Pop, by Brent Short

Andy Warhol Museum, by jpellgen (@1179_jp), via Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Pop
 
                                                                       Interviewer: Do you like interviews?
                                                                       Andy Warhol: Yes
                                                                       Interviewer: Yes?
                                                                       Andy Warhol: No
                                                                       Interviewer: No?
                                                                       Andy Warhol: No
                                                                       Interviewer: Yes and no?
                                                                       Andy Warhol: Yes
 
Found art, 
death and celebrity, 
golden screened icons, 
objects of veneration.
 
Mass produced, manufactured,
grid, interchangeable, appropriation,
technique, original in their lack 
of originality, overload.
 
Pop, off-beat, a put-on, 
the culture of product, 
a true brand, 
blank, a copy, surface.
 
What’s exciting, what’s boring,
blotted line between life, 
death, a flatness to everything,
pleasure of repetition.
 
Pictures of money, 
the serial splendor 
of soup cans, permutations
within the same.
 
The complexities of looking,
staring into the camera’s eye, 
unflinching,
indeterminate.
 
A witness, fundamentally absent,
fey, camp, monosyllabic, 
stalking fame, living in 
your own movie, new kind of person.
 
Finding tenderness 
and endurance, 
an exorcism 
of the now.
 
The
trick
of
disappearing.
 
Charlatan, visionary,
Dracula, Cinderella,
lost time, found time,
singular, series.
 
Shot, spectacle, stain,
explosion, funeral, 
Jackie, veil, 
amazed in our watching.
 
Luminescence, devastation, 
candy color allure, Marilyn,
your journey is over,
amazed in our watching.
 
Death and disaster,
iconic car crash,
revelation, be careful, 
doom, mortality.
 
Grainy, grim, unbearable, 
electric chair, hot seat, 
holy, waiting room, 
assembly line.
 
Daddy’s little rich girl, 
message from Edie, 
phone call from God, colorize, 
invisible, high contrast.
 
Eternity is 
silver on silver, 
eternity is 
a factory.
 
Tabloid,
public memory, 
movie star president,  
America, the bright and shiny.
 
Blur, saturate, erase, 
interlocking icons,
intensified,
mythologized.
 
Naturally synthetic,
the plastic inevitable,
dumber,
comic.
 
Ingenious,
tragic, stark 
and terrible, 
print it like money.
 
Who needs people 
when you have television?
People just go by, voyeur 
of extremes, deeply superficial.
 
Unaffected,
clean and plastic, 
strange and new,
open and closed.
 
End point, pointless,
disassociation, uninvolved, 
spectator, routine, 
entropy.
 
We’re all consumers and stars,
a figment, an apparition, 
a walk into the future,
mirror, machine.
 
I accept everything,
I accept nothing,
transformation,
profane, sublime.
 
Lord’s Supper, motorcycle,
to find a point of indifference,
to not be sure, to be 
your own product.
 
Monotony, transcendence,
department stores 
and supermarkets
are the new museums.
 
Automation gives us 
something to do, 
art gives us something to do, 
bland concealment, non-interview.
 
Beauty, truth,
the misbegotten, 
their fifteen minutes of fame,
the camera never lies.
 
Brent Short

Brent Short lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His poetry chapbook, The Properties of Light was published in 2015 by Green Rabbit Press. His poetry has appeared in Eads Bridge Literary Review, Sandhill Review, Tar River Poetry, Saint Katherine Review, The Windhover, Amethyst Review, San Pedro River Review, The Thieving Magpie, The Writing Disorder and The Orchards Poetry Journal.