A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

mercury.

      Venus raging in the east.

      2

      Couldn’t hold on the substance escaped you a scum on your hands after popping soap bubbles airy light multicolored dancing nothing left after but echoes of ridicule and rebuke the light quivered with shame all that poetry doubtlessly pretty wisdom questionably profound what’s it worth when you find yourself moneyless on the threshold of your life beaten humiliated abandoned by family lover friends but did you have any family lover friends to do the abandoning your employer sought means to replace you with something cheaper your landlord looked for legal means to evict you for someone richer you were a walking wound a mass of blisters boils in continuous abscess an emotional hemophiliac your presence on the street mortified you saw yourself in rags and filth stinking up the air a blot on the street leaving a trail of slime wherever you went carrying pestilence the eyes of suspicion examined his movements picked him up with vague curiosity put him down with quick distaste filed him in the drawer of incorrigibles smirked with satisfaction over his ineluctable failure here was little promise of anything worthwhile barely maintenance of a roof over his head food in his belly let’s glory in his shame pride ourselves on his downfall against his darkness our light shines all the more brightly against such ugliness what radiance is ours our beauty shows all the more astonishingly he is the foil that brightens us the dazzling sun that makes the moon glow in the night dazzling sun they’re mocking you pitiless angry envious behind its elegant colonial and Beaux Arts facades a city that never left the depression a reporter once said it wasn’t called the city of brotherly love for nothing how does your wisdom answer that at the moment the pain slips into you like a razor beneath your fingernails where has it gone disappearing in a scream of rage.

      The abrupt change from shelter to abandonment in the nightmare filth and blur kicked from the portals of the sky sudden horror out of the green paradise smelling of jasmine and cut grass out of the weedy shade the glistening dew out of childhood heaven into the psychotic shriek stench of garbage the homeless man on the sidewalk screaming at a strip of sky between office towers. Broken in two their life a snap of green wood and asphyxiating fire. Sudden pinching and shrinking darkening and lowering as if draining a country lake into a sewer sudden collapse from the house on the hill to the tight apartment in the city the water stank of chorine lukewarm like an unwanted kiss you barely saw the sun marking time above skyscrapers. Giant tombs of human hope. Loss of promise in the labyrinth. Concrete concrete. Metal glass. Streets straight and narrow as graves. A prison three million strong stretching as long as the horizon. The nights ringing with sirens and sleepless moans of traffic a patient in pain with cries. A pustule a fist a vast cesspool stinking with the. An ineradicable scar of the humiliation of. Dark and abrupt as the head of an ax as it fell between your possibilities your impossibilities your impotence on each face reflected the image of what might be and what must and shall. Absolute brutality of the real.

      Human. Reduced precipitate distilled to. The least. The subtending bond that. Skin. Gristle. Need.

      Laughter stuttering in the kitchen.

      Voided what promise had made perennial confusion lambent change a handful of loose coins on the dresser keys severed locks.

      Tirra-lirra-la.

      The sounds of girls playing hopscotch drifting up from the alley.

      A view of ginkgos.

      Paste of gray in the sky.

      Fetid odor of whiskey mash floating from the river an alkaline phlegm of rain.

      Hopelessness you fled into the silence of music forest of books white paper.

      The solitary one quiet one child collapsed inside his skin he would have to learn how to lock his eyes.

      There was no she there only hardness meeting sparks splay in the air flint against glass sharp meeting sharp in a paralysis of furies. Strenuous and athletic hopelessness spitting delusions of. Encounter of cacophonies self-imposed gymnasts of. Exultant in their capacity for cynicism and survival. Laughter of unjoy. Exalted demonic desperate. Crossing every promise with a vindictive defeat sucking each other into a contest of. Obloquy. Monologs carried on inexhaustibly panted gasped unending hoarse in relentless refusal to stop gripping the mind in a vise squeezing into submission the silence of the pavements black pointlessness of an infinite grid of streets. Nothing returning to them everything moving in that chaos nothing changing as the prisoners threw themselves periodically against the walls of their cell but there was no way out for there was no way in no gates windows ingress egress the wall closed over their heads like a dome someone had taken pains to lock closed the sky. Panic. Horror. Rage. Despair. Resignation. Resentment. Until no longer able to take it they once again began to wring the necks of their neighbors. In the latest glaring of hope.

      Who. Why the octopus of maggots.

      My folly for was I not human why deny revile or try to escape the human was shoved down your throat.

      Grab what is offered.

      In random possession.

      Filth depravity viciousness there was nothing the child could see especially beautiful about. The homeless woman shrieking curses in the afternoon. A dampness of rot hung from the ceilings. A cat hissed in one corner a dog growled in another. Each departed for a room no longer his own. They met in mutual loathing marked by periodic fits of delusion. Of liberation. The light from the lamp on the table was slowly erased. The towers beyond the window hung rows of yellow lights oblongs of a suspect luminosity that deflected imagining. Imagine the squalor behind the pane. Imagine the curl of stained sheets the smell of urine and vomit. The eyes of stupor. Or worse the prim gentility spiteful defensiveness of a dead-end career shredded family collapsed life attended to in a narrow grave furnished from thirty years ago.

      Evade.

      Escape.

      Run.

      Into self-imposed silence.

      Bits of the past behind that past arranged on a blue tablecloth embroidered in white. Fragments large and small slivers and shards the shape of Mexico or France others like little men in oversized suits others the profiles of half-forgotten women. A bird in flight or balanced on a wire singing furiously. A spider suspended in a bathroom doorway. (No cockroach nocturnal innovation among vermin yet ancient as the horseshoe crab skittering behind the sugar jar. Yet. Here.) No. The shape of the light in a shaft of dust. There. A hand sweeps a towel hanging on a clothesline out of range of your sight. The sour taste of unripe grapes an almost black blue despite the fuzz of fungus on the skins. Theft. The pleasure of. Mr. Carter’s grapes you must not steal them. Must you.

      There was that small corner in the backyard where you always felt hidden though you weren’t. As though there visibility had been secrecy. A kind of safety. Or a little throne of stones. Ochre. Where on boring afternoons you could be more tolerably bored. Smearing your hands on your pants. Negligently exposing the stain of your crime.

      At times the pieces are swept from the table with cavalier violence and you must build fragments from the air as if nothing had ever been.

      A pattern of white flowers on slate blue.

      Or rather a list of miscarryings. The melancholy woman with the long leash of dogs. Gone. The spokesman of anarchy on the indifferent corner. Now. A young girl in a tartan jumper and white socks sears the air with mockery. A grocer stares at the vacancy of your request. In a pharmacy a fat black girl full of anger and laughter. A slinking middle-aged queer with furtive and defiant eyes. The defensive Italian bellows silently at traffic. The Irish teenager eyes the sidewalks with predatory anguish. Anxieties of pigeons locked in a recursive loop they flock pointlessly in the lengthening autumn their genes summoning them to a migration they can neither pursue nor escape.

      The light goes on. It could fill volumes of brick asphalt and antique glass could bulge from the libraries of tar warped window jambs creosote roofs gray raining sky. A book ducked in a puddle bloating obscenely its pages open like a whore from her inner elbow a needle slips into the gutter near