Friday, March 5, 2010

My Town Needs To Be More Poetic

One of the truths of life is that everything changes. If it didn't, it wouldn't be life as we know it. But it'd be like something in a wax museum, just standing there motionless.

But even in a wax museum, things are still changing. The wax will droop, slowly melt, and fall away.  It's decomposing, so that if you looked way ahead you'd eventually see clumps and hardened puddles of melted wax all over the floor and a humanoid scaffolding left behind of nothing but clothes pins and twisted pipe cleaners.

There is after all a network under girding everything, like the frame of your house or the skeleton in your body. Once you peek behind the curtain, or see behind the facade, that there's workers back there peeing on the backside, you're more content, like me, to live with the illusion. Except I know it's there.

My town is just like everyone else's town. There's the good side of town, and of course the bad side, where the filth goes to prosper. In the part of town where the dives flourish, the houses of ill repute do a good trade, and fly by night carpet dealers scam their victims.


I was thinking that if it were more poetic -- the town -- that at least we'd have the heroic image of something that doesn't change. We could hear the songs and read the words. Like "In a little Spanish town, on a night like this" or "Out in the west Texas town of El Paso." It freezes it, the imagery, to a particular place and time. Even the cactus at the edge of town stands eternal.

I need to read more poetry, so I'd know how it goes.

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