| Sunsphere: 11th St. Expresso House |
| I used to watch you from the back porch, smoking stale herbal cigarettes, I laughed. The setting sun shimmered off your back: redded your orange, pinked your yellow, blushed you, as I sniggered, pointed. A giant orange disco ball for the big orange valley-- perched atop your wrought-iron spire. I am sorry you are not the Space Needle or the Eiffel Tower. Sorry about the World's Fair, about our lingering obsession with platform shoes, The Village People, and leisure suits. Who knew then: subject of high school jokes and shaking heads-- you would grow smaller, more distant-- as men used you as a launch pad, more like frogs from lily pads than buffalo from cliffs. Now cordoned off, you stand silent a geometric lollipop, metallic-flavored, distasteful, visitors forbidden, an imitation of innovation. Our monument to the lame, the unoriginal. Like an avocado refrigerator, afros, or a chunky gold pendant framed by a wide, white collar, luxuriating in a swarthy bed of chest hair. |
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| Sunsphere, Knoxville, TN |
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