Soap Opera
They want to know what’s
going on,
the characters that, week by week,
move from the brink of one crisis
onto the tense, cliff-hanging next.
It’s written into their faces
in old lines of anxiety
saved up from debts or vendettas
or not knowing who the father
is. You couldn’t make it up.
Like us, they can’t escape themselves,
derived from the derivative,
who look as if they’re real but aren’t.
They show us we are victims, too,
of circumstances, of ourselves,
on this side of the flat widescreen
where love also revealed itself
to be not quite as advertised
in the short sunny intervals.
