New Poem: Frown

I was waiting for the dentist and the receptionist said,

‘Why the frown?’ I said I didn’t really know and it was

something I started doing when I was about ten. People

noticed it even then. Maybe I thought it looked serious

and I wanted to be as serious as my brother or my father.

Don’t we often want to be more than we are? I said, the

plus side being that it helps us carry on, but the down side

being that we are always unsatisfied, but then, that doesn’t

spring up as if by magic from inside, our desire is manufactured,

teams of people sit in towers of steel and glass figuring out

how they can get us to want stuff and even if we can’t afford it,

we still yearn for it, and isn’t it this the reason why we stick

with the system, eh, we’d rather have what we can’t have, than

change the fact that we can’t have it? She said she was

just wondering if I was bothered about the time of the next

appointment.