Depth of Field

Out among the disappeared

Light seems illegal and deviant

Eerie and mysteriously still

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The flat-line of desires,

The ghost of former existence

Blurred away in heat-seeking focus

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Smoked away the napalm sky

Crashing to the grey raving tides

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Lenses zoom and point of view

Vacuums up the foreign dust

From rubbles of deaths in New Delhi

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Are there enough pixels to adhere?

To white balance the sun’s

Avant-garde dissonance, the focal noise

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Wind chill day of justice swayed

By the vertical jitter of cinema-verité

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Light intensely accelerates into the night;

Lumbering like the golem towards his romance

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In the damp gauze of moonlight

In terminal equinox, in a feverish sweat, loves satinesque

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Streaming midnight movie scenes the dark room glows

Dichroic rolls as scrolls, the grassy knoll

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Childhood’s unreal world; the overexposed:

The spinning, leering lovers now picturesque

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The crazed mixture of drugs and money in spindles,

The molting waxen squares of plastique

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The terrorists smile in pomp, our luminescence

They ask in ruse, “What is the caption?”

Is it in color, is it black and white?

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Napalm sky, smoke black, fire bright

Rushes of deadline blood lost in backlight

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How damaging is art to the unfocused eye…?