Girl gasping for air, every ounce of her remaining strength deployed in the battle to keep breathing for a few seconds more.

Filmed during a chemical attack on the Syrian village of Khan Sheikhoun; other children in the back of the same truck were already dead – she couldn’t have lasted long.

A grotesque moment, but you weren’t wrong to look. In a different epoch, only looking (and not doing) might have been veering close to voyeurism; but now it seems right enough just to ‘bear witness’, as the journalist said who broke the story.

Not that you’re first with the news, as she was; but there’s more than one job for journalism to do. Another role, no less important than the primary task, is to compose subsequent versions of specific events so that they may rise to the level of our common culture – the place where otherwise isolated occurrences involving disparate people, come to belong to all of us, and us to them.

Not much for you to do on this occasion, however. The half-formed faces of these children are wide-open to the future; and yet we know it is already closed to them. It is written here already, both the resilience and the frailty of human life. The contradiction which characterises us all, presents itself spontaneously in these bodies which are both flawless and lifeless; whereas careful composition – a new rhetoric – is required to draw this much commonality from the gnarled particulars of most adults, who generally appear as fixed and closed as the number of years they have put away.

The dead children of Khan Sheikhoun are modelling what they have not done and what now they never will. In this tragic instance, there is nothing more for your new rhetoric to do – except to hope that such instances are few and far between.

Vodka and Red Bull – bet you still didn’t pull.
There’d be no lights left on in Take Me Out.

But none of this counts when it comes to it
Neither personal slights,
Nor what the West might have done in North Africa some decades/years/months ago.

Once upon a time is a different zone from the moment you chose for yourself.

From the Metro tram stop to the Manchester Arena foyer, there is a raised walkway, then 12 steps down.

12 times you could have turned back
11 moments left in which to think again
10 remaining occasions for the rare Air Jordans to swivel right round and run back up the way you came
9 steps still to go before your torso goes over and above where your head should be……

No doubt about personal responsibility; only then was there an end to your autonomy.

The white-armed goddess of the golden throne, swats away her husband’s Olympian hand. Lord of the ‘tug and pull’ h-shake, he meant to re-align her, bringing her back into step with him. But the First Lady would have none of it.*

Fixed on the face of the patriarch, portly but powerful.
Affirming his unchanging expression, the music builds and finally resolves.
Panning across, now trained on the cornflower blue of his loyal spouse: shot remains the same, soundtrack builds as before.*

*As seen by the Ancient Greek poet Homer
*Through the lens of a family melodrama on Indian TV.

Husband and wife looking out onto our world with their what’s-the-deal? eyes.

These actors are so good, they seem to be wearing the camera – as comfortably as an extra layer of make-up.

As the ship of state goes down, the violinist plays on…..
Serenading protestors until that ‘body of armed men’ broke his strings.

Amidst the tear gas, baton charges and Molotov cocktails of anti-government protests in the streets of Caracas, violinist Wuilly Arteaga continued playing.

There he is among the masked cocktail mixers, guided and part-protected by them – soft boy in a hard place, not-quite-right symbol of their not-innocence-exactly.

Amidst the slowing down of the world economy, even after ‘recovery’ from the credit crunch and global recession, the price of oil has continued to fall.

Venezuela’s national anthem is Wuilly’s favourite tune; his clothes match the colours of the national flag – yellow, blue and red.

Venezuela is a one-chord band, oil the major earner. Demand now diminished, currency devalued, imports impossibly expensive.

Sans violin, Wuilly’s folks play ‘supermarket lottery’* for the chance to go into a shop and buy something.

*Write down your number and put it in the hat – if your number is picked out, they’ll phone you.

Eating garbage off the street
After a prison riot, eating the bodies of fellow prisoners, allegedly
The man set on fire during a protest – maybe ’cos he’s a thief, perhaps for supporting the government
Deaths during recent protests (55, or over a hundred, depends who’s counting)
The student – his parents asked him not to go – killed by a canister that came at his chest from the ranks of the national guard.

Venezuela can’t string it together much longer.

(You don’t need me to say ‘broken violin’, do you?)

Down the escalator from the keening and yearning of pre-teen spirit

Back into the banality of Mum and Dad; but this was to be no Happy Monday

Panic among pink balloons, ‘surreal’ and ‘bizarre’ said the ones who got away

Early enough not to know of the Manc who flicked the switch and made himself an It.

Not wishing to speak his name lest I nominate a martyr for that cause with no merit,

And all must know he’s worth less than that; but It’ll live another day

If treated as ineffable. There’s more strange fruit to inherit

Unless the bastard us in him – his nihilism, we address, and first, admit.

Bastard Brady – was born out of wedlock, y’know
Bastard Brady, rot in hell! Wot you did, done broke the spell

Shadows on the moor – there’s more out there, y’know
Shadows cross that herbivore world: Mods and Minis,
Long legs and Twiggy, in England’s pleasant land.

We could have believed in it, that’s how we conceived of it
Till you came along and bared your rotten teeth

In the back of a car like a rock’n’roll star
Your cherry red lips are unmissable
Still kissable even in black and white

We value human life for what it is
But even more for the possibility it contains

‘Total possibility’ is how you described it
But better dead already than soaked in your atrocities
Boys and girls, begging unheeded; their lives shut down, unplugged
And, of course, your own

Never more the wee boy still as the deer you saw deep in the forest
No longer even the VIP prisoner neighbouring the Krays
And twinned at chess with a disgraced Labour minister.

Inhuman quantities of salt, spewing and shouting; hand hits wall, fractures (not the wall), only eight stone on a six foot frame. Was this when you wanted to be transferred to a secure hospital, or when you went on hunger strike in order to be sent back? Night time snacking, nurses reported, and who knows if it was full blown mental illness or a personality disorder fit to be contained in prison?

Either way, never anything but detained: lucky to have missed the rope; only by a matter of months.

Fifty years of a locked-up life
Brought down to where the sun don’t shine.
Room, no view; and all this time never exercised in the open air.
Box not much bigger than the one you went out in – unless you’re still there.

We’re not talking ’bout lead in pencil
But strip down base graphite to a single layer of atoms –
It can be done – and a new world of possibility opens up. read more

‘Beyond words.’ The pilgrim from Hamsphire, one of an estimated two million worshippers in the town of Fatima, had entered a state of grace. Or else it was all too much for her – the Pope, the crowds, the Portuguese sun, and the little shepherds whose visions of the Virgin Mary have finally brought them to sainthood, a hundred years after the Madonna first appeared to them.

A hundred years of people striving, warring, winning, losing, dying; now colonised for Catholicism by the Holy Father. Make no mistake, besides claiming for itself the presumed innocence of Francisco and Jacinta, who died in the global flu epidemic before they had a chance to grow up, this was the Holy Apostolic Church taking back a whole heap of time, amending what times past are remembered for.

See how it’s done. Not faultlessly, for that would be in error – perfection has no need of prayer. Instead let the faithful glimpse the feet of clay – this Pope’s jug ears, his Mr Potato Head, so to see themselves making the difficult ascent alongside him.

At the open air altar, in the midst of the sacrament, a flash of calculation in the Pope’s typically humble countenance – perhaps something in his line of sight that wasn’t quite right.

It’s ‘artisanal’, this ecstasy; as he himself might say, ‘you work on it every day’. So how to work the myth and reality, folding each into the other like eggs and flour?

Take two thousand years of practice and as many of belief, moderately sincere……

Birds singing undisturbed at Drayton Manor, closed again on Thursday. A chorus of Tweets meanwhile, after 11-year-old Evha Jannath fell to her death in the water-course of Splash Canyon, a ‘rapids ride’ at the Staffordshire theme park.

Tableau of men in black, casting shadows. Police, Health and Safety inspectors – too late now!

Circled by chutes of water – its unaccustomed stillness; curved lines of the flat surface they’re standing on, standing in for the grooves on my record deck.

Album of cries and shrieks, long played out on Tuesday. When the needle dropped on this poor girl, were there rubber-necking onlookers – or did we keep our distance from the scene?

What did for her, they say, was standing up to change seats. Because the banter’s always better on the other side.

Bish, Bash, Bosh went the Twirly-Whirly Boat; and this Comic Strip just got real.

Earlier that morning, Evha wasn’t dressed right. She borrowed clothes from classmates in order to come on the school trip.

Your modest Muslim clothing: perhaps too loose for a safe ride.

Drayton Manor Theme Park reopened for business before the end of the week.

Did you think it would be ‘just a perfect day’,
Or were you miles past thinking, anyway?

As ship leaves shore, easing aside all agitation
Hypodermic depletion, you’re expecting repletion
Now fully at…. Rest.

State you’re in, you’ve got to laugh about those Chinese imports.
Needle-shaped candy available in local newsagents:
Depress the syringe in order to squirt the sweet juice into your mouth.
If only it were so easy, easy, easy.

Never as simple as brass bands and that.
In those days, it was round the Tarn and on to the Ba Ba Club,
That’s where your Mam were at.

Couldn’t you have managed this, too?
Making it through
To something more ’n your final fill
Of heroin spiked with fentanyl.