Light is aflame as the night begins to bleed inspiration. Trickles form like river mouths, stretching every which way like spiderwebs, like illuminated highways leading to the hallways of always.
The evening sports a cold whip, but rage keeps me warm. Creative, fulfilling, molten rage. There is sustenance here, an undending banquet. A boundless aura of imagination to pluck from. But there is emptiness as well, carving its way to the surface from within. Gnawing a path.
Trickles stall and coagulate only to reanimate as the humidity rises. The storm chugs forward like a stampede in slow motion. A bellowing choir; fierce, angry and so serene. Stabs of singular breaths sluggishly swelling into an ocean of voices. Here I stand defiant, ferociously alive. A single breath, a swell of voices. I am alive.
The skyline cracks open only to soothe itself into milky serenity. Raindrops and haze form playful angel wings before a backdrop of sleepy blue and wounds of dirty white, slowly engulfed by brilliant purple. A burning red evening to welcome a colorful night overcome by the struggle of brilliance upon black.
In the wake of all this my eyes burn and my soul finds a second's sanctuary, yet my body rejects slumber and the warm fabric of a motionless moment, even while tested by perpetual unrest. I am devoid of all, yet nourished beyond parallel.
I strive. We strive. Let us strive.
Let us cultivate and concoct whisperfuls of meisterwerks as we sit in opaque rooms painted over with ebony. Let us grow smaller and towards disappearance in oversized cashmir chairs that flow over and around us like a velvet womb of quicksand. As laughter softens the murky walls of these wildly twisting chambers, painted over and left to bleed with the pulse of the city. A heartbeat that churns and thumps like the belly of a great beast.
It calls, beckons, mesmerizes and saturates. I reply with a joyful roar, a vivacious howl, a speck of thunder from a tempestuous soul. The echoes skeet through cacophonous rooms dripping with slithering, wet, heavy air; rooms where time is idly swallowed by treacherous shadows and burned to a crisp by brilliant spotlights. Where golden crowns and silver linings are drenched in tar. Everything enveloped by overpowering hues of crimson and blood red. We are dripping with treacherous shadows, exposed by brilliant spotlights. Full of crimson and blood red, we shine. We breathe in the heavy air.
I feel a pair of lips graze my ear. A calming yet petrifying revelation follows: my lips won't grant my teeth and tongue passage. Language is amiss as conversation falls victim to rigor mortis on the cold ground, flailing about lopsided and misaligned. A wingless bird. I sleep among drowsy ghosts and slowly writhing apparitions upon succulent black waves, under caleidoscope skies of lightning and fire, but in the presence of the living my stance becomes frozen and unwelcoming. Fervor drains as we sit enveloped by mutual misunderstanding. I am slowly growing mute - another sad truth to grow stale upon a pile of so many others.
Ghosts will not quell this flame. They lack the lips for the job.
And I am the buffoon indeed. Fearless to a fault, friendless to the end. Staggering drunkenly across heavy, greasy terrain, through obtuse encounters and mastication, I object and abhor - regurgitate and reiterate and reform and reformulate - but in a gentlemanly manner. With thought-through phrasing and the poet's gilded touch, you understand. I was raised to be one, after all. A gentleman. Undeserved and undeserving, perhaps, but a chauffeur, a charlatan and a charmer none the less. It would be a shame to lose sight of one's pedigree, arduous as its implemetation was, I'm sure, so I withstand. With gentlemanly perseverance, of course. With backbone, poise and meticulous wording. I persevere.
So let us be burned by sulphurous flashes that tear through our hiding places in darkness. Our legs are flaccid and shivering, far too weak to support our skeletal corpses. Let us skulk away in corners that seem to stretch on and on, strangled by grey walls seething teardrops of frost and putrid black smoke. We take shallow, desperate breaths as we gnaw at our skin and flesh bereft of moisture and vibrancy. Angry weaklings one and all. Let us become dust.
Yet... who would let us, if not ourselves?
