Billboard (May)

Facebook is my friend’s personal billboard. Television is a motion picture billboard and motion pictures a nation’s notions of itself in subtle word-for-word scene-by-scene billboards. They go on for hours, but billboards in landscapes were made for seconds’ sight. Freeways set up the dogma of capitalism, like skyhigh Mao icons. Buildings with big words state expectations. Billboards on trailers arouse desire. Yet around the edges poetry intervenes. Paper peels, rust lines borders, spotlights go on the blink. Graffiti changes brute meanings. Weeds scramble the hard words, like May icons. Rooms become soft and airy once we turn the switch ‘Off’.