Public Service Announcement

"Public Service Announcement" from Pop-Up Book of Death

The Fade In is not the flash of eyelids

or the stagger of curtains on a rod.

The Fade In is that sudden light

when captors open a trunk

or a burial plays in reverse,

not the tunnel of headlights approaching,

but the blur and focus of breaking a plane of water

and the vacuum of lost breath

only to parch in this setting:

A scene of desolation:

A four-lane highway in a setting to be recognized as Wyoming.

Wind.

The Camera,

that filter of lenses like spectacles of a stranger,

the eavesdropper who steps over wires to the stage,

whose mind is not the soft, warm

package of the mammal,

but a network of metal,

frames the scene like a windshield filthy

with dust and nicotine.

Of course, the soundtrack plays here.

Similar to a shell at the ear,

the score moves in microcosm,

a fly that crept up the canal to the drum.

It knew the eyeballs of raccoons as a maggot on the roadside,

knew wind beyond endurance of mammalian squinting.

The fly knows the road,

forsakes a tradition of buzzing

for a communication of truth.

Safe at last from the tyranny of wind,

it sings in the ear of the audience

and plays the trick of the shell.

Focus on the wreckage.

One less body bag in the ambulance.

One body bag closer to a new package of body bags

like a box of tissues.  Pull out one,

up pops the next.

The fly sings a song of zippers.

The body bags are kept on the top shelf in the ambulance, more out of superstition than convenience, next to a spiral notebook with "Victim's Last Words" written on the cover in permanent marker.

The Notebook Entry:

Help.

My leg.

I have blood.

The wind.  The wind.

Close up on

the survivor,

the boy with the earring that dangles.

This earring, now weathered by wind on the roadside,

followed the metamorphosis of wind chimes

from charming to terrifying in the escalation of storms.

Deep in the bomb shelter of his mind,

he flinches at the clangor.

The camera crew left for home after filming a segment for the latest installment in a series of public service announcements and driver's education instructional videos that feature a ruddy Hollywood favorite and The Hall of Bloody Prom Dresses, a museum of Prom Night death, a monument to iniquity and drunk driving.

Close up on

the studio janitorial staff sweeping bits of beer bottle and windshield beneath the hems.

Falling leaves.

Our spokesman, known for a span of fame portraying police officers characterized by quick excesses of violence, resists the similarity between the row of pretty dresses and the mystery of his mother's bedroom closet.

For a meager restitution to the survivor,

the studio assigns a purpose to the car accident

like a campfire story

or a threat.

The survivor prefers the footage

that wanders across his sight in television commercials

and cauterizes

unlike the flow of his memory.

After they removed his boyfriend in a body bag,

the survivor speaks his lines:

It is August,

the month of highway death,

and the sunshine lost god.

All vehicles of motion have reefs to wreck upon.

The road is no longer a plane. 

Potholes are cracks in the ice.

Asphalt remains impenetrable,

but no longer stagnant.

The car may travel parallel through infinity,

but I am forever perpendicular

and planted.

The cameras crash into my brain

and perform a puppet show on my face.

Our spokesman buckles his seat belt in honor of the dead

and the fly sings of crevices.