24-hour news network — Summary

Dave BontaCheerful

some mouth has run all night and day

what ills not heard of which extraordinary news as good as any peace

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The poem pictures a news channel as a single mouth that has been running without a break, day and night. The speaker doesn't describe the stories themselves. What comes through is the constant noise, and the strange way it flattens everything.

The last lines are the trickiest. The wording is knotty, and the poem seems to say that nothing bad goes unreported, and that the "extraordinary news" is treated as though it were as good as peace. That reads as ironic. Endless coverage of disasters gets dressed up as something valuable, even comforting, when it isn't the same as peace at all.

The speaker sounds tired and a little wry, standing slightly apart from the chatter. The mood is restless and numb at once: a world that is always informed but never calmer. The short, clipped lines and the lack of punctuation add to the feeling of a stream that has no natural place to stop.

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