All food has turned to inarticulate balls of hair. Grade school craft projects have assumed souls, their dignity damaged with pencil-lashings. Slashes rip leftover radios still chirping nightly news summaries from 1922. Craven fantasies of hedonists lie vanquished, each dream suffocated under its own flaccidity, clustered like punchlines declared righteous by the solitary comedian but dismissed as vacant backwash by her peers.
A lonely tube of shoes and socks rivals for my attention but I am drawn to a crowd of humble geese, their towering and rigid frightfulness sated by the catastrophe surrounding us. Their stern posture of marmish dignity has given way to greyed passions and humorless dust in their lungs. All creatures so remarkably similar but these creatively-appointed birds are unique among the survivors, maintaining their reputation of authority while visibly defeated. I step heavily through their fields, honest but chagrined at what past triumphs have come to.
All motorized vehicles upon which society relied are gone. No one can draw a circle, no one can turn a wheel. The bus and taxi drivers of yore now operate the heavy machinery of thought. They manage obligatory rituals of memory, their urgency falling hardest on they who felt they knew and understood basic accommodations of human races. They anthropomorphize vanquished towers and shattered religions, filling dead air with substances of life.
Oil tycoons are gone. Natural resources are unknown. We survive drinking vaccines and formerly poisonous stinkroot plundered from enormous birdcage facilities that swallowed thousands of hospitals during the Bicholim Conflict. Microphones and loudspeakers from the sky blast savage noise, colossal rapture of radio sounds overlapping like alcoholics addicted to mind control, northern lights replaced by northern noise of a decimated heavenly audio system none on earth could have fathomed had we not seen it ourselves, crashing through thousands of firmaments.
Towering but unsteady the crutches that hold God’s legs above the ground stampede like redwoods from the sky, punishing the groaning earth that He so sullenly surveys. How did crowds of wandering blow so hard and far apart? How do incredible creations, monumental moods, and façades of fathomless extremes resign themselves to such violent deaths?
