by Paul Hostovsky
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One man slaps another as hard as he can in the face. A third runs up with a microphone and asks the slapped man how it feels to be slapped in the face. And it feels like a slap in the face, which the man begins to say but then starts weeping, and his words trail off as the camera goes in for a close-up of the wet glisten in the eyes of the weeping man. How does it feel to be weeping? asks the man with the microphone while we sit at home and watch and weep for the weeping man and rage at the man who slapped him, who is standing somewhere off-camera waiting for his turn to be asked why he did the slapping and how it felt and please pass the popcorn because as it turns out the man who slapped the slapped man is a slapped man himself, and though he isn’t weeping now, we can feel ourselves feeling for the unweeping man who slapped the weeping slapped man who has just slapped the man with the microphone— and though we really can’t blame him, we do blame him, and we don't blame ourselves, and we keep on chewing.
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Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.
This is so true -- and so well done. It's a form of journalistic pornography that has caused me to turn off the TV over and over again -- but not to write a poem is good as this one.