Anthem of Suburbia

by hannah covington

Suburbia is choking on brand names, great blue

letters staring absurdly outwards through a haze of hot wind, blowing like smoke

through the city. The people walk about wearing masks, filmy, oily rain

drops bouncing and sizzling off the hard plastic of their faces, and every last memory

is stamped into the asphalt, and lost, at the mercy of a thousand tires of a thousand cars.

There is an infinite peace in suburbia, even while its people rush about blindly, crowing like chickens.

And, nestled deep in soft cocoon homes of warm brown chicken

feathers, the blind sheep live, showing pride in their sameness. Aquamarine blue

skies, the vast ocean outside their windows, are blocked as the shades are drawn. Cars,

murmuring angrily as they snake through endless asphalt jungles, are bitter as they cough up smoke.

Hungry human mouths cry out for food – not for the food of knowledge, not for any sacred memory,

but for the next serving of blissful lies, eyes deep and blank like empty grey windows reflecting the rain.

The only unpolluted thing, it seems, is the cleanness of the rain.

Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, BI-LO, AT&T. CVS, Wendy’s, Facebook, MTV. Kentucky Fried Chicken,

X-Box, Nintendo, YouTube, McDonald’s. Why do I write poetry? Memories

tainted, free thought subdued. Thinking, learning, working, living inside different sized boxes, rigid blue

walls, sickly sterile. Eyes slowly going vacant, faces expressionless, bleary-eyed and choking on smoke.

Red cars, black cars, small cars, big cars, fancy cars. Everyone wants a brand new, shiny new car.

How peaceful it would be, surely, to be the only one on Earth. Wandering through junkyards of cars

abandoned in the streets, while the towers burned, and the factories fell, and the rain

ate away at everything, hungry. Peaceful, to have grownup as a child, walking alone across smoke

colored glass and dust on the ground, smashed from windows with curtains unfurled. Skin like chicken

scales, hands worn, lips dry. Nothing to do but to walk forever, through the empty Earth, navy blue

skies, beautiful, glittering, vast, and free. Nothing to live for, nothing to lose, and your only memories

are ones that you have made for yourself. And the ancient, trembling Earth has memories

of its own, lost and forgotten, that it holds within itself as it sits silently, brooding. Your body, like a car,

travels faithfully on, carries the temple of your mind. The woods are thick and the fields are long, blue,

cold, crying lakes sink deep into the ground or trickle to the oceans that fill with rain. Like a chicken’s

caramel eye, hot coals of meteors plunge through the sky, colored like autumn leaves but leaving smoke

long after the fire is gone. Holding stiff hands over flames in the dark, smoke

curls up through your fingers. And the only thing left is a memory

of something far from suburbia. Broken shards of sea glass, in a jar. A dream catcher, with chickens’

tail feathers dangling. An old teddy bear, eye missing, fur torn. Cigarettes, dried roses, rusted car

keys, a million pine trees. Worn out shoes, lemon drops, old leather, goldfish in a bathtub of rain

water, dusty, yellowed books. An ankle bracelet that pinches your skin, the color of robin’s egg blue.

What would those nervous chickens of suburbia be, without their large houses and gleaming cars,

with the smoke lifted from their eyes? Unable to hide again from their memories,

would they drown in the torrents of the Earth’s rain and in those oceans of deepest blue?