~ a kind of poem
It was out here that the late-capped, fresh-faced survivors came to live their lives.
In the winding rows, on the sprawling stretches of the metropolitan run, they find their plots.
Curbs and signs, barriers and symbols, snake a journey through these pockets of stilled scape beyond the tamed cores.
The suburbs.
Everything came together in school and at church, amongst the forest of malls.
It was there that cultivated messages and collated patterns were gathered and disseminated, from the parents to the children.
It was here that the Market flared its roots, sold style, passed on the molded mind viruses to the next gen.
In ____, __, all this is true, too.
Many houses, some homes, dot the sidescapes.
Cul-de-sacs lie in every corner, also known as dead-end streets.
The farm road runs round strip centers.
Trees cover every inlet, but there is no sound of nature.
A fire department catty-corners a pair of churches.
The parks reside across from offices.
Wildflowers do not grow here.
Gyms and fields and cafes and schools scatter themselves across the countryside, in between the estates of the faceless and vampiric.
Every view is the same.
In this unnatural space, there is no place you can walk to.
Everywhere over this synthetic territory, there are cracks in the concrete.
Throughout this aberrant realm, everyone’s a stranger.
When you drive across the railroad tracks, and turn left, you get in line to the bigger city. A long wait in traffic, filled with increasingly more and taller buildings.
If you turn right, over the bridge you’ll shortly find the heart of town, low lying and interspersed with restaurants and churches and little shoppes where the forgotten things are still sold.
Their names converged, Franchised & Chained, or shuttered, these small places guide a traveler into the hearth, and soon after, out of the community.
It’s Friday and everyone is eating breadsticks at the Olive Garden.
This place is not big. And it is not very memorable.
This is where I grew up. This was my Primal Landscape.
