August 21, 2010
The Movies
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They come from the dawn of bricks,
and start at inconvenient hours:
"First show quarter to six."
Barely time to buy some flowers,
from an anti-Semite sucking anti-histamine.
That’s a date: she smiles,
I drive. We cringe: This one’s a dud.
A stream of people files
out, a joke lands with a thud.
Then you must together make a date decision:
Move with the crowd and flee?
Or stay and love by acting cool
with cheap-seats mockery?
I like that she thinks this is cruel.
Labor, cash and honor were spent to make this bomb.
We laugh because we’re wrong
to think the screen can show a dream.
It’s just a mirror, long
in parts, stitched up by a team.
Best just to let them stir you up, then settle in calm.
But ninety minutes on,
they fool us with a false ending.
She leans away. A yawn
gapes; she’s no longer defending
the choice of show. They want us to ignore the time
and money wasted watching
actors who don’t show up live
with elephants in matching
tractor trailers, who just arrive
in cans, a flickering trick – no pulse, no breath, no rhyme.
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