! Goody Or Baddy? A Varifocal View Poem by Michael Shepherd

Turning over the pages
of the national newspaper
half-alert, this morning,

shock-horror! A full-page photo of,
can it be? Jade Goody, the motormouth
invited back to Big Brother for
obvious reasons, who’s caused
world-wide repercussions for abusing
an equally cunningly chosen Muslim
of compassionate intellligence..so, controversy;
a troublesome flea in the charmpit of
the body politic..

oh, no - it’s a model who just looks like her,
advertising at huge expense,
Specsavers’ ‘Varifocal’ glasses…

ah! that’s the word we need –

varifocal…

and aren’t we all? sometimes we focus
on the short-range, sometimes on the long;
Jade; TV producers; media; politicians;
motormouths the lot of us; one day
we hate the Muslims or the Christians next door,
and their perpetual cooking smells of curry
or of vinegared fish-and-chips;
next day we are on our varicultural best behaviour,
almost, but not quite, inviting them to eat with us;
it’s called freedom of speech, integration, democracy..

Even as I speak, varifocal editors of varifocal media
are preparing balanced feature articles by
varifocal feature writers entitled
‘Jade Goody – true voice of Britain? ’
and we’ll pour the milk on our breakfast fodder
and slip on our varifocals with the other hand.