Here everything has a price. See the snaking lines of men
queuing around the echoing hall of barking butchers
to cut out their eyes. £10 for your sight!
To cut off their hands in the slicing machines.
£10 for a touch! This is the desk in the entrance foyer
where you can humiliate yourself for strips of bacon fat.
£10 for your dignity! Kiss goodbye to that dress madame,
those plastic pearls about your throat. Here you are no-one.
Sit over there and answer that telephone.
These are the children with cough candy for teeth
and liquorice fingers, biting each other in piles
like starved pups eating their mother. £10 for your bubs
if full for my starving daughter. Smoked sausage, kippers, finny haddock!
The ladies and gents leer from the stalls in the fish parlour.
They lick their teeth with oil slick tongues. £10 for a leg!
£10 for a touch of the flesh. Nothing is free, but money
is not the only currency here. £10 for your boy for the night!
£10 for your kidney! Here is small beer for your refreshment.
Vicks for the smell. Opiates for pain for as little as a finger.
Everything for sale. Come buy. Everyone has a price.
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