Not Fit For Twitter
Not Fit For Twitter
by Dennis Mahagin
Swear off our media
and the Beast will starve
you, shunned from the belly
of July’s picnic trance
as a light plane drools
and drones at blue
expanse.
Zimmerman
was the blimp
in a scrutinized sky,
by the end,
I was so sick
at the sight of him,
started imagining
aftermath of a farce
wherein the bald lawyer
called West
might advise
purchasing
a treadmill…
“Yeah George …
Bowflex makes a damned
good one now I hear
in fact they’re
the best,”
West might
say, grinning and
pumping the pasty
plump ham of his
infamous client.
Talking heads
notwithstanding
it’s true
what the seers
have often said,
that Conscience
makes you do
strange
things, start to eat, eat
say, in horrible earnest
after telling
Humpty, or Hannity
that the killing
“was God’s plan…”
I watched that man
on the tube,
sort of inscrutable bland
calm rabid Michelin Man
gone beyond
his ground
standing, Kafka
and still,
ballooning,
ballooning
impassive
ribbon curl of hungry
lip twitch, starch
collar dolphin
flip tie on the cheap
tourmaline suit.
And somebody in my
circle of friends said
“ain’t hardly the end
for Zim… now he gets
to know how it feels
to be hunted …”
After the spectacle
that made me so sick, I
couldn’t stop listening
to what lawyers
said
over and over
as a bad glutton
being force
fed, being
force
fed
I stripped
the day bed, did
dishes, scoured
every TV room
with Pine Sol
Windex and
Clorox
bleach.
“This story, sure had
some legs,” another talking
head said “it bled, and bled
and bled and
bled …”
Trayvon, long gone
with the fall leaves, skinny
skinny ass gust and swirl
while buy and
by George celebrates
incommunicado, fat
fingers
moon face deep
in five pies, blue
berry, mince meat
pumpkin, key
lime and
peach.
Silencer
(a response poem)
Against a fusillade of forgetfulness
the poets stand their ground
waving that thing around
crazy in the choice to not back down
the worst kind of justice
is the silent treatment
Our last man standing is sitting still
judge & jury reading this to pieces
as an edgewise everyman
locked in a struggle
to pull the trigger
and effectively end the conversation
stop talking about the tragedy already
he says
casually gesturing toward the next one
calling ceasefire
just to claim the last word himself
as a trophy for his mantle place
Surrender
your attention please
there will be no terms
Not Fit for Twitter’s diatribe plays on Zimmerman’s corpulence (I guess, not having watched the coverage)to criticize the media overplay of his hand in the event, and media exploitation in general; curiously enough, bypassing the issue of Stand Your Ground. Making us as sick of the poem by its end, it has its own effectiveness. I think what Halifax has to say about the gun’s being “the last word” silencing attempts at justice is more to the point, in that its arbitrariness signals “the next” tragedy (by extrapolation) for the media to cover.