The suburbs at 4 am
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The suburbs at 4 am
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Nothing stirs save the spirit of the air, the feet which carry me, and the feline that follows me. Day carries its slow combustion to its logical conclusion; night embers with half-latent potential. Images arise of prison cells, dank hideaways of degeneracy; of desperation laced by floral frills, of ailments chronic, irretractable ignorances, opiate madness of thin hopes dashed by inevitable bad news, frail moments of childlike aspiration, tarnished baubles cast aside to sully in the lawn, overgrown lives with too much beauty pressing forth irresistible blades, too much feeling in the meaningful blooms of happenstance that dullness is chosen instead — by manipulated euphoria, leading back to the entrance of the funhouse strobing with candied lights — a tantalizing hint of artificial vanillin on the cancompressed aluminum wind.
Is anything really alive beneath the skin of the once-polished machine, now fallen into a state of disrepair by complacency, neglect, willful sabotage and passively suicidal refused stewardship? Can anything true be seen in the memory-maze of optical illusions, sensorial photographs crudely animated by stopmotion of stilted embraces and avoidances? A key falls into the lock of the heart. Two of its three tines fit, the third is far too bent to turn. The peg does not seem to fit the opening. A paper creased cannot ever be returned to its uncrinkled state but by arson — returning the pressed fibers to ash by propane flame, interspersing the remains amongst rich loam, sewing futurity's seed within the admixture, and empowered faith of unswaying laws carrying life's irreducibility into an endless proliferation of vibrant forms by the very same transmutation of an ancient world timeless with profundity —spurned by pseduoprofound postmodern philosophies and contagious pessimism.
What comes of a career symphony when the million performances decay into background static, the figures reproduced faithfully so many times with slight variations vanishing asymptotically, statistically, barely deviating; players trained in each new generation on gradually-refining craftmanship of instrument-making, unexpected talents bursting forth from youthful protégés cauterizing cometlike the rent voidflesh of silent space before winking whimsically into the twilit panorama of time; the lopassed smattering of polite applause masking actual experiences ranging from vehement dislike to bored indifference to tearful wonder with blasé golfclap? What change is sparked in the audiences that justifies the alleged toils of study, of composition; of artistic self-doubt seemingly exceeded by mountainlike solidity of belief in the imperceptible greatness of the unknown that drives one to express, to create — each passing generation united by the same perfect temptation?
Surely somewhere something stirs if within this breast, within this cage of future fossils and amberized insectoid skeletons, even a ghast of conceptless infanthood laughs and cries thoughtless into the cigarsmoke city, if trees grow as other cured leaves smolder in the halfawake predawn in crudely fashioned cylinders in halfawake hands, if other multilegged creatures creep beneath the uncertainty of midnight's umbrella speaking nonhuman tongues, if unlikely sages stare from behind steel verticalities resigned to inscrutable mandates of unfeeling deity — if other minds pulse with contradictions and certainties and images resolving towards eternal rest. Surely something stirs in the suburbs.
by Daniel Pendergraft_
created for HIVEon August 25, 2020
