INTERESTING TIMES

The Russian Ambassador to Turkey has been assassinated in Ankara.
The news comes out of machines and dutifully we metastasise the news
          to other machines known to us in awed shock.
Who would dare?
It happened in an art gallery and some brave photographer, no doubt terrified,
          had the presence of mind to take photographs that look like stills
          from Reservoir Dogs.
Truly we are living in Walter Benjamin’s arcades,
          Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
A truck ploughs into Christmas shoppers in Berlin, much like a truck
          ploughed into tourists in Nice earlier in the year.
The Russian Ambassador to Turkey has been assassinated in Ankara,
          and the Tsar’s man is to be President of the United States of America.
I am fascinated by the skin around this man’s eyes, puffy, pasty-pale pink
          like foreskin, where the Cheetos-coloured fake tan refuses to adhere
          as if in disgust.
The skin hangs in bags of terror, bulging with horrified anticipation.
I try to understand Aleppo, Mosul, Aden … but my mind runs up against
          a black ice wall of horror and stops working…

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