Prague at dusk

The City laces its inhabitants in shades of grey. Oppressively close to the surface, some of us duck, others simply walk carefully, our shoulders stooped, trying to avoid the monochrome rainbow, somewhere over, at the end of the hesitant drizzle.

 

The City rains itself on us, impaled on one hundreds towers, on a thousand immolated golden domes. We pretend to not see as it bleeds into the river. We just cross each other in ornate street corners, ambushed from behind dilapidated structures.

 

We don't nod our heads politely anymore. We are not sure whether they will stay connected to their lolling bodies if we do.

 

It is at such times that I remember an especially sad song, interlaced with wailing.

 

Wall after wall, turret after turret, I re-visit her. It is there, in that city, which is not Muslim, nor Jewish, or Christian, not entirely modern, nor decidedly antique that I met her.

 

And the pain.

 

Passing Ships

 

We are ships that pass in pitch darkness, blowing horns of despair and need, trying to avoid the inevitable collision of intimacy, the lifeboats of cheating and emotional absenteeism at the ready.

 

There is no moon on our ocean, just the churning waves of loneliness, the froth of our relationship sprayed thin across our lives, as insubstantial as the dreamworld we call our mind.

 

Lone seagulls of pity oversee us, necklaced albatrosses of empathy and love, phosphorous fish gaze up, their mouths agape at our oddness.

 

At times, we shipwreck, outcast on our islands, and we wonder at the exoticism of our selves, the hopelessness of memory: such strange beasts we are, such miracles, once in our lifetimes, a roll of DNA, or an experiment gone awry.

 

We set sail into penumbral seas in a doomed quest for sun and flowers. And yet it is our forlornness that renders us so painfully beautiful to behold even in the absence of any light.

 

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