The numbers don’t stack up,
But the numbers never do,
When they start to talk to you
In grey suits before flags hanging just so
And minders peeking out behind them
As if the ‘never seen’ have never seen their man
Standing before the mass of microphones, tight smiles
Cameras, old hands and ring-ins,
All asking asking asking questions
That might as well go unanswered
For all the truth they address
In the post-codes out there that count
Come election time, and then don’t figure much
Except as future slush.
Except the answers don’t mean much anyway
When interest rates are looking like rising
And the grey suits who never have to put a hand
Where interest rates hurt, talk about
Talk around, talk and talk,
About tightening belts, thinking twice,
Not being rash, considering ourselves lucky anyway
Compared to what
What’s happening other places
Where people might think the luxury
Of worrying about interest rates would be luxury indeed,
Deeds done, smoke screen spun, there’s that flag
To slip behind, to walk down a corridor away from
Masked, covered, wrapped in iconography
Suitably masking unexpected photography
For a quiet drink, maybe an embargoed cigar,
More smoke, just like numbers.
There’s greasier smoke a thousand miles or so northwest
Human grease and tears mixed on the evening news
Like the only news there is, till it goes unseen
Filling every pixel of every screen, but too much seen
To see all over again, so better change the channel...
But there it is again.
No, these skins are living black, not burned that way.
Strange the faces look the same, the tears run the same way,
And yet... oh that’s it, further west still, turn south,
And here we are.
That’s the answer, another conflict altogether,
And the sun never sets on the new empire,
A globe painted red as Kipling ennobled it,
But this red dries to sticky black, black
Even after the myriad flies have lifted away from it,
Moving on, gorged but frantic not to miss the next slaughter,
As appointed by a figure beyond comprehension,
Who prestidigitates with cigar in hand,
And mind on other things, and could no more than you or me
Name the capital city of Tajikistan, or possibly,
Even Georgia, until looming dates hint at destiny,
Ignominy, a mere footnote, a curio in history,
When only a war will do to elevate its makers
To chapter headings, whole volumes,
A marked but indecipherable column adjacent to Babylon.
Look on my works and tremble, look upon the wreckage
That I dissemble, flag-masking the details, before,
As my mission accomplished and superhuman things done
Between puffs on a cigar lesser mortals may never know,
Unless they are sanctioned Cuban peasantry
With no ear for irony, but absolute capacity for recognising
The caller in the called, the maligner in the maligned,
The shape in the smoke that never forms twice the same way,
Unchanging.