The Weekly Shop

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

I growl malevolently at the brawling thugs around me,
vultures and sewer rats and shit eaters all.
I am one of a throng of hungry peasants
fighting for the best bargains
in the supermarket's reduced food section.
It's a territorial imperative -
we all have families to feed
on sagging pizza and stale bread, on scabby spuds
and flaccid vegetables ready for the compost heap,
on 'meat' products so thoroughly processed
that most of the goodness has been stolen away.
Counting pennies I make sure we have enough cash
for the essentials on our worryingly long list, maybe for a couple of bags of twenty for a quid frozen sausages,
bangers that a starving hyena would no doubt turn its nose up at.
Oh, and hopefully for a few scraps of offal,
the rubbish of the carcass that in better times
my butcher would have given me for being a good customer.

In the next aisle I jealously ogle an opulent housewife
clean and crisp and immaculately dressed
(well-scrubbed up, my mother would have said)
checking out the finest cuts of beef, cuts costing
more than we spend on food in an entire week.
The fine young thing chills her pert, lace-clad breasts
in one of the chest freezers. She looks at me sideways,
disdainfully, I fear, then she smiles coyly
and leans seductively over her trolley
on the pretence of checking her shopping list.
The woman gives me a free, spectacles steaming spectacle,
a forbidden eyeful, and she knows full well
that my wife's mind is fully occupied
comparing the prices of spam and cheese
for the kids' school lunches.

In the books and stationery aisle we hire a Land Rover
for the inevitable twenty mile detour around
a morbidly obese woman giggling like the twat she obviously is
over the naughty contents of Fifty Shades Of Frigging Grey.
I hate the fat fuck and love her with all my heart in the same instance
because she makes me feel slim and desirable, she makes
my own burgeoning waistline seem more appealing than appalling
and in my mind at least I look like a catalogue model in comparison.

We stock up on tinned beans and spaghetti
(Asda Value Range, of course),
peeled plum tomatoes, rice, dirt cheap dried pasta
and the crappiest cat food imaginable, and I yawn
because even though this is a super-duper supermarket
sometimes shopping is the hardest job in the world.

At the checkout an ancient jackbooted woman
frowns at my brown kids and browner missus.
She looks at me as if I'm filth
with her milky, hateful, accusing eyes,
eyes that clearly say “Hey, shit-for-brains,
you lowered yourself to shaft a low down man?
Let me get this right - you actually put
your precious, white, Caucasian English tool in that?
I hope your cock drops off and your bollocks
swell up like melons, you dirty little cunt.”

“I hope you die more horribly than even I can imagine,
you moustached, goose-stepping old bastard,”
I deliver a silent reply with my own, equally venomous glare.
“But of course your sort never do. Your sort invariably
live to be a hundred and seventy. I want you to know
that I despise you with my whole being, you awful, rotting bitch.
Why are monsters like you never touched by the wrath of God?
Is it because God is cruel? Is it because His malice is random
and His vengeance is delivered blindly to the most undeserving?
My missus and kids are worth a million of the likes of you.
You don't deserve respect, sweet, sweet grandma,
and I sincerely pray that a foul plague or an aggressive tumour
comes sprinting your way faster than the devil can divert them.”