[Newspoetry] The Subject was Neu-Roses

[DL Emerick]

http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostemailed.html

The Subject was Neu-Roses

What do people talk about?
Look at incidental data.

The most popular recent articles?

Educated women most want motherhood, not a career.

New dog flu may threaten your puppy mutt's life.

Men -- married or gay -- seek gay sex on way home.

Meanwhile, the Vatican says NO to gays as priests.

Dowd's says Bush hires mostly hacks and cronies.

California acts to post warnings with fries (duh!).

Science says we have a cursing gene (evil yetzer?).

Medicine says Implanters have Conflict of Interest.

Finally, a piece of news: no justice in China (DUH!)

Friedman opines that Bush's halo is waterlogged.

And so it goes.

(Number 19:
Web Sites offer answers -- some reliable.)

What's it all mean?
Something to talk about, or gossip about,
high reader curiosity interest is in news,
but very little of it concerns anything useful.

Even our local paper spins its frontpage headlines
on UW Men's basketball ticket prices and nonsense.

News is supplemental to presupposed understanding,
supposedly educated enough to be supplementable,
knowing how to tell mere information from truth,
to remember truth is no momentary object of fact.

I use truth as if it's a princple of a system.
Fact freaks think otherwise, I know too well.
Fact freaks dwell on "Just the facts, Ma'am."
They are unable to tell fact from its spins,
and hides their biases in (re)collecting facts,
as news is journaling, not encyclopedia-called.

March of the Penguins was a big hit...
you could see the digested vomit
from the parents to the children,
so characteristic, we think, of birds,
and likewise of our own bird-brains,
where we don't chew our own food,
we swallow swill thru eager mouths,
we spew what we have chance caught.