The past finds a bittersweet reflection on crumbling billboards and signposts. Fading words and dying colors, once brightly hopeful with promise, are now relics ignored in the sunlight and battered by the rain.
I often pass these silent testimonials, echoing in the stillness and finding a voice in the heart. My new and richly-tailored sport jacket, well-polished shoes and current designs cannot disguise nor ignore the fact that I am inextricably connected to these vanishing images painted on decaying bricks and corroding tin. The complex fonts and varied colors, which composed and enhanced yesterday’s tomorrows, leap out at me. Theirs is a language arcane to younger ears but well-remembered by those fluent in their archaic vocabulary.
Colors and letters reveal and resurrect themselves: the italic emphasis in RED, once prompting us to play and to freedom before danger was realized, emerge from a rusted crustiness; the GREEN of tranquility, before anxious expectations set in, is also there amidst a coagulated paleness; the alluring mystique of AMBER, before mystery divulged itself and disappointed, lies encrusted in darkness. The colors and writings through childhood’s spectrum before these and other words and shades were confined to traffic signals and life’s routine mundaneness. The scattered billboards and signposts of a brief summer that, in the suddenness of a moment or two of sleep, arose on an everlasting, approaching winter…in which memory desperately strives to repaint and reword eager, dying ambitions.
Photo: forgotten-ny.com
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February 26th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
(That was really beautiful.) I know what you mean, though I don’t have the age to show it. An overwhelming sort of melancholy, isn’t it?
February 26th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Thank you, Andave. This was a truly heartfelt piece for me that I wrote within the meditative whim of less than an hour. While it’s certainly not a masterpiece, it’s a slight masterpiece within the personal depths of my consciousness….However, I’m still stubborn enough to defy time and feel unbelievably young.
(Despite the fact that I’ll be 54 on March 6. Yikes!!! Who would have believed it? Me!!!)
February 29th, 2008 at 6:04 am
Andave-ya is right, it’s beautiful. And also, as with many of your pieces, “out of the box.” Totally unique - yet with a reader’s understanding that is universal.
February 29th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Thank you so very much, Suzann. I’m happy that this made sense to you and Andave and that you both enjoyed it…I’m still trying to sort through it all. This “out of the box” (!) exercise was merely the result of a glass of good brandy, the coarse fumes of a cheap cigar, and fragmentary inspiration.