Roller Door Devotional.

Thus I walk past roller doors.
Every house has one: unadorned, monochrome, uniform; shut. Inevitable and inexorable
and lined up like ducks. Out here they are to contain double garages. These are two-car __________________________________________________families, overwhelmingly
I wonder which comes first, the duckling or the speckled egg?
I imagine an empty garage, waiting for a car purchase.
The homeowners are hitchhiking.
There is no bus line here. The train station is a long way away. The freeway is right there.
__________________________________________Your course of living is more than
strongly suggested. Yes. These doors are repetitiv
and give good face. They air no dirty laundry. Because of this, I am sure they have a full __________________________________________________ _______________hamper.

Yet I don't know what the people behind are like.
I don't know if we would find things to talk about or not. I blame the roller door.
There is no need to expose yourself to the street. You are funneled from house to freeway ____________________________________________________________without a peep.
Now - if you ask why the garage (in this year round, mild climate), the answer
(incredulously given): you've got to have it. You've got to .... Otherwise your house has no ___________________________________________________________resale value.

People want it because people want it.

Broken down like this, the garage door makes perfect, hermetic
sense; the logic, spinning me in a vortex
enclosed in the panorama, I get seasick

and of course there's theft here. You've got to be security conscious . You've got to be
_______________________________________________________vigilant.

Roller doors are tin tigers lying in wait for invisible thieves.
Paranoia builds, a sticky car seat on a hot day. I do not belong here and these roller _______________________________________________________doors
know it. I do not want to belong here and these roller doors-
when one opens like a yawning maw, swallowing its face, you see
what it has been hiding. The camping chairs lawn mowers power chords and power _______________________________________________________drills
even neatly stacked, the contrast is shocking
I feel I have been caught wrongly looking
at scrubbed-down duodenum, pancreas, gallbladder
a medical model yet uncomfortable

yet my gaze is hungry; hunger grows like a tyrannosaurus here
and I know how we could die out: there isn't enough to consume; aluminum food
and only seconds before it slides shut again
a low and even purr, if any other
someone will be called. This malfunction will be nipped in the bud. Like the errant
barking dog, its vocal chords excised, presumably
via some mechanism I can only surmise:
a swift phone call, a smoky room, grave and deep-throated agreement to handle the
___________________________________________ issue and then the operation is like a neutering
or the slide shut: the muffled yelp that signals the end
of the subject, like the border skirmish hinted at
while tourists sit on the beach, with cocktail napkins, the cover up
by sunglass-wearing men

but after all I go too far.
What is eliminated here is mostly confined
to that which is not clean line
and the natural materials are here
for the simulation: the faux cedar, faux pine, faux mahogany. The facsimile
the reality, with no figures or carvings or bas relief, no relief, yet

the small choices that have been made from a limited set. An oxygen-deprived snatch for
______________________________________ a glimmer of difference within sameness

how scared we must be. How we reach for more then gasp back as more threatens
until we end up trembling pigeons in grey fists
damp feathers and damp fear, waiting for the guillotine
a thousand thoughts in these last, swirling, minutes, the worst of which; the most ____________________________________________ debilitating, being
of you. Where are you? And where were you, all this time
during which things have been laid out
the roller door or then again, in slate, sea spray, evening haze?

In battleship, shale, ironstone, wild smoke? Peacock? Manor red? Blue
Ridge? And the size of the panels and do we have stacked boxes or a brickwork
pattern? So, the subject
expands and contracts, like an accordion.

A horizon doesn't come into view. Thus I walk past roller doors.
More than preoccupations, shrines; devotions.

~

words: Rose Hunter, Australia
images:

~

this is the only image not included, i felt it doesn't really come out looking good in small size: