking holidays

Extras and walk-ons in a save-the-planet backdrop

We come in and bring them work, and buy their paltry pots

Ravage their sites peculiar, tease on frisson’s edge

What that life for so many ends here in ditch or hedge?

Move on, don’t linger, to hear such things would spoil our pleasures

These are the usual samey droops we came to get away from;

The pavement vendors, the British splendours, who sell Big Issue

The rags that grimace on street-stained shopfront mattress

With dog; they can feed a dog so they are feckless

With long sad faces sit there vacuum cases

All the day blethering, craving, pleading alcohol

Where do they get that idea life owes them a living?

Not got the grit, the application, of those great exemplars

Paragon vagabonds whose cruise ships our centres

Provisioning and incising through our minds and money

Excavating our wooden sense and larded pensions

So good a deal we think it is, an all round doddle

Watching through dreams we cherish, while wandering past unnourished

Faces whose landmark must-see monuments our caviare

We drive round behind the glass safe in a covered car

In half-life, a life provided off the shelf

Life made up by Walt Disney of trays of paper clips

Happy the fake-mates take your life away and charge you bucks

But when the wind blows then the groves and troves no more

Are milk and honey

Ah, and can such things be, we see an Armageddon river

A viral pandemic has closed the routes to Mindanao

To Florida, Acapulco, like abandoned apple trees

Swept by tornadoes, fruits flung, as our destinies

Never before, befell all hell, nor will be the same again

But no, no-no!

Get down the road and buy yourself just half a brain

Worse things they say happen at sea, and so they do

The monsters who course the waves bring in a curse of accide

A workout with pedlars’ packs for spree, a royal jamboree

Forks grate against knives; bingo, scratch cards, and lottery

The Premier League, cheap soaps, and Tesco Chardonnay

All come in containerloads with abject gadgetry

Balloons and teatowels extolling Eastern promise

Lots, inundations, stuffs we’ve seen we do not need

Until the shops reopen

Life out to grass, its farce a settled permanency

Even young fogeys imitate we past-it ginkgoes

As badges of honour, origin, of whom they like to be;

Consider them cockerels roosting top of midden heaps

Those who, arrived, feel pardoned from reality

Part of the art of installation is whom they vaunt to be

Their choices, no repercussions, only drift and jealousies

Under a blanket spell, no eye-holes given; but fallacies

For company. I wish you learning so you come to see

And grieve to free your lives from self-imposed sterility

From the penitentiary isles’ imprisoned purgatories

Wherein life is no life behind a flat and painted veil

That pale which fosters misidentity with sanctity

And welcomes captives offering plastic sentences

The clastic pulverisings as instated by the rules

Your apprehension’s inattention marks you jailed

And la, before you know it, you’re a gull entailed

A paperweight and makeweight in a tawdry global frieze

And actually no longer can your thoughts spring latencies

But only a seems-like life; supposed suspicions true

Look at yourself, into your heart – and darn it! - is this you?