Cartels lurk in systems
of glittering marble
street lamps
placed for nostalgia
no need for umbrellas
beneath glassy atriums,
mazes of coffee shop lanes
brocaded street benches
wait in arcades with no weather
for the weary and bored
department store goals
at each end
pedestrians herded
between
aspiring lives.
Meeting the Bar: Postmodern (Experimental)
Today Anna Montgomery has focusing on an excellent series of writing experiment suggestions by Bernadette Mayer, an avant-garde writer known for her innovative use of language.
Marousia 
I liked the descriptiveness of this piece
Ouch, sarcasm — of shopping hell. Well, to me.
ha i like….def any mall i have been in sure feels like that…great end breaks on the line adding meaning to different places…our mall is like a ghost town these days…
Well we just had our Boxing day yesterday and everyone is out in full force. I like the ending line, aspiring but deep in debts by month’s end ~
Oh you have described the mall beautifully. Very nice!
Yes, this is it precisely and painfully. I try to stay clear all of December if at all possible. Fantastic descriptors and you’ve tightly woven it with skill!
wonderful stanza:
brocaded street benches
wait in arcades with no weather
for the weary and bored
loved this…
nice…you captured it well…some of those malls look like a palace with all the marble..a friend of mine just came back from dubai and told me about the malls he has seen there..
“Brocade is a class of richly decorative shuttle-woven fabrics, often made in colored silks and with or without gold and silver threads. The name, related to the same root as the word “broccoli,” comes from Italian broccato meaning “embossed cloth,” originally past participle of the verb broccare “to stud, set with nails,” from brocco, “small nail,” from Latin broccus, “projecting, pointed.”wiki”
So clever, with etymology lurking amongst the shoppers in the Mall.
I will never look at a mall the same way again!
excellent description.
They are another world to me sealed from reality. I remember them in Singapore, dozens and dozens of them on every street. You could lose yourself in a dream or nightmare of not being able to find your way out 🙂
Nice!! 🙂 Especially liked:
“street lamps
placed for nostalgia
no need for umbrella”
Shopping malls are pretty evil!!
Love it! I walked that Mall as I read it & saw, heard, smelled, touched it all as I dissolved into a gaudy mass of McDonaldized temptation. ‘Aspiring lives’ indeed ~*
retail paradise. i wonder what is outside. vivid poem.