You like how the dismal streets meander through
the trapped night
alley-wise, the cluttering grayness of cement
and trashcans leaning like
beggars from shops and cloisters, the cats,
their eel-like bodies streaming, eyes glittering sharply like the meteors
of streetlights. The sky has been guillotined, dropped in the lap of the
city, which cradles the bloody sunset still lingering on the rim ---- this
criminal night now lies before you like a rotten fruit, accusing you, who
merely prowl the fringes, the outskirts of a crater left as evidence of
catastrophe. You enjoy its despair, which drifts in the form of faces fleeing
from windows, faces which glance at you, then retreat, as if bullets ricocheting
from a madman's rifle, they cannot keep their gaze on you, mired in their
hovels, burrowing in the listnessness of their lives as you walk, a stifled
seeker.
You wonder --- where is the girl who once turned
the corner up a dark flight of stairs in a blue-gray tenement, the shimmer
of her black stockings edged with perfume, where you followed very carefully
and on a third-floor vista, watched as she gestured and the thick dust
furled like ectoplasm? Where is she whose alchemy turned a room to a place
of spheres and divans, where lovers disported and all the time the water
from a hidden source clamored and rolled, its small veins mingling with
the fleshly furniture? Where is that room, the light fastidiously grappling
from the many gnarled objects a pair of dice in an hourglass, their black
eyes fixed like a cobra upon you though you knew your luck had run out,
that your luck meant not that you would walk from that room with the girl
cowled preciously in your arms, but would grope away feebly, dried blood
sifting through the hourglass of your body? Where is that room of flesh
that would never lay silent as long as you remained, whose lap, like the
lap of the night where you are trapped, churned like rain-beaten vines,
where human appendages trailed indistinguishable from the lacework of chairs
and the fixtures which cleaved to the ceiling, the walls slanting curiously,
like predators in the wake of a recently slaughtered meal? You have come
to a spiral, a narrowing circle, a seeker who has wandered from the edge
of a vast amphitheater where night has dropped, whose only option is to
go down, though you know this
amphitheater, this fate that has befallen
you like an endless night, is
corroded, that its long rows are crumbling,
for you have made this journey too many times to count --- these stone
rows, these streets, these
mouldering alleys, have nothing to offer but
the search for that stairway
you will find, then lose, then find again.
But you love these dismal streets where your thoughts meander forward,
where the people never stay more than seconds at a time.....
