Nightvault

Smoke out the window and bastards away, hurrah, I follow the line of the thread of smoke rising into a metropolis of the bitten, the uncouraged, who launder nothing but knives in the simplicity of a metal dawn. To be less than writing is now the norm, to make fiction grand is nothing if not pure ease in a millennium devoid of people, peopled with shells and shadows of shells and paintings of the shadow of a shell. All is remembering now. A gesture toward the passed and passing and yet, there are still some unblossomed buds awaiting spring here and there.

The angels are busy looking for themselves in the eyes of men and women. For a mirror, even the ocean is broken and the blood is rust and smoke, tears of the fish and smoke. The challenge appears in this moment to be one of manifesting one’s heart from an ancient toothpick which has been hidden inside one of the leaves on the planet. Apparently such a thing might even be secreted at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps in an area without light, an area no larger than the song of a microscopic crab as it digs in the pitch a place in which to bury its eggs.

Furrow of the blade, furrow where the weasels have vomited up our gods as we crushed them with populated machines, incremental spasms of desire written with incredibly thin blades. Up above the air which is carrying this smoke out of my bedroom and into the vast night which I can never fully know, Superman and Spiderman are vying desperately for the carnal pleasures of the moonlight and neither will rest until it is decided which one of them truly owns the reflection of the sun. I am waiting for to find my toothpick, for to find the leaf in which my heart is hidden and am heavy with the vast weight beneath which my planet struggles to shed her skin in the form of we, the people, of we her and its and their children, the flood is come and has left opals grinning because light knows our secrets and we cannot read it. Writing because the waters have long since ebbed and are currently preparing an encore of some unguessed duration in which all of our legs will separate from our bodies during sleep and go to speak with all of the animals and other creatures which we have destroyed simply because we did not need to.

Yet I do not necessarily include you in this, my long accusation, for my own pressure is enough to inflate all of the maps, to bring them to life so that they can crush us and we can rest securely knowing that we may finally cease to crush ourselves. The bear is turning into autumnal gold near an infant. The goose is germinating her wheat which is not a vegetable at all, but instead a horned and musical hive of downy laughter that feeds upon algae and other parts of speech. All of the dogs left many years ago and it is with their shadows that our shadows now play but I have not yet lost the value of hope, even if I cannot find the thing itself. Would I were the word ‘were’ and not the word ‘is’, for then I could breathe sweet relief during the long recitation of the lie given out daily with the returning of the worked and sold, the burning of children in a semblance of quietude that is primarily cacophonic, the burying of the aged before they have even hinted at their years.

The voice coming through the light which was near but not upon the table was a woman’s voice and it said that he has a thousand faces but only one name. All I could remember was the eyes of thousands of horses and how the night leaked out into the sky through them, though it was not of them. The nightvault eats all of the keys and spits up new life, and the scabs are miles deep and nothing swims within them or feeds them kisses of lapis and silver. Old hippies keep singing as the hair falls away and the trumpets rust near some closets mistaken for technology. I cannot spell anything but the word spelling in my sleep. I wanted to wake up, but upon waking found only that I had wanted to wake and was still asleep. I saw the television and all of the silverware arranged in a department store to form words that might have been a silly rhyme or possibly the name of a vagabond that had ridden too many trains through the mouth of too many holes. Forgotten the names of father and mother and father and o the nostalgia of—do not for a moment believe me sarcastic or the venom will take you down and crush your bones to chalk and even the vultures will pass you by because of the teeth of desperation, because of the blades that grow there, because of the elevators we built to carry us up to a point where we could finally see nothing but how very far from the surface we had lived.