Money is speech. Firms have feelings. The People’s Republic of
    Facebook
is offended by that woman’s pseudonym,
takes a copy of her passport to have her account made out to her
    real identity.

Your bank card is good for drawing cash, but
not for a balance or a statement. The Greeks, meanwhile,
revert to barter. One wolf cries ‘terrorist!’

and sheep come from miles around to applaud a (Kurdish) boy
     being savaged.
(It’s called NATO.) A list of NSA search terms
is so confidential, it can be shown to one person, if that.

Beate Zschäpe, on trial for the past two years for her part
in the racial murder of ten people, shares giggles
with her latest defence lawyer (28), cold shoulders

the other three. The accused bench is like a box at the opera,
there she is, popping a cachou into the new boy’s mouth, cynosure,
     flash of cleavage.
Wagner directs Wagner. Disparities widen; ‘scissors’ is the German
     term of art.

Cities fill up/empty out (your choice) with ‘buy to leave’ property.
Countries not busily pursuing their dissolution (UK, Belgium)
      harden themselves.
Walls go up against Serbia, Mexico, Palestine. A large body of water
      (Australia) is of course ideal.

Donald Trump pioneers the quick-drying comb-under.
The Republicans come up this time with sixteen (digit sum: seven) dwarves.
Never mind the quality, feel the narrowness.

The weather breaks records every which way; traffic reports –
miles of Stau – go on forever. Railways lose money hand over fist, but continue
their policy of neurotically expressive pricing (no two the same).

The Chinese stock exchange gets all kittenish at a cost of trillions.
America is good for an atrocity a week (‘gun violence’), and doesn’t get it.
Brazenness or apology: a style choice. Putin is a figure from Artaud or Genet;

‘Sepp’ Blatter wins and flounces out of FIFA, postdated; ‘el Chapo’          
burrows out of a high-security Mexican prison on a rail-mounted motorbike.
Lame-duck Obama goes to Africa to preach the virtues of term limits.

Human rights lawyers disappear like old snow or coral reefs or old-growth forests.
Most constitutional arrangements are subject to review,
most trade is with China. Nothing trumps (trumps!) immediate gratification.

Governments continue to attempt to refine their populations.
The new instrument of domestic policy is the F-16,
used by Syria, and now, three years later, by Turkey as well.

Saudi Arabia apes the US; a ‘loose’ alliance ‘of the willing’ bombs Yemen every day for
      months.
Whole families up sticks and emigrate to ISIS, if they can find it, or, failing that, ISIL.
Religions have feelings. Cartoons aren’t funny. Speech costs.