Does Anyone Care?

A riot police officer directs his colleagues to clear people away from a burning car in Clarence Road in Hackney. Photo: Getty Images

The hellfires of the dread Inferno
are not alight only in the Underworld,
from which bonfires of the vanities
of human desire, avarice and conceit
are cleansed in a conflagration of
these mortal sins, oh no indeed! One
thing has a tendency to lead to another;
assault and insult the populace, they
snarl, object, and the dry tinder fires up.

For there are communities the world over
where poverty of morals, human indignities
of bovine ignorance result in imbecilic citizens
boasting of "fun" to be had in mobbed
gatherings notified by brutish messages to
come along, join the gleeful mob in a frenzy
of looting, torching and any type of vile
and violent civil disobedience a truly
demented imagination can percolate.

Watch the civil authorities moan
in disbelieving dismay. Why, one might
think they haven't a clue that bored,
unemployed youth are apt to act out!
See the politicos wring their hands,
promising to solve and salve the
inequities and forgive all transgressions.

Look, police just standing by passively.
The hits they've taken have informed
them that witness to fire-bombing and
looting is acceptable, but riots ... definitely
not so. You there! Grab that flat-screen
set, those video games, the cellphones and
the track shoes, and just ... you know,
amble out - casually; no one cares.