--- H A L V A R D   J O H N S O N

1.
Punch 7,568 details into your light-brown box
and you're done. Lunch is just a swallow away.
Downloads come around 2, and then there's a cup
of tea, or maybe a slug of whatever's in that bottle
in the brown paper bag in your bottom-right drawer.

2.
Review carefully the crafts we're trying to keep alive
until we can do something about funding them
on a more permanent basis, and then you will have
time for a meeting or two, network or not (good
time for a snooze). Schedule assassins for Friday.

3.
Time, place, and imagination come together around
5, just as you dash for the door, heltering and
skeltering your way to your train or your bus. Hard
as always to get taxis in the rain. Public transport
full as ever of transcendently pragmatic folk.

4.
None of them speak, none menace. Our ability
to divide has never been questioned or called into
scruple. Key elements of our mental world parlay
into partisan ambush. We can clearly see where we
fit on the trenchant curve of the public's opinion.