2.16.01

Snowing by candlelight. The city's been put to sleep and the horn of civilization muted. Trees shiver in the wind, unable to shake the stuff as it clings and it clings to the streets and the drone of the whirring machine is gently smothered to silence. From here, the city is diminutive and luminescent under the insalubrious and eternal glow of unconquerable streetlamps. Human faces, themselves hollow lanterns, hang in neighboring windows, trapped in an extraterrestrial eddy, tossing and roiling in a cosmic rapid, foam mounting on the surface and collecting at the corners. Our collective worldview is a giant cup of tangoed orange light and creamy white night. Out of the cold a woman has come to the door offering her milk, which he takes directly from the breast, one hand fisted and violent at his groin. Hot foul breath mitigates the chill of untouched ivory skin and the moment cataracts to a thinly spread pool still gently rippling. The air has cleared, the night turns white. And winter comes like a gentle and cool tongue on a fecund but rotting thigh. I wait here for it to expand into a future where false exigencies cease, to accumulate heavy and deep, immobile on a turbulent current, to bury modernity and leave us all naked and liquid in the loss of artifice. I slept in a sherbet shell creaming from the inside and my dreams were haunted with the tincture of sun flares on ice. Throughout the night I turned and turned, trying to hide from it. When I woke, the nuclear scene was unchanged, only deepened. Its fallout glowed ultraviolet, emanating the last sunset's glimmer from the ground up, through the crystals compressed landside, through crystals flurrying Brownian amidst the interminable toxic urban light. Now the sun has risen and ultraviolet is in supercession. We are celestine beneath our familiar guide. Church bells I've never heard travel losslessly over chaste air. It's as though a celebration has commenced, the long awaited but impromptu revelry following a birth. I don't want to leave my vigil on the third floor crest of this hill to walk out into the womanly landscape and defile her with Mondrian movement. I want to stay here, basking in the calcimine glow.

future past index