Compute the Sorrow

Add up the dead and dying,

Damn right;
Numbers only lie in pieces
Approximated in plain sight.
A room full of statisticians
Say, “There’s margin of error here…”
With whole percentages of tears
Running down the faces left alive.

Spreadsheets winding,
Snakes of snakes,
Ladders that cannot rescue us
Lead us up or bring us down;
Shrouds around our shoulders
Cover us, stiff on unholy ground,
With another cynical calculation
Of what truth we get to hear.

A spokesman on a lectern,
Speaking like a man,
Recites his configurations
Of the lonely and the gone,
Tries the sound of sympathy
As if it pacifies the soul;
He’s a pathetic little liar
Blaming the total for the sum.

I’m leaving on the 1:15,
Necessary travel
Going nowhere else but home
(I have no-one left there now);
The blank-eyed man is saying
“It’s hard to compute the sorrow”
And I don’t quite understand:
You just add up the dying,
Just add up all the dead.

You can’t compute the sorrow?
Why not?

© BH, 2021

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A nod to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow’ - I borrowed the general framework. This about Boris Johnston’s plea for victimhood ‘It’s hard to compute the sorrow’. The figures were rising hour by hour. Even by the usual framework of reported numbers you could see the awful milestone coming. OK, the ONS compiled it using their independent methodology. But, really, hard to compute. Do the math, Boris.