Freedom From The Press

Rohana McCormack

 

When the Book of the Month stopped

for lack of back payments,

I let the New Yorker expire.

I did not reorder my Life.

Time was running out. 

My Woman's Home Companion

especially distressed me!

The Saturday Evening Post

gave up the ghost and I dropped

Good Housekeeping.  Parents' Magazine

and Psychology Today

were filed away with my library card

in the garbage.  Redder than Redbook,

I refused to ingest Readers Digest

or the National Review. 

I fired the Daily Worker, too. 

I never was in Vogue. 

I did not renew Gourmet or Holiday. 

I had no stomach for Christian Science Monitor,

Fortune, Popular Science OR the American Home.

If a Witness slid a Watchtower under my door,

I swore at the top of my old Village Voice.

Supplied out back with stacks of

Wall Street Journal, I canceled my toilet paper. 

I did not go Ms or MAD.

Instead, I wrote poems to the Pentagon

which they filed under "Investigate."

I've learned to recite underground.

I've found a pen that writes under water.

It's a fight to the finish.

An official U-Naughty-States Censor

tried to disconnect my lights.

He pronounced me a Communist "Prevert,"

a Menace, hyper-conservative, an ANARCHIST.

He had me put away for life.

I've left my epitaph hidden in the graffiti

of a Hospital Staff washroom.  It says:

"Freedom From the Press and Depression!"

It's not easy to die laughing these days

but better than dead serious.

 

 

Copyright 2007 by the Tipton Poetry Journal.

All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual poet and may not be used without their permission.

 

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