LIGHTS OF THE NIGHT

There are back streets there, quiet, themselves as if slumbering. It might get quietest close to the witching hour, and the faint sound for a really keen ear would be the hum of the electrical lights. These are yellow or yellowish, - soft, lonesome, - even though each is not incredibly far from the other. Those lights just wait, and remind the viewer of a row of soldiers at attention, waiting in, or assigned for some reason to a limbo, a land where nothing is happening. But then, a bit of rain does sprinkle, and a breeze announces itself across the little boulevards and the grasses the cement forms house. It’s like the beginning of a story or film, a poem, - but there is much more. Across and down the way there is a large highway and it winds south and north, an asphalt snake, the car lights like the eyes of bugs,- and sometimes the procession goes fast while at others it is forced to become languid and lazy.

There is a heat wave, and one store has its lights out and rests,- it’s a beer store, old but still there. On its side is a building that used to be a dental office, and oddly enough, the pictures of teeth are rotten,- faded, marred and scarred. Beside the teeth are only two of the once five letters and so the sign says TE. But on the other side,- across from the a large community garden, sits 24 hour coin laundry. Its lights all work, and there seems to be some divider inside that reminds one of a bamboo fence. A man and woman are there,- holding up clothing, folding things. He wears a red t-shirt and shorts, while she a white shirt, long sleeved, and blue jeans. Their silver car waits under the lights from the signs, the overhead lights, and perhaps a bit of filtered light from the nearby modernized and thus large gas station. So there is it,- the quietude,- and a few people, a sort of light themselves, a very few souls doing their work in the night. And me too, a documentarian of sorts. The note of not much note, or the note about the kind of singular note the lights and a few spirits make inside of the time of the moon…

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