How to Read the News
I hear you proclaim the small boy was found barefoot and alone,
But his mother says you smashed her car window.
I do not refer to you, my Son, I speak to the State and corporates,
Together forging the news.
You see, Son, the news and media,
A State’s most critical business venture
In the trade of complacency,
Manufactures multiplied realities,
Every one with a humble dash of distortion -
Imagine the droplets filling your sweet eyes
Each time you flip and watch and rely.
Many may say that the King used to be the only news:
“Here, read this, and believe it!”
Undemocratic, inherently untrue.
The King’s resin now repeats:
“Here, read this, and believe it!”
The pan is twisted with divided pieces,
How divine to have a plethora to devour,
But, Son, the recipe endures.
If all that is true, Mother, how do you read the news?
If the media is out for its own interests,
Its benefactors and the status quo,
If the news does not give us the truth,
As you seem to uphold,
How do you know what to believe?
My dear Child, reading the news only begins in the morning
But it carries through the day,
Measure what you read with what you see,
Falsehoods and inconsistencies witnessed with dismay,
Blackveiled masses guided by repetitions,
Trapped inside the infinity mirror of limitations,
Trust your own vision.
Consider applying history
As told not by the victors,
But by the survivors and debris,
Adjust your values, Son,
Led by the heart this world cannot steal,
A lens must be worn in reading the news,
Only then can you unravel the electrified eel.
Paper trails and dollar signs,
Linger in obscurity
Off the headlines,
Question, who is funding?
Trace motivations and crumbs,
And the faces upon masks they have shown,
Read the news with these implications sewn.
Just as it took you practice to walk and swim and play,
Reading the news is a skilled event
To create as you would discerning clay,
Question the misleading and the smelly,
Find a nugget, hollow or dense,
But venture into that crooked force
A headline attempts to dissuade,
And Son, always regard the source.
But, Mother, how will I know if I am right?
Child, you are an iron man with sparks, flickers and gasps,
Cultivating senses chiseled with intention
To question a thornless rosebush,
Sidestep trip edges and gaps,
Foreshadow based on actors and past,
And to close the playbill with a smack,
To read the news, Son,
You reside amongst ancestral knowns
And the uncertainty of unsung notes.
MISSY MALVERDE
Missy Malverde lives in subrural America with her life partner, raising their loving and discerning child. An anti-capitalist from the land of Sandino, her heart is a writer and her mask is a lawyer, somewhere in between she gardens, studies tarot and organizes in her community.