it said on a passing van as I drove to the airport
wondering what everybody does
and why they’re on the freeway
and how it all welds into some kind
of economic system.
Freelance windows is
transparently a front for something else,
behind and within
and hidden only
by thin dazzling optical deflections
of the wheeliebins and clear azure sky
opposite.
It’s a Chinese laundering operation probably,
some four-eyed yellow-skin Triad mobster
grinding his sin
in a mortar.
After all who’d seriously want
to freelance
as a rectangle of glass?
such a fragile existence
a subsistence
of clear views,
the only physical gratification
being the bi-monthly application
of a rubber squeegee,
or a young fat finger scrawling
Clean Me!
or else its just a shower
of maladjusted needy raindrops.
The French have windows
with outside
shutters,
for those sort always end up
in the gutter.
(Certain French people have windows
without
side shutters
It depends on what opens your curtains
the French mutter,
gutturally ambivalent
to the last.)
How, I ask you,
does a freelance window
take to all these argon-filled
triple-glazed cowboys
with their laser diamond
computer undercuts
and their fancy etched
and shatterproof
shapeshifting systems
providing poor man’s crystal
in a new world?
There can be little creative joy
and no job security
in being a draughty old sash
or a flaking casement.
Only a matter of time
before the cut-rate cut-glass
cold-calling corporations
blue chip
and tip you
into the skip.