experts on the news wholesaling cheap wisdom at retail prices experts with fireproof smiles telling you how to get closer to your dog why friendship's a reasonable investment how to know when love is more trouble than it's worth experts on the news will guide you through the raw and exotic tribulations of a beauty queen with cancer explain the invisible like a crossword puzzle sort the fangs of war into carefully ordered columns attend a birthday party for horror to which they'll bring practical gifts they attempt to chart the trade routes of volcanic sadness with concepts so foreign to God they might as well be instruments of torture designed to be used exclusively on children I'm tired of falling into the holes in their eyes I've had it with quotable martyrs and the death of the truth by lethal injection I can't comprehend people who lie so religiously you don't understand a word they say or why doom is a product that can name its own price why some stunned slut of a reporter can grin into a steel eye so fateful with power it changes everything it sees and give us his face like a snot on a priceless stone he touches his hair and smiles
You can find this poem in David Lerner’s — A Bouquet of Nails: The Previously Uncollected Poems of David Lerner at Zeitgeist-Press.
“I can't comprehend people who
lie so religiously
you don't understand a word they say”
David, I think your poem is terrific. Thank you for "volcanic sadness," among so many other phrases. Part of what inspires me to write distinctly non-journalistic and non-political "stuff" is that I don't want to have the "experts on the news" control all the language we use and hear. We have to keep alive the idea that it's okay not to know everything, and it's even okay to have some optimism. I am going to share this poem with others. Thank you.