a healthy return

by Martin Hayes

there was this place
and it wasn’t a town or a city
but people lived there
and there was one shop and one pub
they all went to
and the shop had eggs and beans for the people to buy
but the shop shut down when the distribution company
couldn’t get the eggs and beans to them
without a healthy return
and then the busses that came through that place
twice back and forth everyday
also stopped coming
because there was no healthy return in it
and then the people got sick
because they couldn’t get to the doctor or the dentist
or the one library left or the one swimming pool left
and in the end
there was only the people left
in this place
and the pub
to which they all went
to drink the landlord’s homemade gin
to talk about how they had all been
forgotten by the machine
until they all died out
and nothing existed anymore
in that place
or any of the other places
other than the rumour
that there’d been a people who once lived around here
but they’d all died out
because there was no healthy return
to be had from any of them