To resist is to conquer.
Watching humanity move with the measured flow of blood.
Shadows loom indistinct and distorted.
Monkeyposters on the wall, pasted at night, mean revolution has been slinking among the pragmatically-content-but-uncomfortably hunched people who pass this station. The trains still run but no one rides them. There are no passengers; they do not stop; they come back with different numbers. This station has become an installation, where the lost sit on damp benches—no longer waiting for transport, but with no place else to go. This town has forgotten itself and become despondent along the roadside, thumb-to-the-sky in shivering anticipation of perhaps a warm, smokey cab to carry it into the daylight, to free it from pairs of headlights coming down out of the fog, down from the Mountain, the endless source of headlights, fog, and misery.
The war may be over. This only means a life brimming with punctuation will be replaced with a soggy blank page. What more can be written after so many pages of waste?
The monkeys found an old building, off Main Street, all dilapidation and disrepair. They leave an open bag of flour lying around and the moisture of the air turns it to paste. They started a hushed-tones reading group, Dead Poets Society style, gather-round-the-campfire let me hear your rain-soaked soul. They got poems about boxcar-endlessness, rhymes with water and drizzle, manifestations of cracked pavement and oilslicks, grass between the railroad ties, ducking in pairs in the night for kicks, and some don't come back, lost in the mists of the edge of civilization, and some come back with the gravel-trapped look in everybody's eyes but they've got stones in their eyes, I mean genuine boulders. It's not all gravity off Main Street, though, because what they really love is the dawn. They have prophecies about retaking the town, Old Country Fair Style, with pie and balloons and laughter and sun. They're working on bridges across the islands, getting their drifting worlds back together, in anticipation of punishing the darkness for how it has separated them.
Waiting for the Flow.
The link-boys wait and warm their hands.