(no subject)

Nursery rhyme

In the morning the news look like a school textbook arriving a century late
and at that rate you inevitably come to guess
that you live in history – and history is a bad neighbourhood, a nasty piece of real estate.
You’d better move and start living somewhere else.
Somewhere else, where one might less fully appreciate
its familiar smell,
its ignorant fury,
and its industrial sound.
You might ignore it –
and it will count you in,
you might join it –
and it will surely count you in,
you might try to alter it –
and it still will count you in.
And either way it will cross you out.
So don’t you ever step out of your biography and allow yourself to be seen
when history is around
on our ground.