Phone is ringing.
Again.
A voice whispers in my ear
And I know already
What I am about to say.
Welcome…
The outside sun is only rising
On a day like today
Because dense cloud has parted
And red sky warns of rain to come,
Warning us all who sell the benefits
Of different clothes, or better weather.
Welcome…
…one name
In exchange for another:
An introductory offer,
Common courtesy translated,
Encoded in a transaction.
Who are these people?
Phoning me?
Asking for my help,
My understanding?
Clock is ticking.
Clock is always ticking.
Tick.
Time to sell, to order;
Time to select;
Time to ask, respond;
Time to know.
Tick.
When sun angles through the blinds
It dims the data light behind my fingers,
Shades terminal and handset.
Winter sun’s low spark, stark in contrast
Warms the words we speak
So many miles across wires and waves.
Who are these people?
Phoning me?
People with concern and need:
The happy and the sad,
Strangers I must come to know
In as many seconds
As there are days in a year.
Tick.
I must set minds at rest, resolve, complete, report,
State the obvious, demystify and, where explanation fails,
Speculate or invent, conclude.
Who are these people?
Phoning me?
Me? A story-telling secret agent,
Healing their illusions with mine
Making amends for not much,
Squaring the half-unbroken circles
Ever decreasingly followed
As time runs out:
My paltry minutes bridge
All the hours and days to deliverance,
The long haul of late arrival,
Eternities of lost and missing things.
Who are these people?
Who bring their anger,
Let it loose and with it reveal
Their own unspoken sorrow.
Who are these people?
Harassed by obligations;
Brought low by change;
Bereft, wounded.
Some help I cannot give.
Welcome…
…to a half-world sold out,
Sold on at half-price, heavily discounted,
End-of-line, shop-soiled, special offered,
Never-to-be-repeated, final reductions.
Reductio ad absurdum.
Welcome…
…to the selling floor, the virtual platform,
The customer journey, up the khyber,
Where we promise to satisfy every need:
For every bursting heart, a pocket picked.
Welcome…
…to consumption and stimulated want.
While stocks last! Everything must go!
Tick.
The sun is setting,
It’s light fading to ringtone echoes.
Night has fallen but the sales go on.
What everyone wants is the slogan
For you must have it too.
What everyone has will never be enough.
Who are these people?
Phoning me?
Who still want more.
Whose voices shake
When more is gone.
Who are these people?
Phoning me?
From lives divorced from mine,
Whose worlds are alien
But whose hearts I can grasp
Whose deep-down souls
I recognise through all the bluster
All that chaotic need.
Who are these people?
Who go gentle into the retail night
Who brave the glitter and the hype
Who put their hard-earned on the line.
Honest souls, old and young,
Are doing the best they can
To buy their way ahead
Just to get along.
Who are these people?
Phone is ringing: auditory hallucinations in my ear.
Welcome…
How may I help you?
May I hear you?
Touch you; feel you?
How may I heal you?
Tick.
Tock.
© BH 2016
This might be recognisable to many in the low-wage economy. Especially those in at-a-distance retail. We’re just components in the thin red line of sales. Oh, marketing puts the puff into the illusion but some have to live it every day. Somewhere the deals get closed, promises get made, kept or, failing the keeping, covered over with excuses. The illusion is really that something more than the bottom line actually matters. We’re all complicit in the myth. How we sell and how we buy, everybody accepts its basis in fact.
Let’s face it though, we’re creating and solving our little first-world problems. The fate of our measly trousers, our ephemeral drawers. Yet some of us do still care. In the seven minutes in which we can.
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