{"id":9379,"date":"2015-05-11T15:32:42","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T19:32:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=9379"},"modified":"2015-05-15T23:01:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-16T03:01:44","slug":"tv-blues-and-other-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/tv-blues-and-other-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"TV Blues and Other Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TVBlues_585x585\"<\/a><\/p>\n

TV Blues\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Life is hard with twenty shows to watch.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t keep up when things get rough.<\/p>\n

Forever on your guard, a writer might botch<\/p>\n

favourite characters, write them weak instead of tough,<\/p>\n

or ruin a scene that\u2019s meant to be tender<\/p>\n

between two characters that truly love each other<\/p>\n

and make it violent because selling out the gender<\/p>\n

is more important than love between brother and sister.<\/p>\n

An actor could turn out a massive dick<\/p>\n

and ruin everything with racism newfound,<\/p>\n

forced hiatus from network politic,<\/p>\n

or worse yet, cancelled pre-finale, all confounded!<\/p>\n

Life is hard when your twenty shows have hit a wall;<\/p>\n

it\u2019s even harder with nothing left once you\u2019ve watched them all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Zeitgeist 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As much as I would like to write like that,<\/p>\n

with but one sentence across a whole page<\/p>\n

acting as a whole poem with silent sage<\/p>\n

brief wisdom, I am not one for caveats<\/p>\n

about drizzling hurricanes and mismatched<\/p>\n

destinies\u00a0or darkened minds trapped in rage<\/p>\n

at the sweetest of things in this world’s age.<\/p>\n

All these are the most sorry written acts.<\/p>\n

I would much prefer to write of women<\/p>\n

in love, and all things that for once go well.<\/p>\n

Life today is lived through onyx lenses,<\/p>\n

and so dreaming of fairytales hidden<\/p>\n

in plain sight is not realism’s death-knell<\/p>\n

but bravery, in optimistic defenses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Life is the longest thing I\u2019ll ever do,<\/p>\n

and it’s still too short to listen to you,<\/p>\n

with your misogynistic, piece of shit<\/p>\n

ignorant chat-ups; you don\u2019t have a clue.<\/p>\n

Don’t talk to me you stupid, sexist fuck;<\/p>\n

I can’t help think that you’re a massive schmuck.<\/p>\n

You demand underage girls flash their tits<\/p>\n

and hound them on the street to suck your cock.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not funny with your anti-gay talk<\/p>\n

or your rape jokes behind us while we walk.<\/p>\n

Take that fedora elsewhere; fuck right off<\/p>\n

with that \u201cchivalry;\u201d I can\u2019t help but baulk.<\/p>\n

Life is the longest thing I\u2019ll ever do,<\/p>\n

and it\u2019s still too short to listen to you.<\/p>\n

Audrey El-Osta is a Melbourne based writer studying Linguistics and Psychology at Monash University. A collector of cookbooks, listener of audiobooks and reader of poetry, she lives with four cats and three humans that don’t quite measure up. Her work explores themes of femininity, sexuality and womanhood, mental illness, comedy and linguistic identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life is hard with twenty shows to watch.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t keep up when things get rough.<\/p>\n

Forever on your guard, a writer might botch<\/p>\n

favourite characters, write them weak instead of tough,<\/p>\n

or ruin a scene that\u2019s meant to be tender<\/p>\n

between two characters that truly love each other<\/p>\n

and make it violent because selling out the gender<\/p>\n

is more important than love between brother and sister.<\/p>\n

READ MORE.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001008,"featured_media":9380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,218,219,199],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001008"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9382,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions\/9382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}