Is there any better place to people-watch than a GP waiting room?

This week, poet and artist Frieda Hughes reflects on beauty standards as she people-watches in a waiting room

PEOPLE-WATCHING IN THE WAITING ROOM

Waiting for a shingles jab and wearing my own face, I noticed

The hugely billowing pale pink lips arrive first, pillowy

Protruding lilos in the pool of perfectly motionless flesh

That stretched over fillers to form an expressionless landscape.

The machine of the mind that made that mouth

Is churning them out for competing identi-dolls

Separated only by almost similar hairstyles,

Infecting others. The twelve-year-old girl beside her

Curled around her smartphone like a tentacle,

Sliding sideways on her plastic blue platform

And tilting her head up, up, up and gurning

Into the screen she held above

As if having strange ideas about unseen things.

She recorded the spider-leg eyelashes

That clustered at the edges of her lids,

Poised, and ready to leap off the cliff of her pre-pubescent features.

I could almost see where her thoughts trod the line that would lead her

Into the artificial limelight of the distorter’s chair,

So she could become clone-like and acceptable

In a raft of other inflatables that eddy pointlessly in the world’s oceans.