Tonight he dreams
he is driving
across a landscape impaled
by satellite dishes.
The land is a Chia Pet
someone is painting with a secret
so it sprouts
U.F.O. launch-pod-like
satellite dishes.
He stares
out the bug-spattered
tell a vision windscreen
as he chugs to the future
a place where
with a clear reception
you can watch anything:
five hundred channels, five thousand channels
five million channels.
He shifts gears with a
telephone receiver,
moves himself, his car,
like a picture from a magazine,
he moves his payload
’cross the country
changing channels
using a converter box
an old brown box
with a single row of
fifteen buttons
framed as in life
by a knob at each end—this rig
on the dash of his car.
He pushes buttons
on the converter.
He’s on a superhighway now.
A cul-de-sac in suburbia.
A dusty track in the country,
houses set far away from the road,
each house guarded
by a phalanx of satellites.
He changes channels faster,
steering his car
with a measure of cliché
white-knuckle desperation
for that which he’s searching,
for that which he’s left behind,
missed, in a wide city
boulevard now.
Driving down a coast beside cliffs
with the ocean below.
He is back on the rain-blackened
streets of his neighbourhood
now. A commercial break
on the windscreen.
The gearshift begins to ring.
From its cradle
between bucket seats
he picks up.
It’s his ex on the phone.
His ex from the seventies
—no—from the eighties,
his ex from the nineties
his current ex-lover
yes her.
She’s calling out to him
huffing on the phone.
She cheats and hangs out
with a clique.
She shrieks and hangs up
with a click.
He stares
into the receiver
puts his foot on the gas.
The sun is setting.
Just another day in the future.