the city of the dead

This is that moment of warm bright sunlight smack in the kisser, where the heat and glow adorn your flesh with such attendant mention that you feel the shadow pressed from the dead center of your chest, the plaintive tear where the darkness separates your shoulders the way wings would if you gave them any thought. As if the sun sent bullets through this daily drudge and carapace to ink in the long lonesome that spreads wherever your breath abides, instead of this litany of marble and granite, corridors stunted by their breakneck grins and collapsed intentions as the rapid fire repartee riddles the slabs and the timbers. We are the follow up questions left unanswered before the pestilence. We are the answers to all the questions never asked.

There is a riddle in the architecture, a secret sealed within. Like a myth of an angel’s disfiguring touch on an upper lip, the words somehow built occluded to rapt silence, a hush to hold to like an oath. The long decay, the slow collapse, the infinite unwinding of the transitory— some details die off, some facts fade away, some gut clenched truths are taken with us back to dust. Facets held by brick and whisper, plans that seems implicit from the direction of a stairway, a frame that could have held a door. Some buried then, some intuited so, all our motives left to the elements like meat. It’s a further that exceeds almost all of us, from blood and bone to embodied ink.

Your stories will outlive you, at least for generation or so. Or your stories will flutter in your wake  for a few moments then settle into the piles of the past. Or there are no stories, there is no you, and the words keep happening anyway— the city of the dead always dreaming in the wide awake. Sleeping on their shelves, wandering your dreams, turning your words over and over and over. Worm and beetle, moth and mouse, the workings of ten thousand mouths making shapes of these stray syllables. Making sense from the saved forms and minted coinage of abstracted minds, shades at rest in the boxes in the backs of brains, ghosts alive at the least glimmer of attention. The empty streets where you and I are all but gone, tomorrow waits for yesterday.