-
IMPULSE BUYING
Guiding my shopping-cart — obedient
zimmerframe — along legendary aisles
of a hypermarket's glass and plastic
cathedral, I pause, from time to time, to
genuflect before the lower shelvings
of cutprice toilet rolls, bumper bargain priced:
or elevate my hands in prayer to reach
the topmost realms of bigname toiletries
for rare, luxurious bathroom mysteries
of quality-time self-indulgencies.
Disdaining the butchery department's
pelmets of dead bunnies and the wasteland
battlefields of sacred slaughterhouse blood
I gaze up reverently at florists'
multicoloured rose windows without crowns
of thorns for wedding anniversaries
long forgotten in the mists of legend
with wilting lilies, jaded maidenhair.
— My one criticism — there is never
anywhere to sit down (unless you came
in an automated wheelchair) to rest
one's crutches except in the self-service
food basement — its murderous spiral stairs
cunningly nicknamed "Take a Pew" — what fun!
There to serve oneself with a wobbly cup
of scalding weak teabag tea (hygienic
doll's-house brick of papered sugar) — the lump
in the throat of closing time's hidden bell —
a strange excitement in its eager knell
as I prepare to face checkout traumas.
© James Kirkup, 2008
