Chicken Soup for the Soul

At a Formica chair and table
I'm a scratchy will-o'-the-wisp
with a stomach turning over
pulped Mc Do dough, egg
shat by some light-starved peck,
sausage stringy like a fish cake,
fermented grease ragging
on my pancreas. In front
of me a metre wide mustachioed
cowboy flicks through a mag,
you can see his neck fat grip
each bovine sway his body makes.

In this nowhere back lot,
a book shop should be my best bet
(what else, Toys R Us or a picnic
on the pavement?) but even here
there's a fucking Starbucks, whales
and business types thumb-flick
self-help, Twilight, Stephen King,
and slurp hot slew to brew
with their homely bile, heave
their ham and weep in the Real-Life,
Business or Christian Fiction aisle.

It's not Kafka they're after, it's
chicken soup, live the dream, a deal
whereby they're gladly duped;
as long as there's calories
and Catholic values pumping through
their arteries the nation-trolley
keeps on pushing. The publishers
know just the kind of comfort,
pseudo-science, bigotry and fear
that keeps the shelf-stock moving.

New Non-Fiction is stacked with
shameless mongering, cellulite moslems
are coming for us, what we need's
a ream of women hacks divulging
their period anecdotes and turning
our lives around for us with tears
and hugs and sickly homilies.
In American bookshops they give
you a shopping basket at the door,
and ask "Is there anything else?"
at the counter. Feeling queasy,
I get a Mountain Dew and a bun,
swing through the doors and take
a stroll beneath the billboards.