A police helicopter hovers above
my house, flailing the air, its thrumming
outlawing conversation, even thought.
Perhaps they are observing the druggies, dealers,
who gather round the BT kiosk
by the nearby park, and then scatter,
like the Vietcong, when they hear the rotors.
The police will have my scowling mugshot –
as I glare upwards at this wasteful,
pointless, harassing jolly at my expense –
to add to all those other dissenting acts
recorded against my name at NSA
and GCHQ: for example,
supporting the ANC while apartheid ruled,
and now tagging ‘Cuba’, the war on terror’,
‘drones’, ‘Waziristan’ in my posted poems.
Why be surprised? If we employ spies,
to justify their pay they will find secrets,
which, by definition, are meant to be
private but which are not, per se, wrong.
While metadata clouds in the outskirts
of Cheltenham – costing so much money,
employing so much talent – thousands
of people, elderly like me but poor,
die each year of hypothermia
unregarded.
By David Selzer