I got caught in the financial factory and before I knew it my entire body was covered with small symbols and insignia, indicating varying denominations and levels of worth. Camelskins and lips and dangling appendages where other things used to be. Corpses on hooks in the classroom. Styles that come and go in the New York breeze. Shaved places lathered in foam and lotion. Sea foam and ocean. Slide valves where spit flows from subways. Apache people with patched jeans stitched together in a gigantic sail. Towards emblems of tiny houses melting in the desert. Mines where fire flows like blood through the vessels of the earth. Tiny clocks spinning in tune with pigeons and city birds. Droppings on the sidewalk. She slipped. Camera opera. Red badges of courage flapping on the clothesline between our buildings. Socks filled with promises and pinned to the line. Pass them back and forth between us like messages. Inside apartments, curtains pulled down. Light fixtures on the floor. Fans which spun out the window into infinity. Chopped limbs and things. Zebra skins wrapped in newspapers. Elements which make up elephants: eyes and ears and the trunks and tusks and husks. And water falling from space, seeding the barren earth. Lightning flashes from the furnace deep beneath our building. They say a man sleeps beside it, whispering softly. Armadas of merchandise rose up from the streets. Flocks of living shit flying past our windows. People concocting primitive airships with great big nets, flying around trying to capture it all. Alliances born and broken all in the same night. I’m escalating through the levels of your subterranean shopping mall.

Blow me off, blow me up. It’s all the same. Cranes erected while you were sleeping have built the beginnings of an entirely new city all around us. Holy places for love to dwell in iron towers, with doormen and apartments like strongboxes. Impregnable fortresses. In unblemished solitude. Slippery elevator floors and shafts leading down to nothing. Sloped piles of manure crafted to look like pyramids in the city square. Children playing on them. Pharoahs and slaves and treasures buried there. Imitations of emotions emanating up from the sidewalks. Vast city blocks reduced to ashen plains. I’ve carved my hieroglyphics across all your walls. Palimpsests of regret and gentle confusion.

The places where the snow fell and filmed itself falling and then organized small events to show everyone these movies of itself. None of us had seen the real thing of course. Vaporous faces. Hands of leather. Embers of men burned together. Men who’d done better than us. Who’d sailed ships a thousand times bigger than our puny island of rock and sewage and carnage. Pictures of murdered presidents hung in the courtyard. People stood around saluting or refuting them. I shook myself back to sleep.

Harmony rose over us from the bay. A great golden ball which climbed into the sky and became a twin to our own city sun. Years of dirt and disuse flitted off each of us and floated out to sea. Where the twins circled, the seagulls swarmed. Forming figure eights in the sky. Internal nuances of the assembled crowds below echoed this motion. Forgotten members of our great society rose up from the gutters and grassy patches around trees. Men and women with arms like apostrophes indicating ownership. Sloping down to the waterline. Sleeping in great heaps as the day wore on into night after night. Canals filled with refugees. Gates and arches piled high with silver and gold coins. We all finally have enough spending money. The times we forgot about each other come and go. Vigils held over great distances. The jails swelled with bodies until the whole complex burst into loaves of bread, which we lashed together into great rafts. Seagulls came down on us at once, but we pecked their eyes out, and pulled off their feet.

A cracked helmet. A memory turned renegade. A place in my heart unfinished and unfathomed. An ancestor called upon. A city that fell down around us. Symbols and insignias which floated up from the wreckage, uniting overhead into holograms, articulating God’s glory. Streets bent back on us like logic we can never escape. A public timepiece in the city square. My eyes are fire. My fears are candles. I await your response.