Where Have All the People Gone?

The world as I know it is no more. It is done.
No more humanity. Where have all the people gone?
I'm cheek by jowl with another seven billion
But for most of the time I'm unutterably alone.

At first I was bewildered.
I could not recognise the landscape.
I felt like Thomas Newton,
Just landed in New Mexico.
But now I've come to realise
I'm where I've always been.
What was once my childhood Trumpton -
A place where I could come to no harm -
Has become a sort of Interzone
But without Burroughsian charm.

Whatever happened to respect?
It got up one day and off it fecked
Along with manners and panache
And the last vestiges of my cash.

Don't you know, it's a gent's prerogative to be obtuse?
Time was when I'd be met by a beast with many shaking heads.
These days I get slapped or at least a mouthful of abuse.
I guess it's me who's got to change. Go on, increase my meds.

The cool kids let it all hang out with their morals so loose,
While I sit around playing The Royal Game of Goose
With tergiversators, big time bastards, small time crooks.
Vending machines filled with nothing but Beefy Seabrook's.
Nobody talks to each other - they don't know how.
Facebook killed the art of conversation many years ago.

B.R. 25/07/2013