The Revolution Was Already Televised [Poem]

"The Revolution Was Already Televised" - A Poem by Tom Shaw

I'd hear you out if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
I didn't catch the stagehand's team
setting scenes, making a few.
The crisis narrative unfolds -
I'm locked on dramas shown anew.

I'd sing to you if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
Instead it writhes in bitter fury;
snaking round a rotten apple.
It hisses hymns of a forsaken place;
hymns towards a hellish chapel.

I'd hold you close if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
It churns the earth beneath my feet
and hooks its tendrils in my boots.
Dragged away by crooked teeth,
I go where trees will not grow roots.

I'd love you back if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
My stomach turns with revolutions,
tangled in a fork and sliced apart.
I munch on my own mushed-up mind
and wait for the next programme to start.

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Music - Irama Gema - The Construal of Space in Language and Thought
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An earlier version of this piece very nearly made it into my book, “Born Anew”, before I decided to save it in the hopes it might win a few competitions. It did not, and while I could have re-submitted it to other competitions, it awarded me the opportunity to re-visit the poem and make some changes to it, allowing it to level-up into the format that you see today.

The title is a play on Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word classic, which is worthy of merit for many reasons. In writing my own poem, I had a lot of ideas in my head at the time around predictive programming, media scare-stories, colour revolutions and engineered crises that made their way into this poem. It takes a more surreal approach to how the media creates a “narrative” around the kind of things we should be expected to talk about and believe in. Fellow Substack poet and writer David Gosselin recently did a very in-depth piece on this exact subject, which I’ve linked below for your reading pleasure.

https://ageofmuses.substack.com/p/hol...

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