time

The young man stood in the parking lot of the mall solitary like a lone tree in a forest, like a blade of grass through cement. An odd older man met with him. The man’s hair was a fright of white in all directions, a storm of chaos and white. The older man spoke of storms and light, of past and present tied together by fire and garbage, by an act of forgetting made by something from the sky. He was clearly madness in a jumpsuit.

The young man listened politely in the odd painted geometry of an empty parking lot. He adored the old man for his bottled madness in those gentle eyes, in a kind of suburban boredom snake bite antidote in those crooked yellowing teeth, those odd strung words hanging in the stale summer air like astronauts high above the earth. The suburb may have once been a utopic vision dreamt of fusing a 3 headed beast of farm, city and something skinned of lawns, tiny parks and street signs between, a lava molten notion at the end of that long horrid war but it died house by house, street by street. This town to the young man was clearly its grave and his street that last clutching , grasping spasm of an idea mutated into a dullness: ash in the mouth, guano in the eyes.