Exchange Rate

Exchange Rate

So, the exchange rate was good today,

now look - here’s Dobson with fistfuls:

coin clutching, fumbling foreign notes

into gobbing cash machine, with skilful

dark hearted display of light conjurery,

maybe sardonic that he’d been pushed

before bailing, but who'd hazard a guess?

A Sisyphos, once requiring improvement

in pushing bollocks up hills, quickly left,

needed no second chance to be so deft,

knew when the wagers of sin turn deaf

that all day’s fools gamble, frolic and play

when you think they’d run out of breath.

Practical, stirring circulating currencies

from brash new world to old and, hey,

if he could make quite so bold, to claim

back some ten bloody years’ snatched tax,

so carefully pilfered in austerity’s name

by those great venerable master-shafters,

whose straw grasping operation last gasp,

beggars every Christian neighbour’s belief

if all weren’t damned doubled up in grief,

battered from 12 rounds over toilet paper;

snatching dry Italian pasta and Spanish red

from mouths of those elderly consumers

who'd voted to leave is better than dead.

Wiping lucky palms with hand sanitation

while engines of state, leaders of nation,

cooing pigeon voices from radio stations,

speak subtle words of percentage and herd,

let it rip through bellies of the population.

Listen to them, take heed, protect, survive,

count their blessings you're staying alive,

go on. Congregate in clubs, sup ale in pubs,

picnic last suppers amongst lily and shrubs,

Clap for carers like it’s a bleeding telethon

some Children in Need appeal gone wrong,

an annual Red Nose Day bereft of punchlines

where life’s currency becomes enough time.

They'll offer you soft soap suds, love not hate,

don't think about it too closely, but appreciate.

A clapped out nation sweats through its fate;

Dobson ponders tomorrow’s exchange rate.