Swamped Stupid

(On the Target Audience for Hellboy 2)

Cheap richness harrowingly manufactured at inordinate
expense – fake semblance of the ancient: digitally
mastered pocked cracked Alp-high granite arches worn
and dressed and creviced for a gross of unconvincing
centuries, all garishly exalting excesses of meshing

twining lurid hues where violets bespeak the whole range
of the rainbow long before they’ve reached the blues –
the kind of wet dream Piranesi may have in a drugged
and drunken stupor wanted to have had – from which
he couldn’t have awakened anything but deathly ill –

ungovernably mad; the massive charms of importuning
armies of technicians so adroitly skilled and in such buzzing
and complex cooperation that no single pixel can
escape the fatal dosage of another freeze-dried thrill:
concatenated stupefying blasts of phantom violence that

leave you tranquil as a softly dying pilgrim in bewildered
trance who gave up, long ago, believing that mere
Canterbury could fulfill. Evidently to a fourteen-year-old
boy no pleasure counts that doesn’t shanghai all
the senses – swamp them stupid: spill and kill.


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