Please Queue Here. Sliding doors into job centre, the ‘centre-link’, or whatever it is called wherever you live, and my dignity stays outside, tied to a bin watching passersby with purpose and paid contracts tucked under their armpit. Feeling them brush past and march on through Determination into an office. Or another sliding door. In which you feel legitimate. I wipe my feet across a mat, Please Queue Here, and stay still, finding the tail end of a week-long queue. A small shuffle forward and the man in front sighs again. The reception is long. Employed grown-ups are frowning outside, hooked elbow of a thousand SIM faithfuls flowing past. Inside, we are lining up to be given a number so we may, apparently, climb out of this pot-hole of poverty and into a mortgage. We are clinging to our sense of self that still believes in possibility, against all the monochrome, the slumped shoulders, the babies that cry and the adults that are desperately trying to climb the gutter lip of their own groove. We spin on making this same music, we remind ourselves what is important. In this silence, in this begging wait, in this context, what is important remains silent. We don’t speak to one another. We are too busy surviving.
“A thousand survivors,
jostling for a smile”
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