The blind men will be rolling up today…

The blind men will be rolling up today…

It was lying abandoned

Its headline torn away

The pages crumpled where

Somebody had been sitting on it

When the train was full.

Do people read newspapers?

Or do they just hide behind them

With small squares cut out to peep through

Counter surveillance from before the wall fell

When a dead drop could mean more than one thing

But often involved a folded piece of paper

Hidden in the cracks between two bricks

In a wall next to a lamppost

In St James’s Park

My mother used to read the obituaries

To see if she recognised any of the names

Or in her latter days to make sure

She was still alive

It got harder for her to tell

Once her eyes failed

It seemed people stopped reading

Once the news rolled around through

Twenty four hours

And people believed what a celebrity

Influencer posted about vaginal cleansing

Being a predictor of climate change

Nobody trusts experts

It is only the truly stupid who will

Inherit the earth

Maybe I wrote it

Do they sell any of Rupert’s papers in Liverpool

How do they square that with watching Sky sports?

I guess principles are flexible friends

When the storylines demand

A different narrative

But the print had blurred

Probably transferred to somebody’s bottom

If they had bare legs they might

Have a print run all the way down

I hope it wasn’t a page three model

Do they still have those I wonder

When all is said

Red Tops were never meant to educate

Or even to be read

Just thumbed through

Until the sports section

Do people still lick the end of a pencil?

I wonder if dating sites

And registered trade lists

Killed the classifieds ads page

Blnd 34 wd mt tll dk man

35 2 40 for gd cln fn. No posers.

What happened to the news kiosk

The paperboy

The multiple editions?

There were three editions of The London

Evening Standard

See how times change

Not The London Times of course

As that has never been the same since

They removed ads from the front page

In the sixties.

Today the same story is on repeat

Until the facts are known

Although by then the narrative is formed

The truth goes out of the window

And the journalist

Is called an enemy of the people