Eyes: In the darkness of the dreamworld slumber all images and fashion:
Rocking the cradle, the designers,
Admen, educators, politicians. Would they coo with such passion
If we weren’t, in fact, little dribblers?¹
Head: Aspiration, growth, contentment, a sense of identity,
Environmental awareness are five
Marks of sanity: if consumers do want insatiably
They cannot be in control of their lives.
Eyes: What think you of the ravenous babe with his labouring gob,
Suckled by the reassuring medium?
Even as it clouds his thinking, it safeguards his job² -
Which he produces, as he consumes ad nauseam.
Head: Gob unemployed? On yer barge! Yet I wasn’t bought
By the cradle-smell of the canal,
Nostrils leading me to work, for my blood had caught
Life from the arterial channel.
Eyes: Your finger on your pulse, others’ on the Inspectorate’s, differentiate
The air-borne signs of impurity;
But do you think the broadcast matter find equal weight
Of full-blooded wit outside Arcady?³
Head: I’m not distrustful of townees’ capacity for gleaning
The truth from media fads,
Who’ve original vision to pick unqualified meaning
In the breathing space between ads.
¹ People, trained to talk lovingly and appreciatively to the consumers of their goods and votes, treat us like babies, as they appeal to our subconscious.
³‘On yer bike!’ was once a Tory politician’s challenge to the unem-ployed to look for work. Barges brought raw materials to the polluted cradle of the English Industrial Revolution, as Arcadia disappeared into the voracious maw of infant consumerism. The Pollution In-
Spectorate safeguards our air; but
who nowadays complains about
admens’ pollution of the airways?