Tonight's Poet Corner: Today's Top Stories

Today's Top Stories
by Belinda Roddie

I stopped reading the Sunday paper. Its headlines
scream at me, black text shrieking for deliverance.
It wants me to listen, but I'm inundated
with information that's half false, half mad,
full of ego trips. I'm losing my grip, and the fact
checkers scratch their heads. They don't know
what to do with a case like mine. All they can
show me are the liars with their pants on fire,
but they're sure as fuck not dancing on telephone
wires. All I look at are the crosswords now, maybe

the comics when I'm in a good mood. The colors
they use on the characters are overly saturated, and
I'm tempted to scribble on their faces. Give 'em a
good ol' mustache and devil horns to boot, like my
days in elementary school, when the books were
bigger than my head, but my head was big enough
to hold my dreams in. Now the threshold's shrunk
a little, and there are bills to pay, and I can't sleep
as well these days, so grandiose aspirations to build
rockets and solve world hunger get put on that
backburner we've all become used to.

The social media feeds are filled to the brim. I see
the hungry dig right in, their chins buried in
the trough. They reemerge, and their cheeks are
dripping with epithets and denial. They cry as
they eat, and they get fatter on the bile. I pass out
the napkins, but no one wants to clean up after
themselves. They say the world is ending,
but for real this time, and in this age where
I don't trust the media, I try not to believe them. But it's
so damn hard. It's so damn hard. It's so damn hard.