Temple of marble, crystal, brass, and bronze
The door to door retail shop music
Like the opening of some Patrick Nagel coated Touch of Evil
Over here - ambient
There - satin saxophones
Here - pulsing house
Then here - abrasive country
While there - manufactured hip, poppy jetsam
And over here - serine washes, pacifying waves
Each bleeding into the next, spewing out from window dressed maws
With their mannequin teeth and tightly matted carpet tongues
Mouths full of service, merchandise
Shoes
Books
Toys
Music
Movies
Videogames
Posters
Jewelry
Electronics
Cosmetics
Glasses
Salons
Appliances
Lingerie
Clothes
So much clothing!
Etcetera, etcetera
Just relax, breathe
Discover needs you never needed before
Into the piper's caves, somnambulate to the looping sounds of kitsch banality
Continuously played from open to close
Piping, piping
Out into the echoes

The echoes
Echoes
Heels striking marble as if needle drops
Sneaker squeaks
Baby cries - the scratch
But there's no beat to the cacophony
Voices, chatter, discordant and dizzying
These blood sounds - they channel, draining
To the center of the temple to be drown in the roar
The pouring falls and showering blooms of fountains
Lean over the pool, and gaze upon the cold false stars
All the glimmering copper wishes beneath the feet of bronze nymphs

Distant escalator hum - another siren call of sorts
Intermeshing teeth for the laces of children's shoes
Best double-knot them to be sure
Legends of mangling
Shredding
Masticating
Machines of indifferent apatite

Onward, past the kiosks to the smells of the food court
Styrofoam partially melted by General Tso sauce
That sweet and sour sticky air
The rubbery cheese of orange grease pooled pizza
Fake meats hanging overhead by the chains of franchise
Steamed broccoli
Ice cream scepters
Giant pretzels birdshot with highway salt
Coffee syrup buzzing beelike

Catch a sparkle of diamonds in the corner of your eye
Gold watches, platinum
Shiny lures
Down into the misty pit
Floating vapors of Obsession, Cashmere, Chanel No. 5, White Diamonds and the myriad of candied pop star lines
All clinging to the florescent ether like a drunken swarm of mosquitos, of gnats, bloodthirsty
Clinging to your clothes like cigarette smoke from a Jäger-dive poolhall
Yet it's a clean sort of grime, this alcohol soaked filth
Disinfected, like surgical tools

Can you feel the voodoo adhering?
Soap opera adjectives rubbing against shoppers like cats marking their property - bold, restless, young, beautiful
Scurrying like dryads into the forests of clothing racks
Leather, vinyl, polyester as ferns, thickets - the green
Pied, pipping

Nostalgia?

Quieted now - the wind in the trees
Fewer feet upon the marble

They tore down the fountains
Nowhere left to make wishes

Gates close, and do not reopen
Boarded up, painted over

The echoes moan now, as the lights dim
Security guards patrol like deer in a ghost town

A sepia dinge yellows the marble like stained teeth
Yellows the air like geriatric oblivion

The dry voiceless cry
Bankruptcy
Sold off, sold out
Liquidation

The auctioning of mannequins
Venus de Milo - stripped like Lavinia

Rumors of loitering gangs, drug deals, even violence
Better to shop online
Safer
Easier

Tradition wavers then ceases
Antiquated
Atrophied
Withering, retracting, caving in
Leaving liminal spaces - fetishized
A peepshow menagerie of voids
Through glass observed, almost coveted
And so monitor screens replace window displays
With abandoning nostalgia
Nostalgic abandonment
Like the pleasantries of funeral attendees
Such sentiments

Kronos eats his young
But the sweatshops do not close
Greek gods become Roman gods
Rome falls
Long live Rome

So, from the vast and empty parking lot
Watch the sun set down
Behind what becomes a great, inglorious, mausoleum
Once a temple for a bad religion
Now a tomb
Vacant, and unborn


12/27/2020