[Newspoetry] On This Date In History

[emerick at chorus.net]

On This Date In History

Having no brain working me up to storm
ramparts on ramjets rammed into verse,
I read my news metered out by yards, terse,
hoping to seem wise by how I inform.

Eke! Eek! Eke! Oh, look, Mommy and Daddy!
An iambic pentameter crawled
to us!  It's over there!  May I squash it,
before its copulates co-populate
the earth full of noisy merry nonsense?

On this date in history, what happened
was merely this: events collected dust,
became faintly obscure by becoming
completely into a moment of now,
and, glimpsed on stage, like a beauty queen
parodying regal pagan pageantry,
dying reagan in para-tragedy,
the news in reviews has nothing to lose,
but it does evanesce, nevertheless.

What's like a pun, but's not a puny pun?
Give up?  Read cross-selections of the ages:
cross-word puzzle clues near confuse us
with Confucius who had his bon-mot uses
picked clean when Florida recounted
all our votes, discovering de Leon,
the alien lie of lying lions,
oh, dandelions dying, yellow Greens,
fountain springing up eternal you-thee
-in-Asia, o tempura, au morales,
the nyet-work times, they are not a-changing.

A date in history is not today
but yesterday's troubles once far away
are brought back resurrected, posthumous,
for us to buzzard over, fret upon,
picking up where we left off left-overs.

Synoptical Day of All Toadies comes,
dissecting today's Date in History,
correcting off-by-one-errors, it fakes
the past by discarding in bigger flakes
all the news it never saw fit to speak,
but printed, anyway, to hide ads in them,
among and around them -- buy, buy black bird,
have you any wool gathered, black sheep?

I stumble here upon the truth in ads:
it borrows verities by breaking news:
receive the sacraments, the excrements
of society, from swollen waist-lands,
spills its toxic fertilizers a-broad-
cast, b.read-cast into maws of diners.

<<I had something to say, about the news,
but my struggle to say it did not speak.>>