I decided that it would be fun to respond to Eric’s Monday Photo Prompt. I do not know if the form of my response is in compliance with the rules and I did not have any money for the judges. I love Eric’s pictures – Go check him out.

Escapism is my brush with infamy, but my brain shrinks rapidly as my escapes no longer work. I wish to leave the neighborhood, to head for Terratell Park, not artfully named for a famous man from our city who cut down millions of trees and was thus able to wire the entire town with electricity and telephones. As we get further away, as history gains perspective, sometimes we become more confused on which humans do good things.

I strive to get out of the plastic neighborhood with structured blocks that might curve and then not curve to fool us into thinking that there was some natural essence to how we live. The sidewalks bulge from tree roots, and I must watch carefully as I move quickly, listening to loud music, attempting to get away from the world, or else I trip on one of the bulges in the sidewalk.  It is the broken form of man creating a stumble that feels as though I am going to be face down into this cement which might hurt twice as bad now with our temperature at ten degrees Fahrenheit.  The bulges tell us our forms are wrong, our structures are wrong, and each house is the same as the other but in order to make it tolerable, the ingenious developers reverse floor plans or chop off floors. Each form is so contrary to nature that it seems as though the neighborhood would fall to dust within a year if we were not out with our hoses, our paint, our caulk, our fertilizer, or the multitude of machines we use to groom our forms into acquiescence to our square and empty lives, our lives built on a godless concept of the world where we work to serve as god ourselves, to take a perfect world and foul it all to pieces.

Getting out of our Barbie Doll neighborhood brings glorious feeling. I feel as though I am flying a kite, and nothing could possibly go badly because the wind is beautiful in its care for my graceful and respectful sail, which seems to be most in compliance with our miraculous habitat.

The park has a sandy path which was necessary to keep the joggers feeling as if they were in control of the earth and not the reverse, joggers needing clear boundaries on where they might feel comfortable to lay their feet, not wanting to get lost off course, but also not ever wanting to do something different today from the way it was done yesterday. At least the path is sand and not tar, but I approach the old train station where Mr. Terratell received all of his contaminated nature so as to control his city and bring millions of dollars to his pet poodles and other caretakers.

The center of the old train platform is a yard blanketed with cobblestones and an old evergreen tree surrounded by what we try to call a natural rock wall but is nothing other than chopped rock that is laid in an offsetting pattern. The evergreen, which has been growing under man’s hardline stare for perhaps more than 20 years, in a central position as if we worship it and then we surround the tree with cobblestones as if at one time our city was like Vienna.

We organize our cobblestones to combat the ruinous damage of dirt on our shoes from Wal-Mart, and on top of the cobblestones there is a bench. The style these days is with the rod iron handles and frame with the wood slats. All of these forms, even the tennis shoes from Wal-Mart seem to pollute my will to live, but today, the bench is partially covered with snow. I feel the snow ravaging the bench and creating splinters for the springtime lovers who don’t care to get mixed up in the grass. The old queen evergreen drops poofs of snow and water and these create an amazing pattern on the slats of the bench. Nature comes in to show man that his forms are fully defective. I imagine and then can see clearly, mixed up in this nature, are the ghosts of family members of Terratell who lost their lives at a young age while he was collecting poles of wood.  I intently see marks of two butts which had sat down so lightly on the bench that they did not crush the snow or pack the snow, but they poofed it – Yes, nature and ghosts have an incredible talent for poofing.  Maybe that is man’s problem – He masters his forms and structures, but he no longer poofs.

No matter, for nature and ghosts have rendered our bench irreconcilable with any human activity, have returned the bench to nature and have installed the most outstanding shapes within the snow that you will ever see.