The Good Immigrant IX
Winter, you party-pooper,
wizened fingers of a grisly Midas touch
on black ice glazing desolate asphalt,
shaking trees free of foliage,
you left us a daunting dawn of
streetlamps flying low-hanging St George’s flags,
shrivelled by the mist.
The flags look pitiful in
their operation.
The flags behind the windowpanes
fare better, beneficiaries of body warmth.
But their imprisoned fate
tells its own pious tale of crunch.
When austerity threatens alterity,
a flailing economy must fuck its victims,
the scapegoats & their fragrant oud
& their foreign tongue & excrement,
nourishing manure for those English fields.
You, immigrants, are minor heroes,
Your back displays whip wounds
of hardships & you must shake
winter’s frosty hands at dawn.
You, too, must salute
the shrivelled flags turned on themselves
in a punishing fate of being tethered
to stolid lampposts,
another fiscal misadventure.