Ken Meisel

Arbus would later insist, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. –Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment

SCENES FROM AN ONGOING MOMENT

What makes them give up, these half-dead
bums, all laying around like dirty turnips.

A 1958 Ford, morbid, Sun Gold and Raven Black.
Its deep grill, so obscene and premonitory

and open mouthed; those quad head lights–
and a scalloped rear end; and four oval taillights.

And, parked beside it, a two-door 1958 Olds 88,
Pearl Gray, its gaping mouth, mischievous, taunting,

and its namesake, lettered in metal right there
above the chrome grill. On the theater marquee:

The Seventh Seal, that film by Ingmar Bergman,
death wheelbarrowing itself here, to play chess.

Chess? Can you imagine it? Forms, created
as conventional shapes, these men, these cars,

and death, playing a game of chess? And then, later–
in 1969, Charley Manson, drilling down

on that loud Beatles song, Helter Skelter,
riffing it on his hack guitar as he schemed

a violent revolution against the blacks, the rich.
Intervals of naïveté and neglect, those girls

that killed for him. Mike Love, worried
he’d adopt Don't Worry Baby as a cruising

song as they barreled up into the hills–
to mark their murder victims. And then–

in 1995, O.J., in that white Ford Bronco.
America’s image of a chase, on four wheels.

What’s in the chase, hidden? It’s the familiar:
death, playing chess. More acute, for the camera.


Ken reads "Scenes from an Ongoing Moment":



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Ken confesses: "This poem juxtaposes cars, cinema and song with death as it plays chess with us. The poem aims to underscore the odd, arbitrary if tragic happenstance that can be so prevalent in the course of life. Further: it highlights cinema and social media as complicit in the longstanding and prevailing, vulgarized voyeur culture. The poem emphasizes that performance—in extremis for the camera—is now the standard fare in vogue."

KEN MEISEL has work in San Pedro River Review and Rattle. His most recent book is Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018).