One Day's News

Not quite a "found poem," but a poem from "found" news. While living in Weehawken NJ in 1995, I was startled by the overall gruesome tone of one day's headlines and news stories. They seemed indicative of where we are as a species.

ONE DAY’S NEWS
from The Jersey Journal,
Nov. 21, 1995

Five years before millennium
and here is one day’s news:
An Oklahoma teen
is chained in a well house,
burned with an iron,
scalded with bleach,
shocked with high voltage.
Give back the money!
his tormenters scream.
He didn’t take
his mother’s
drug-dealing treasury,
but she won’t hear it.
Beat him! she tells her husband.

Well-oiled gears
crave Aztec offerings.
An escalator rips off
three tiny toes
from a three-year-old girl
on the New York subway. 

A leaf shredder sucks
park-worker’s hand
into the chopping blades
in maple-red Hoboken.
A head and a leg
wash up in Newark.
Cops say they match
a torso found
in an unmarked suitcase.

Thieves shoot cabbies
in back of the head,
then strip off their socks
to get their money.

Wanting a baby,
an Illinois woman
kills her pregnant rival,
cuts open her abdomen
with a pair of scissors
to deliver a boy.
She flees the scene,
but not before
she slashes the throats
of the woman’s other children.
Arrested, she asked
“So what’s the problem?
Just why am I being charged?”

Down in San Juan
the livestock are killed
by chupacabras,
goatsucker vampires
that drink the blood
and eat the innards.
Two cats, five goats
and twenty parakeets
already murdered,
the baffled police admit.

Just one day’s news.
Sufficient to one day
is the evil thereof.