believing is reality

he was in his mid-20s and already a star,
his informal rigor makes an uncanny order out of descriptions that, at first glance,
appear like no place or nothing

he had a general deadpan aesthetic,
with its embrace of the ridiculous and its
fixation on banal, everyday things.

you enter through a place that looks like the
very last picture show, an old movie theater with
soda-stained carpet and a busted popcorn machine,
sleeping bags and clothes are scattered around,
as if the theater has served as a shelter from
some unnamed danger outside its doors

beyond those doors sits a tiny mud-brick house,
an eerie replica of the one where he
was living when he was captured in his spider hole,
look and you will see dozens more unsettling sights:
a wrecked police car,
a carnival ride rigged with bomb casings,
a dilapidated two-story house,
a rusted oil tanker,
an interrogation chamber

if it seems that some sort of disaster has taken
place here, it has, at least to him, to many others, too,
it was a crucial reckoning in his life,
through the extraordinary communal revolution
that occurred during his time,
he experimented actively within the new paradigm:
believing is reality