Breakfast TV by Sarah Wallis

Breakfast TV

I would swear my soul

smells like cheese on toast,

the buttered kind

and roasted under the grill in Hades

time, that melt on sizzle

the Worcester sauce, and always cursed

to be an empty or missing bottle...

the sun stopped to sniff the air

the familiar scent of roses was not there

a change in the weather

another given up to this affliction

I wish the world would stop selling

souls for breakfast

you see it everyday

on the dazzling screens and doomscroll

desecration of nature, forests burn, water warms,

whales beach and seabirds strand

territorial war burns neighbourhoods

to the ground

and the world

is watching, it yawns, bored to death

of breakfast tv but the world

is still watching, and waiting

to stop watching us burn it all down.

Sarah Wallis lives on the East Coast and has a couple of chapbooks out in the world, Poet Seabird Island, and a treasure hunting book, Precious Mettle. She enjoys taking her nephew out for ice cream and making him laugh when they wear matching penguin hats to prevent the dreaded brain freeze. In exciting news she has been granted a UNESCO Fellowship and a month-long writing residency at Skara Library in Sweden.