INDECENCY

          

       Scream – not just for the next jug:   the hard-rock snarls are so loud
       You need to scream – your plight of which the pub’s owners are proud,
       Since it is the direct result of their having obeyed
       Their marketing expert’s instructions on how to persuade
       After-work drinkers to buy more beer than they really need:
       'Keep battering their eardrums, till their eyeballs almost bleed'

                                                ~

 

       All the crap you had to put up with all week long and will
       Have to again, starting Monday morning, and you could kill
       Yourself for not quitting, perhaps you’re just a masochist
       Fooling yourself you’re a saint or a hard-nosed realist,
       Don’t most people take comfort from routine torture, take pride
       In any job well done?

                                                *

       
           Yup, there's a cheap halo hovering over drudgery
        – Including, no doubt, scribbling lines of so-called poetry,
        Long-winded lines of words dragging their wings, like drunken bees
        Bloated with some bitter nectar;   or words like famished fleas
        That can’t yet convince themselves to feed off Litricher’s bitch,
        Like proper addicts of her blood.

                                                ~

                                                          But there's the rub, the itch,
        Of the needle and the needing more, the groove none escapes,
        Streak of the human spirit’s need to stray, beyond an ape’s
        Ambling, rambling contentedness (which even apes will flout)
        Into fields of painful experiment, eurekas, doubt
        – All the shape-shifting tricks that sooner or later harden
        Into habits

           (*fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)