A: Romancing down the Corner Store
Of all those petty signs without credit
And all those puny signs devoid of credit
Of poetry and usury – Open All Hours –
And of our fathers, founding nations by finding
Retirement, pensioned off to a gilt-edged
Security, I won’t stash the usual wad of lies
As such, or tell stories about counting out scratchies
Until a much bigger coup was in store, or remember
How Dulcie, to get even with the Keats’s rule of thumb
Complained about the cockroach – a Handy Food – swallowed
Whole and alive, only to receive an extra – sent upon the bill
‘La Cucaracha!’ ‘La Cucaracha!’ We came to conquer
Napoleon said that, and the Fat Lady shouldn’t wear denim (axiom)
And of our fathers, and of English breakfasts, washed down by some
Foreign store, I say, finders keepers to a nation of shopkeepers
Tit for tat in a game of this and that, in this age of the deep-freeze
Where not only the dollar stands to go soft, and the man on the corner
Who used keep pigeons in a loft, is now respectable, and clean-shaven
Enough to race customers, and buy and run his own LuckySeven
B. Of Death and History
Where are the YouTube videos to show these things
About ourselves we never see, for instance
Distance from the shop, the next door drapery
Or the time it takes to traverse this space from A to B
And how the World Food Store, if caught on the hop
Must be good, for at least one more long weekend
And then the 20teens, arranged to ease this pain
In lieu of Mogadon, resigned to sun and blue fading
In the rain, came the endless lines of Aldi chains
Where the workers lost, and the shopper stood
To gain confidence; or is this merely the difference
Between – she’s got a nerve, changing channels
On my dream – character and personality, exposed
Again on increasingly smaller machines
Where numb to misery and the crisis in store, no more
No more do we catch what the refrigerator hums
Switching off death and history.
I am wired for delicacy, but the online grocer brings
Only ecstasy, oh how I try not to admire the bourgeoisie
Especially at Xmas and Easter and all year round