One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
- ~Kurt Vonnegut
Poems
The TV is On the TV is On the TV is On the TV
by Matt Hart
is always on, which is a lie, and it's Sunday
which is the truth, and there's a thing
in the corner blooming with colorful language,
so I look at it for eleven seconds trying to imagine
the most honest way to tell you an orange,
but then I realize that the most honest way
has nothing to do with the imagination, at which point
I realize that honesty isn't the best policy,
but also that that orange sure looks delicious,
and if we only had some little fishes and some
eggs and a crusty piece of bread, maybe a knife,
we could eat a still life for breakfast,
and right then and there all the blazing-est art would fly
right out the window, chirping its hurt
at all the sunnier dispositions, which is another
way of saying even the bright things are
awfully bright, and additionally
that thing in the corner is opening its mouth,
revealing its satellites' gratuitous violets, "Give me
my motherfucking gloves," it reminds us
not to be the image of an image of an image
nor to come any closer; mystery
is crucial for the good of human being,
all running together in the yolk of an egg
or the zest of an orange and two or three other things,
some crying, some screaming, all the stars in one bite.
Orange shane5000
Another Small Apocalypse
by Richard Jackson
That twenty thousand people in the early 19th century
watched twenty-three animals, including a bear, ride over
Niagara Falls in a burning mock pirate ship tells us
something about who we are.
It is either night or
ashes from some distant tragedy floating in the air.
It's not the horror but the horror's face we must imagine
as our own. We can't bandage our hypnotized hearts.
We like to carve our names on rocks, in trees, as if
by this we owned them.
Excuses fill the night
like bats. This is why we need so many distractions-
twitter, Facebook, texting — anything to stop thinking.
It's why Lot's wife turned back to gaze at her own death.
It's as if our souls lined up like pigeons on telephone wires.
Or that we thought a plane's unreachable vapor trail held
our innermost secrets.
We believe in dogmas we don't
understand. Someone wears a bomb into a mosque
and we hardly have time to mourn before the next
commercial. Our days walk by unconcerned. Night
covers up the names of the lost.
Here, we watch the owl
watching for prey. The treed opossum hangs in the tree
all night, watching, waiting for us to move on. The lake
refuses to shimmer. The lava of our lives hardens.
A few lightning bugs try to warn us. I remember someone
saying most poems only watch like old men gazing quietly
at the tide. Even our memories seem like retouched photographs.
Our words hang ill-fitting in the closet.
There are still
nine thousand unidentified bones from 9/11.
If you listen closely
you can hear this poem trying to find a way out of these
nightmares. I write this on a moonless night, the birds
inexplicitly quiet, watching the onlookers gather at
the yellow tape of another murder lit by the flash of cameras.
Conversations in Reality 2 - Distinction loccus