Eating Out

There are dumpsters simply brimming
with left overs and send backs,
bin bags full of lummy slop:
coconut pannacotta
truffle honey mozzarella
California bouillabaisse
cassoulet of summer beans
and even when you mush
the food together
it still tastes pretty good
but then, you see,
there are these down-by-luck
table-salt of the earth types:
smelling like asparagus piss,
no money, no grub,
little half-healed cuts on their nose bridges,
and anyhow
you'd think they might be allowed
to lick a strand of marinated pig fat
from the inside of a bin bag
but no, you see, because the nosh,
even when it's been tossed out,
still represents the chef
' it's still product '
and they say a restaurant's reputation
is as good as its clientele
and, on occasion, these homeless chaps
get drunk as all hell
and shout abuse through letter boxes
so the really good restaurants
have a cage,
a big steel cage in the alley out the back,
to protect their scraps
from the poor saps
with their bellies cramping
and their sunburnt eyelids
and so, I mean,
it makes you feel terribly helpless really,
forty slightly overdone scallops
going to rot in a cage, imagine.