| ::02:01:08::
::: On the crosswalk :::
Between the painted lines, fast food scraps
And headlines break down in the sidewalk cracks like grout of front-page, Arts and Culture, abbreviated World stacks
Stunting sprouting dandelions.
A song interrupts as a jingling advert:
”What’s It All About” from that album by the Grouch
Plastic and Paper Product
Restaurant and Catering Supplies
All flies attract circumnavigating patience as a virtue. Times is not meant to go again.
The “skidmarks” bumper sticker on the tagged-up fire hydrant with the kid in skid ripped off across the street from
Wash and Dry. Forgotten fame on the wrongfully chosen color for a brick hot wall, sits as dry and silver as urban scrawl.
The day-travelers cross the line and walk the signal down to suggest which way to look at the way you think of yourself right now.
Do you feel shameful enough that you draw a bath?
Wash that posthumous grin out of your mouth. It’s deflecting powerful kisses “as effective as halitosis” and your chosen word, “hate”, proves ineffectual in its pumping mass. It lies in the hands of image-makers and downtown movers and
Orville Redenbacher challenged Mr. Clean to a duel to win the heart of Mr. Peanut who Clean showered with the acid iodized rain that the little girl with the umbrella says she’s stuck in a perpetual rotisserie-style salt glass fit and she is a smoking vampire. She begs the Daily Mirror to kiss her reflection goodbye.
Make it a ritual of passage. Sketch it out like hopscotch on the dog-sh*t-ridden-piss-evaporating sidewalk in the antithetical coloration of Easter egg. Graffiti artificial gun-powdered shell chalk particles dissipate if you stroll in an offbeat right-winged gait asking cabbies about entropy in a clean city.
Perhaps you can empty your pockets here. Take your clothes off on the corner because you initiate aesthetic aversion to your coated social scripting and it appears we chalk it up to illiteracy.
Read within the lines and color your facial enhancers, peel polish off your waxed curbside ailments next to the liquor store. Close for the holidays we’ve forgotten. Park free after six on weekdays.
We traffic, we jam down as we part ways.
Rolling up pedal pushers before getting caught in the chainrings. We’ll crank revolutions into revelations, or reverse the vice, or vice versa.
Steer clear of the potholes in the street and crackheads on the sidewalk and the hipsters snorting lines designating premature lines on their attempt at expression co-opted commercially implanted thought osmosis-like head dunking in the aquarium walls in the house of the Jones’.
It’s time to return your appliances and send a Thank You letter to the so-and-so handyman who sealed your waterlines and the cleaning lady who works a thin line between wrinkled hands and the dripping fate of the faucet, scraping between pierced tiles in the Albert Hall She’d love to turn you off.
Written by: ~ Lia Yaranon Hall |
