Big-Screen Banality
If our unwavering trust
in UFO abduction (despite
simpler, less radical explanations)
was not pitiful enough,
the green men—increasingly
aligned with Hollywood cliché—
prove suspiciously unexotic
even relative to our Earth cousins:
axolotls, giraffes, ants.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right).
How about all-screen banality?