Channel Surfing

Pat Sajak drives me insane

So when Jeopardy ends,

Channel surfing begins.

Flipping through dialogue

Splices messages together;

An unrecognized warning.

You had me at—

An offer he can't—

Seize the day, boys—

Letters spill into each other,

Titles and dates lost

In the seemingly endless search.

That chilling siren echoes through

The screen and into my room

As the screen freezes on The Purge.

Through my TV screen I watch

Innocent people in broad daylight,

Gunned down for no reason.

This one is set in Philadelphia.

It’s weird seeing places I recognize

Burning and crashing to the ground.

I thought that the purge ended

At sunrise the next morning,

But there's no signs of stopping.

I sit there and watch for hours.

The moon climbs the night sky,

as I fall asleep on the couch.

The TV speaks to an empty room:

I’m Jim Gardener and from the entire

Action News team, stay safe out there.

About the Author

Ryan Hiemenz is a Junior Media and Communications major with a minor in Creative Writing. He works for many different publications on and around Arcadia University, both writing and editing in various styles. This year, he is the president of Arcadia's English Honors Society, Sigma Tau Delta. More personally, he is a huge fan of all things horror, spending much of his free time watching, reading, and writing things from the genre. Over the summer, he even self published a horror poetry chapbook called Fearing Fiction, and he loves to build on the stories in that book!