Monday, April 14, 2008

The City That You Know Don't Want You 'Round

It may seem that i have forgotten this little spot, but i have not.

i have just been a little lost. i have just been hiding in dark places. and i have been chain smoking. i have been perched, waiting for the world to pass its nights and days by me. i just stayed here. But i really want to go.

But there is no where to go here. It is a wasteland of story-high cranes and concrete skeletons amongst the knocked-down buildings and the giant holes that have replaced them.
The crosswalks are closed everywhere and the city of a million persons is deserted. When the city remembers the wealth it has on the week's end, it drives itself downtown and drinks itself to death in the bars lit with large television screens.

"More than a million!," our baby-faced mayor and the developers chant. The inner city condos are selling as fast as the suburban thick-lawned, cookie-cut houses sprawled almost an hour away.

i run out to my old standbys to remember but leave early every time. i walk back to the little apartment and it isn't even midnight.

So i hide idle.

2 comments:

  1. As Gertrude Stein once said about her home town of Oakland, "There's no there there". I could say the same about suburban Long Island, a place I have never called home.

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  2. i imagine that yours is a different kind...

    you can't smell the greed and steel and stale beer in Long Island...

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