HAIL ALL YE,
from inside the lions den. All the jokers fakers ogres and fools, my people, you are welcome here, at the end of time. The foul breath you seek, the reek of sour nesting, the rust taste of curdled blood, here all seems easy to day. All together different from yester day:
And just like that, I saw the children pour from the forest like an errant wave come to sweep the great yard away. And I in my vestments, peering through an opening in the high tower, interrupted from a long winters nap.
Once again
their little necks stretched toward the sky and their mirrored faces and arms and legs all grace and force, moving in uncanny uni son. I whistled loose. Down at them, into the air between. What came back to me
I do not know.
Their forward momentum (as if tin cans rattling behind a cart) at once stopped and silence demanded my attention. All earthly respiration halted, the greater spheres too, and the children quirked their heads halting at an angle precisely forty-five degrees west of north. Unblinking upturned faces resting upon tendersprouted necks telegraphed images from childhood.
I once visited a park in a decaying US city, and as if on a jungle jim in a schoolyard playground, clambered up on a large sculpture there. The art, as I rubbed against it in my scrambling, somehow imprinted into my body, leaving marks, some sort of tattoos that were dyed on my skin forever, messages to be deciphered.
As all such memories from dis tant childhood past, this vignette had no accompanying sound, and out of their voicelessness the children flowed as deep water current and also as rippling waves above.
UNBEARABLE DEAFNESS
accompanied and amplified their dance.
Sucking at my fingers, I wished to be rid of such dis ease. The children smell blood, I thought, and after my forth shower of the morning, fully scrubbing each time, I slowly descended the endlessly circling staircase to stand motionless
at bottom.
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