In the Dead Malls of My Childhood

 

A flickering buzz reveals the tiled and plastered dead

In shadowed concourse, in banked elevators, in logo t-shirts.

I want to overshout the frequency--where is Gen X?

What was left in dusty bays, now empty?

Glittering ash, unswept glass; neon-burned by the 80's.

It's a decade for the quasar-born, the 80's,

Space-wide, just discovering the lonely, pulsing dead.

Even without it's neon makeup, it's empty,

A cotton rustle, an alien flash, glitter t-shirts

Remain silent in the abyss beneath our shoes--

This cave used to be Gen X.

It was ours, but what is a cohort? Gen X

Can't own a decade, sign for a mall, beam live from the 80's

We can't dance funky in each other's mother's shoes

Because this space groans, already dead

We got the drawerful of concert t-shirts

But when he presses the button, the speaker's empty.

Where the did this concourse drain itself empty?

Where did they go, the acid wash of Gen X?

Try to clean the rain from the glass with t-shirts

But it's a cold plaster storm of trash, blowing from the 80's:

Music like hailstones, electricity dead,

Chords keeping us stiff in our unlit shoes.

I see the labelscarred shelves nude of shoes

Every case, hanger, kiosk, body left empty.

We'll outfit the plaster as if the heroic dead

slung a guitar through the chorus in a Gen-X

movie, the kind where suburban hagiography, so 80's,

Says malls are choice, everything is cool as t-shirts.

Roll our flag in the cotton sleeves of three t-shirts

Worn barefoot, despite the plaster cast of shoes.

Mannequins and muses lived on screen in the 80's.

But all those movies' sleeves are empty.

We shot all the aliens--we're Gen X! 

But we didn't save them; the malls, too, are dead.

We're a holographic 80's band, our cassette, t-shirts,

summoning the dead with a kickflip, without shoes.

In an empty suburban lot, celluloid hisses "Gen X."

It's not great. It's not necessarily completely intelligible. But it's within the broad I'm-going-to-give-myself-a-break definition of sestina and therefore--yea!! Finally. A rough sestina. I think next year I might be exploring more poetic forms and maybe revisit this. What will it look like if I spend a year working on it? Well, pretty much exactly like a dead mall, probably -- hollow and disintegrating. Let's find out! :) 

-- Chrissa