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Recorded Reading (2:35): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hmw1tuyzdufwja8n0u16k/Media-Star.m4a?rlkey=jlv610yn4a57elekw32bmhhtv&dl=0

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(Companion post to immediately prior “Sic Transit” and immediately following “The Fourth Door.”)

While we’re discussing the illusion of “success” as defined on our third dimensional Earth, let’s take a brief and unsavory glance into the world of mass media as it presently exists ~ which generates and maintains that illusion for a credible population.

In order to maintain connection with the celestially generated visions she shares with her readers ~ often at a pace with which they have difficulty keeping up, even in their infinitely swifter roles ~ this poet has maintained a complete fast on both audio and visual media presentations, in the highly compromised forms in which they are offered to us, for much of her adult life.

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Media Star

The game show just awarded her
An auto that is worth a lot
(Unless she can pay half in tax
She will not drive it off the lot) —

One quarter of our viewing world
Sees “wrestling” on each Monday night
(Every hold choreographed
For its falsified delight) —

Inhabiting a home as have
The folks our favored sitcom in
(Which the money they must make
Could not actually begin

To pay for), we find live therein
A tribe of two-dimensional
Cutouts, on whom you depend
To feed three same lines back in full —

A fascinating oxymoron
Is “reality TV”
More full of lust and anger
Than anybody’s one life be —

Nor is it meant that we suspect,
Nor is it hoped we ever think,
A single scene of it is staged —
It’s just another fatal link

In the bright illusion
Keeping us distracted
From the ways in which
Reality’s refracted

I’m not living on the same
Planet as you are
You live in illusion
On some media star

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