A Hijacked Nation

The TV runs on a loop:
Torn clothing,
ashen faces,
wails of realisation,
Maniacal sirens and amber alarms,
blood running from foreheads and knees.

Concrete monoliths shadow the victims
as the financial quarter haemorrhages
blood, money and confidence.

Yellow-jacketed police
fight off the mobile phone carrying hoards
and their snap happy images:
A double decker bus splayed open,
the spires of the handrails imploring the cloudless sky for quiet.
Tube station entrances flooded with confused commuters.
Then dark tunnels lit by the moans of the half living, completely terrorised.

Staring into the dazed eyes of a smoked young girl.
we feast on her tearstained phrases.
As she turns from us in tears we turn from ourselves in disgust.

News 24 hours a day:
The endemic urge to know infiltrating the cables and wires.
Self-revulsion dissolves under the grip of mass personal anguish.
Our appetite for human frailty establishes a new frontier
amidst the cycle of rehashed reports.

Newscasters draw
out
every
last
ounce
of
information
and it mixes with interrupted links, broken communications.

Made complicit in this general disarray we sympathise with the survivors;
disguising our morbid rubbernecking in morally righteous indignation.

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