The Slave & The Shadow: It begins with passive consumption ("the TV was on," "I heard," "I watched") witnessing a being enslaved by its own lies, then a shadow—a lost, fragmented identity repeating its straying. This is the internal, personal corruption.

The Clown & The Mask: The perspective shifts outward to a public spectacle. The clown is the performative, mocked figure past redemption. The mask is the futile attempt to hide a core that has chosen evil ("the man did the deal"). Here, the refrain "Only evil is real" lands with the force of a bleak epiphany.

The Consummation: The poem intensifies into the mechanics of evil: it steals, twists, and wins when the soul is hollow. The repeated cries of "innocence" are starkly contrasted with the horrifying command to "Tap dance and lie"—a perfect image of performative complicity. The metaphor becomes brutally literal: the "bones on your plate" are "the bones of the child." Evil is not abstract; it consumes the most vulnerable.

The Source & The Refusal: The focus returns to the TV, the modern hearth, identified as the engineered lie ("bent out of shape"), the vehicle for evil dressed as the nice guy. Its voice doesn't shout; it multiplies—a brilliant line about propaganda and algorithmic amplification. This multiplication of voices leads to the final, exhausted, furious uprising of the collective voice: "We're sick of your lies / Never again." The ending, with its relentless "Again and again," echoes the earlier repetitions but now from the position of defiance, mimicking both the incessant barrage of lies and the steadfast resolve to reject them.

Screaming Into the Abyss

Collection of songwriters under the leadership of Bill Kinlough

Screaming Into the Abyss

The Great Unwashed