A Poem: "The City"

I come from a southern city

Of steamy sunlight,

Women in jeans too tight

Always ready for a quick line

And a hard stare from men

Who’ve mastered macho though little more.

I come from a place for men,

A place for women

To mass-market bodies made firm

For the purpose despite dangers

Of selling disease along with their desperation:

The fear of going unnoticed tends to conflict

With welling fears of diminishing expectations,

Making prey seem more attractive

While the fear of being unique

Or different overwhelms a quest for individuality.

                Robotic insecurity

                Cosmetic necessity

                Automatic insincerity

                Homogenic perpetuity

The fear of being alone in the unfathomable marketplace

Collectively called the human race.

I come from a southern city where it’s a way of life

To push one’s way through lines in stores,

And strife without compassion or pity

Drives many on these shores

To travel with a forty-five

Behind tinted-glass doors

Seeking conspicuous anonymity.

It may be sunspots; it could be the moon

Or the heat and humidity forming thunderstorms

Each afternoon; the lack of trees,

Thick air without cooling breeze,

Whatever the cause it’s madness all the same.

You’ve got to be strong to evade that game

Of marketing yourself through rules

Learned exclusively from the tube.

You’ve got to be strong if you hope to break away

From those shallow trenches in which insight-less

People stay lifetimes, lived exclusively in tune

With visions from the tube.

Be warned it’s not easy

Going it alone without shared

Experiential knowledge of queasy

Reactions to having one’s mind pared 

While the ability to think is being devoured

By tens of millions of audiovisual machines

Stared into hour after hour.

Define this friendly hostile town

Turn international city

Somewhat between culturally sterile

And hyperbalically churning intensity,

Both bay-water still yet churning

With multicultural complexity.

City of the sun so sensuous,

Its people possessed of myriad desires

While their lifelines grow continually more tenuous.

Its race-paced lifestyle ever inspires

Increasing consumption of resources – so strenuous

To the complex ecosystem survival requires.

In this southern city of the sun

With steamy atmospheric magic

Men and women naked without a gun

Become a paradigm of tragic trends

Wrought with tell-a-vision clarity:

Power fused, sans logic, with machismo,

Perverse passion reverts to hatred

As chaotic ethnicity explodes delusions

Of multicultural harmonic tranquility.  

 [Written in 1991, published in "A Voice in the Void" 2002]

It still seems relevant today. Perhaps more than ever?