They look down at you
from the wings of theatres,
those gods of Olympus.
You are not just a speck on the ground.
They look down at you
like Harry Lime on the ferris wheel in The Third Man.
Your home is being tracked on Google Maps,
your dusty cyber footprints patrolled,
catalogued, print-screened,
archived for the rainy day that will surely come.
Your chromosomes have been analysed secretly
by doctors and clinics.
Your creative writing and art are assessed
through diagnostics
more comprehensive and spot-on
than the Rorschach Test.
Your face is on a thousand CCTVs,
rough-hewn into a showreel.
Your Oystercard’s movements are logged
at Grand Central.
You’re impersonating an ordinary man,
but we’ve got your number.
You were scouted young
with your anomalies in the nursery
with your abnormal eye-tracking movements,
and your impaired movements,
your scores on the Wechsler.
Later, your impaired reality testing
or score on the psychopathy
or personality disorder scale
or some other pathology
was filed and noted.
Your files are regularly collated:
everything correlated,
burned on CDs and photostatted.
Nothing is random or coincidental,
not over something so fundamental:
the safety of the public.
The welfare state came with a price
from cradle to grave,
bankrolled by an anonymous benefactor
demanding the immediate instigation
of a Ministry of Private Information.
