Plastic Burglary
By Dave Finchett
No-one has actually become younger by
injecting liquid tissue from cows and pigs,
but still they line up for treatment, gather like
sheep, corralled by the walls of a waiting room.
They go in dark glasses to the surgery
via the letters pages of “face-lift weekly,”
where, in column inches, neuroses are
massaged, and identities are changed to:
name withheld, name supplied, surname dropped.
Choosing scars behind the ears instead of
lines of character, branches of wisdom;
choosing inflated cheeks and a trout pout
instead of the folding fans that sit by the eyes,
the legacy of the face’s happiness.
Real life is chopped up, cut out, lifted, stretched,
while the oblivious are anaesthetised.
Struggling to eat, speak and blink, a face
bloats before the imagined lens, a body
curls up into a foetal ball and is hit
by the racket of global narcissism.
Youth has become a shrinking goldfish bowl,
an endless succession of disposable snapshots,
a sense of perspective that catwalks its absence
in fabulous pink sling-backs.
