Slow Violence

The media loves violence.
As one editor once said of headlines,
“if it bleeds, it leads.”

We, the lemmings, are outraged
on cue, unified on cue. Lights,
camera, action. Our blood sells.
It sells iPhones, music, insurance
Our blood brings frenzies of
twenty four hour, on site coverage.

But it must be the right sort of violence.
It must come in a sudden splash.
It must come in a vivid shade of crimson.

There is no money in slow violence,
the slow violence of indifference,

A child torn to physical shreds is news.
But not a child torn to pieces spiritually
by the slow, gray violence of poverty,
or torn to intellectual shreds by the
slow violence of substandard schools.

Thousands homeless and hungry?
Humans too poor for medical care?
Reel in the news trucks, go back to
your regularly scheduled lives.
There’s nothing more to see here.

By G.H. Monroe

Biography:

Born on the eve of Christmas, 1960, I spent the larger part of my adult life working in the information technology field but never strayed far from my true passion, which is writing. My debut book, “That’s My Story!” (Amazon) materialized not from a quest to write a book, but from a love for writing short stories. After years of writing short stories simply for the love of writing, I ended up with a collection of short stories that some said were suitable for compilation, and so that is what I did. I live in Western New York near the Pennsylvania border where I am working on my first full-length novel. Though I have always written poetry, I am only now beginning to investigate submitting some of my poems for publishing consideration.