Airstream Ranch

While I'm working on a few updates for the second printing of Secret Tampa Bay, I thought I'd shift gears slightly with a poem remembering one of the many roadside attractions that has vanished during the course of my time here in Tampa. Blink and you'll miss it - that's what someone said to me about Florida when I moved here. How very right they were.

Airstream Ranch

There it was planted
Between billboards
Like a question mark
At the end of wordless puzzled glances
From those zipping past on I-4.
Less than a footnote now,
A background blur in an overexposed polaroid photo
That belongs to the age of
Garish pink painted pachyderms and
Mediterranean revival style
Shopping mall food courts.
Our roadside temples of the mysteries
Raised on the bones of conquistadors
Fading faster here in the sun,
A heap of broken images
Uploaded to the cloud
And then carted away for scrap;
These memories of minor monuments
That have at last outlived
Even their own uselessness.