The News

 Sally prefers not to watch the News

But dutifully I plod through until

Guilt or frustration overtakes the drive

For information and I switch off, but still

The ghosts remain to sour our evening meal.

Impotent against the endless flow

Of pain, injustice, arrogance and greed

I flail around to make sese of the slow

Acidic drip etching each raw fact

But smothering the spark of hope with lies

Accumulating till I cannot tell

What I should think, and thinking act, to rise

          Above this indolent depressive mood,

          Fight for the preservation of the good.

Brian Hick Nov 2010

©copyright Sally Hick 23.11.22

          I've 

     Been here

  Too long; today

I did not notice the

        Pylons.

Brian Hick November 2010

©copyright Sally Hick November 2022

2

Individual pylons are okay

But near Southend they come in feral clumps

Like teenagers on heat.

Even autumn's colours are subdued

 By greying lumps strung out across the bland

Decaying flats.

Morose commuters, on their wy to work

Ignore the slow decline

Towards the east

Assuming London life will be enough

To overwrite abandoned nights

In numbing purgatory.

Meanwhile the smirking pylons watch the trains

Trundle on, then trundle back again

To Southend's terminus.

Brian Hick November 2010

©copyright Sally Hick 11.11.22