Everyday Negoiations

I walk through this arch and its half shadows and I am gone, on the other side of wall in a world that might not be there. That's what I think , crossing the street, the late afternoon sun creating large swaths of slanting shade that caused the downtown high rise and over windowed condominiums that loomed over the cross purposed train tracks to seem emptier than they normally be so close to  five in the afternoon. Large, empty, thick with history of conceptions, bad business deals, lies told on phones with rotary dials. Even the newer structures, staggered edifices with mix materials of steel, glass, concrete and wood notable for the profusion of balconies , seemed to have been constructed in a designer's mind to recollect and establish a connection when matters of public welfare and taste were hand in hand. 

It was a simple contradiction to resolve, the resolution being to either rid the city of the people altogether and so not have a center of constructed perfection where down with the presence of human weight and woe, or , less violently, resign yourself to a convenient solipsism, imagine that only you exist and that since because everything is merely an aberration of the senses, you have it in your means to filter out the faces, the torsos, the expressions of others who crowd your personal space, a space you require to be everything you can see. This space halts behind the skylines and the ridge of far trees and power lines.

 The place that others inhabit is beyond your concern or care. Let this failing light and what it reveals for mere minutes in the day, the deep resonance and secret shapes of what is molded to functional requirements which are now matters for history books, add peace to your mind, which is fevered and quirky and fast on the draw when disturbing elements intrude over the invisible lines of death you've drawn on every black of concrete you tread over. But now, it’s time to be gone, to consider the void, what is   beyond this passage, the shadows that malinger and grow until only the basic outline of the walkway is visible under the least luminescent  light above. Time to board a train to where? Anywhere? Does it make a difference? When was the last time going in a direction you've decided upon prior to a journey result in a quality difference? 

Sleep faster, we need the sheets, your father said, eat slower, your mother mentioned, and then continued, we have miles to go before we run out of gas, this said in a Ford station    wagon going between Detroit to Cleveland by way of the turnpike, listening to radio stations fade and criss cross their news , weather sports, there was country music playing , a gospel choir, someone screaming Jesus almighty God , rain and no rain, the sky dark with clouds , thick groves of trees along the road behind which seemed to be one large factory after another, smoke stacks poking the clouds, flashes of rows of broken industrial windows obscured by perversely green flora and fauna, there was never a good time to play fifty states, Cleveland was rain and shadows and deep hills where tall houses were build, hills where the rain went and filled the basements, every house in the neighborhood had a third floor that had walls growing moss...