The Country That Argues

A death is a fact for one night only.
By morning it is a question, and a question has sides,
and sides have champions, and champions have feeds,
and a feed does not sleep, and does not check, and does not grieve.

First the machine — without it, nothing after this reads.

There is a country, and there is a screen, and they keep different time.
The country moves at the speed of a committee.
The screen moves at the speed of a thumb.
The country must gather evidence, and weigh it, and be slow on purpose,
because slowness, in a country, is another name for fairness.
The screen has no purpose but the next thing,
and the next thing must be hotter than the last,
or the thumb moves on.

So when a boy dies on a dark road, two clocks start.
By the slow clock: a mortuary, a family liaison officer,
a charge, a date, a courtroom eighteen months away.
By the fast clock: a clip, a caption, a hundred thousand shares
before the slow clock has finished its first full minute.

And a man six time zones west owns the fast clock.
He did not build it to be cruel.
He built it to be free, and then he learned —
as every keeper of a fast clock learns —
that the freest thing in the world is also the angriest,
because anger travels, and grief just sits there, heavy, in a house in Essex.

This is not England’s disease. England only has it early.
Watch the slow country and the fast screen
reach for the same dead boy —
and ask, before the play answers it for you,
which of the two ever once asked his father’s permission.