Poems

The Revolution Was Already Televised

A Poem by Tom Shaw

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI'd hear you out if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
I didn't catch the stagehand's team
setting scenes, making a few.
The crisis narrative unfolds -
I'm locked on dramas shown anew.

I'd sing to you if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
Instead it writhes in bitter fury;
snaking round a rotten apple.
It hisses hymns of a forsaken place;
hymns towards a hellish chapel.

I'd hold you close if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
It churns the earth beneath my feet
and hooks its tendrils in my boots.
Dragged away by crooked teeth,
I go where trees will not grow roots.

I'd love you back if I knew how,
but the black-and-white spiral won't say how.
My stomach turns with revolutions,
tangled in a fork and sliced apart.
I munch on my own mushed-up mind
and wait for the next programme to start.

The Revolution Was Already Televised - A Poem by Tom Shaw

Music - Irama Gema - The Construal of Space in Language and Thought

An earlier version of this piece very nearly made it into my book, “Born Anew and Other Poems”, before I decided to save it in the hopes it might win a few competitions. It did not, and while I could have re-submitted it to other competitions, it awarded me the opportunity to re-visit the poem and make some changes to it, allowing it to level-up into the format that you see here. It then made its way into my next poetry book, “From A Dying Empire Near You,” where it is very much at home.

The title is a play on Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word classic, which is worthy of merit for many reasons. In writing my own poem, I had a lot of ideas in my head at the time around predictive programming, media scare-stories, colour revolutions and engineered crises that made their way into this poem. It takes a more surreal approach to how the media creates a “narrative” around the kind of things we should be expected to talk about and believe in. Fellow Substack poet and writer David Gosselin recently did a very in-depth piece on this exact subject, which I’ve linked below for your reading pleasure.

Gil Scott-Heron also does with his piece, albeit less abstractly and within the context of the American racial divides of the 1960s and 1970s. Whenever I think I think of this poem, I also think of another musical talent noted for his lyrics, albeit a very different one to Gil Scott-Heron: Morrissey, and one of his solo singles, which has an excellent chorus in keeping with the theme of this poem. I’ll leave it below for you all to enjoy.

You can use the image version of the poem, seen below, to share this piece easily on social media. It is also available as a print on my Shop, which you can use the button below the image to take you there.