Another for Jim
Harshly. Harshness that subsides to beauty
but not yet. Landscape
softened to torrent, wash of windshield wipers, wish
wash, blurring the bumpers and the bumper
stickers, bare trees spilling to action.
What it is to imagine atrocity. With clarity.
Shudders and stutters,
glazed eyes, loginess derived from antipsychotics.
What we think of
as madness actually side-effects of drugs
used to forestall it. Think
of this. Information, imagination, the relation
between.
Your taxes pay for war and torture in
El Salvador.
Here it gets thin, not what happens
horribly, but before
and after, how image soothes the gap,
maybe a rooster, shrieking berserk,
becomes a hand tearing the landscape, its
photo, torn paper. You went into this
further. Behind the techno-scrim, bright pilots
expose their weapons, you felt for what went on.
Under cloud cover. Then mad for good,
not numb in the gameshow eye. But nonstop
talk, breakneck drive.
by Monica Raymond
