We hug
the night away.
It’s heaven till we part,
cross town to man McDonald’s tills.
for cash.

Real Hells
are worse than this
eight hours shifting bits
of animals from fire to mouths
that smack.

Kids dropped
a cinder block
on Linda’s doll she held
in match stick arms. A taste of Crack
at dawn.

No cops
come here (no tanks).
No ambulances here
where Linda played her mother was
asleep.

At six
pink tourists peer
from sixty stories high
across the boulevard to see
the beach.

The kids
in ‘normal’ homes
watch television ads
then bus to spend their day in school
with guards.

At lunch
a lady’s fur
(chinchilla, chilly blue)
gets splashed with Cola near the pool.
She sues.

A thief
has lost his head.
He looses Uzi shots
that catch two tourists who’re surprised
to bits.

Fresh drenched
in CK1,
the pretty people prowl
where either sex and any name
will do.

A man
who’s happy here
and likes his wife and job
offends some beach front bandit, gets
run down.

The rich,
the really rich,
buy politicians’ smiles,
and being faces that we know,
get ours.

A nun,
someone who cared,
can’t turn attention off.
Now working-drinking-praying’s failed
she jumps.

We raise
a million bucks
to put a greeting in
a rocket NASA’s sending up
to Mars.

Shifts end.
The centre holds
we tell ourselves, and war
is what the bloody Balkans have,
we say.