The Author Tries To Get News From Credible Sources
I thought books would be a cool metaphor mostly because i wanted to write about books.
Radiant, here is the Gun Library;
Take our tomes of heroic murder-
over here, semiautomatic statistics,
novels littered with convenient curses.
We're lending half-truths at nearly-half price
mind the misery, pay in blood.
Caress these pages - each word speaks bullets
the book jackets have decorative illustrations
of morality. Reload the spine and fire
and never stop to think.
The Gun Library always wins, like
a chessboard with no white squares,
consuming, moving forward.
Keep firing.
As we pass the Trophy Halls, remember this is reality.
Outside you are imagining Death. Remember, this is fiction.
The tour's nearly done - don't forget
to read and share and like this message or
don't understand us at all.
The Gun Library tells stories, but gives endings.
Thoughts
It's easy to mistake the world for being simpler than it is. In fairy tales, the 'answer' to a conflict is simple - a Kiss, a Magic Spell, a Lucky Encounter. In politics, the solutions would-be candidates propose to their would-be voters are catchy and simple. In both examples, the nuances of our complex reality are taken away with the power of language.
Wording is powerful. "And They Lived Happily Ever After" gives a reader the freedom to imagine their own, perfect ending to a fairy tale. This is one way that the interpretation of stories reflects the person (I like to think poetry has the same effect, allowing readers to find their own message.) However, control of the narrative between the writer and the reader is a narrow balance, if there is any. Imagine a news article about a recent natural disaster that blamed a political party for being unprepared for it, without any evidence and using inflammatory language - the angry tone of the article would be 'engineered' by the author, but the lack of concrete evidence lets the consumer imagine the horrible things that 'happened'.
Overall, this poem is about the anger, hate, and violence that biased and misleading language can create.
-tomatobean
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