Keep control of distracting drips.
Ensure that toxic waste stays in the river
And not in your hearing or underpants.
Male pattern baldness sorted
with one click and an NHS credit card.
Enjoy the rest of your day now…
Let’s posit a mentally ill person
(a Mental for short)
travelling 150 miles by coach to a special unit
(a Special for short).
Would he or she prefer
(a) an angular, unanchored, image-freighted text
on torture by industrial suburbia, the capitalist tide
withdrawing only to force itself again
up into the Shannon river as etched by Spencer; or
(b) something lyrical to lift the spirits?
Recruit your capacity for third-person episodic foresight:
You are now the Mental in the Special, your logo
An “S” above five little “M”s like a plume of smoke
Over rock pools, one circled in blue. Behind
This you can enjoy the free market
of your inner warring states, lover-language undercut
by “bitch!” until all is oceaned over
by the soup of satire.
Control? Don’t even consider it chuck! Why lose
another battle? I have considerable sympathy for you.
Jim Russell