From The Shadows Of Suburbia

This is a montage of snapshots, two dimensional images lacking
depth, pop stars and politicians, athletes and entertainers, false
gods and goddesses framed in the chalk silhouette of a fifty-inch
television set held in place by weight and gravity.

It is a stream of consciousness that blurs the line between art and
entertainment, echoing the etchings and scribbled graffiti scrawled
on the building’s walls. “We’re playing God.” is painted in black and
white, red and blue, sometimes colored green or covered with an
aura without substance, reality complete with the choreography and script.

This is about a wide-eyed blank stare planted on the American Dream,
weaned and preened, bigger, better, faster, stronger, with its wrinkle-free,
smooth skin injected and perfected by Botox, stream-lined and fat free.

It is a poem that ends in an ellipsis, a self perpetuating pantoom of
circular logic and lifestyle lacking any punctuation, but packed with
a collection of love and memories, an enduring stuggle, clinging to
life, with its roots twisted around a slab of granite.

This a comedy, tragedy and drama rolled into one, a patch-work of
shade, shadow and sun, angst and ambiguity, raw, flawed and
unpolished. The game that can not be named is being played,
eking out existence one day at a time.

It is the story of a mutant middle-class, black, white, yellow and
brown, blue-collar workers mixed with the white-collar crowd.
A culture spawned in a Petri-dish, the descendants of the first urban
refugees to homestead the Promised Land and subsequently
programmed with chronic attention deficit disorder to forget the
squalor and suffering. It's all a reflexive response, a ritual of existence
pestilence and death, the stripped shells, carcasses of Lincolns
and Caddies at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-First Street.

This is a pebble making a splash in the puddle of mankind, the
ripples become waves crashing on a beach. Human overflow in
mass exodus from eddies, pools, alcoves, niches and side streets
past factories and apartments, buildings and junkyards, flooding
front lawns and backyards, spilling over picket fences and rows of
hedges, reaching the hieghts of spires and steeples of churches
and synagogues. The towering tombstones, giant mausoleums cast
shadows under the glow of the night light, a big, juicy slice of
orange, swirling, twirling, spiraling around, and anchored in the
clouds hanging over the skyline.

It is the eternal moment of paradise, cut short by the haunting wails
of a saxophone down in the dark, as paw-prints dance across the
carpet and a cloud of pigeons begins to flap and flutter. While
soccer moms and little league dads drive home in s.u.v.s and
min-vans. They cling to the belief of their own invincibility and immortality.

This is the stain of original sin on their souls, condemned to dangle
between heaven and earth, blinded by the reflection and refraction
of halogen streetlights on a cul de sac off of Main Street.

It is no longer about pointing fingers or throwing stones. It’s about
seeing things the way they are and writing poems.