The mall is still good at making you want
to wear a fanny pack and pay the claw
machine until you win a stuffed basketball.
The mall is still good at orange chicken
and eyebrow waxes, and also entertaining
your children with cartoon-themed racecars
and space ice cream. The mall is an excellent
smooth jazz jukebox, music that makes
you forget about music, like the light rocking
of an anchored boat. This is why you go
to the mall: to listen to the tenor sax thrum
while getting in your daily step count
or chatting hoverboards with the kiosk
salesman. One day you hear a guitarist,
we’ll call him John, playing his guitar solo
over the loudspeakers, accompanied by
the normal electronic keyboards
and the fretless bass, and the solo starts
unobtrusively. Gradually John amps up
the solo, brandishes his whammy bar
like an Olympic Hammer, slays the sixteen bars
as if his wife left him right before he walked
in studio, or as if he just decided, fuck everything,
I’m going to play the best goddamn solo
the mall-circuit ever heard. You keep walking,
try to ignore John by grabbing a cookie
decorated with rainbow icing and sprinkles.
John keeps jamming, must be thirty-two bars
now, and he’s really making you emotional.
This isn’t what the mall is for, you think.
This is spoiling my rainbow cookie, you think.
But when a John starts wailing, he can’t be ignored —
he’s a voice crying through your dessert.