seven eleven
Or is it nine?
Sorry. My mistake.
Is this a convenience chain or something?
Can nothing cast its pall without cliché?
Must everything be told in mindless jingle?
Beauty’s in the eyes of the beholder.
I suppose.
A piece of scalp parting a people from its innocence as it parts its host forever from corporeal integrity ...
somewhere a special effects man is transfixed, despite himself;
somewhere an elephant grunts its pleasure at yet another meddlesome priest dispatched;
somewhere a broken vow is avenged in the midst of bloodied horror.
Who says it isn’t so?
A towering inferno whelms the hearts of pyrotechnicks as a rose a poet’s muse.
A celluloid deception wags the paw that wags the watchers
just as surely as a fortune parts the pockets of a million willing dupes.
Yet none complains.
It’s what they came for.
What’s the difference?
No-one squawks when Dirty Harry blows the bad guy’s head to pieces
but the bad guy.
(And his wife ... and, well, his children ... and his mother ... and his kin ...)
And who’s to wonder?
He’s the bad guy, after all.
But that’s the problem.
He’s the bad guy ’cause we say so.
Is Osama no-one’s son?
Does Hussein cheat on his wife?
If a million willing dupes are finally slaughtered by the time a Dana Carvey joke is answered
does the fact that they’re Iraqis make it right?
(Or just Afghanis?)
What a joke.
Forgive them, Allah - for they know not what they are.
A nation born of pique against a heedless distant power
has become, itself, the very thing decried
as a new anointed George recalls the former in a sea of mindless jingo.
Wake up and smell the coffee, folks.
The tea is in the harbour
and the towers - once, symbolically, 11 - are no more.
Would they still be told in jingles if the month had been July?