Shane

Shane lives in a town left behind, works in shifts and listens  

to men in a tea bar who growl through smoke across plastic  

cups. Blame spreads. It rises like smoke, drifts across the  

yellowed ceiling and falls like smoke, lingers in hair and  

clothes. Insidious, cunning, it latches onto fibres, writes its  

own genome. It stinks everyone and everything whether or  

not they hold a cigarette. Most do.  

Listen carefully as the Sun rises.  

The shop steward asks them all to look in the mirror. Shane doesn’t  

want to and besides it’s covered in a galaxy of condensation; oily  

supernovas smeared across cracked glass. The shop steward still asks,  

what do you see there?   

They see victims. 

Shane sees the forgotten, the left behind, the alone. 

And he sees white faces once so proud, so potent, so pleased. 

So strong, so vigorous, robust and ripped, riding against a sea of blue.  

Eyes as misty as the glass. 

Shane, bone-tired, puts his X in a box and has blue dreams of an  

ocean-wide future.  

The bodies in the water are just ducks bobbing.  

It's the waves that make them wave. 

No bread, so no fuss. 

In the noise of the factory floor, Shane stares into the bold shadows  

beneath the bagging machine, the metronomic slicing of his shift:  

eight times sixty times sixty. 

Minus one, minus one, minus one, minus one... 

Shane lives in the middle right on the edge of town.

Someone else calls his name; he puts his head down and walks on.