The Urban Soup (Part V)

A prose-poem to the city:

You're large and broad and gleaming and dark enough that anyone--absolutely anyone--can draw inspirations in your crevasses and spin the longest, thickest threads of story and narrative. There are pools in your irises: the highway knots and dirt piles and gargantuan trees in shared backyards. But you've always been too big for me: I could never narrate properly, and besides there was way too much to follow. Your wrinkles spawned the angry wanderings of the unhappily ripped-off schizoid, the ten years in solitude, climbing offices and billboards and aqueducts, rooting for truffles in your garbage-heaps and looking for the illuminating half-light in front of marquees stationary and scrolling, managing and sweeping your cumulonimbus alley cats and teeming posses of grasshopper persuasions, trying to persuade your winter-hardy plants to sprout and head-scratching in mystery, useless by the lake-breeze where I fell into the striated cloud universe overhead. And then one day it all vibrates together: one day the pattern of the rushing strangers singing outside the pub and the hot-dog man struggling with mustard and the loner grabbing for the buraucrat's hand in the office and never letting go and the proprietary man with the trenchcoat and corner seat all meet at some gleaming shorted-out intersection to confess to each other. Themes of redemption and epiphany course through your streetcar wires overhead, saltatory across the eavestroughs under which secrets are whispered and donuts are thrown into the gutter: confessions and epiphanies not of the modernist spelunking of the unconscious mind, but confessions of irredeemable vagueness and lack of judgment and epiphanies of gas prices, love triangles, essay theses and unpublishable pamphlet/tract topics. Streetcar wires: the neurons of my city. Also the cages of my city. You can never see the sky beyond them. They are some sort of focus barrier. I come to you and your statues and I walk much less than I normally should (these days I hop and fall and slide): I wished once to stand on the tops of the spinning ad-blocks and size up all four cardinal directions each in turn and slow as all get-out; I demanded once in my earlier youth to see halos over the obelisks, to see arrows on the ground pointing my way down the alleys and up the fire escapes where the secret meetings went on and all the best poker games happened, but now I wouldn't think it. Your irises are enough; irises: the highway knot viewed from a satellite, the hole dug out and filled up again, the shallow pool working with tidal constraints, seeping into the shack, the weeping willow as tall as thirty hardy Norse woodsmen. I know them: I know how they constrict and I know how they come to have the colours they do. But what of this inner pitch-blackness? What of that mystery?

Wow. Pretty self-indulgent, eh? Don't ever try some freaky voodoo component analysis on this text. You know who you are.

Consider: "This is the story of the boys who loved you / Who love you now and loved you then / And some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you / Some just laid around in bed. / Some had crumbled you straight to your knees / Did it cruel, did it tenderly / Some had crawled their way into your heart / To rend your ventricles apart / This is the story of the boys who loved you."