Environed By Lights

 The traffic lights change too quickly around here, maybe because they know that nobody is coming. Heck, when we're not looking they probably turn purple and pink.

 There's a certain poetry about them, like infinitessimally small stars we have the opportunity to watch die, and be reborn, we navigate about them and chart the best course, reading their instructions like fortune tellers. They are small Gods we honor with our approach, they govern the great consensus so that we may move fluidly together. I always thought randomness was true freedom, expectation a secret ruler, a calculable surrender.

 I watched the walking envy the driver's speed, the drivers envy the walker's intimate view, neither truly happy to be doing what they were doing. The human condition: to compromise oneself, always finding something to want, something to give up in order to reach half-satisfaction. But that's the point I guess, to take something and leave something else leaves a man never overwhelmed, always in balance. When we become complacent we never fight for ourselves, when we dwell on what we have or had we fail to want anything new. It's a maze of doubt.

 I knew the feeling of being lost before but not lost entirely, and that night I was. The traffic lights bled, linked together in harmony. I watched the strung-out guts of the city reach a new impasse, mirrored reflections of sea and sky. When it's early and the air is cold, pushing back thoughts of home is impossible. The bliss in idleness is always at the edge of your mind, but a puppet cannot control his strings, movement is his home, his own actions, at time, foreign.

 The sky grew pale-faced, shedding blues to the street landscape, as I walked across an intersection, and stood right in the middle. One street's lights shone all green into nothingness, one shone all red, a third shone a mixture. I took the path with no traffic lights, they were pointless to me now.