| Crime and Impunity
Sundays, this town stays shut,
shop-fronts iron-clad against custom.
Yet a fragrance of fresh-baked bread
draws the gourmet under arches
where Arab pavement sellers
swap its source for shiny cents,
alongside Chinese sunglass sellers,
Senegalese leather merchants,
purveyors of products without packaging,
meeting needs not formed by advertising,
unlicensed providers for extended families,
whom a crisp new police patriarch
promises to put out of business:
a clean sweep of hardened workers
into gaol or the maw of re-organised crime.
Mondays, it’s business as usual
on the other side of covered tracks,
white collar criminals back on the job,
deciding which sharp practices
should be made legally just fine
now the nation’s maximum law-maker
embodies aspirations of half the population:
money from cunning, wealth by stealth,
celebrity through vulgarity; a mogul of image,
shaper of collective lack of imagination,
fated to rule till reality bites harder than sound.
Week-long, a new Spring blossoms
for falsifiers of pharaonic accounts,
corrupters of judges, Men of Honour,
lords of cement. Just keep those immigrants
clandestine, vulnerable, desperate,
or force them to fortress Europe’s frontier,
push them across, wave goodbye
to our common future.
Slam down the shutters. © Bryan Murphy
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