Clare Saponia

A Market for Adhesives

Today, it’s as though there are prizes for

clinging around the White House. Casualties

and eye-witness divas become a commodity

as salt and psychoanalysis. Death is taken

down and favoured according to location.

Prayers are recited and withheld in equalling

measures nobody can explain:

there are fewer reasons and motivations,

fewer justifications to those ears bent, yet

more prizes for selected deafness, for

those clinging around the White House.

for England

multimedia images quickly

onto you today. No fleeing

into death without a webcam

or digital mobile to hand: fancy

Abu Ghraib bereft of nostalgic

sadists; England caught.

England saved. She was

sick and we didn’t speculate

nearly enough.

The Uneventful

A plain time doesn’t seem quite appropriate, agree

the heads of state, pinching here, biffing there,

collecting the ingredients for an eclectic bear-hug

and sneaking a coy left hook in when the referee’s

back his turned. On that they agree. A need for

haemorrhage and weakening backbones. There

are pills and powders to help. Documentaries and

flash newspaper coverage, telepathic satellites that

determine the outcome before it has happened;

heroes that survive and pander to commercial

indiscretions before a victory, fidgeting with the

meaning of the word victory. Morals have been

grated slick as iron filings and teeter between

winds. Magnets have been discontinued. As have

ashtrays, buckets and cat-litter troughs. In the

next decade, bloodshed might become genetically

farmed and screened prior to deciding who to

discriminate against. If we try hard enough.

Though, science can’t really help taking the piss;

putting bashfulness aside as the fancy takes him,

a tight coquettish grin rings from ear to ear and

sounds his intention. “Oh, go on!” he says, with a

flapping wrist. And forgets to blush.

The pacifist Pacifist

I don’t want to fight this because

fighting this is also war.

So what is the peaceful pacifist

supposed to do? Equanimously

sit cross-legged, eyes closed and

lightly smiling at atrocity and its

allies? Do I let enemies maul each

other and then me, should I

accidentally get in the way? Do I

love them, all the same, sit tight,

ommm and hope for the best?

I have no special reason to get

hysterical. We live sufficiently apart

for me to delete you from my wad

of preoccupations. I simply have to

sell off the TV, carefully avoiding a

morning tendency towards BBC

online, Radio Four, Guardian-Buxton

Spring deals at WH Smiths – in all

national railway stations – and a

history of serious guilt complexes. I

could start eating animals again,

maybe even on a daily basis. I could

take up judo or kung fu in the name of

self-defence, christen the world a dojo.

My dojo. I could build a cyclone B

plant for fun and tell all the journals

I no longer read: this is how it’s done.

I could write about these adventures

and invent some others, like the one

where I met Gandhi and we secretly

took Elevenses in his back garden.

And then I became him.

And we copied ourselves into myriad

Gandhis because the elevenses we

took were actually aphrodisiacs and

love got all randy on an empty stomach.

How different it would have been had

love multiplied relative to us.