badlands (revised again)

[mnaz]

“Badlands”

You know some badlands out on Highway 23, weathered down, streaked in minerals, beaten down to indistinct mounds as you crest a rise; they leach surprising color in late afternoon. You pass through a gap, onto a flat, and sit for hours, feel a metallic breeze on your cheek, watch the mounds deepen and dissolve, darken into sooty and morose old mills and fallow concrete, stain and ruin, fences gone. No guard dog around, nothing to guard. You sit for hours, watch heat simmer on fissured pavement, sticker vines and rust.

The Rust Belt? Made a joystick out of it, made a killing. Hemorrhaged for years but held our own. You call it a house of cards, bottomless debt, the banking ruse, a teetering mouse-click economy. Downer man. You decry fraudulent war; you can't do that. It's all there in public, in the Information Cage, cluttered glut, digital creep, shadowy men cooking up shine. "Enron robbed people's savings". "Enron gave millions to the Taliban". It's all right there. And the Screen to sort Friend from Foe each week, track their stock symbols. You hate the Screen, hate lies, the bigger the better, but it's not like you'd invite ex-Friends to dinner anyway. Your negativity is pointless.

You know badlands out in the redrust country, on a six-lane hangover south of town, in the Jimson weed graffiti, shot-up factories, old hangars on a crumbled tarmac. Down the vines from hanger nine the boys wired their war birds, wired bolts to mammoth Pratt and Whitneys, Allison blocks, wiped oil from their brows, fed the screaming raptors, won the war, built roads and deco gas pumps, roadhouses, neon swoop, lots of factories. The strip is everywhere, oil-slicked over a hundred rotted rail spurs, the desert rising rusted on peeled billboards, broken barstools, cracked vinyl booths, bacon grease and black Joe. Tangible, pre-digital grime. Before physics fell to the microchips. It all changed. Music became shinier, vibration a little more petrified, can’t put a finger on it.

You come for a soft, diesel breeze, pleasant language of decay. But they were hell fire mills in the best of times, a fiery furnace blanketed in fresh snow, soft bumps, debris left when the doors closed, gabled line houses on a starved steel sky, soft mortar and grunge, checkerboards of shot-out panes and raving wild dogs roaming filthy literary tombs, Detroit, Youngstown, Sometown mass-producing rust. We built the damn things, in factories moving around like drunken walls at the Zircon Lounge, carburetors and pistons, cables and gaskets, gears and hoses hissing snake oil men, castle and crenellation, Genesis and Revelation. We hauled rocks up the hill, rocks from the ground, built pyramids, cathedrals and pound for pound legends and bombs, got used to the sound. Everything fought itself; rain fought its only sun, and the roads went south, deep south, river bed ghosts, soldiers clutching a song. Someone had to haul those rocks and it was damn hot.

You come for heatwaves rising from quiet ruin and streaked mounds. But it might be the dead of winter, grim silhouette across a dead waterway, bog of dull muck and gray sticks, the mill, fearsome hulking ruin, gothic stained mountain with spears. How could we fail if we made the steel? You picture its crucible, milestones devoured in molten punch clocks, gut it out, crank it, ship it, and limbs sacrificed to the plant. You picture birthday cakes and bar fights over nothing, over crumbs. The young and strong go until grizzled, bodies broken, furnace going cold, and mills are left to the waste land, random spray paint undergrowth and a peaceful diesel breeze.

[dadio]

Powerful write. words made to work and work well.

[mnaz]

thanks dadio; don't know where i'm going with this
other than similarity of things, even in the "desert."