The streets where I spent my formative years are wide, quiet, and plain. There is

one cinema,

one high school,

too few ice cream parlors (four, to be precise),

too many banks (again, four).

The energy here is passive, like the energy in the power converter on my computer:

quietly existing under a stoic, polished exterior.

It is very unlike the splashy crackle of The City, with its skyScrapers and its Squares.

The streets where I spent my formative years are slow; people drive around the loop,

from the cinema

to the high school

to an ice cream parlor

and a bank.

Travel resisted,

they provide their collective energies to those places, suffusing wherever they are with

a dull heat.

They always loop home though.

But now I want to leave these streets: these streets that I did love with their

simplicity

and suburban claustrophobia.

They gave me the knowledge to

postulate and ponder,

measure and make,

write and to roam.

I look for my niche elsewhere.

These streets of my formative years,

while dear to me,

are not mine, and never were.

I belong elsewhere despite my best efforts,

and so I go, for once

to get lost in a crowd, to fall.

Perhaps I will

fail a test,

miss a movie,

drop an ice-cream,

lose a few dollars.

Perhaps I will form.