Love is the thing with shadows. Cover your eyes, little soul, there is crookedness afoot. Find your heart where you leave it. In a shell, in a letterbox, at the old witch gate. When you're hungry, paint your mouth with ashes. Gargoyles unfold triptych when you forget to give them a name. Watch the clock for your mother's blessing. Count yourself lucky you've only one soul to spare. Not much time to place your bets now, the bridges are closing. My arms falter, carrying old men on my back. In the broken mirror inside my crooked pocket, I am no mother of nations. I ditch my father by the burning roadside, and scarper.
But this city keeps its own furrowed brows, smites me against the grate. When you're hungry, I think you should eat. Bare my breasts to slither-split tongue. You are here. In the nightmares remembering you. You are penitent. You, old glass dome. If you are the altar of my own worst fears, polish you. I'm running out of words. To describe. To keep. I know you how insomniacs know darkness. Believe in you the way streetlamps believe in dawn.
Old towns. Ghost towns. Pointing a camera at things makes my fingers less cold around what I can't have. I'm drawn to the interplay between light and darkness, though didn't realize it for a long time that I could be both. That I could balance one foot inside the cone of wonders, while the other tiptoes amid the shadows, still.
Not all cities are tragic, though I don't know of any tragic cities that are not beautiful. There's pain seeping in between these cobbles, in places where women tore their heels, and men stitched mouths with dirt. There's a song in how the lights fall, and the marble looking down on you as though you belonged to the past already.
There's tragedy, which means inspiration, also. I thought if I let go of tragedy, then a hammer would fall on me, but then uncrusted my eyes, and found there's such an abundance of it in the dust-pits between bricks, the mortar that cobbles together human life. How could I ever run out of ideas, in a world made of such wondrous, superb sorrow?
