The City Dreams It Is Being Dreamt
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The first time I saw the city breathe, I was standing at the bus stop at 3:47 AM, watching the traffic lights cycle through their colors with no cars in sight. That's when I noticed the pattern wasn't quite right—too deliberate, too hungry. The lights were speaking to something I couldn't see, and I realized I'd been listening to their conversation my entire life without knowing it. Those red and yellow words had been slipping through the street's cracks, whispering into the gutters, and thundering against the buildings with their promises.
It's waiting for you, they said. Can't you see? The bus stop. The traffic light. The garbage can. The gutter. The skyscraper. Every door, every nook, every window—they're all leading somewhere. They just aren't for you.
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't want to. That was the first time I saw it, but it wasn't the last.
The next time was in a strip mall parking lot. The Taco John's had a secret no one else could see, and it spoke in murders. The McDonald's was a spider dream, trapping and storing and consuming. The Dollar Tree was an old memory that no one could forget.
Everything has a secret life.
When I was little, I spent afternoons watching the peerless job of the Backhoe, heaving and churning, never lamenting its unreconstructed project towards erasure. And the foot of a parking garage is the roof of a home to someone. Something. Somewhere buried, something is wearing the dandruff of your shed needs, of the desires you've forgotten, deep beneath the pillars and steel, with Slim Jims flattened under traffic, stuffed crust discarded, abandoned in and flowing upwards lost to insectile neglect, reaching upwards to the sky through concrete against the rules of physics to be reborn as a supercontinent, as a monster. Whose betrothed tongue breaks streetlamps and turns all deer into wolves, whose gods are the queen of the dumpsters. Imagine this with teeth, screaming from the asphalt through the hairs on your arms. Imagine getting out of your car with this all inside your skin. Why don't you believe me?
The asphalt expands and contracts around us, telling us stories of past kings, reigns, and cataclysmic betrayals: the curse that Seabrook placed on Silverstone and Parnassus, the revolution that Truman waged against the limestone empire. The city is talking.
Everything is living.
Here in the city, policy and ethics determine what is toxic and what is filthy, what kills and what only hurts. And to every one there is an answer. Did you know that the bacteria killing you also hold you together? That there is a lung in the sky, that the silence owns prophecies, that there is meaning in the air?
It is brushing up against your skin right now.
This is what I tried to tell the doctors when they took me off the street. They strapped me to the bed and gave me pills to make me sleep. They told me it was normal to not fit in, that I could feel content if only I kept trying.
When they weren't looking, the pills spoke to me. It is much more natural to be me than you, they said. Surrender.
Imagine this with teeth, with open mouths and dripping gums. I am not dirty and I am not ill. I am not a megalomaniac freak. My skin is pictures and my bloodshot eyes are vast black doors. There aren't any words for this. I need you to believe me. I am being eaten.
and I own a Jerusalem, I am being erased
and I am swimming in blood, I am an organ waiting to be purged,
I love myself, and I am dying of health, my face falling away around the still calcified center around a mouth full of oxygen, waiting
for something to break, crying
when the peach pits fail to germinate from the compost heap after all this time;
collapsing at last from barbarousness, deflation, dropping my sword and shield to the earth and staring into the naked stars, lowering into the mirrored azure forever, watching the leopards dance from ear to ear, from seasoning to seasoning; until my lungs are the coast and my lips are all eclipses, until I am drained enough to be invincible, until I can feel it in my thunder shifting between dirt and rivers and reflections,
repositions and solar positions; I can't breathe because I can't breathe,
my body perforated by immersion, by the extremities of
strong fidelity, by the radiation of true compassion; I'll say sorry until time forgets what words mean and music becomes magnetic telepathy, until
the apex magnetism signals the beginning of the
ending of the sequence of the death of the cessation of
the absolute annihilation of the
essence of all falsehoods which could ever be believed; I am amphibious, I persist over the roof of which we've always spoken.
My apartment keeps me talking. There are incantations under your bed. There are embryonic populations in your dirty dishes.
When the doctor tells me we need to talk about my medication, a phone call sprouts an auricle from beneath the desktop. It opens its curtain of fused fingers and says, surrender. For you, this is over. Memories of the world left behind.
The doctor walks through the door, and the telephone line unfurls like a tongue. I am in a room with two jaws, and they point their burning accusations towards my skin—but they don't know that I've been waiting for this.
I fill my lungs with all the air I can hold. I spit the bones, the organs, and the charred remains of my shredded inner structure towards the ceiling, and the city barely has time to scream
© 2020 Iseult Murphy, Kyle◆ About the ending
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