Brandon Schmittling
Washington, DC, United States
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Sunday, August 06, 2006

An Ode to Rockville

So, it is official - as of yesterday I'm set to move into a co-op house in Columbia Heights. It's a really groovy place with some characters right across from Wonderland Ballroom. I have mixed feelings about where I'm moving from, namely, the city of Rockville. On one hand, it has been good to me and frankly is a beautiful, safe and prosperous city. But that's not what I'm looking for at this stage of my life - I'm looking for an urban setting and this move represents a change not only in location but also in my mindset. With that in mind, I have written a little prose on my experience in the RV; this was at 2:30 in the morning after a trip to Brickskeller so it is probably a little angsty and critical.

(bongo drums)...

I leave you now, Oh Suburbia!
You brightly cleansed and convenient behemoth -
you bringer of status and things rat-racian
For to own a condo is divine and merciless;
Fake stodgery and uniform dress
with daffodilian readiness, thrown lawns and pitched gardens,
ghoulish stares and syntactical fences.

I loathe your dwellings, your partial life
your promise and deceit;
Your half-hidden corridors and persons half-sketched.
The repeated affronts to my sensibilities
will take a lifetime to recover from.
But only a day to leave behind.

I bury my feelings for you here, now,
amongst the carcasses of other times, places and contexts.
Forever to wreak of American similarity
in tightly packed honeycomb -
delivered overnight if the price is right!

People cut from a magazine of men's fashions.
The occasional crisis reminding and aging me
before I realize the dream is still within reach -
certainly elsewhere but not in:
a new baby,
a logo,
a checkout clerk,
a mason jar,
a firefly,
a yard no one owns,
a wall of plaster I'm afraid to decorate for fear of intimacy,
a decorative power room to impress god knows who,
a disheveled couple cleaning their car week after week;
and drowning in suburbia.

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