There's plenty of bad faith provoking its way around

Plenty pathology

Plenty the wish the father of the thought reporting

OCD escorts the courted public enemy

Plenty of sympathetic magic – loathing, loaning, leaning,

On others, in suburbs, distributing blame

Plenty of - if you do this you're a (loaded word) -

Plenty recall to mind the one's who've suffered

Who’ve succumbed

Straitening thus their home-alone devices even further

With got up violent force engraving situational fears

Into the heart and head at every move one - hardly - makes -

Hello resentments.

There's incessant talk-you-through of constant blow-by-blow afflictions

Brought 24/7 - one sole topic just - and I suspect much fiction

Turn on a home electronic broadcast entertainment

Turn on the news – you silly thing – and wall-to-wall

Papered with anecdote and incident come stories from the field

Some maybe you think through to expose their hobbled crutches

Their hitches, britches, rings and things pretence embellished

Slanted misshapen so to fit a gory story slot

Amongst their haunted overhanging categories

Voices are oozing warnings, sympathies; all day are oozing words

Keeping the habit potent in the worried clocker hooked

Of the hope that tea and sympathy will do to see us through

Meanwhile a nation palpitates to get adoing

Things, anything, especially what will lift the curse

The normal things, but also things that show goodwill

A score of 'nightingales', arenas, hotels, (fee-bought-in?)

But where's the medics, staff, for them, the sick to fill

No sirens here, no signs of ambulance, police,

No sightings, no big stirs, far less than usual,

Unheard of empty spaces in the hospital car parks

And latest figures falling for the deaths or so it seems

The streets reserved for stray and hooded disaffected men

Looking perplexed and anxious for escape by pacing

And a more assured in shorts - their cohort keeping fit to fly

By a simple stolid willed conceit the virus

The stats provided morally by casters' cobwebbed news

Mean just as if were papyrus dug out from Nubian sands

A hieroglyph however holds a meaning to be read

Their stats preserve no sentience that a logic can decode

Enough stuff given to imprison minds in further cautious heed

Rich circumstantial hearsay, trepidations turbid brew

Little substantive – number countings groping on and on

Hapless in media re without a star to point us whither

Nobody knows, got handles on the living situation

Lurching about from count to count from surmise to suppose

Having something to shout about as governors or news guys

Out-distances precision, by a showman's shadow-length

Just where this sloop of care is headed, guiding compass wrecked

Those dysenteries of yesterday, maybe their hoarded hauls,

Flushing themselves - maybe a judgement – that's not cool to say

But there's no toilet paper left to wipe this guess away

How far in deep we are remains an unknown proposition

After the fact to be determined – do not think so -

The masters, mistresses, all, will deck with horray-hearty palls

Their set-out stall and lathering will say they won

They brazen saved our necks, salvaged our shopping aisles