Modern Life As Glass House
Screens and screams. Fifteen years since
I read the list of band names, I wonder
if Strangers Die Every Day is still together,
or what their sound is in the distant jungle
space and time blooms. Sam Neill died today,
stranger outside of his fame. Stranger
than the way our bodies shudder for movie
stars, we plausibly believe we are being lied to
a sitting Senator has been deepfaked into still life
and war is used as a proxy to drown the mob
asking how an ear regenerates, how little
girls are fair game to the rich. Sad, Jurassic Park
made me believe as a child the sound of a future
where, by the end, we learned to respect the past, learned
anything at all. My son wants to be a paleontologist
from the same movie, thirty years after my brother
and I sat in a near empty theater, mom and sis
left us for Sleepless In Seattle. I love that day
the opposite of how so many of todays are broken
by the machinery of our addiction and distance.
I can hold my son and tell him I’m sorry his hero
died, deflect from the boiling heart-thronged anger
where two Federally ordained murderers shot
another character, because that’s what strangers
are to each other, and a revolution seems at the cliff
and it feels like we are outrunning ancient predators
and trying to hold the hands of Timmy and the older sister
who doesn’t get a name, because why
would any of us care as much about a heroine
who also happens to need an older man’s help,
and how can we pretend it’s nothing but preternatural
to blend politics into life, from celebrities.
We are using everything, here, all of us pushing
the biggest invisible rocks around to breakthrough
into a life that’s more palatable than the ending.