Kiosk of No Returns
surive just about everything & you’ll end up at the mall
near the end of the movie,
when my grandmother died, i spoke at her funeral about how she was a painter and she said, you don’t paint the tree, you paint the space around the tree. she never said that. i am the poet & in grief, we near everything called living, we round it, do not go to places dangerous when there is a safe space to wander
you sent me this photograph while i was taking a bath
i lay there every night in this pandemic
terrified.
terrified of what comes next & who is gonna die. & am i
my children, my parents, you
how can you ask me to love in this place & we don’t
we go to spaces of abandon
to still the terror: Look, here’s a picture of a dying mall in
America,
h o m e ofthe f r e e
i want to tell someone of this fear but who has
any more room to hold it whose lap can you sit on
& say, what i want
what i want
what i want
is to be sure again, of why we built any of this. why we needed any of this. remind me why we crawled up out of the swamps for this excess of speed and glutton and was it to perfect suffering. have we reached that shore yet. have we designed it so perfectly we can’t ever go back or forward, but stay here taped off, an arrow marker to the place where you belong, and we’ve got the best prices in town.
you’ve got to fill the frame with our obelisks and titans to consumerism. ephemera of pleasures that filled us once. now we are empty display cases. now we are hand sanitizer to remind us how we broke off, our fossil beauty in beige and tan tiles for miles of smiles…. how did we know desire. what was left to discover here. we pushed beyond temporary till disposal was the birth of this nation, i sing of thee.
Photograph by Todd White
@hollarrr
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