Germantown Pike: A Mini-Collage

I.

“Why Plymouth Meeting at night still haunts me— when you look down Germantown Pike from a car at, say, 2 am on a Sunday morning, if it was merely desolation to see, there’d be nothing to say. Why something must be said is that Germantown Pike and the environs (Plymouth Meeting Mall, Fed Ex, Starbucks) all exude such a sense of foreboding, menace, and compressed anti-matter or anti-material nothingness, from having been built in a jagged, ill-shaped, ill-placed fashion, that the consciousness of the individual is sucked into a vacuum from seeing them that it cannot (in my case, at least) ever really recover from. It is man’s inhumanity to man hewn into architecture; and crisp, poignant to understand that Plymouth Meeting by daylight looks innocuous or even impressive. Daytime world and nighttime world in Plymouth Meeting are diametrically opposed.”

II.

                                                            Big

                                                         square

                                                        buildings,

                                                           hulks,

                                                           hover

                                                           above

                                                       the individual,

                                                            who, if

                                                          abandoned,

                                                          will wander

                                                            all night,

                                                              freeze

                                                             to death

                                                            in cement—

                                                              crucified,

                                                             also, by

                                                              concrete—

                                                               warped

                                                              landscape,

                                                        Germantown Pike,

                                                             sheer drops,

                                                                overpass,

                                                               pass away—

III.

Pat offered to give me a ride,

as air was being sucked from

my lungs, oppressive wafts from

parking lots layered over other

parking lots layered under other

parking lots, hewn above concrete

fields, more concrete fields, hewn

in rain-slicked black on a November

night, splattered like black paint

with silver dabs for icy moonlight—

Pat could barely drive her car, we

were trapped in the maze of the first

parking lot for fifteen minutes, Pat

encouraged herself past all the criss-

cross lanes, zany yellow-striped

other lanes, even more zany sense

that cars were converging at odd

angles to us (they could destroy

us, I thought, they’re demon

vehicles sprung mechanically from Hades)—

Pat slipped inconspicuously onto

Germantown Pike, which stuck out

its tongue to lick us, turn us white

as sheets, where all was concrete

& sodomy beneath concrete above us,

yet we escaped, over to Chemical Road,

it was only half as sinister, Pat

almost crashed, but found herself

surviving, as did I, as Germantown

Pike laughed, saying Not next time, babes—