trying to find a new voice - new poetry February 2005

pm

I held the door for you;
no more bad writing
no more lonely waiting
for you to look back
and feel the same


Musak

People speak fondly of autonomy, but it’s like
Darwin used to say; we’re all just animals endlessly competing

for mating rites and territory, although it would seem that Tescos
has removed this necessity, and so patiently I wait

by the ‘shop-spoiled’ shelves, awaiting my turn to view the precious
damaged items that are usually so mockingly out of reach

High above me the musak seems to say -- you are Nietzsche,
you are a sixteenth century Tuscan monk questioning your faith

and endlessly misquoted in bars and Munich beer halls, where
swastikas barely concealed on the freshly painted ceilings

excite nostalgia in fat American tourists, desperate for
a point of reference and a sense of comparison, and so

it is, that bewildered and slightly aroused, you find yourself
in the ‘meat and poultry’ section and somebody is humming

a tune from the radio that you heard this morning
Over breakfast, only you can’t remember who wrote it

and for what reason the chicken pieces, for want of a better
understanding, are pink and flaccid and three for a pound, each

fleshy lump held taught beneath a thin layer of polythene,
previously injected with pork fat to increase its size and

appeal by some minimum wage Dutch slave anti-Semite
and you find yourself asking the same old question: why does

nobody write poetry about pork fat, it’s everywhere
even our food seems to insult our intelligence and sense

of class awareness, it’s post-modern, it’s carbohydrate free
and I hate it, Darwin I feel, would have shopped at Marks & Spenser

where cost equals the finer things and so much more, and then
finally, the brunette with the tinned tomatoes in a spicy

Italian sauce, turns to you and says “please don’t look at my
shopping; I don’t come to your home and watch you get undressed”

PW 2005