SCENARIO

"Do you begin to see there is no face there in the tarnished mirror?"
—William Burroughs

Gun-toting racist lawmen swagger drunkenly across the landscape.
Sexually repressed secret agents plot each other's demise. Hidden
enclaves of technocrats vie for power and unleash deadly viruses. A young boy abruptly blooms into a red-haired wolf, leathery femalesnake-beasts invade the English countryside.

We begin to see this story as its own kindof viral replication, endlessly mutating itself into new forms.

The leathery she-beast is now a captive sideshow attraction. Expose all faulty wiring and cheap, duct-taped bandstands,
the hollow flash of out-dated tricks! The trappings are there,
but their mechanisms are left dangling, half-completed.

We hear the staccato police report, the carnival huckster,
the dispassionate scientist, the Hollywood censors;
all purveyors of noxious light.
We wait for the explosion.

Once it’s over, we are left
with bald cacophonies, with a sick nostalgia
for a time just before the bomb went off--- the silence that up until then, we chose to ignore.