Think tank

And as we see the NHS sliced up,
being lined up for private hands,
clumsy, unaestheticised American hands,
hot, unwashed, still slick with blood
from the last country they disembowelled,
but untrained in anything tender or remedial,
we understand at last the equivalence
between a think tank and a kettle of vultures.

A think tank is a special place.
Chemistry there has yet to describe
the miraculous detergent that can cleanse
human fat, boiled into the fibres of your clothes
by a temporary napalm sun. Yet somehow it deprives
rag straggled food shortage queues erased by bombs
of food and medicine. Such a selective surfactant
that allows us to emulsify hope on the basis of policy,
rather than science, is surely a miracle. Look up.
Perhaps the next bombs will fall on you.

Who cares? In this Swiss calculus of gold reserves
and numbers to which you cannot put a name
our flesh is fondue at the most refined feast,
and who needs health when you are food for cannibals.