The malls are all nearly empty now; they sold off the last headless department store mannequins a couple months back, 90% off the overpriced starting point. The only thing left now are a used book store where the old dude sells junk he gets in bulk for free from estate dump-offs, and the military surplus store, where you could get a nice knife but they're gonna look at you funny if you're wearing a mask of anything other than a beard and naive belief in freedom as a god. A couple stores can now afford rent where they used to be kiosks, and you always hope it turns into a giant international flea market, pull the unpainted food trucks up to the big double doors of the long gone tire center on whatever all purpose capitalist destination from three decades ago could give you tires along with your home goods, let the wretched of the earth, who have come here always but hidden in the corners of this country, finding shelter in the gaps between margins, let them thrive in this place. But it won't happen. The value of the land's potential is always more than what poor people can actually do with it. These old buildings will hang on, out of kindness to the small business owners who are respectably white, but eventually be bulldozed and hauled away, and replaced by a new investment opportunity, unfaded by time, bright and shiny and made of the newest plastics, which decay even more slowly than the ones from before, although it all ends up in the same pile eventually, far beyond the horizons we pay attention to. Those are the hills you see, cutting a skyline in the twilight of America, piles of rubble of dead dreams, with a thin layer of soil and grass sown over top, sprayed with pesticides to keep any dandelions or four-leaf clovers from blooming, and fucking up the eternal sameness.
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