Prospectors

The city crackles like dollars unfurling,

Nationalities queued up in transfer shops

In shirt-sleeved, mustachioed lines that spill

Into the street, to send money to the subcontinent,

While a cockroach and a rat creep by, unnoticed.

The city reeks of money, as trucks of workers

Sit contentedly in backs of pickups, smiling,

As maniacal Arab drivers fly down hard shoulders

Desperate to get to work, to feed outsized

Families, to gain financial credence.

In a tower high above, a light turns on inside

The mind of an old Saudi, who remembers

The desert, the camels and campfires, simplicity

Of life no longer existent in Al Khobar,

In its place this race for expatriate riches.

Greed is infectious, afflicts the previously immune

Eventually, gets into the mind like a tapeworm,

Eating memory and intelligence, replacing it

With bank details and investment opportunities.

An expatriate head is filled with figures.

Diving contentedly into his compound pool,

Imagining it filled with cash, a British expat

Tries to wash off the guilt of today, the dread

Of tomorrow’s humiliating duties numbed by

The funds he sends to family by online transfer.

Twenty years later, he sits in his chair,

In his flowered acres in England,

Remembering with terror the fear

Of losing his job in Saudi, that the tap

Might be turned off, and he would

Have to start working hard like his friends.

JRTF

18/11/14