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MK Ultra
Television;
Mother of a generation.
To the shopping centre she is a faith healer;
An arms dealer to the schoolyard.
Her children are her acolytes.
Who spent a thousand monotone nights
In her death-watch radiant halogen light
Sobbing fitfully at the poignancy
Of the white dot and whine
Of high frequency anguish;
Like the innocuous whistle
Of some falling incendiary device.
She thinks celebrities are nice,
She's only in it for the money,
Her indifference engine maps a mathematical function,
To fathom the human brain's capacity for mediocrity.
Her ad-breaks tend towards infinity.
She recites her cataclysm
In the speechless sulphur,
Popular kultur,
surrealistic tannoy spiel,
Dealing slogans of attrition
To the anaesthetized millions
Milling in shopping pavilions,
On the emergency frequency
Via satellite telepathy.
She always plays monopoly,
She always wins,
She has no empathy,
She has no sins
To confess
No stones to cast
No boards of redress
She clutches vast
Leviathans of commerce
To her breast
When she delivers her sermon.
Her spark plugs attract vermin.
She never shares files,
She sells amateur karaoke,
Show trials and plastic surgery.
She gives lectures on biology,
With a knife between her teeth,
Teaching nazi ideology
Of Aryan physique.
True beauty is always unique.
She has seven fake faces
For the years of the week,
True beauty is always unique.
TV'¦
Your fall schedule festering in the blinding,
cross-eyed nothing of dead air and advertising
All the skinny blonde pigs suckling at the teats of your soul
Worm-holed your wretched skull
Blear eyes wide to the dull wet dreams of marketing men,
bursting with the toxic semen of genocides and slogans'¦
I fantasise new programs in the doomsday of your eyes.
They watch me, ghostly,
Through skeletal sockets,
Lips of static electricity,
Suck my energy
While I'm still young
Tell me you love me
While I suck my thumb
Slide your tongue behind my ear
Breed new death into me
Softly
I'm ready for your frozen breath'¦
To sweep me into ecstasy
Drive me crazy with leaden reality
Smear hot plasma on my tummy
Tell me you love me
Never leave me
I'm lonely
I'm
TV I've been drinking I'm stupid and ready
I don't feel so good'¦
I've got wood for your anchorwomen'¦
Your jingoism makes me taste blood'¦
Last autumn I coughed sputum
at your desperate housewives
and moaned for the human condition
A long slow lament
Weeping pessimism from gaping pores
A pounding orgasm
Of migraine and bed sores
blood stained brutal dreams
Metal in the moth-lamps
of your eyes
PLEASE STOP YOU'RE KILLING ME
I feel your bony fingers of war correspondence tracing fault lines on my neck.
Break my mind while I'm still young.
I taste ashen semen on my tongue.
Come,
Slide your schedules down my throat.
TV... I'm nervous... my brain bleeds... a furious synapse flash...
A fuck brain chorus... of neurological heaviness...
She sows seeds of deceit in the homes of the nation.
She doesn't offer salvation or return our calls.
Same stale voicemail falls on deaf ears from dumb phone:
'Your call is important to me,
Please leave your poetry after the tone.'
Her alkaline rivers run red;
Past the battery farm cities,
And Ritalin factories of attention deficit societies,
Carrying pestilent disease from the carcass of cultural variety
Which she feeds to birds of prey;
The grey vultures of the market town tombs of the dead
Her fumes stone the crows who scavenge her bread
TV why don't you show them... Colostomy bags and wheel chairs and the same blank expressions stare at the same fucking screen in sixty years, with two blue pills in the morning and two at night and all the wasted youth and energy vanished into the ether in one fucking nuclear flash of honesty and they won't even have any memories because they have re-runs and DVD's and WHY DON'T YOU SHOW THEM THAT?
Why does nothing seem real on your screens?
When I wake up in the morning I have advertising jingles stuck in my head, I sing them in the shower I'll never be lonely
Why don't you show them all the broken dreams of chattering Technicolor dusks and burnt-out husks of humanity huddled around the dying flames of your crazy cathode ray religion realising that there's no salvation and coming down into the migraine truth that tears the souls of the forgotten millions who live with more freedom than they can handle and do nothing and die regretting all the things they could have done with their time to make a difference? TV why don't you show them what they could do if they turned off their sets and wrote stories or poems or drew pictures or painted sunsets or wrote songs or formed bands or travelled or followed the voices inside to self-actualise?
TV could you be afraid of them?
<unfinished>
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Comment by: - 2007-07-13 20:30
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Do not ever, never, never!!!! strip this down to three stanzas. To do so,
Would kill the poem, ok there is still a need for the red pen to run its self over the poem maby delete some of the solo lines or two line stanzas. The last big rant is the diamond part of the poem, as for structure, the mind makes its own and so does the poem. Genius is contained here. |
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Brilliant! Bravo! Your command of the language is breathtaking. I believe the only thing lacking here or tweakable, is perhaps the format or presentation. Also, below a few things that caught my eye;
She thinks celebrities are nice,
Sheâ??s only in it for the money, (She = TV, I don't know about these 2 lines, they bother me. I'd cut those)
True beauty is always unique. (i just didn't feel these lines belonged to the piece.)
All the skinny blonde pigs suckling at the teats of your soul (hm.. I wonder about losing the teats of)
fantasise new programs in the doomsday of your eyes. (I just didn't like this line, it seemed out of place)
I'm
TV Iâ??ve been drinking Iâ??m stupid and ready
I donâ??t feel so goodâ?¦ (I also didn't like these, they seem out of place)
Colostomy bags and wheel chairs and the same blank expressions stare at the same fucking screen in sixty years, with two blue pills in the morning and two at night and all the wasted youth and energy vanished into the ether in one fucking nuclear flash of honesty and they won't even have any memories because they have re-runs and DVD's and WHY DON'T YOU SHOW THEM THAT? (This is very long, I would make several sentences here. I wasn't sure, it did kind of seem like one last rant, such frustration, spoken without a breath?)
Thanks for sharing, keep 'em coming. |
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Comment by: solaris - 2007-03-07 08:15
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performance poetry, relying on sound for its drive for the most part - at least, at the start... not a bad thing but just sniffed a bit of contrivance, but i felt this really came into its own as you worked through the thoughts, culminating in the desperation of these lines that you must rattle off with hardly a breath.... phew!
TV why don't you show them... Colostomy bags and wheel chairs and the same blank expressions stare at the same fucking screen in sixty years, with two blue pills in the morning and two at night and all the wasted youth and energy vanished into the ether in one fucking nuclear flash of honesty and they won't even have any memories because they have re-runs and DVD's and WHY DON'T YOU SHOW THEM THAT?
Why does nothing seem real on your screens?
When I wake up in the morning I have advertising jingles stuck in my head, I sing them in the shower Iâ??ll never be lonely
Why don't you show them all the broken dreams of chattering Technicolor dusks and burnt-out husks of humanity huddled around the dying flames of your crazy cathode ray religion realising that thereâ??s no salvation and coming down into the migraine truth that tears the souls of the forgotten millions who live with more freedom than they can handle and do nothing and die regretting all the things they could have done with their time to make a difference? TV why donâ??t you show them what they could do if they turned off their sets and wrote stories or poems or drew pictures or painted sunsets or wrote songs or formed bands or travelled or followed the voices inside to self-actualise?
makes me want to slam down my glass on the table, stand up and shout 'more!!!' lol |
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Hi Mike. Why no one has commented on this, I don't know. Personally I thought it was overlong and could do with some editing. These lines, for example, were great:
"Who spent a thousand monotone nights
In her death-watch radiant halogen light
Sobbing fitfully at the poignancy
Of the white dot and whine
Of high frequency anguish;
Like the innocuous whistle
Of some falling incendiary device."
And:
"She gives lectures on biology,
With a knife between her teeth,
Teaching nazi ideology
Of Aryan physique."
But some of it seemed like flab-encrusted filler, especially the couplets and the shorter stanzas, and I felt like the last part was more of a monologue. Maybe it was your intention to screw with the structure, of course. But personally I think this piece works better stripped down as, say, a three-stanza poem, rather than as a ranting monologue; or maybe it should be just one long manic monologue without the caesura at the end of the stanzas. Despite that there is much to be impressed by in this piece and I look forward to reading more. It reminded me of that song "Television The Drug of a Nation", and although it's a point that many people have made (myself included) it can always be reiterated because it becomes a launch pad for so much else going on in the world, both sociological and political. Even for those of us who prefer to read books, the cathode ray nipple is still there to suck from time to time.
Take care,
Paul :D |
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