What's on your mind? He says. What's on my mind!

He means hello, good to see a good morning, and you,

And so forth, and how are you? Well, how am I?

How really the hell down to my nightmares am I,

How am I up to where God and I grope for one another,

And in the middle where I ask who loves me and why?

I'm fine, I say. How are you? He says he's fine.

One of the bleaker moments of modern history.

Cruelty, waste, money, selfishness are on my mind.

Loneliness, loss, waste, waste. On my mind.

In the architecture of poetry words like hell,

Hunger, God, stupidity, are for rough building.

Anyone can sledge them into some sort of cairn,

What's on my mind is that I'll level the rubble,

Get walls up on it for the curve of a stair up

To great roofs, to be lived under every living day.

But now there's a new way of saying hello.

How are they treating you? Same answer. Fine

Some of them pay me, and it's a job for life.

Some of them are my son, eight blonde years old,

And his mother. Others take names away from me.

They do what I read every day in newspapers,

But worse to me on the page after the last page.

How are they treating you? I always say, Fine. But

The real question is, THEY, THEY...who are they?