Tuesday, April 17, 2007

NaPo 07 #17: Economic Migration is an Eighty Mile Trek

This one is pissing me off. It doesn't say what I want it to say - probably because I know what I want to say but don't know how to say it in half-decent images. Fuck it! Fuck it all!

Economic Migration is an Eighty Mile Trek

Behind the wall, a wilderness
of ditches dug to drain the soil,
their looping routes layered in arches
of brambles and bushes, blossoming hawthorn.
It's easy to amble aimless across
this unmapped world, its whorls of growth
a narrative of nature's nascent charm
smothering the steel and stench of life
beyond the fronds of the fallow soil.

My walls are packed with the produce of lands
that span the globe, spirals of goods
freshly jetted from fields to joust
in polythene packaging for my pocket change.
I buy tomatoes from Mexico, break them
free from their prison, pinch and fondle
their standard-sized, unsullied flesh.
In the street, I bite, assert my right
to consume the fruit of foreign worlds.

Someone penned a protest note
to a national rag, to rage at the plans
to erect an arc of energy mills
behind the walls of the wilderness:
'it spoils the views', they vent; 'it threatens
the natural world'
. I wipe some pips
from my chin as I read: 'it wrecks the charm
of this special place, and the price of my house.'

I turn the page, pick at the news.


Talking of images, most of my blog images have gone awol. I was hosting the images on my website, but now I've (temporarily) had to take that down ...

I've got spadefulls of shit for sale, if people are buying. Buckets of the stuff!

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