The grey world unfolding beyond the window, watching the ebb and flow through the steam of morning coffee. Maybe I've annoyed the weather gods, each time the rain stops and I attempt to get out, by the time I get downstairs, it's returned more intensely than before.

Late morning the rain stops, the city resumes as a sauna, heat and humidity clinging to the mist rising form the pavements as I walk through the streets. The sky promises this as a temporary truce, the next downpour cast in deepest grey crawling across the hilltops.

The news cycle continues; the social contract fraying at the edges, pages torn and cast into the fires of vanity and desperation. The question of the day is how do you govern when you've lost the moral imperative?


And when it ends, for end it surely must
whose voice shall soothe, find words to salve the grief;
no unquiet dead entangled with cold dust
might sing these sacrificial days. Belief,

we're told, might dull the bladed truth, the stage
dim lit, dark cornered, where our masters hide,
midst gathered lies which hypocrites engage,
this ragged gang who'd seasons halt, or tide

refute - for what unfolds, to them's, a game.
Who counts the dead, content with coin and trade?
Those graves are strewn for numbers without name,
statistics, while no empathy's displayed
by those who power, alone, would seem suffice,
who'd view that rotting flesh as, but, its price.