A television A TV
Advert Advert
A parade parades
Of harelips children’s
Children with no harelips
Upper lip
One face
Upper lip at a time
Ribbonated like
Bulbous broken pots
Protuberance on little
Shoulders
Eyes in alleyways
As young as five by walls
Eyes in empty rooms
Of shock
Granite faced discarded
Cracked harelips
They express painless horror like fires in glass orbs
Of a poor family with bare skinny arms
Motherly hope, squatted on a floor
Where are their tears? Imagine for yourself
The night, the fears, the tears out loud
Uncontrolled in the darkness
The anger said – why me?
Why was I born with a misshapen head?
No tears, the cameraman shows no tears
The cameraman the cameraman shows
Shows little children little girls
No bigger usually
Than a wooden spoon lugging
Carrying gallon bottles
Plastic bottles home
Of dirty water across the wilderness
From a pool
To grandmother
Then they drink who is toothless
From a saucer
Water and thirsty
That washed babies
Big bad animals and laundry
Drinking and pooing hanging over logs
What do they think
They’re doing and drinking water
Big bad animals the colour of dry bones
Take out the kettle full of spiders and eaten flies
Take out the bowl full of grass seeds and beetles
Take out the yellowed cup uncleaned since last year
Take out the flowers in the grave withered and dry
The cameraman the camera man
Shows the faces was paid to show
Of little girls on film
Living in squalor that have to yield
Under road passes
Abused to the monster master
By spikey men inside a man
Who come again with a road-curb mind
To the hollows and a stain in the brain
And the shallows crawling in pain
They grin who does it again
And bare it like a train
They sin and the little girl
And repair it doesn’t understand
With pins and tins the orphan
And prayers the reject
To wandering cows that gets no respect
And I bet it’s easy in a country with so many
Thronging the markets and the cemeteries
Where they burn bodies to the nice deity
But forget that they are thin and broken men