News Poem by Chad Lilly

Watching Cliff Notes on reality,
snapshots captured
and edited for time
c o n t e n t
and the given response
of a test market audience
being moved toward
or away from
some new terror

or monetary consequence
inflicted by the
I.R.S.

mixed with new fashion trends
and moral standards packaged
nicely between school shootings
and not-so-random acts
of intentional violence

and the latest breaking information
being brought to light by
some new internal investigation
of human rights violations
by another acronim-agency
of faceless agents
marching behind
a man-made army of
zeros and ones

prop-o-ganda
spans the channels
with ready-made events
that get reported as 'live',
while lawyers
and politicaians
deliver monologues
and alibis
as reasons why
not one of them can answer
a 'yes' or 'no' question...
with a 'yes' or 'no'

parades called trials
decorate the prime-time slots
with testimonies of
endless talk
and tactics
designed to provide
the legal ways and means
for any defendent
to be proven 'not guilty'...
as long as they
can pay the retainer

systematically flooding streets with chaos
and filling televison screens
with missing children...

until people are willing to beg
for a police state to protect them
from everything they've seen
on the news.