The Lower Third

                                           And the lower third tickertapes bad news

                           from right to left

           to help us read it faster,

or forget it quicker.

A knife fight in Ladbroke Grove:

police are searching for

their posteriors with both hands

and begging for mobile phone-shot footage.

Meanwhile on Split Crow Lane

in the Far North, near another famous wall,

other villains are surrounded and the road sealed off.

In distant Sindh and the Punjab,

the counter for the drowned passes 1000,

while unprecedented floods happen again.

Some grain reaches East Africa,

a speck of sand on the beach of famine,

perhaps we won’t need a Band-Aid this year.

                                               The news ticker runs slower,

                                   for all the world

            as if expecting applause

for such good news.

And here in Albion, perfidious or no,

the cost of dying is falling:

we need spend very little to die,

and prices will fall as we meet the final demand.

The contenders hide in their corners

awaiting their pyrrhic victory,

no longer appearing in brief tales at the bottom of the screen.