Night

Night is the unwitting predicament where blind mistakes pile, where haunted objects groggily suffocate you from sleep into reckoning. The innocuous table settings and furnishings you conjure out of the shadows and array through the slow timeless dimness hang plaintively alone, harbouring a whole that is beyond use, beyond investment.

The tedium of these ciphers deceives you. You have let yourself grow accustomed to bits of your shame and then they immobilize you. They are not yours in the night. They are warmed by lamps on tables and fabrics that you can see through windows. You sleep in the dust. If you walked all night you would only see more yawning apartment windows yellowing the night with other bleak stage sets. The burden of a populous life would drown you. You are shut into the night, lay down in dust. You start when you wake up in the dark. It has all ended. Everything has sunken back into the stable tomb of that morning, below the paralytic sea, obscure. The bare peak of a choppy dark wave flickers out of the shadow, salty foam crusts the corners of you mouth, finite on the broad lagoon. Beneath you and all scattered around the dark are those junked inventories from the sunken city, threatening with the complicity of the tide to disrupt your sleep and corrupt your innocence. But you will not see them. The moments when the city darkens before the dawn, all the streetlamps snuff out, the hallway sconces, the shimmering light from the courtyard, the muted shadows and glimmers from the windows, the cold sea lights, concede. Beneath the skirts of the earth, where you can rest, for a lingering moment, your eyes race across the fullness of the dark for some fragment, a touch of pain to reconcile your presumed fears against the offer of peace. You will never have control. The things do not have stories. The things are gone. But in the unpredictability of the city light you forever watch your hands for touch, your chest for breath, your eyes for old reflections.


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