Drive In — Summary

Shapes of times quaver and mutually reflect, lightening the transcenium with sparks of gay and minuscule emphasis.

The lone hitch-hiker stands out and plucks up a number everyone knows, and collides in the atmosphere about him. Unstaggered but still moving, his generator throbs one, two more times. He's a perfect replication of the primal source, more potent and triangular than the campus that betrayed him and on which he was based.

I try to indulge every passion, even that, half-guilty and overwhelming, for a fat hamburger, onions and a shake. Meanwhile the restaurant gleams and dips out of view. I ask you for it to go, please, and you look like someone fearful of infection, as though incapable of grasping the warm view you join in this place. After guessing the age of the usher who calls intermission, you return to your neighbor who's been chewing on the rear of your seat and wade up the lights where your breath is filming in front of you. His muscles are hard as Platonic forms, his Adam's apple ruddy in the twilight gleam that tightens as the stars' names come on the screen. Outside water is cheap and uninspiring until some fascist pokes your head in it and won't let go.

Gunfighters pass like little girls around the corner to buy ice cream. The pharmacist wears magnificent lenses and gets lost in the street, listening to their thunder as they irresponsibly destroy his front windows. Soon his cerebellum is unravelled in the children's hands and my belt buckle comes undone again.

Your gaze has been electrified, you feel in touch with the music that has blended you into a semi-sour cream, tenderly melting into the cushion and trickling among the wrappers on the floor. You can't help noticing you've become a thing of gerunds finally. Your dreams embody you in the wrangling order, while your horoscope looks on impassively. I have taken over. But never ask, whatever it is you were just about to ask.

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Steve Benson's "Drive In" reads like a dream stitched together from movie-theater scraps. The setting seems to be a drive-in or cinema, but scenes slide into one another without warning: a hitch-hiker who feels like a film character, a burger order, an usher calling intermission, gunfighters smashing a pharmacist's windows. Logic keeps slipping, and the poem seems to be imitating how a screen story and real life blur when you're half-absorbed in both.

The speaker sounds playful, hungry, and a little guilty, admitting to indulging "every passion." There's also an undercurrent of desire and menace, in the hard-muscled neighbor and the "fascist" who holds someone's head under water. By the end, the audience member melts into the seat like "semi-sour cream," and the speaker announces, "I have taken over," then warns the listener not to ask their question. The mood is woozy, funny, and slightly unsettling, like surrendering to a spell you can't quite explain.

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