A Pinochet Trial

Can we talk about your hopes for a second? Last time we walked we went nowhere. I am sick of the empty containers that line the walls advertising guar gum, extract of steel, palmate...

I want you to give me something with which to write the rest of this. I used to live in a nation of broken glass. The metro sped through it not like blood in veins, as other poets said, but like a word shoved very hard in the mouth of a child not yet willing to speak. It was a teaching cruelty.

Everyone who writes, writes about silence, and they all say it is full of meaning. I am not yet convinced. All the disappeared stars in the sky, all the supernovas we missed while watching sitcoms, are as gone as their light. Though we can live in the memory of someone we can never relive them. Let us talk for once about the destruction of youth as the crime it really is: a crime of lightbulb-eaters, a crime of replacing saplings with shit.

I am taking down the containers. Their yellow-red illustrations feed no one. I am filling them with what little I know, most of which is regret for all the time the sitcoms stole. I am rolling them to the back of the store with a skateboard. I am opening the doors, and waiting for a small toppling star.
posted by Adam at 3:27 PM [edit]