Three Poems from Last Night
Empty Cinema
You take a seat, without popcorn or cola.
The houselights are up, auditorium empty.
The movie doesn’t start for twenty minutes.
You watch the blank white screen, enthralled.
It only looks like this twenty minutes a day;
Sometimes, it’s a black screen, the same
As the doors and walls when the lights are off,
No, maybe it’s a slight glowering rectangle
Barely existing thanks to the scant green glow
Of the emergency exit signs,
otherwise
It’s adventures, twenty four frames per second,
Everyone stares, not knowing
What it really is, in the same way
They stare at all things, apples, windows, genitals.
Ultimately, a blank white screen
Is the hardest damn thing in the world to look at.
Try it. Within seconds your head is throbbing
With all those water torture pop songs,
Images of all those old loves that did or didn’t,
Things you’d say to the boss if you had a pair.
It takes another ten minutes to slightly accept;
White screen, framed in black, silence, inhale, exhale.
It’s funny, you paid to get in here for noise,
CGI, spectacle, explosions, heroes, heroines,
Only to find you needed the exact opposite…
At which point you’re rabbit punched
By the Pearl and Dean jingle. Within seconds
A piss weak American beer becomes your sole passion,
enslaves your tongue to your eye.
