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She looks up from the wheel
To an illuminated billboard,
Faultless plastic skin.
Just think,
Particles of light are rushing around
Like millions of drones
In that Factory of Misinformation
Throwing her face out into the night.
Twenty year-old features,
Ten foot high,
A tub of moisturiser
The size of a truck,
But she’s stretched as thin as a liar’s excuse,
No depth apparent at all.
Her billboard surveys its domain,
Standing erect over crouching cars
And photo-sized shoppers
Complicit like her in a soft-centred sell.
Who are these victims? They can’t see jack…
It’s a high-gloss incident
Of Robbery By Beauty.
She's also a victim,
One of many,
But driving out to the real real world,
A woman of twenty at the wheel,
Passing lit and beckoning signs
Of cars and phones and new releases.
And moisturiser.
She stops at a farm
And knocks on the peeling paint.
Upstairs, in the candlelight,
She catches a glance in her grandmother’s room.
The moisturiser sits on the dressing table,
Pride of place, unopened.
Next day she wakes,
Pats years of dust from a familiar blanket
So rough, so flawed, so comforting.
She’s always known…
That if the sun is over
A particular bump
In the ridge of the roof of the old wooden barn,
It must be…
Chicken Time.
She looks through haze,
The particles of dust
Like millions of messengers
Willing her to live.
And looks through glass
(A cracked, illuminated rectangle
Out of the attic),
And throws on a robe.
Wetting her mouth with long-cold coffee,
She flip-flops past a lamb in a box.
A laugh, in unison,
At the patent absurdity
Of tiptoeing daintily
Through chicken shit.
She studies the map of an ancient face,
Dips her hand in the bucket
And scatters some corn.
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