Shoppers, take this time to please your companions.

Right, left, right—obviously they take your attention

via clockwork sales talk. A drop of discoloration

is being processed when you talk to them—

lover, robber, gender, industrially colour blind—

magical are their actions to repeat the blooms

of <magnolia on marginalia>, high-price of intentions

under duress. If all good shoppers are careful enough

to be attracted to the whiteness of the lights, or to something

strange like Mambrino’s Golden Helmet, I would like

to think that life in a crowded place is clueless

about the appeal of mass nouns to the art

of small things like undeclared birthdays

and acupuncture points. Inside the fitting room,

there’s a hunk of love, all spruced-up with a groovy

sense of purpose; this I’m referring to all types

of clothing as professionals, feeling the way

we feel right now, are available on site to serve you,

always. But what is fake measurement if everything

at this moment can only be claimed with payment,

starting from the alteration fee, tape receipt, invoice,

the repaired item with accompanying stub—

to your free time to talk to strangers, that is building

a relationship brick by brick? Bonuses, oh you see

dripping their milk nutrients to the floor

the inert clerk would love to suck clean

with his mouth-knitted shoes. All for customer

service and store convenience, for Professor Paper

Machine’s shiny happy people honouring the dance Sufism

of sutra lights, a teetotaling fallacy of tropes

for crab paste to not junk the scent of earth,

shoplifters of hearts hardwired into the machinery

of healing, of entrances and exits space-altered

by their ethnicity as the spell of philosophical

flowers embraces a technē that’s automatic for

the people under the shade of the Plasticine trees.