The analogue phones are picked up,
the digital panels assembled;
an electorate’s pulse is about to be
taken, coded, parsed, pursued.

Think of it as an expeditionary tasting,
a random spoon dipped into the heat of
the national soup – are they salty
to that statesman, peppery to that policy

and will they be cruel with the cutlery
on May 7? Is it our hope that the tribunes
are lead, by opinions optimistically offered,
in a calibrated, representative fashion?

Remember – our errors are averaged away,
fluctuations surfed, narratives powered
and preferred. But in all these intentions
to vote, something is getting lost:

the uncertainty inherent in what people say
they will do. These are snapshots, not truths.
So we count and count and count and count
and maybe we will understand.

(after a conversation with Tom Mludzinski of the polling firm ComRes)