Static in the Foreground
An elegy in eight parts.
I We start with a car lot, burned down because the fire alarm had been disconnected to save money so the manager could pocket the difference & misuse irony then retire into the silence of sand and shade and sea & other things reluctant to mean more than the waterlogged ledgers & their stories that teach us nightmares and give us a sense that we could get away with murder if only we pour the gasoline just so. II Imagine we sit far between intersections— just to the left of the setting sky fading through shades of viridian then violet & into the cyan of a city along the shore of a lake so static every sound hits like a bus filled with ambition, like a tourniquet soaked in the salty sweet of a fever dream— i.e., the idea behind the tragedy. Imagine ripples and reflections like a broken TV playing the last scene of a movie you’ve never seen and it’s terrifying because you know no one dies —they just linger until the sequel where they linger again & become less than a voice speaking in the timber of first-person accidental. III Should I break the fourth wall? —you wouldn’t listen, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you I’m not partial to streams of thought that die and wallow, caught in sensations that taught life how to live & how to breathe and believe and leave you groping for a plot, an overture—anything that won’t have you grasping at meaning measured in micrograms by a man compulsively correcting you when you say you don’t know, but really, you know— I would never tell you how to read a poem. IV The car lot burned down. The Everything went wrong. There was nothing left to leverage; so the owner’s son dropped out of college & got a respectable job— he’d learned to be a bricklayer & later a lineman who climbed an electric pole and fell & after the funeral his wife finds a manuscript, a novel where the main character and narrator share a name and an elevator down to a postmodern hell filled with antimodernist impressionist sculptures made of concrete meaning, which they bash to pieces after declaring their sins by dying and leaving journals for their wives or lovers or au pairs to find and read, edit and publish and finally wonder why the neighbors don’t come around much anymore. V Another thing was that the claims adjuster had been drunk when he wrote his report; he’d exonerated the cleaning crew. Which was fair but it got him fired because he’d preempted a lawsuit meant to provide bonuses to the shareholders & secretaries who keep the system intact as it atrophies and dollars are packed in the cracks —inefficient, yes, but that’s not the point; the point’s a counterfactual where a young man (really) reads Marx & reads like a saint; he comes away with the insight that capital is murder, but that also becomes not the point; so he comes away exhausted and wheezing & wondering what are his options—other than give up on long weekends and summers at the beach and become some stoic who thinks he feels nothing as he he sits stoned, faces down sales seminars and pep talks from life coaches who don’t notice that he never really learned what it’s like to tell a lie. VI In the end there’d be another funeral with sandwiches cut in quarters & daiquiris with an overbaked cousin telling stories about the ends of wars too remote to remember, the battles so secret they’re recorded in flavors of Pynchon or Wallace or Emerson and Thoreau doing shots of tequila while sorority girls watch and wonder if university was a waste of money, or if they should become hypnotists who recall Atlantis like a practical miracle & articulate absolute motion like a whirl-o-wheel rusted after too many generations of material fanatics took too much and demanded too little. VII Car lots are like leech fields that have run dry. Car lots are like broken topsoil when the wind blows east-west and piles into anomalies which cause poems and mythologies and other sentimental cataclysms as we go drifting from interstate to interstate, surface street to side road, then along the drag along the shore of a lake in a world like a planetarium in disrepair. VIII But I would never tell you how to read your poem— after all, I don’t feel your lips or the tension behind your eyes or the rhymes that prove your beginning is gone: this is the concept of a used car lot that lived too long. This is the fire & the consequence & the half-remembered sunsets drifting left to right across the plane of a galaxy with stars that live and die along spectral lines, the signified mechanics of half-lives and afterlives of the ledgers that intrude on the conscience of a poet well versed in the flash points of ordinary hydrocarbons.
You should break the fourth wall. Do it, I dare you.
Who did these drawings, by the way?