Broadcast

Seventy languages heard
in the bazaar of Dioscurias,
today’s tower of Babel
streaming terrible news.
Spleens vented and faux miracle cures,
the process a disembodied entity.
A dunce in his dark corner,
pulling out a plum.
Tales of the demi-demon’s hellfire.
The annals of blah.
When fear and ignorance wed
the fools’ opinion bred.
The awful price of cloudberries.
Big doings and lovification.
An all-round bantering
entitled ‘four score and ten’.
Housebound with the plague,
Joe Blow accesses interior resources.
Phantasmagoria meets pandemonium,
ruling the Hertzian frequencies.
There’s some vague quote, in air
quotations, what the overlord
said to the underling, the ghost
of de Talleyrand declaring
‘language was given to men
so they could conceal their thoughts’,
our nerve-nets linked to the sensorium,
to the amuse-bouche of idolatrous ravings.
The sultan of Ptah, being smitten,
is declaring war, and love, and war on love.
They hoard munificence in a time of fluxion.
There’s paltering implicature
and Billy Bob Roy losing the space race
by mere picoseconds. All other powers
delegated to the devil’s minions.

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Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician and multiple Pushcart nominee, has had work appear in hundreds of publications around the world. The winner of the 2020 Libretto Chapbook Prize (20 Sonnets), his books include  The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press) and Like As If (Pskis Porch), all available via Amazon.

[image: Radiowaves | Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi]