Old Bread, New Circuses

We live in thrall to those who have the skill
to make anyone or anything believable —   
magicians of the moment

able to command compelling spectacle 
from the routine and long-established progress 
of second to minute to hour to day. Like heirs of the film moguls

they sit in dim rooms divining the desires of the masses,
cutting and pasting snips and trails of each into collages
that stir us all, pulling the old strings on our puppet hearts

not with fiction but with purported fact.
Get a whiff of their work on the evening news, for instance;
calm yourself to the delicate vocal rumbles

of trained explainers,
fall into drowse at smooth graphics…
then, thrill awake

at how the climax bombs you,
how the coda unnerves you;
the poetry of this created public opinion

echoes long after the channel’s changed.  Think of those
who are paid to knead and bake such things,
those who pull and punch it till it’s swollen

and turn it into something we’re told is
the staff of life, something we’ve always been told
is the staff of life — loaves of familiar bread

flung at our heads as we sit in the bleachers
of new circuses in cheap seats we chose 
without ever leaving the pleasures of home.

Don’t you shudder to wonder
what they eat and how they are entertained
when they rest, when they are safe at home?