Personality

Who shall tell us what personality is?

Not the women in their playgirl suits

Wandering the streets of whore

Waiting for a suicide refrain

To ring in their ears for eternity.

They have those sores on their arms again

The ones mined by their pubic crabs

Migrating for the summer

Escaping punishments inflicted by pimps;

The ones wearing free-range fur coats.

Nor is it in tag lines infecting buildings

The type dubbed post-modern architecture,

Nor in delinquents bashing a drink machine

Full of twisted coin, that unkind legal tender.

Let them be ready for an archangel’s party

The calling to home of the doubtful good

It’s not abnormal for them to bleed together.

A proclaimer defiantly wears a tight wedding dress

His dried semen embroidered in the white linen

It’s not abnormal behaviour to him,

The designer label has remnants of colour-blindness.

How it is that sunshine must be bottled

And bled out of pinhole punctures.

The needy are desperate to watch themselves

Shaking the dead hoof of a drug man’s mule

Meanwhile expecting a gift of a silver coin.

‘Sunshine is for everybody’ the Bible says

‘For everybody living and for a small price.’

It’s the way the human world has brought itself up:

And briefly, the best ideas are born

From breakfast cereals shaken to death

On a lonely Sunday morning before

The church bell rings in a believer’s security,

And who shall tell us what personality is?