The Eighties

Imagine a video, grainy, herky-jerk
in the style of the day.  There would be music —

ambient cheese,
machine dribbles and drip-drops

behind a voiceover of a poet
intoning something trivial.

The visual would be of a person in a crowded reception hall.  
Celebrities honored and infamous slapping them on the back.

Come-ons, sly glances,
hero worship.

The person walks home, accosted by random passers-by
insisting upon artifacts, autographs, posed pictures —

everyone’s got a camera, not a cell phone to be seen —
it’s a tourist town. The person is an attraction.

Gets home, climbs stairs,
sits heavily down amid squalor. 

Buries face in hands, or tries to, but the face passes through the hands
and now the person finds they are behind the neck,

as if there were cuffs to be applied
or a bullet is coming to the skull soon.

Outside, a crowd gathers,
looking up at the window, all of them holding candles.

Dissolve to seascape. The person walking, translucent;
the ocean can be seen through their twinkle, the moon above it all.

The person leaps into the surf as the shot dissolves again
to the crowd, the candles, the fade out.

If this were the Eighties we could get away with this:
the music dripping, the poem droning,

the air glimmering, the crowds desperate
for the Touch Of Meaning. The open ending, the after shrug.

And the Person, who exists in the video
for the sole purpose of being a patsy for the Director

who cannot be bothered to explain any of this
in later years when asked about it.

The Director waves an airy hand, says, 
“It was the Eighties. We got away with murder.” 

Didn’t everyone alive then
feel that way?
Didn’t it seem
like one big crime scene?
Didn’t it feel like
there was a concealed weapon
under every jacket? A body
in every trunk? There was a mystery
to be solved upon waking
every damn day and we all
were trying to solve it,

and we never did. It became 
the Nineties and then the Aughts
and now everyone can smell 
the bodies left unburied and 

everyone left has their hands up,
waiting.