I cannot overstate the extent to which this place is anathema to me.
Not the straight streets and clean right angles, no,
Not even the endless repetition upon repetition
Or stubborn insistence on demarcations where there are none,
For all these, at least, can be beautiful in their own way.
I speak instead of regimentation, not in the sense of order, but of that of coercion,
The infinite complexity and potential of each and every life
Restrained and pounded into its designated box
Of drywall, siding, plaster, fate.
There are certainly those who find comfort in this enforced structure,
And I do not begrudge them that--
--but how many of these denizens ever had a choice in the matter?
Even a magician of the untamed fields
May carve out the occasional solace in the cacophony of the city,
For the law of large numbers dictates a certain amount of fantastical emergence as inevitable--
--and after all,
What is a metropolis but a vast, burgeoning nest,
The underside of a rock turned suddenly skyward?
But this place, of neither quiescence nor bustling,
That seeks to trap all those who enter in the mire of a carefully scripted existence
Within only those boundaries which it creates and allows,
Cannot, morally, be forced upon another.
Submission has its place and its purpose,
But a world without the prior of consents and self-determination
Is merely a cheap diorama of shoebox and construction paper,
Glued together by a child who knows only the world
Inside their own naivete
And to whom its inhabitants are mere cutouts to be twisted and torn to suit the scene,
Not consciousnesses, not souls.
Instructional, certainly, perhaps even aesthetic,
But fundamentally static.
One constant in all of parameter space,
A single point in the dazzling hyperplex.