True Crime in a Clown World
Let’s workshop this poem about the scoliotic moral sensibilities of our safe-space era, where even true-crime hosts must honor not only indigenous lands and trans bravery but our cherrypicked trauma.
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
True Crime in a Clown World Vulva stabbed to meat-mallet mush; neck oyster-shucked to bone; spine knee-snapped like a yard branch; eye sockets goon hamstered (three extra-cheese deliveries of edging)— all this, yet the podcaster pauses for her one trigger warning: the victim’s turtle starved.
"True Crime in a Clown World" is an intensely dark, satirical poem that offers a scathing critique of what it perceives as the distorted moral sensibilities and performative empathy prevalent in the "safe-space era," particularly within the true crime genre. The poem argues that contemporary cultural norms can lead to a scoliotic moral prioritization, where profound human suffering is desensitized or overlooked, while selectively chosen traumas or more palatable forms of victimhood receive undue emphasis.
The title, "True Crime in a Clown World," immediately sets a cynical and unsettling tone. "True Crime" points to the genre, while "Clown World" suggests a reality that is absurd, chaotic, and fundamentally disordered, implying a breakdown of genuine ethical engagement and a triumph of performative or inverted values. This context establishes the "safe-space era" as a landscape of moral paradox.
The poem unfolds with a brutal and graphic enumeration of extreme violence: "Vulva stabbed to meat-mallet mush; / neck oyster-shucked / to bone; spine knee-snapped / like a yard branch; eye sockets / goon hamstered (three / extra-cheese deliveries of edging)—". This series of visceral, almost surgical descriptions details horrific bodily harm with chilling detachment. The imagery of "meat-mallet mush," "oyster-shucked," and "knee-snapped like a yard branch" conveys a dehumanizing brutality. The phrase "eye sockets / goon hamstered (three / extra-cheese deliveries of edging)" is particularly disturbing, blending extreme violence with the mundane, almost absurd, language of commercial transactions and sexualized internet culture ("edging"). This juxtaposition heightens the sense of a world where horror is casually consumed, rendered into content.
The poem's central satirical thrust, which explicitly targets the "scoliotic moral sensibilities" of the "safe-space era," arrives with the final lines: "all this, yet the podcaster pauses / for her one trigger warning: / the victim’s turtle starved." This abrupt and jarring shift is the poem's core critique. After detailing an extreme, multi-faceted act of human violence with unsparing clarity, the single "trigger warning" is reserved for the death of a pet. This stark ironic displacement of empathy and concern critiques what the poem perceives as a performative, misguided, or desensitized approach to trauma in media. It suggests that in this "Clown World," while genuine violence is detailed without explicit warning, the "cherrypicked trauma" of a starving turtle (a more conventionally sympathetic or culturally sanctioned form of suffering) is meticulously flagged. The poem implicitly connects this selective empathy to the broader cultural demands for "honoring not only indigenous lands and trans bravery" (as alluded to in the summary's "safe-space era" context), suggesting that while these causes are acknowledged, the immediate, visceral horror of the crime itself is either overlooked or deemed less worthy of caution than a specific, less human-centric, form of victimhood. The poem thus argues that such narratives, despite their graphic content, ultimately fail to engage with the actual human tragedy in a morally consistent way, instead prioritizing superficial or ideologically aligned forms of empathy.
true crime, satire, moral sensibilities, safe space, trigger warning, empathy, violence, normalization, cultural critique, hypocrisy, irony, selective trauma, desensitization, contemporary media, performative activism, social commentary.