During commercial breaks I watch lives
melting outside convenience
stores. They do not see the commercials, will never
know what it
feels like to be part of a target
market. The volume increases in
these moments, the clouds sag with it and release millennia
of failed ascensions on believers and non-
believers alike. Roars are quieted, we mistake concurrent
misery for community. You can edit this scene if you
like, add waste paper bins and buckets to catch the deluge, coins and heavy
machinery that make no
difference to a half hour of entertainment you
have worked
hard for. Earned. In my wishful variations I frost
rooftops with vegetable gardens and television personalities from
home
renovation shows, their teeth whiter than the clouds. I change
channels in search of summer snow, of volume without
sound, of a tolerable fate for the
puddles
I won’t clean up. You can count them
if you like, or erase them, add bike lanes and trees
and public
parks, you can drive back and forth all
day in admiration, thinking goodness is as
pink as redundancy. You run through
phone lines underwater (I paint the water green just for
you), accept the remote, even come to revere it, when really
all you needed was another commercial break.
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