pea (Towson Town Center Mall)

I can never find my way out of malls,
but I don't mind.

These places and stores
line inertly in the lasting low light--
everyone stands in their assigned places,
mannequins that can talk
and yawn
with an unglued mélange of boredom and pressure,
boxed and wrapped together with the stinging words,
"May I help you?"
It is commonplace that everyone in here looks at each other
without seeing a thing.

They should bring some dogs in here, or something--
you can't pet dogs on the internet yet.
Maybe that could work.

Everyone in here knows the truth;
it hangs above everyone's heads,
it crawls inside their covered mouths, and it saturates their eyeballs;
it is a frozen pea to a trachea;
and inasmuch no one will say it:
"We could all do this [shop] on there [the Internet] anyways."
Everyone knows it: shopping with your feet has become ersatz,
but not for me--I like to look at calendars up close before I buy them.

Except for the slow-walkers, slow-talkers
and a select few teenagers who can still feel
the integrity of this sad, tiled hum,
the same who still give this place breath in January
afternoons,
except for them,
everything seems kind of hollow, even the light.

I bite into my hot pretzel and keep walking,
encompassed with a cloudy, familiar blend of ten million smells at once.
Its colors always change, but the crisp smell of consumerism will always be the same,
that vague, familiar scent that never leaves once it stamps its mark;
it's ingrained in the tiles, in the moving hands and the swaying fabric,
in the faux wood of the faux eyelash kiosks,
in the bad cell phone service and the slight wobble of every table,
in the clumsy, nervous, ever-avoidant eye contact,
in the abyssful echo of the bathrooms and the drowning engines of the hand dryers,
in the yellow plastic and the wet floors,
in the light.

I leave with a fifty-dollar mustache razor
out of the wrong exit,
wondering, "How do they get the Jaguar to the fourth floor?"