THE NIGHT THE LIGHT DIED.

 

 

The streetlamps all sputtered a fatalistic drumbeat. Slowly dying and fully conscious. Flicker from grey to darker grey and back again. The streetlamps muttered, voices of deranged memory. Pieces I’ve never had.

 

I feel dying now, in a twilight arena and want no part of it. These    Things    Never    Happened. Suffocation, humiliation. Things of powerlessness taking over my body, forcing me to watch all the things I don’t want to see.

 

Condemnation and criticism. The streetlamps rattled. Bantered. Flickering. More than half of them on the other side of the street went out completely, finally. And more than one at a time. And more, behind me now, catching up quickly. Flickering off. Dusty keys banged on a drunken piano. Tone deaf madmen wave dead orchids in my face. A terrified rabbit being eaten by a fuliginous vortex. My clothes are worn, dirty, stained with rock, ash, asphalt. I try to think of all the hands that used to raise dingy shades in hundreds of thousands of furnished rooms. They surround me now in the darkness aware of the absence.

 

I am the only thing defining them now. I can’t get this straight. Sitting in isolation with hollow men and gaining no support what-so-Ever. Standing, walking, running in isolation. My feet are heavy, an effort to recognize or control. Streetlights flicker. Streetlights snicker…

 

AND THEN THE RAIN CAME

 

… and then the rain came. Big hollow drops crashing into everything. Bouncing off awnings, drilling holes into old cars, pock marking the asphalt just a little more. Raindrops the size of marbles, the color of dead radio stations, the speed of wasps.

    The Water is thigh deep now.

… and then the sky turned liquid, came smashing down and chased everyone away. The sky became sad or angry or bored or just fed up. Became too full of the things that make explosions necessary. And then let it all out.

 

The Water is waist deep now.

,it started to rain. Everyone took shelter. In their homes. In their cars. At Aunt Ruth’s. On Sesame Street. The sky couldn’t hold it anymore. And no one wanted to feel it so they hid. Bullet rain crushed the dead.

 

The Blood is neck deep now.

Behind glass, the world took on a new streaked and molting perspective, things became less substantial. It seemed… suddenly… less important to talk. Looking through glass, now, with the new underwater unreality, it became a time for introspection. If anyone said anything it was hushed and quick.

 

    The Urine is mouth deep now.

   But elsewhere, in the cold, with nowhere warm to hide, the feelings around turned ground to a freeze, stopped in a grit. Agitated feeling.     No.   Gloom and, cold and the concrete is harder now. And teeth are more real than cheeks. And hands are fists and feet are claws and livers and stomachs are jackhammers and the cars are demons and the doors mean exile and the people passing with umbrellas and someplace to go are meat.   Walking meat.

 

    The Water is above your head now.

   The clouds hung low, a mist on the pinnacles of warm and distant towers. The lights ascending up concrete steel brick cliff faces grew gradually more obscured and smudged. There was the illusion of a ceiling or some solid end. Up there. In the interminable downpour.

    The Water laughs.