[Newspoetry] Recursion Repeats Allusion

[Donald L Emerick]

Recursion Repeats Allusion

Once upon a time or another,
I would read worldwide news,
to follow a story day by day,
to see what happens next,
which was often nothing at all.
Nothing continues to be told,
nothing continues to hold you.
You may come to one last point:
either you or a story disappears.

Disappearing people happens
for a multitude of causes, and
makes up what we call news;
those causes keep reappearing,
though all the people disappear.

A story disappears when people do.
What is left still happens as before,
quaintly now ignored, quietly buried,
a thing of rumination, older memory.

News speaks of this magic act,
that a story reads faster in eye
than it does while it happens.
News condenses itself,
compresses itself,
compacts itself
reduces to
nothing.

I used to sit up in cozy library archives,
far from all stuff that would surround me,
scrolling through stacks of brittle papers,
old newspapers, magazines, books, letters,
all the stuff that some yesterday wrote out,
thinking that it could tell me its own news.

Somedays, dust in me stirred
more than distant dust in texts.
I'd think news was just as good
no matter how old it became,
and was just as well bad, too.

A story seemed to repeat itself,
after awhile, come back to life
again, in a multitude of causes,
new cast and production, old story.

I wanted to know how to answer:
does nature do history, naturally,
or do historians do it, artificially?

Those who study history's news
doom others to repeat its words.
That reverses dear Santayanica
speaking of some diachronica,
found in Christmas or Hannukah,
of days come back to haunt us.

Newscasting drives spirits away
from today into yesterday's news,
to exorcise spirits from our world.
Newscasters chauffeur the dead;
Like morticians, they undertake
to bury; forget all that has been,
to sell recycled news once again.
They ferry the dead across Styx,
who put some coins in their eyes.

Do I have a news point to paint?

No, not today, it's raining again,
washing away paint I splashed
and dashed on canvas yesterday,
uncovering graffiti I scrawled and
scratched and scraped to save,
covering them in protective coats.
Now, today, I read those notes,
Dust-washed mud reincarnates.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
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