Was that noone else stood with them
because, make no mistake, it is not
wages that are being stolen,
it’s livers.
Our sacred instruments,
That sticky-stringed brass band,
Its filament bagpipes all a-bluster, maddening,
With phlegmy spit in the oboe’s reed and
Suction, gasping, gulping down the trombone’s naked mouthpiece.
And iron rusting through the violins –
Gut-red snowflakes.
As Sherlock Holmes once said:
The benefit of being a consultant is that I may chose my cases.
Remember to lie in the bed you made,
Or on the floor.
You sold the bed
For the low, low price of £7.20 an hour.
Make no mistake,
The money is not on your hands,
It’s in your throat – trickle, trickle –
all moist and humid
Like yeast.
Speckled with the thumbprints and the
undernail grease of a hundred sweaty shaken fingers.
When it dribbles down your chin
and pools in your toenails,
and hardens in the neck of your bassoon
and you blow so hard it rolls back out of your nose, foaming
– like shit in the U bend of a toilet –
Please remember sir:
Do unto a man as you would have unto yourself;
For us, your suffering is little more than an Imposition.
weihao2 