Precinct Poser

Shopping. They’d be at least an hour.
Immaterial what they were buying:
essential fripperies, dress material.

I started getting tense, all this waiting,
and the waste, and the dying - I could try
drilling my diamond eyes into the crowd,
gilt-edged from new-town jungles

to forage in this escalating famine
of pavlovian glass and steel -
hardened shoppers’ faces I might crack
into seismic smiles, eruptions of compassion.

Why bother? Everyone was right,
of course, in a dying world,
in a Rorke’s Drift undertow
to the politics of acquisition.

Besides, hadn’t they left someone
at home to deal with the floods
of debris and pot-bellied children
that poured through the letter-box?

The arthritic grandmother, perhaps

that alluvium of drought,
limping to the diluvian dustbin?

.

 .