There are five degrees between them (Mosul, Iraq, is North of Cocoa, Florida), but down by the waterside the lush, green vegetation looks the same in both locations.

In Mosul there is plenty of Attitude: families who’ve taken refuge on the East side of the city, crossing the pontoon bridge over the River Tigris, returning to the bomb-ravaged West, determined to salvage something from their former existence.

And who could blame them if the TV or cooker they struggle back with, came from the remains of their neighbours’ home, ’stead of what’s left of their own?

On the side of the city that remains habitable, increased demand for accommodation means that landlords are doubling the rent. Beyond the boundaries, another tent city springs up – ready for refugees-in-their-own-country.

Here in the cradle of civilisation, there are children who’ve clearly seen too much and others who seem unmarked. Was it just the accident of where they happened to be, or that some families had more to fall back on, or whether the struggle to survive each day provides sufficient urgency, or if they are young enough to see themselves in the future/a future for themselves – which?

In Cocoa there is excessive Lassitude: five youths hanging out in the long grass, smoking……and filming a drowning man.

There it goes again, the little black blob of his head, up above the flat-calm surface and then down below with a spluttering cry.

Snickering and name-calling, as if the drowning man (Jamel Dunn, 31, disabled, heavily tattooed) is losing face instead of his life.

Here in the crocodile of civilisation, did you feel like gods laughing at the puny struggle of a mere mortal? And if that’s how you felt, why use the phone your filming on to dial 9-1-1?

‘Never in my life would I ever have thought we would need a law to make this happen,’ the Mayor of Cocoa said. Of course he’s correct. read more

Flicking from general election to martial law – not much more than changing a light bulb.
Sold to the United States a century ago, when Spain needed the cash.
Americanised, yet every inch the Far East.
A long line of disaffections: each generation must have its own (communist, nationalist, Islamist).
The militant group now showing allegiance to IS started out as a ‘family militia’.
Who told Islamists to look like icons of Jesus – or even take his name?
The President’s in shirtsleeves, doing the business: unusual business where there’s no counting the cost; his USP is order at any price.
Waves of civilisation crashing over these islands: Hindu-Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic. Talking about women, the head of state still speaks barbarian.
Successive breakaways and the different headgear of their respective leaders; from the outset on the lookout for the best deal with central government.
Always ready to rain – except when already raining?
Lining up to get away, thousands waiting patiently between the fire fight and the Army road block.
Normal life….to be resumed….further disruption included.

All the gold a couple could wish for
Wrapped in a handy-sized bundle, gratefully received
This summer’s day: 4 August 2016
See how it was: his mother’s pale face suffused with joy
Father (proud father) cradling the reason for completing his daily round:
Te Deum – O God, We Praise You. Not needing to get high
To get through the tedium of it, as posties have been known to do.

Odour of ordinary infused with news of his rare condition
Each moment now incensed with unusual significance
The known unknowns – how much does he see in us, how long have we got?
Holding his parents as tightly as they hold him.

They wound trees to obtain the bittersweet resin known as myrrh,
As the parents of 10-month-old Charlie Gard have been wounded
By successive court judgements going against them.
Myrrh that’s made for healing and also for embalming –
How poignant the discrepancy now all their appeals have failed.

So tender is every sight of him, each instant
Looking back to the future that might have been
Each instance looking forward to no future at all
In quickening preview of a sickening end of time.

2.

Poking out from a distraught dad’s top pocket
His boy’s cuddly monkey toy, tight-lipped grin in permanent upswing.
That monkey-face is polar (bear) opposite to the father’s fixed-down mouth-frown.

Boy can’t cuddle toy ’cos he just can’t move
A calm exterior may mask pain he feels but lacks the capacity to show
Such is the brain damage he’s suffered, we’ll never rightly know.

So here comes the judge; baroness, no less.
Mind sharp as a scalpel, she’s cutting in to the contradiction:
Medical advice versus parental instinct to prolong life at all costs.

Operation over, the hearing comes to an end.
The boy is to die – ‘dignified’; the parents may never recover.
But when the state intervenes for the sake of the child,
Humanity recuperates from natural calamity –
Or so it is claimed. read more

‘You come here when people die, why?’ ‘Even then, they’re not really here’.

Grenfell somewheres are confronting a troupe of professional anywheres
Of these, the son of the manse maintains such decorum as he can muster
Naïve in the matter of socks and ties, but not daft enough to expect ‘more tea, vicar?’

Wiser still – or cynical, the locals have seen our sort before:
Reporting that doesn’t come, then drops in, drives by
Shoots and chews up its reportees, leaves them for brushing aside.

Alongside ‘deportees’ and ‘detainees’,
How many have we fetched and fixed in stories that we nailed?
So let no one be surprised, if reporters are arraigned with officials to be jailed
When they tell us we’re not wanted: no dogs, no ministers, no journalists.

Dust and ashes in a vertical no man’s land
Block-jacked upwards in contempt for ‘streets in the sky’

No more the chequered lights of a Broadway Boogie Woogie
Silver slivers in the early hours made way for the grey of the First World War
Meantime the furious orange that gives its name to burnt

First the flames engulf the tower, then the tower is all-consuming
‘Grenfell changes everything,’ says the fresh-faced council leader.
Wheeling his way to a blow-up bed in the sports hall nearby
The boy with cerebral palsy reports the council is speaking air

Across the city scant resources scattered in panicked disarray
Tenants decanted, doormats banned, perspective binned for the day

Grenfell comes loping greedily, echoes of Beowulf, towering above
But Grenfell has no mind nor movement, unless we make it so
We may choose the allegorical, if that’s how best to recount
(And of the dead and injured, not only the amount)
But we must have clear-headed and categorical
When that’s what it takes to remake.

Hunched with hands forward for the handcuffs,
There’s a moment when, from a certain angle,
Richard Burton comes to mind: dark hair, bright eyes, brooding.

But this one’s not even Welsh
Only that his on-off missus cooks in a Cardiff caff.
No claim on the Celtic flame, then; simply a standard-bearer for failure.

Missed the Muslim march he’d muttered about mowing down –
(You mightn’t know but it’s happened more than once on Merseyside,
Years ago, when Orange was the sash some fathers wore)
Making do with worshippers milling round after midnight

And when you spilled them, had they reached their state of grace –
That sense of being other than their everyday?
Did you see it in their faces, Jealous Guy? Unlucky Man,
If just a taste of this had come to you some other way…..

My guess is yours didn’t come at all
You never arrived, even after all that panting down the motorway
In the van you may have hired for somewhere to kip; alone again, naturally.

‘Did my bit’ – come off it. And ‘kill me’ just cracks me up.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Martyr Manqué – this time as farce.
Call this a terrorist? Dial ‘F’ for Failure
And you’ll have the full measure of White Van Darren, the man-less-than.

Knives drawn and mad keen to cut it out,
They came looking for the heart of Saturday night.
Hands held in the gloaming,
That small-town movie where we are the small-time stars – slashed.
Smashing the dash of melancholy,
When the moment’s liquid in the mirror behind the bar.
This was a one-way mission: gun the motor; kill the self-loving, self-loathing self-doubt.

How many had to die, you numbskulls, to affirm your existence for the eight minutes before death by cop?

Drive-in, stroll-on Saturdays may never be the same
We can only make them better.
Don’t say we owe it to the dead,
Or we’ll have let our freedom become burdensome
Do it for ourselves,
For who we are without the daily grind to make us dumb
Our mission is this: fix what’s under the hood, discover what we’re like unfettered

And if sometimes an unknown voice which has to be the ghost of that Saturday night….
It’s OK – she’s on our side.

‘Amputate his hand without anaesthetic’
Baying for the blood of this God-like medic
‘Rogue’ surgeon’s powers of knife and death….
If his head were severed, no intake of breath

Kathy Griffin turns the plastic head around,
So the lens won’t catch the white patch not covered in fake blood.
Hers is a comic performance for the camera, drawing on the tragedy
Wrought by ISIS executioners, also performing for the camera-eye.

Down the decades, was Ian Paterson method-acting as the galloping doctor?
As gourmand of the chest area, slicing & dicing where Trump only copped a feel.

Here a breast to be removed – unnecessarily, as it turns out. To another patient,
We can save your cleavage if we operate only here – insufficiently, as it turns out.
(God save us from men playing God, except when we need them to be infallible.)

Meanwhile a Muslim surgeon treating victims of the Manchester bombing, cannot comprehend the make-up of Salman Abedi:

‘I don’t understand how someone who professes the same faith could have such a discordant view of life.’

But how many of us are truly harmonious? Paterson points to discord even in a surgeon’s performance, ending in terrible strife.

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.