We the Audience
There is a village in some hot place
It doesn’t matter where
It looks like paradise
It looks like fuck all has happened there
since the beginning of time
Sorry
I meant to say
it looked like paradise
It looked something
like paradise
I looked at it
You probably would have said
you’d seen paradise
But in this village
there’s a family
A mother, a father, too many kids
and they’re poor
But they’re poor in that way
that makes it charming, because
the nut brown natives don’t want
or need IPods
So it’s okay. Being poor.
It’s okay being poor if you’re in paradise.
And it doesn’t matter anyway
because there is no village, no family
they’re just a way
we try to empathise. To say we, the audience
understand
Did you know the Holocaust wasn’t real?
It doesn’t feel real to me
I don’t know
what it’s like to stew in my own faeces
to have leprosy or typhoid
or die screaming naked with corroded skin
and Prussian blue gas slipping in
Slipping in and twisting
Slipping IN IN IN IN IN
and efficient boots outside
and gasping! pleading!
God! No! Please, God! Fuck no!
I don’t see how that can be real.
But it’s still…
sad
It’s still a tragedy
like Hamlet or Macbeth
or something where people die
and we learn lessons like
“Never, ever again” (except in Darfur)
We, the audience, learn these lessons
and we take them (yes, we, the audience)
to better ourselves
We get taught these allegories
in school
And Jews and fags and darkies suffocated
and that’s okay
because they’re only stories
For us.
for readers of serious books
For you, and me
and we, the audience, we do
empathise
we find the parallels with our own lives
the human spirit, residing in us all, and
we learn these sacred truths
from God, from life, from the Disney Channel
Sorry
I lied. It looked like paradise
to me too.
