VERSION TWO
Reality TV
Sean Farragher

"I was supposed to fly a plane into the White House."
ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI, testifying at his sentencing
in the 9/11 attacks.

The lies are told over and over until the eyes cloud;
Many die not from the violence but the fear of it.

Terrorism rides its own pale horse. Written in code
laws of barricades are new bibles, manifestos of
revelation and terrorist ride with exact images
of doom-- both lies and truth, caught in public notice,
to burn the nail to the quick when light stops.

2.
In New Orleans reality TV faked
an artificial maze as if it were
bad sand with no crude oil.
Now, sewage murders the poor
created with slave ships,
Jim Crow and other instruments
of torture locked in an unlocked
fetish box coated with aluminum foil,
gold leaf and indelible chipped red paint

"I don't think anybody cares, really. New Orleans
is kind of like at the bottom of the country,
and they just forget about us. “ROBERT RODRIGUE,
of Metairie, La. (from the New York Times 22/03/06)

I begin with a scream about Bleak House and Dickens’
characters shifted fortunes and marriages and deaths --
disease traveled by air or in looms of a kiss.

The TV's glare strikes novels for future ceasefire
Kennedy's resonated commentary applied to all Cubans.

During our civil war when cotton mills screamed
for the south to win markets of the Bard's Eden.
the innocent suffered for faulty estimates of value.

If I mix Dickens and Kennedy and exaggerated
as any opera soap opera penny paper might for
"experimental history", I claim atomic clouds
of stats, a priori, the square root
of minus one equaled to laws by Pythagoras.

Are victorian secret sex societies and New York
Children's brothels turned on their ear as fact
of universal hypocrisy; Are we cousins removed?

I have lived in the actual world of Lt Col. Anthony
Marshall, born 1792 Standground Hampshire, England.
My triple great grandfather fathered my double
grandfather in Dublin in 1838. Anthony’s fifth son,
Chapman Marshall and his sixth, George,
sailed by ship and train to Iowa in 1859
from Plymouth Street and Buckland Terrace 8 Devonshire.

Why do I treasure the sterling silver fork,
complete family crest, my bequest from Chapman’s
English wife brought to Cresco, Iowa,
before the Civil War ground best
and worst into infected wounds?

Chapman Marshall, an Iowa State Senator
and Stump Congregational Preacher were known
for his magical oaths that healed with hands.

They say Rev. Marshall had the gift of words.
I thought he had been made up an act of hubris
by kin conjured as grandiosity until I read
his 1906 OBIT in the Cresco newspaper.

I am certain there is some cousin in Devonshire
who shares our particular brands of DNA
that Chapman and wife brought to Family Tree TV
for reality snapshots, genealogical time machines.

We presume to have many scientific sacraments
born of reality TV: Can a poem mock itself?


3.
“Chapter 1 BLEAK HOUSE — ... Implacable November weather.
As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly
retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be
wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so,
waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”

Rain is a viral persistent sore in the belly when it
flings debris at 140 miles per hour breaking mirrors.

Watch the sky. Lungs die. Drown!
The water is a river flood underneath
the basement to the back stairway.

Mother cannot breathe. She dies in a wheelchair.
Uncle Rose walked to the Stadium. No water there
Ripe air sweat clogged on the edges of despair.

Dickens drew another cartoon.
Men, women plot the scheme.
Poverty has no excuse

Many plots, subplots, first lines
and narrow ends shroud BLEAK house
with a fog deep in New Orleans
to break levees and flood the plain.
Some lovers unite. Children die.
Fortunes change.
How can I measure fate, tragedy?
Does no one care? Dickens did.


4.
Where does history end?
Will ice caps melt, seasons change.
What is wet becomes dry, and dry
becomes ocean, mountain, and change
that perpetual magic wand
beats time on my head.

Earth is manna. Now,
ground into monuments
TV's speak ends time.

Is Reality a sucker’s game?
Are rules fixed to make ratings
an accurate barometer of doom.




END