PLASTIC NEON RAINCOAT PEOM

("Peom" not a typo; in homage to Robert Grey, he of the poetics dept of UNCC.)

Okay: so I was working at the Warner Brothers' Studio Store in South Park Mall, Charlotte, NC, winter 1995 (soon to be '96). It was a pretty plumb gig in alot of ways, but in alot of others I felt trapped, pinned, a victim of the system, a common moth on display in some youngster's paste-board insect collection. I also felt pretty silly about feeling so trapped, and feeling so rotten about it. Bundle of contradictions, you might say.

So one day, one cold, grey, rainy, nasty November day, I found myself cruising the mall parking areas, and thought that maybe I might find a spot in the mall's underground parking lot and thus avoid the rain.

I sat in the running car, under the shelf of the mall at the edge of the parking lot, and had a kind of Alger-esque,* Thompson-esque,+ Twain-inspired~ moment: what if I just leaft the car here, running, to eventually run out of gass and die? What if I were to walk away from all this? I mean, I've done that kind of vagabond gig before. It wasn't like there was alot holding me back. All of my worldly possessions were in the back of my (borrowed) car. I could make it. I knew how to keep my gear dry, how to make a fire in a rainstorm, how to hunt and scavenge for food. I could carry a hammer and make my way doing manual labor if necessary.

I sat there, thinking, dreaming, pole-axed. Nah. No way. I couldn't do it. For better or worse, I knew that that way lay not only madness, but also misery. I knew that, for better or worse, I belong in this glitzy-cheap hurly-burly world where effluvia is substance and meaning is commerce. It's where I was born and raised and what this world demands I accept and embrace.

Some time later I wrote the poem. Rachelle swears it was after we moved to Atlanta, but I seem to think that I wrote it while living, temorarily, in parents' house in Charlotte before we left for Atlanta. (Which impression is, in my mind, strengthened by the fact that I lost it, at my parent's house, and it remained missing for some 8 or 9 years until it turned up, again, at my parents house, in a drawer with some other documents I had written that they had found around the house.