The City and the Season

Written September 13
We left London today, early enough to catch remaining stars, and second guess the dawn for the orange smear of city lights. A whole different part of the body, of the consciousness is used in a metropolis, in a place bashed with the heavy concrete stamp of humanity. I’ve heard more languages than I can recognize, and the anonymity of it feels so strange. Each little human pocket, allowed to flourish as far as individuality’s restriction’s let them, like separate container gardens all thriving with the same gaudy exuberance. Dependent, really, on the excesses of unnaturalness, so many souls surviving on what should not be, like algae blooms in polluted waters.

I love to watch the airport ground crews, and imagine the moment they left their beds. Always dressed to accommodate the weather, they stand like little oasis’ in a desert of reality defiance. I’m disturbed by my surroundings, but no better than them: a streaky fuselage window, a work-worn woman steering snaky trolleys of luggage, the woman who boards looking exquisitely fashionable, the woman we boards suddenly awkwardly self-conscious of her white sneakers and clean, flared jeans. Maybe we’re all a little mood music sometimes; just a bland effect on our surroundings, just a hint of something nicer, but not really carrying a melody at all.

Reaching down to land on New York, the landscape smeared with the yellow rouge of goldenrod, I still felt a little out of place. This passage through London was so necessarily timed, like a little boy catching a falling pear before depositing it in some intended basket. I’m still not sure where I’m being taken, how far I’m hindering or helping my progress. Fall is breaking here, but the Season hasn’t changed, not yet, the Sun still lingers in prominence over Night. And so Summer stands waiting in me, waiting to bring into fruition that which will sustain me for the next change