los desaparecidos

The Big Society promise that has yet to deliver

The Independent, 4 April 2012

How unsettling

when all four dragons

rise up on their haunches

as one.

But what a deal!

– thirty-three cents on the dollar

buys them a billion big ones

of prime goodwill.

Watch those

intangibles hatch on their

balance sheets. The money snatched

from those

who have gone,

leaving no trace, no weepers.

Los desaparecidos.

Finders keepers.

So this theft

is Mr Cameron’s Big Society

transferring power away from the state

and handing it over

on a plate

to the people who keep

Mr Cameron’s party swinging:

The banks,

who lurk

in their mirror-glazed towers

to welcome with frost-binding shakes

the hands

of citizen co-ops,

and top up their budget-blitzed library,

village sub-post-office and children’s

playground schemes.

How charitable

these lenders of last resort must seem

when seen from a cliff edge that even now

is crumbling.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet