“A meditation on media and popular culture. A 20 line, free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's poems in The Double Dream of Spring.”

Somewhere in the composite glare of afternoon,  
Television flickers behind the eyelids—  
not so much an event as a slow river  
of other people’s faces,  
their bright unreal laughter scattered  
like loose pennies along the sidewalk in front of a studio.

You rehearse a conversation with an actor  
who will never interrupt you.  
Glossy magazine pages turn their own angles  
under the lamp, spooling dream-smooth.  
A jet trails across the muted ceiling  
and behind the glass, neighbors recite  
the lines they forgot they were given—  
how does one become so expert at forgetting?

We eat popcorn, scroll past atrocities,  
whose captions droop with gravity  
in the festival of headlines.  
Destiny is a commercial break,  
your reflection, flickering faint in each device,  
filling with the ghost hues of the world’s  
continuous interview, going on without you,  
as if you had gone to pour a drink  
and missed the final plot twist.

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