This is Hard Life

Another writing exercise from one of my classes. This time around we had to choose a place and describe it to the fullest detail possible. Seeing nothing worthwhile in my locale, I traveled to Chinatown and slipped into my favorite internet cafe.

Beats break and rhythms shatter across straight edges and hard corners. There are no shapely curves or groovy ridges; This is hard life and few of the chairs are even soft, though they are somehow comfortable, as is the din of the scene.

Unabashful disgrace hangs in tandem with the cobwebs and debris off of the minimalistic light tracks which hold bulbs as bare as is legal; This is hard life and it has no filters on its shine, though the corner shadows do creep out, trekking far from their lowly recesses.

A woman electronically screams from the peripheries, perhaps a warning to the unwary patrons; This is hard life and it brings all manner of its occupants to bear: the perfectly elegant homosexual, bruised street urchin, and sultry gothic or punk.

A treehouse holds its ground around a bracing pillar, though no sentinel mans its beacon; This is hard life and one cannot afford to live cautiously, risking everything for one more day, one more moment of experience.

People hide under headphones and man computers, wearing shirts with inside jokes only they get and using acronyms as humorous relief; This is hard life and the folding walls that contain the technomonks do little to dissuade them from worshiping the cyber gods in their own way.

There are paintings and murals in the back, by the bathrooms, and no one is forced to view but the most avant-garde of them; This is hard life and only the creators, as evidenced by their stiff price-tags, see art as anything but a temporary departure.

Three tables hold court of kings, bishops, and rooks, not guided by the hands of gods on high, but mortals in a macabre game of skill; This is hard life and these possible leaders must be ready to wield their enforces with the strategies taught by few other games.

Behind the bar and the working people is the decaying brick wall which anchors the whole room in crumbling reality; This is hard life and, not matter its true structure, the foundation must look strong, for anyone to put faith in it.

Of course, this is not hard life, but Backspace, a simple internet cafe. But what it means to me, and others I am sure, transcends such a simple premise. It accepts those which others turn away, not in policy, but atmosphere. It stands, in fact, as a reprieve from that hard life by being merely a facade of it.

With this, I was pulling some of the stylings from poems that I had enjoyed in my poetry class during the summer and tried to apply them to prose. The effect isn't quite what I had hoped for and is going to take quite a bit more work before it looks less like prosey poetry. I do think the mental picture is painted, however, which was, of course, the objective of the whole assignment anyways.