Roger W. Hecht

TALKING PICTURES

The girl with two heads are two girls, really, who share the same trunk. They sit at the feet of the talk-show host playing with My Little Pony. What makes me cry isn't the thought of what will come of them, but the total satisfaction they take in the toy. What will come of me? In two more days I'll take my next big step. Goals were defined, a job I knew how to do. I went to the grocery store, broke bottles of liquor and shouted, "there are devils in my brain." A whole world opened up for me on the road home. Drugs come over the border. Everyday has the same drugged look in this heat. Tiny dots, tiny bits of experience. I couldn't yet think of what I had to think of. The landscape was ruined, in a sense, by the insistence on looking for landscape. The image didn't stick; the thought of the image did. Everything was art while we were moving; when the car died the place resumed production. There are chickens for eating bred beakless. I met the farmer who grows the corn that feeds them. In the city it's never like that. Capitalists eat their young. When the border closes, drugs are tunnelled under. Oh, the small comforts we need! What was it the drunk said before she leaned against and slid down the face of the refrigerator? My dreams—episodes really—images set outside of narrative will spread their meaning by signs & warnings that they alone understand. Think back to what it was like to hold a little clay something and believe "this holds all the pleasure in the world." It's as if two minds were at work at the same time: one said, "you made those feet of clay;" the other said, "now walk a mile in them." I can't say they weren't talking to each other.

 

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"Talking Pictures" is a composite, an implied narrative plied out of many stories and non-stories. Finding the sense in the fit of the pieces is always the most interesting challenge. I knew "TP" worked because I had accidentally pulled the plug on my computer with my big toe while composing it and was able to reassemble the poem from memory.