Every kid knows it, the suburbs have failed. Distant gated segregation towns hide their children from the dangers of the world in cars like shells of turtles, and insurance keeps us driving out past the decay. Burn petrol to burn midnight oil far from home to come back late at night after half an hour of driving where our children make their own dinner and do homework without us, or run through the lots alone, all these huge yards and empty night streets where no one is looking out for anybody. Kids running and skateboarding and insulated from all the dangers of the world because they never sleep without supper and all they ever do is build momentum for a future that may become a lie if they can't run into it. Through the future, where glittering midnight stars show in the sky out past where cities kill the night. Suburban churches where people confess to each other feelings they wish were true, shopping for an authentic life, wondering if their children will have all that we want for them: safety, joy, clean playgrounds, innocence. Innocence fades to dissolution, to depression as life we believed became the life we couldn't prove. Past the suburbs, keep running past them. Jump through fences to swim in stranger's pools with all your clothes on. Past the woods at the edge of the park are bears wandering away from the construction sites, returning to rummage through the dumpsters, and everybody is wearing a turtle shell, huddling into themselves, their children's friends become their friends, and work in the city all the days of your life to buy the dream of the suburbs, a place to call your own away from the fury and the sound of city life, the distant terror of rural life. A footbin either place destroying both.
God save us from suburbs.
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