Time Capsule: Proposal

Inspired by my sassy friend's recent time machine posts, I've been looking through a folder of things I wrote in high school. It's completely ridiculous, melodramatic, self-important, pseudo-intellectual.... Ah, adolescence! LOL.

I've mentioned before my younger self's loathing of small towns -- my disdain of banal suburbia, even -- which strikes me as funny now that I live in a town the size of my high school. Ah, well. Here's a poem on that subject, written by me on May 28, 1993 and revised on June 6th of the same year.

Proposal
I would like to live with you
(not in some small town
of scraped-up knees and garden
hoses tangled on the porch
of iced-tea afternoons
some small town
of rocking chairs where living
means nothing more than breathing
in and out)
in the small tight spaces
a few square feet of paradise
between factories and office buildings
built up in stories of spent cigarette butts
a flood of symbiotic, throbbing noise
from cars and angry neighbors
a homeless dog barking
three blocks down
a city fenced off in blocks
sectioned into flat square worlds
that rise instead of sprawl
(like some obscene quilt reaching
for its own ends)
You at the window
in artificial sunlight
You beneath neon signs
You on the corner of 51st and 4th
in your wrinkled brown suit
standing around
as the jazz man hits all the wrong notes


I recall that my writing group (which consisted of the aforementioned friend and about 10 senior citizens who met -- what was it, weekly? biweekly? K, do you remember? -- in the basement of the public library) took issue with the parenthetical about the obscene quilt reaching for its own ends. Strong language, for sure, and they didn't think the visual even made sense. I'm not sure it does, either, but I felt strongly at the time about leaving it in.

What I meant by that phrase was that small towns seemed cruelly suffocating to me -- that by living in one and never leaving, you would be smothered by the weight of your own provincialism. Or something. And actually, although I like the small town where I now live and where I hope to stay indefinitely, I still agree with that sentiment. (I just typed and deleted a nice paragraph about how this applies to my town and to DH's job, specifically, before I thought better of it. What if I'm not as anonymous as I think, and I get him into trouble? Blah!)

Anyway. Challenges of small town life notwithstanding, I find I do like the iced-tea afternoons. Though make mine a Dr. Pepper, please.


~RCH~