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Sunday 4 May 2014

Still Lights


.

call me when you get home: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 1 August 2009

On the seventh day
He rested.

For eons
He had waited

Until the time was right
To lure

Big tech firms
Into the cleanest

Little white
City

He had ever
Created.

And then, and then
Into the silence

He shone
His lights --

His red light
His green light

And his computer
Timed don't

Walk signal.




a little time to think about it: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 15 August 2009
 

a teacher appears when the student is ready: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 15 August 2009
 

civil disobedience: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 4 September 2009
 

judgment: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 25 August 2009
 

take the long way home: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 5 August 2009



then the doppler-compressed sound of a truck's horn: photo by greg (It'sGreg), 23 August 2012

5 comments:

Bob Gaul said...

Mind you, I had a pretty great day today and coming home tonight to find this just made made it sweeter still...

manik sharma said...

Tom,

I did not have internet access for the past three weeks..The little white city seemed like a misappropriation of the white and grey I have known to conjure my urbanity..There is no living with it and without it..And where have I come back to..Beyond the "Pale"..Plots can't go trickier than that..Love this ..

TC said...

Many thanks, Robert and Manik.

And yes, its really true, smack in the heart of the heartland, amid what used to be tall corn country, a clean, well-lit, highest-per-capita-income high-tech white-flight nostalgia-lit silence-blest bit of something like... paradise?

The ghost of Edward Hopper seems to slip through the shadows in these empty streets, in this town which seems to have suffered -- or to be celebrating? -- a mainline hit to the epicenter by either a neutron bomb or the distilled essence of the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Barry Taylor said...

Nothing more ghostly than a vacant city corner. Those two guys have the look of last men. That's a great conversation between poem and images - thanks Tom.

TC said...

Thanks Barry. They may indeed be the last men, making this a very quiet conversation -- as would of course befit this almost perfectly silent little town.