CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD

We are told by a Minister of the Crown

that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,

that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.

We are a mature democracy but

allow ourselves to be treated like infants.

Though his writ runs only in the largest part

of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,

his pronouncements dominate the media.

He is the son of working class Pakistani

immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –

though not those of one who would have ordered

“Over the top!”, while brandishing a pistol –

have been completely shorn of his past.

He is a trimmer led by a trimmer –

that sinister clown, that jovial

sociopath, that idler, that sponger –

leader of a circus of distractors,

of seedy rhetoricians, of swindlers,

that extols the charity of food banks.

The coterie seems to be kept in power

by a clique of greedy, threatening, snobbish

xenophobic, racist parliamentarians,

obsessed with the zealotry of abstractions –

‘freedom’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ – but all merely

servants of the corporate masters

of the universe, who have already

acquired their gated Ararats, and designed

the manorial space stations to which they may

need to repair. Meanwhile, liberty,

we are told, must be measured in Starbuck’s

coffee cups and Wetherspoon’s cheesy chips.

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