WALKERS
This is a very good example of a very bad poetic practice. Hugely self indulgent, it asks the reader to recognize and accept as valid the poet's metaphysical/metaphorical description of a specific place and time. If I get away with it at all, it's because mall designers tend to cleave to their clients' wishes, and mall owners/operators all want the same thing: cheap, yet elegant. Of course, at the time, I was working as a Customer Service Representative (read: peon) at the Warner Brothers Studio Store at SouthPark Mall in Charlotte, NC, through the Christmas season. Any and all faults the poem may have I therefore blame on Warner Brother Studio Stores, Inc.
I kept it for a number of not very good reasons, chief among them that I like the description of the mall as a giant granite butterfly emerging from chrysalis, absurd though it is. I think it's a nice, hard image that describes SoutPark, and alot of other malls, quite well. (Yes, I tried to work it down to a haiku; no, it didn't work. I hate haiku.) I also kept it as a kind of in memorium for another poem, entitled, I kid you not, "Plastic Neon Raincoat Poem," which was much better, and which was written and subsequently lost during the same time period as this piece. I still harbor a rather tragic, almost perverse hope that someday it might pop out from under a bureau or slide out from between a couple of books at my parents place here in Charlotte, which is where I was living when I wrote it.
Working at the Warner Brothers Studio Store was great. Short hours, great people to work with, fun stuff to stock the shelves with. The people who came to shop there were universally happy - grumpy people, it will be noted, don't buy Daffy Duck bedroom slippers. I ate a lot of hot pastrami sandwiches and General Tsao's chicken with lo mein from the shops in the food court. Of course, there was no money in it, so when I got offered the job in Atlanta... Well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and if he's lucky he can do it in a Bugs Bunny necktie.