Luxury villa row

Luxury Villa Row

In the sleepy street
In the sunbaked silence
No children play
But cameras whirr
To guard the empty villas
Where high walls
Imprison the wealthy ones.

What prison do they fear?
What gaol do the walls foretell?
For money earned in darkened halls
And spun across the world to Tenerife?

Five thousand feet of polished marble
And beds where never laid a head
With pools untroubled for 12 months now
A listless silence undisturbed
Except by maids and cleaning staff
Preparing for the Christmas trip
That may happen or not at all.

And yet the window’s cleaned and grass is cut
With hedges trimmed
Tables polished, not yet turned
The wealthy ghosts have yet to come.

Perhaps a breathless week,
Spent mostly on friends’ yachts
Ordering cristal when ashore
But a hardly a glance
Hardly a look askance
At the villa
At the top of the road
A cul de sac
That leads to nowhere.