PEOPLE-WATCHING IN THE WAITING ROOM
Waiting for a shingles jab and wearing my own face, I noticed
The hugely billowing pale pink lips arrive first, pillowy
Protruding lilos in the pool of perfectly motionless flesh
That stretched over fillers to form an expressionless landscape.
The machine of the mind that made that mouth
Is churning them out for competing identi-dolls
Separated only by almost similar hairstyles,
Infecting others. The twelve-year-old girl beside her
Curled around her smartphone like a tentacle,
Sliding sideways on her plastic blue platform
And tilting her head up, up, up and gurning
Into the screen she held above
As if having strange ideas about unseen things.
She recorded the spider-leg eyelashes
That clustered at the edges of her lids,
Poised, and ready to leap off the cliff of her pre-pubescent features.
I could almost see where her thoughts trod the line that would lead her
Into the artificial limelight of the distorter’s chair,
So she could become clone-like and acceptable
In a raft of other inflatables that eddy pointlessly in the world’s oceans.
