Grief And Grieving

are both personal processes.

For them to be authentic
to the loss that they observe
they must surely be private,
or rather reserved for the few
with a similar sense of loss
for the person who is grieved for.

To live 'amid a national grief'
is to live where nothing seems real.
It is to live where the media
compounds individual losses 
until they lack all individuality.

The presentation of loss
simultaneously represents
everybody and nobody,

The listener soon becomes inured
to what they hear, immune to the grief
for being unable to recognise the grievers.

Signs Of Greater Age (15)

1)Enjoying reading and the radio,
as much as your senses permit,
but disliking television, because the latter
embodies all too well the cult of youth.
And it embodies the idea of activity
for its own sake which is something
you need less of. 
Television is both overpowering
and transient, it has expanded further
than ever most people imagined it could,
or that it should ever have gained the right to.

2)In the reading and speech based radio
you enjoy liking the amount of sex,
violence and bad language it offers
because they are grafted on to strongly written characters,
whom you can enjoy because they are well made fictions
that are easy to set aside when their charm wears thin.