gravity

a friend of mine once made a statement to me that was really a request. asking me to make a promise, a covenant. he said,” if i’m still here [in this city] when i’m twenty-five, kill me.”

he was a man wise beyond his years. the gravity here is different. stay too long and it becomes inescapable. here i see people try and fail. i've watched those that don’t attempt anything and still fail. eventually all get sucked down into the fault line that courses thru the cracked broken heart of the city. a broken love. split. ever shifting. it grinds people up between aggravated spiteful tectonic plates. the city’s first and primary fault is the line that runs thru its heart.
they try filling it in with limestone and ignoring the groaning tremors.
the blank eyed minstrel sings songs of loss in front of the liquor store. the lost and confused wander the street and i think they get it better than the rest of us. the delusional, those stricken with schizophrenia, with autism and downs. they live a better life. each year another shop springs up and disappears by the following summer. houses perpetually for sale. factories abandoned. lots vacant like eyes that have seen too much of this place.
it’s finally getting to me. the pull is getting stronger. gets harder to pull myself up off the floor each morning and move. doesn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. autonomic function. i play my role. the dissident the passive curmudgeon, prophet of doom, nay sayer.
but there is something else......
there is a disdain for progress. the city sneers at enthusiasm
carrying the ethos, “don’t work too hard. makes everyone else look bad.”
punished for effort. for optimism.
unwelcoming. foreboding. weighted gloom.
hope springs and a dead fish with poisoned eyes floats up in it .
the wise and the wary come and go in the night. the bright and hopeful either get their shit together and get up and get gone. some try to leave after a life time but always find themselves back here. to get digested, consumed like so much limestone.

what is it about this miserable bastard of a city that keeps me here? what brings in outsiders? with their new and unweathered perspectives, keeping life long residents on their broken porches with their cars up on blocks?

far be it for me to take the optimists view.....
but i think that it takes a view from the outside coming in to see it. the bird’s eye view. seen by the migrant fowl that has followed the lake’s shore. followed the waves to find herself here. that judges it objectively, seeing through the dust and without the concrete cataracts that the locals peer at the city with.
i can’t help but see the ugly, maligned, malignant. the diseased shit birds and mangy squirrels the old drunks by the creek and the bull neck coppers that know them all by name. terrified post-urbanites biding their time until they can move away, the junkies with meth rotted teeth.
but there is something sublime, something beyond the natural pull of the town that draws me to them.
staring thru chain link fence at broken buildings and homes at flocks of birds that ignore the nature of this place. hearty weeds and wildflowers defiantly blooming. the flora grows low and stocky. hardy and sparse. fighting against the gravity up out of the cracks in the sidewalk over crumbling brick and disused buildings. nature pushes its way up thru crumbling masonry and inches across worn brick work. it sprouts from places the city didn’t plan, the potted plants all smile in their plant souls at the free and liberated flora. uncontrolled growth.
foreign weeds and vines come from out of town. the willfull creepers like veins across the arms and steel branches of the city work their way up and over stubborn architecture and to the light, immune to the pressure that afflicts the terrestrial inhabitants. poisoned ivies become the antidote to municipal malaise.
music echoes nightly from down home bars, honky-tonks and phony English pubs. mixing with rumbling sounds of trains passing through the town, never stopping. whimsical folk played to fresh faced long skirted girls in unfriendly bars. tribal beats emerge from unsuspecting parks with their broken play equipment and rusted bleachers. slow jazz trails out apartment windows above women’s second hand clothing stores. police sirens and night time helicopter pitter patter. women yelling from bedroom windows at grubby, happy kids who are still playing, in the abandoned lots and fields, out well after the lights are on.
brilliant graphitti lines tunnels along wooded trails. that course beneath freeways and worn and warped, faded asphalt roads. nature wages a guerilla war against the occupying forces of industry and commerce. the politicians, industrialists and the dope pushers. many inhabitants who are not uncommonly more than one of these.
at least the addict knows nirvana when he finds it.
you can always see the sky. no gargantuan imperial edifices obscure the view, no smouldering towers. birds pass over unaware that they are meant to fall out of the sky. gristle for the mortar of the cities warty craggy hyde. many faces and facets. benign and malignant. pure and desolate. a scarred beauty in constant internal war.
this is as good a place as any. perhaps more so because of what you have to do to get there. your half-assed shit that would fly in some college town or snooty big city burrough won’t get you enough to pay rent. in fact you’ll have probably spent your rent money to do it.
this is about endurance. struggle is the reward.you better mean what you are saying. put it all in what you are doing. or you’ll never be forgiven.

on a May day i sit down by the creek legs crossed, eyes closed. listening to the water wash over the rocks and shale. the sun rises and greets the school children and the hung-over alike with a yellow haze that warms the skin as the birds begin to chirp.

i never want to leave.