This is Hummus.
Unbuttoned bedfellow for carrot sticks,
hopped with the flavour of reasons for vegans
and other participating bowel movements.
Spread it, or glob it, you’re saving the planet,
love it, don’t covet its mouth cuddle, but,
share share share.
Show those fellow pitta bread dippers,
make them know that you care.
On the ocean of hummus there are
I have a breadstick
dreams careening
utopias dredged up and digested
by the viscous minutes of café clocks.
before plunging back under the comforting beige,
of thoughts about Orwell,
or what’s it all for, we’ll
deny that we’re ageing, 
yet talk of our age.
But not of that classroom in 2005
where Alice with the homespun scars
passed on her stepdad’s violence with words,
or summer shifts at that depot with the dead end desk,
where the lads only subject was girls that they’d served.
This is hummus,
the firmament’s benevolent quicksand
through which we could slip and
become easy with a phrase:
Watch the world pass by.
And as such we are perfectly positioned,
well, qualified technically,
to ponder the most pressing, the most important,
the most pressing, if you will,
issues –
citation...
Guacamole, as a...
...construct, is...
...oppressive, it...
...others the avocado...
...sequesters the western gaze from its
by no means distant smashing.
Of course more could be done on the more basic level
of social deprivation…
Oh, sorry, could we have the bill?
Separately.
Can I pay on card?
See, this regard for our regarding, is a
contactless transaction,
analysis paralysis, this hummus pot, not action,
a massive, passive raison, for a noble, global faction,
which semantically, pedantically, shies from interaction,
with those it calls ‘in need’.
Treats each homeless person to the same
apologetic smile,
irrespective of race, sex or creed,
indeed, this is hummus,
imported from a section of the supermarket
that your vulgar tongue can never quite make real,
like that time you spotted the hermetical seal,
on your gap yah.
Learning to mind the gap,
yah?
Craft ale on tap,
yah?
This
is
hummus
and its proving as sticky as a metaphor.
This is hummus,
and I feel a little sick.
This is hummus,
out of the chickpeas of the sixties,
now a post-hipster-gigged-post-hipster,
political correctness gone deaf,
its ears full of itself.
By the way, Alice, scars under makeup,
came by the depot one day,
having missed a book she’d bought online.
Two years later she married the lad behind the desk.
Let’s call him Aaron, and say they have a landlord now,
oh, and two kids.
Aaron’s on the ladder at the depot,
but there’s cutbacks,
and it must be hard, getting on,
it must be hard, doing their bit,
it must be hard.
It must be the reason Alice and Aaron
did not come here today
to witness their starring roles
as reductive examples of the sort of person
who didn’t come here today,
to watch their lives suspended in hummus,
as unmoving as her bookmark, deferred eternally,
most unprogressively,
to page seventeen.
Tonight Alice’s hypothetical daughter complains
that there is nothing in the fridge.
No hummus to eat,
no alternative thinkpiece to
dredge up, digest,
excrete, retweet.
And people in her position are not going to buy your shit,
even if, due to consumption of hummus,
its nutritional value is statistically higher
than anything from the Burger King
on the other side of the
– specifically for Virgin trains madam,
your ticket is London Midland only –
tracks.
So, make hummus.
Fresh and unconditional,
on streets, and in gutters,
find its constituents in queues,
and in the desperate views of nutters.
Leave it on windowsills from which were stolen pies,
stir it in the open mouths of yawning bus drivers,
with spoons nicked from Five Guys.
Make it in dive bars,
in wives’ jars,
in the little single strapped handbaggy things
that whatever the newly acceptable word for chavs
still wear,
unergonomically.
Blend it with locals’ pub armchair commentaries,
Taste it in a joke about Decartes or farts,
on concourse floors,
in a word, or inferred,
when holding open doors,
put hummus in the empty glove compartments
of right wing vehicles' norms,
in the poetry of a society,
which is always and never performed.
Make hummus where it shouldn’t be,
Share share share,
and trust in the taste buds of those who today
can only really, fairly, be described as
elsewhere.
Cos, this is hummus,
and, it tastes great.
But, there’s a fridge,
a kitchen,
a very hungry world,
out there.
