The satellite truck fitted with 27 monitors
drives the streets of these cities
capturing moments of rigmarole.
Reporters stand in front of cameras
and wait for a countdown
from the button pushers
inside some production booth
clockwatching like thieves
hoping for parole.
Anchors shuffle copied paper
relayed into the brightly lit studios
by windup tapered interns.
Smile into the proscenium windows
of the world, whip turn and smile
dramatically into the proscenium arches
of this world.
27 monitors inside a truck parked
on the highest ground
flash incessantly.
An old news hound leans back
and packs a bowl,
27 monitors arranged in columns and rows.
Beheadings in a foreign country of war,
lets interview the families.
Planes entering buildings not coming out,
lets interview the fallen,
the ones who looked up and then fell down.
Lets push a microphone in mouth slack
with lack of words or air to blow
into the lungs of the drowned of Katrina.
Lets stare into the harsh glare of exposed sun
until we burn off our hallowed patina.
The lore of de Lorde carries on,
afterwards of Buchenwald,
transfixed on the transparent walls
of the asylum, brought by cable tv
into our sweetest homes.
Lets kill Paula Maxa ten thousand times more,
laugh at hysterical panic and maximized gore,
if you can’t faint then you are immured
inside the caresses of the hypnodomme.
Sigh like a furnace,
sans eyes, taste, teeth, everything.
We’re lovers only on the surface
while secretly seethe underneath.
27 monitors always turned on
pray to the legacy of our lord de Lorde.
All our world’s a stage
dependent and demented
within the confines of the Grand Guignol.
Rumrazor Press 
Hedonism, to the arts and for them nothing held back! Art for arts sake even if only the ecliptic way be lit by the mad man and his fun.
As haunting as it is indifferent, this piece, and interesting to choice to splice in the Shakespearean reference. Your Hypnodomme reminds me of Videodrome. The opening of this reminds me of the govt ‘listening mobiles’…plain white vans that began appearing here 20 yrs ago, no back windows, strange white apparati on the outsides of the vans that the police told people they were paranoid to ask about. Then we had the INS, DEA, FBI and Homeland Security open major offices here and begun hauling people to court, revealing the vans were exactly what the XFile guys said all along, roving hitech eavesdroppers, utilizing both electronic communication interception (roamphone, cellphone, CB, walkietalkie) and laser pointers which they used to listen thru peoples’ windows without warrants, under loopholes of law over what could be ‘heard by others’. The secret state of things has become so prevalent yet ironically we are indifferent to the public side of life. Sad. I myself dont even watch Tv.
I enjoyed this piece of two levels. The first, I believe, you have a birds-eye view of “waiting for the news” as the narrator–which I love. We are a culture which cannot abide violence, yet we gawk at train wrecks. Secondly, I’ve never read a poem by you or anyone who got to the heart of the matter so succincly and with as much pinache as this. More, please!
Ariel Marie: I am so glad you caught the Shakesperean reference. I referenced the first and the last line and the part about sighing like a furnace, which is an image I absolutely love and I tried to write a complete poem about that once.
From Urban dictionary:
1. Hypnodomme
A Dominant Woman who uses hypnosis and mind control to get what She wants from a submissive.
“The Hypnodomme took me deeper and deeper, capturing me inside Her spell. ”
NOTE: I guess a change I can make is not to capitalize hypnodomme- what do you guys think?
I don’t know if capitalization is important–if they don’t know what it means/can’t intuit it they’ll have to look it up themselves–unless of course you don’t want to imply a specific Domme. Being from ‘The Life’ I’m accustomed to ignoring the capitalization as mere visual grammar (Dom, sub as in Mr., man). On ‘sighing like a furnace’ I used to find the turn of phrase a bit romantic and nostalgic, but now I can’t get the bull-shaped oven from The Immortals out of my head, and the humans baking who provided its ‘sighs’, which I originally mistook to be some kind of bellows. When it comes to the commercialization and sensationalizing of the news, the Henley line ‘bubble headed bleach blond on channel nine who will tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye’ is a shuddering snapshot of what society has become with that.