This is a bit of a test. Hope it works. And hope you enjoy the poem and the video. One thing that strikes me about the video is how it borrows quite consciously from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.
Anyway - the poem
Stationary
Lonely motorway
Asphalt and aggregate
A long congested tail of vehicles
Convulses to a stop.
A clock on the dashboard
Measures lost miles
As the minutes pass.
Stasis shrivels meaning,
Swallows belief.
Speed is the highway’s only currency.
Blurred lines its only vision
Visible only in movement.
Thoughts are stretched thin
Try to focus
Will dissolves
Eyes glaze
Vague distractions fail
The radio and cross words.
The anchor drags
At a motorway interchange
Layered bridges
Unscalable parapets
Debris in the gutter.
Buckled and rusted hubcaps and beer cans.
We are the discarded,
The forgotten,
On this obscene stationary carriageway
We wait, heavy on processed air.
But in that restless hypnotic emptiness
Drowsing with boredom and shame
A driver seems to rise like an Angel
Unfold himself
Crosses lanes
To the central reservation.
Arms outstretched
Like a messiah of the motorway
A sentinel on the parapets
Offers a benediction to the stranded.
Calls to us out to follow
Like a Pied Piper.
© David Loffman
30 June 2007
Sunday, July 01, 2007
R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts
4 comments:
Yes it works!
great idea - peom, song, video -
- could cause problems on the A3 if too many people see it though!
Simon
And did you watch it to the very end?
Nightmare!
several times!
yes
I didn't see it but the film Falling Down was on last night starring Michael Douglas. It's about a man who stuck in a traffic jam on a Freeway becomes so angry he gets out of the car and walks off.
And another thought as I write. There is a film called The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster. About a man who on the outskirts of his home city, decides to swim through all the private and public swimming pools that lay between him and his home.
His journey throws up different elements of his life, his failed business, the break up of his marriage, his estranged children, his many unpaid bills and finally his home, shut up and up for sale.
A disturbing Hollywood film.
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