letters
to an unknown audience
A poem for you, Unknown. Representing the special interests of those who lived in Seattle in the early 2000s and returned recently for a visit. And with apologies to Anne Carson.
Seattle
In this decade—in this millenium!
The video store is still there.
The Ave is still there, Red Square.
The old pillar at the grocery selling Spare Change is still there.
The bus tubs, still there
The mystified, muddy and dizzy are there.
The kids out, head down, face full of pins
are still there.
Latte rosettas are now de rigeur.
The website developers still there,
the novelists, screenwriters, there in cafes, writing happy, naive little plays.
Fat women scream down steep hills on their racing bikes—even now, in these days.
The Red Light is still there, the Metro Clothing Co is still peddling collars,
the De Luxe burger, the Harvard Exit,
the bedraggled and angry are still there,
the angry and harmless, too, still there.
The long articulated buses still carve slowly around the street corners.
Gangs of punks still stroll Broadway slowly.
Fretfully tobacco-bearded old men still stand around staring at their hands, still totally homeless.
Still skateboarders clatter the alleyway.
Genial mothers still order espressos, while talking of politics, leftistly.
Still broken-down furniture rides round in pickups, on to new homes.
The spangled-up canvasses, diffident and glossy—they are still there.
The sail manufacturers still press out their sails,
The hills of Factoria still rise,
and the Stranger still cuts down your several pretensions
and the Stranger still fabricates awesome pretensions
and some nice girls still orchestrate dinners on buses,
while camping trips happen still
and hot springs
and anarchists.
Trim, fit ships still deck the waves,
trim, fit chicks still stock the bookshelves.
And the fixies have come, everywhere now the fixies have come.
Comments
sensational!
—posted by bhikku at May 10, 2010 2:29 PM
Oh I do like to dabble.
P.S. I'm impressed you managed to place a comment with the page broken the way it ways. Thanks for your persistence.
—posted by the author at May 10, 2010 9:14 PM
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