dreaming
Future Shock
we eat apples and we spit them out,
we paint our bodies with saliva,
we chew blueberries,
and the haws;
I forget why I'm in this part of town.
we see old friends from the empty past,
and dash to re-ignite our love;
shake hand uncles,
bow to aunts
I think we have never seen before.
we smell the hollow wooden doors
with dark-light sunburn-picked veneer;
I left the car
with top down
and motor running on bright shoulder.
waiting for my daughter - don't know why:
I leave the soundstage filled with friends -
find her crying
by the car,
wondering where her daddy's gone!
pix: Samy Charnine
notes:
The story:
I left the convertible running as I waited for my daughter.
I saw old friends I hadn't seen in 20 years or more., and
ran like a handicap to get their attention. We talked, but
I wanted to get the heck out of there. Maybe that's why we hadn't
seen each other in so long. When I returned to my car,
she was waiting with her suitcase.
hollow wooden doors
with dark-light sunburn-picked veneer;
Hollow wooden doors are the miserably cheap doors one finds in houses, new and old.
When the wretched things are old, they become dark and grimey, and in some places, the top veneer
wood comes loose; the dark-light is the grime (dark) and the newly exposed veneer base (light)...
it shows up when we pick away the veneer like sunburned skin from the back of someone we do not really
like with a fascination and sense of squeamish disgust.
The meaning?
I and my generation cannot let down my daughter and my daughter's daughters and sons.
2 comments:
There's a lot here, a range. But I don't feel I need to understand the references to feel the emotions in it. I like it.
I'm glad. Myself, I feel there is a barbarian sexiness that turns to friendship, then intrudes upon family, and perhaps I - or "we" - have let down those who depended on us.
Perhaps we have let them down outrageously so that they wait by the side of the road.
I feel it's about our time - at least my place in our time - very intimately.
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