This poem is a surveillance device. It is checking your emails, intercepting your calls, reading your thoughts before you have them. When the secret you’d not tell to a soul bobbed past us like a Coke can in the river, we hoiked it out and stowed it in our files. All citizens need protecting from themselves. We’ve made copies of your intimate photos. We know the websites you go to for your kicks. Remember those works you wrote when in your cups? That you thought you’d erased? We found them in the ether, awaiting transfer to a dropbox: the empty bird feeders sway in the wind. There’s light through the mesh where the nuts were stored and the seeds for the goldfinch have all flown.
blake morrison, prism