introspection

it was dawn or something like it
black box, light at the end, streaming
consciounsness, moving images, more than
shadows, almost corporeal,
if you could look through, into the place it was real

faces absent, absorbed,
a boy hooking up with a girl
in the upper left
in the place where society didn't really mind
and smiled because society too had lost something
of itself in the dark hall
the shadox-box projected corridor,
the dreamscape society had loved and lived to
love when society was young and naive and still
believed.

the man had been hacker once,
he was on parole and living a tough life
when the beautiful black woman
had come and tempted him back
for oral sex, cash, techno soundtracks
and the promise of eternal glory:
he hacked the gibson in the thirty seconds
with a gun to his temple, and still
made the benediction, and cracked NASA with a
smile on his face.

Houdini, some sort of victorian wet dream,
for the age of the actual and still yet the
decieved. if he fell in the river, bundled
and chained, he really did fall in the river.
and sink and struggle and emerge from the waters
unfettered
no actor, a legend, amortal

but did houdini really fall into the river?

i've seen the photographs, and the posters,
i've seen houdini smile out from amusement park
rides named in his honor with cheesy senace subplots
he'd never had approved,
but still did he fall in the river?

i was somewhere across middle earth,
when I remembered what the dwarves had awoke there
and stood back in horror to observe
the master of the secret fire
do combat with that ancient evil.

i was the movies.