Looking Upwards Poem by Christopher Shepheard

To sensibilities, mean-tuned,
Ambition is all about gratification —
Horizontal gratification —
Pushing your card in the money slot,
Purchasing, coughing up consumption,
Bargain trawling, trolley crawling.

Take, take, take, take —
The death and death of endless spend,
Life’s aspirations, miles of shelves,
Like streets of roadside hookers, beckoning.
Genital high is their marketing ploy,
And all the crawling trolleys stop.

But progress is all about looking upwards,
Tuning the mean tone into temper,
Giving a clue to posterity;
Even the eye of the primal ape,
Browsed the highest bowers for fruit
And he learned to stand erect.

Look up at the Portland stone and the red brick,
Set akimbo, chevron bonded,
Eluding the eyes of the hogs that trough
In the high-street ditch of the windfall apple,
Slobbering juice from its rancid pulp
And snuffling round the money slot.

Look higher still to where under the eaves
A pargeted ape looks down from a pargeted
Branch, his fresh-plucked apple in hand
And sneers at the snuffling hogs at the windfalls,
Coughing consumption into the landfills,
Hogging their snouts at the money slot.

Ape can climb no higher up now —
Above him are only the bonneted tiles
Where mosses grow, and the spire of a church,
Derelict in a forgotten back street,
Thrusts like an apple-tree shoot and gushes
Into the great thigh-arch of the sky.

(2004)