Tonight on Television, The Pedophile and His Society, A Poetry Manual: Real Inner Time, Real Community Guidelines, #1

By Donny Lee Duke

What's considered the worst crime and who's the most hated person in America? Most would say child sexual abuse and the pedophile. The principle's everywhere. How do we normally deal with it? To put it poetically: to go over Thor's face in the United States and overlook God, the truth of the matter, repeat the vampire. Tonight on Television, a book of poetry, goes to the heart of the matter, the creation of the pedophile and proposes stopping the process where it starts, which is in the caring for of infants and toddlers. It employs the ideal of oneness, non-duality, instead of the formula of crime and punishment, in dealing with that, how it addresses the whole issue, paying particular attention to the hatred of the pedophile and the damage that does to society, which is not only the proliferation of child sex abuse, which, it must be said, the poem aims to stop.

 

The poem is dramatic poetry, theater, and I'm providing this ebook as an accompaniment to the audiobook. I mean to say that the poem is not one in the traditional sense, which you read on a page, although, like reading a play and not seeing it performed, you can do that. You just won't see the poem.

 

I'm the fellow, aren't I? I've spent many years investigating the issue from a personal standpoint, first in university, where, after getting a BA in English and minor in History (University of Houston, 1988), I spent three and a half years learning Classical Greek, translating Greek poetry into English verse, not only to learn the writing of poetry, but to access knowledge on ancient Greek sexuality in particular and on the formation of the human ego and sexual orientation in general, doing a self-study on the latter two by reading extensively in a variety of pertinent subjects. Then I did an unorthodox fieldwork for several years after leaving college in 1993, becoming a vagabond first in the United States and then the world, spending 10 years living in over 27 countries on 4 continents, during which time I paid particular attention to what when down in the families I lived with, as, being an adventure traveler, I usually lived and worked with the local population. You don't believe an autodidact can be an expert? Hey, I'm not just the One, whom everybody is; I'm the one to show you the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donny Lee Duke
• Release date: Aug 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223534488

Book preview

Introduction

This poem, originally entitled The Freedom, was written in 2010 for an online poetry magazine that was considering some poems of mine, Dead Drunk Dublin, but the editor, Andrew Lovatt, decided to put his review on hold awhile, and I assume the poem got shelved, because he never got back to me about it. It’s been subsequently edited and added to since then, quite a bit. In 2011 and 12, I submitted it to several poetry/literary magazines, and it was rejected. Of those submissions I might note Evergreen Review, where the editor actually read the whole poem and put up with my condescending attitude, telling me he’d have a specialist read it and get back to me, but he never did. I made a recording of the poem in 2013, with myself playing all the voices, and posted it on my blog at that time, The Atomic Review, which has since become The Unknown in Perspective, hosting the audio at Internet Archive. A couple of years later I made a video featuring a short excerpt of the poem and posted it on Facebook, paying to have it promoted, deleting the poem from my personal blog and posting it on a blog I share with Douglas, my best friend of 25 years, called Harm’s End. In 2022 it went through a major revision, getting a new beginning, new end, and new title, Tonight on Television, and I reposted it on our blog and revised the video and reposted it on YouTube (Facebook deleted our educational page Harm’s End). I deleted the audio file at Internet Archive, since the poem had changed so much, deciding not to rerecord the poem at that time. I also sent out links to the poem in emails, many of those, focusing on the intellectual and art crowd, mainly in New York City. I didn’t get a single response from that.

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My vehicle of representation is the muse. I should tell you right off the bat that the poem, and it’s many revisions, have come entirely from the inner voice. For a detailed description of what that means, read the introduction to my previous e-book, The Meaning Behind AI. This is a genuine, new style of poetry, spoken word but not exactly that. It’s a dialogue poem with my speakers, dramatic poetry. It could be called a play in verse, although without acts and scenes. It uses deceptively simple, conversational English, but it’s not straight forward talk, not by a long shot. Symbols carry this verse. If you were to simply read it on the page, it might not strike you as fine verse, except at times, because in this style of poetry, sound plays a large role in the quality of the poetry, not in the traditional sound sense of verse, with alliteration, rhyme and so forth, although I do use those, albeit sparingly. The many different voices that perform the poem are the sounds that quality it to meet the bar of poetry and go beyond. This style is a big break from tradition, because tradition limits poetry.

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So it must be performed in the different voices it calls for and as well spoken