24 Hour Day

It is just on opening for the giant shopping malls in Melbourne...
It is first light and dark, moody clouds are still smouldering and hunched up on the horizon.

The Moon, almost full and looking like a brand new bruised angel, still hangs in the sky as if waking up on a couch somewhere after too much revelry and celebrations.

The air is sultry and coiled in minature eddies of heat from the previous hot Summers day as i make my way to the Mall for some fresh bread.

As I slide along on the highly-polished tiles I notice shops on either side blazing with light from inside the stores...

It is 6 AM. With minor exceptions, the shops won't open before 9AM...!

Apart from myself there are perhaps 2 shoppers in the entire complex.

This minute, lights are still beaming from last night all over Melbourne and all over the world...

Sigh...have we still not learned?

Are we still behaving like there is no tomorrow?

I just went outside into a bitter Winter evening and walked the rain-washed empty streets of inner-urban Melbourne. 

My footfalls resounded through vast, brightly-lit mausoleums with a lone security guard, as I glided along brightly polished shopping mall pathways...

Subterranean avenues of Plastic, Aluminium and Glass with fabulous arrays of brightly colored goods placed intentionally in my path and all around me.

My senses are assaulted by so many goods in so many styles in so many shades...everything appears to be multiplying in swarms of meaningless choices, in a nauseous collision with my eyes which suddenly burst in sensory overload, shattering into a kaleidoscope of sharp fragments and bright colors.

My nose is overwhelmed by insidious perfumes of cloying, synthetic odours that mirror perfectly the assault on my ears.

Ethereal waves of androgynous, souless harmonies pour through the vast empty vaults of the Mall, filling my head with the clouds of an insincere oxygen.

A familiar feeling begins to envelop me, and once again I feel like a transient visitor who stumbles upon the scene of a Crime, a vagrant thief in the night, not knowing where to leave my restless eyes which dart from one consumer bauble to another in a never ending search for authenticity.

Through my beseiged eyes I finally walked outside into the Bladerunner streets... 

All over the rain-drenched footpaths neon lozenges of colored light were bleeding into flooding gutters as I traced along darkly lit corners, where cold granite edges met, dodging sheets of blue/grey rain in the noir-edged, glittering night...

And as I marveled at the bright, fashionable displays of oil-based articles on giant picture windows, I saw the reflections of huge illuminated billboards which shrieked at the dark skies like Harpies in lurid neon paint, while the sweet voices of Sirens just kept on whispering seductively to my sub-conscious mind...

Sex, Food, Luxury-Lifestyle, it was all there to be had, all there for the taking they sang...

And I marveled at ALL the Energy we are wasting right now, and the accompanying carbon emissions which we must be spewing into the atmosphere all around the World, from ALL those empty shopping malls and empty corporate buildings which burn brightly through the night...burn away this Planet's lifeblood 24 hrs a day 7 days a week for what?

Just in case, some lonely figure wanders by at 4AM, caught like a deer in headlights by the reflected glare?

So they can praise their own products above all others...So they can Lie to us...

24 Hours a Day.