blackeyesunrise

We reached the point where dying became less fun,
It took nearly three decades of trying:
Cultivating madness over barren soil, passing fallow
Seasons in the fields with shovels in our hands
Etching away at dirt for rain trenches
And irrigated lines; the seeds were planted,
Our crop sang prolific as we gorged ourselves
Upon the labor of our desperation, vines of wild-eyed
Grapes, prodigious wheat, frenetic orchids
In a garden of haphazard colors.
We tended to the whims of our fruit
And madness sprung from the earth to clutch at
Stars with its clutching tendrils, clutching, oh but
We fed the disease with diverted veins,
Watered them well with green and blue ether,
Until now, the toll and toil too taxing to complete;
This harvest, this yield, we can no longer stomach
Its burden yet by dirty light it blooms,
Produces another bushel, another peck.

Only then the sublime opens up
Arranged by five spread petals
To receive its christening.

To be something else
Than a riddle of nine different flushes
More than a losing syllable on a ledge
Something longer than a
Long goodbye.

He lied. The city didn’t kill him; he arrived already dead and staggering through the streets. And those were unhappy streets, unlit, an impossibly long runway on which a plane might roar relentlessly forward but never quite leave the ground. Listen to the clump, clump from where the tarmac grows unevenly. It tells you a story.

The story begins with his arrival, and I was sick of him already, sick of his legends and his vagabond gods. He tells me about the morning and the crow with a woman’s voice screaming from the tree beside his window. He wanted me to believe it was a portent of disaster. That is what he said, there was a woman in the tree.

But whether the woman was real or not is no small matter. So he lay there, the wind pushing through the perforated screen and along with it, the voice that took form and covered his mouth, covered his nose. He said he suffocated finely, he said it took a long time to die on his back, years on his back just trying to breathe.

I thought this city had killed him with its impossibly long and narrow streets that transported one from nowhere to nowhere because he told me, a long time ago, before I grew to loathe him, that it had broken into the one bright sanctuary in his heart and stolen the dear subconscious treasures within it. That is what he said.

How I hated him for showing me the darkness, that terrible corner inside everyone where subconscious treasures go to become sullied, dirtied, rendered unrecognizable. Maybe we all die on our backs eventually, trying to live, just as we all divide into separate hims and Is. He arrived and I departed, carried by one plane.

* * *

Weird.

He died on the asphalt, the man with the tie. He was gone before the ambulance arrived. We looked at the shirt that clung to his chest, damp with what ebbed from him, and it betrayed no subtle exhalation, no gasping hope. We saw but could not stand to see the crater in his skull, were sickened by what crawled out, the raw monster of memories and consciousness.

Or maybe we felt nothing. This congregate flew in like flies to the scent of blood. Pity; we wanted to think about the horror and the afterlife. But look at the blood, how it unravels bright and beautiful from the thousand hidden spools inside a body, the way it tangles through the streets, knots that trailed past the rusty grating into the dirty labyrinths that sang beneath every city.

The blood stained everything, everything except the dead man’s wristwatch. We couldn’t hear it ticking but somehow, it remained unscathed by the impact that brutally scathed the adorned. Around it seconds were becoming seconds, the din of horns rising upwards, sirens in the east, a voice just paces away. Up and up, until the noise mingles in with the pulse of the city.

Somewhere, a phone would ring. Not ours, we relieved.