The 80s (06?)

The 80s
 
Everyone must've read The White Hotel. A glittering exterior,
soft and saccharine center, some silver chiclet.
Gew-gaws on cars, stick-shifts for quadrophonic sound,
chrome or silver cars, and silver the Walkmans.
Boom-boxes large as the coffins that'll carry you
on shoulders of teens propped before telephone booths.
Spangled silver butterfly handle-bars on children's bikes.
Silvery VCRs, their easily broken carriages,
giant Advents in the sports bars with their diluted,
unsaturated, washed-out colors, the murky echoes
of drums on 80s records, as if the footpedal
were buried in purple video mist, mad towers
of Jeri curls, mad King Ludwig's castles of mousse
and metallic sheen, the wash of synthesizers,
the echo-plexed baritones and fake British accents,
the long dark cloth coats and flips of pompadours:
flocks of seagulls on feet. A one-hit wonder
admits in silhouette to career derailment from coke,
shaggy hair intact. What's Dana Plato's fate?
Cheesy sitcoms (thank God!) can't be re-run.
Hipster paintings, charcoal splotches aping Otto Dix
or some police report, in the trash outside once-trendy
storefront galleries deemed insolvent. Club-kid killers,
dopers with shoulder-parrots waving Mein Kampf
in Tompkins Square Park, newly deboned
his Swiss ex-dancer-girlfriend, fed to homeless men
not far from Peace Eye bookstore apprehended
and soon, the Dow-Jones drops, a feather is plucked,
then a single hair, an airfoil in silent descent,
and big hair is deflated, the voice restored to the windscreen,
and not all is wind and the silver mist of videos
generated by dry ice. Note that artist-as-poseur
is not a question of antagonism. We'd bleed you,
but you already have ice water in your veins.