i have the smell of McDonalds
and 90’s pop songs that play
in elevators and waiting rooms.
“i’m wide awake and I can see the
perfect sky is torn”
drifts into my day and enriches it,
brings back countless car-rides,
and faint curiosity about where she is
now,
and if she was singing about romance or
religion
(a brief aside on hume and kant and
dogmatic slumber)
and how profoundly wrong it is to call
music meaningless
when here is this meditation on identity,
this existential crisis set to melody,
and those who discount pop culture
must never have really engaged with it
-
(bloom
and adorno both cast aside in an instant,
an
impulse from a venial wood)
for they see it only from the outside,
like those housing developments that i hate
on principle:
cookie-cutter conformity,
setting of derivative dystopia -
every
house identical,
no room for aesthetics or diversity,
but if i could see the life that teems
inside,
i know i could love it too,
the same way i fell in love with urban
ugliness
so long ago - graffiti, tenements,
broken windows -
(reclaimed by the harlem renaissance
and pbs)
and suburban mediocrity is the next
frontier,
a charge led by pioneers like klosterman,
butler, campbell,
and i long for my name to be added to
that list,
but i can’t be the savior of the
suburbs
if i never leave them,
and i am content for now to drive
around salem,
pretend to be mrs. dalloway walking
through london,
remembering and forgetting,
endlessly, ceaselessly,
with the rhythm of the day.
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