Ten Sixty Six

The land’s all gone, the bears are out, and a campfire builds itself. This land. Stragglers gather and reminisce about raisins and avocados. Some of our kind went down to Geneva but were never heard from again. Bless all of you, says the man on the hill, under an ominous sky that looks like a victim. You will be saved, he says. You will love each other. 

Those in the caravan to Helsinki laugh quietly and chew on their nails to the rhythm of the wheels on a belligerent road.

“Was that Jesus?” someone asks in Swedish. 

A quiet voice answers in English. “Makes sense Jesus would be a hitchhiker.” 

“I got a whole story about that.” No one recalls who said that or in what language they said it (but I know, and they weren’t from Scandinavia).

How is it no one warned us, no one told us a guitar is not a penis but a womb? How born are we if we yet don’t know what bore us? How dark are our dreams, how cherished, and how black is our metal?

That honeywoman struts her asymmetric gait, and we all wait, in case her flavour’s bleeding over the tops of everyone’s shoes. Normandy, you think. Alright. These pebble beaches under weighty skies, stale remnants of baguettes, jettisoned recyclables, and cooled moist condoms pushed forgotten into clefts. From here a fleet launched once and changed the world. Tapestries and arrows; the uneasy gyre of tongues. A millennium since, I still can’t let that Gallic swagger eclipse my Saxon stance. I can’t tell the stubble in the field from the stubble you sometimes grow in the sultry valley of your love. You are widespread. And you know, while your grace may be saintlike, the spark of your ardor remains ghostlike. 

“Quick! There’s no line for the Ferris wheel.” 

Our time is now, it’s only now. Soon these frames will sway, broken and rusted, like limbs once bled by ancient butchers. The boardwalk will splinter and rot, foamy spumes reclaiming each kindled plank. A candy apple stick sucked dry and thrust in the eye of a life-size molded Elvis.

The last gull wheeling on a gust, sent by a waning sky over a lifeless swell.

“You totally should.”

“What if I half did instead?”

“Yeah, one of these days you might even manage funny.”

“Ha ha!”

The kindest we can ever do is tell someone we see their pain. Represent. I’ve never seen anyone not break down when someone speaks their suffering aloud. Tells them they are heard. 

Here, though, the last things to leave are deaf. Silent. Empty of applause. No one to remember or proclaim, the unheard flap and ache of a ragged banner the brief and only actual accolade.