Every Town’s a Dustbowl Now
After bindweed and Creeping Charlie, the dust
blows through it’s own story
an old delicatessen boarded up—
two dilapidated turrets of industry, fallen —
even a bank pushed to foreclosure.
All that’s left is an abandoned church
& a marble bust of forgotten civic leader
Earnest Prout ears shorn off
in protest at crimes against humanity.
A southerly wind whips sand into lifeless eyes
of toothless & dispossessed people.
This could be a town in any country
across a globe rolling like an eye
in skull-fucked droves— plight of millions
picked to death by locusts
then blamed — punished for their own demise.
Bills go up, the heating’s off, fuel keeps rising.
Old Dotty must choose how she dies.
Euthanasia is pushed for the old &
I’ve just passed 60. Only the preacher shouts,
‘Where are you invested?’
He’s full of hope where hope has died.
But there’s a cheque poking from his back pocket.
It’s always about the bottom line
while each sheep that perhaps once
had a name & a meadow, is shorn
begins to wonder why they ever voted Tory
but it may already be too late. Time is close
& that bottom you reached keeps falling
until everyone’s a limbo dancer
& you must work hard to hold on to Truth —
remember that’s your town.
Most relented— doctors, nurses, police
any bureaucrat in that middle tier.
Evil’s just too easy, each in their own ring of Saturn.
We go along as new depths are reached
& all conversations are tied to belief
not your own but handed down, unquestioned.
That’s safety if you are absent from true identity
& your soul wants to go round & round
in a dreamscape that’s simply litter on a dead-end street.
Copyright Simon Heathcote 2022
