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DEATH
IN THE MORNING
1
The
market bosses and stall-covers
start
sulking at nine, pentecostal
finicking
and bacon sandwiches.
The
trade begins between the traders,
then
moody hospital cleaners come.
A
junk-fest behind the library!
Cassettes,
clothes, curtains, huddle in trays.
Wasps
buzz bananas, the air drizzles.
A
dosser dies, a girl aged fifteen.
2
Nobody’s
daughter, she was conveyed
by
aid of police and ambulance
to
an end-of-street morgue, a toe-rag.
When
they jabbed a dead vein they siphoned
enough
cocaine to have stayed a horse.
A
CD in her bag-lady bits,
but
no personal stereo kit.
If
her life had music it was played
and
weighed in silence, mad requiem.
3
In
Egypt’s sumps where Mark Antony
slummed
incognito with Egypt’s queen,
a
child grabbed buyers with customed hold,
sold
her body as she’d often done.
Commerce
bums on from aeon to aeon.
The
young want all, have nothing to sell,
their
only worth their vaulting ambition.
Little
life-stories are sold for crumbs.
The
insects get most, and the rain some.
Alan
Marshfield
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