He said his wife had died, she was a suicide
Could I bring her back to die more right?
He said his wife had died, oh,the children cried
A rope, a noose,  the plank , a fearful sight.

If she died  again of cancer, that would be  alright.
Many folk are with you on that cancer ride.
Oh,oh, oh, keep their eyelids tight.
Children must not see just how this mother died.

It’s  too, too  ,too sad for a man to feel he’s failed.
The dark depressions, the tigers in the night.
The psychotic rage, when the hidden prisoner  wails
Deep, down,  dark, where dead eyes  give the only light.

He said, hypnotise me, get her image back
I’ll ask her  how to feel  when she is broken
I’ll  ask her how to touch her when   her heart won’t open
I’ll ask her to leave a  trace, a track.
I can’t go with her, for her children’s sake.
Ask her why our love didn’t heal her crack.
What tool, what thought, what grace did I lack?

Why do others manage when she could not?
I never knew she dwelt in such a lonely spot.
The bell jar and the spider are so  cruel,  so flat.
It’s over now, I’ll carry the children in their baby cots.

I ‘m the lord of the deserted  at the altar pack
My eyes are ice, I smile and all my teeth are black.
Can I ever be human again?
Can I allow, feel, touch this,her pain?

As Sady Doyle noted, ‘she can’t be sad or angry, but she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this one. Anything she does is wrong.’ One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. ‘No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,’ Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. ‘For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonised.’ Or as Mary Beard put it last year, ‘We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.

Once mobile meant travelling like the Bedouin…
We knew what phoney was.
We enjoyed talking to each other
A screen was a thing that hid something.
Writing was a lengthier process but we had better attention spans.
Reading was partly social; we used the library, not a kindle.
We read the great books even in our tiny poor homes.We went to hear the Halle orchestra and did not feel lowly.
We helped our neighbours.
We helped ourselves to the good available and gave it to our friends
Now my phone is boiling and the kettle rang me.
The microwave is grilling a politician
My tablet has no commandments on it.
My TV is so smart it’s moved out to a place where someone will watch it.
My radio is sending  a distress signal
My heart is heavy.
My heart is light.