Death and Taxes

Tax applied to salt and sugar,
fat and ‘bacco make life longer.

Subsidies for veggies green
add their weight and make us keen

to lose ours and so get trim
sweating in our local gym

or to walk ten thousand steps
(never mind arthritic hips).

Monitors now follow us
where‘er we go and make a fuss

if our movements – bowels or feet –
measure up as incomplete.

Now we need to work much longer
to cut the debt and so be stronger,

and salted chips are too expensive,
so naturally we feel defensive,

and all the health food fiddle-tax
we’d prefer to simply axe,

and not delay our parting breath
to mark our happy tax-free death.

The Rising Tide

 ‘Glebe Crash Repairs’ – the entrance sign –
to the small workshop is flaking,
The crab has shucked his shell.
and the hermit has departed
after decades of breathing fumes
and the fine sand of grinder dust,
eyes fading from the flash of welding,
flesh cut ten thousand times
on cracked metal edges.

A scribbled note tells
how his property was acquired
for the M4 motorway.

Put your ear to the shell:
hear gentle waves
as the dark tide rises.