Death on Television

Turn on
And watch the killing;
Murder, disaster, accident and war.
Prime entertainment.
The way things really are.

Let the mystery play begin.
Someone else’s misfortune
Whores my illusion
As reality is manufactured,
Advertised and sold.
Come, titillate the appetite,
Confirm the prejudice.

Show me evil
In diverse forms,
Carnival freakshows
And horror divine,
Electric shocks
To goad the blood.
My cupidity, I wager,
Is not so strange to you.
Are we not equal witnesses,
After a fashion?
History, it seems to me,
Is but knowledge of pain,
And events our true instruction,
As the soul, in lust for profit,
Speculates.
How cruel we prove,
And add such vices to our credit.
Whatever suffers has currency.

Give me action and destruction,
Some sudden rage to gawp at,
The bloody sacrifice
For Aztec fun.
And is it wrong
That by disorder
I may be ordered
And cleansed?

You will always want the danger,
The blood and dirt,
Animal omens, noises in the dark.
The judge must don the black cap
And solemnly condemn.
The butcher’s knife works without pause.

It is the hour of Thomas the Twin
Poking his finger into the holy wounds;
Nails from the True Cross,
Portraits of Christ.
Now, separate the saint from his head
And describe the crime scene.