"Iglesia Adventista" on Maple and 16th, historic district runs three blocks to the North from here. docked tugboat, insects flying in reflectant annoyance, seaweed brushes the bottoms in ethereal nonchalance. wire mesh grating across the back of the boat bends gently with footsteps. echoes circle casually between the empty barge and condemned cement factory.
Stillness reasserts itself with firetruck sirens and the hollering of laboring migrants in the same way that sobriety reasserts itself with drunkenness and wild lapses into derangement. tiny waves lap against the steel-bottomed boat. the downtown clocktower peals off four a.m. and with each resounding chime the evenings run reluctantly together; highlights kept over, conversations, triumphs, train-whistles and townies swirl counterclockwise and with no proper regard to time into a swiftly fading memory of one grand evening in silent downtown. tripping sober, scott-sally, biking-walking, talking-listening, creating-destroying, steel-toed tapping across cobblestone, central avenue and centennial park. a feeling reminiscent of nostalgia shudders through a cool breeze and the sprinklers whisper into the graveyard. cicada and cricket buzz-hum a smooth trail opens up into the football stadium, streetlights turn twinkled-sympathetic and the stars begin another fatalistic tracing of constellations.
The dew numbs my toes and soaks into my pantlegs. a shiver from the night before runs through my shoulders and into my fingers, picking restlessly at the morning air. time splinters and I get that feeling of ecstatic sadness, an intrinsic empathy for everyone around me and a sudden understanding as to precisely what went wrong. the most beautiful part is the complete inability to act on anything, a morphine-coloured daydream of myself melting through the carpeted floor - and it's not my fault. there's nothing i could have done. I lay there in an observer's trance, music fading in and out by scene, actors queuing up, prop-hands invisible floating on dry ice. curtains rise and the tragedy is played out for the thousandth time, audience never-ending, ending never arriving.
Last thing - darkened stairs turning halfway up, a spare key savior opens into a stuffy apartment. the television dimly lights up a photograph of harvard square with dr. timothy leary looking on, shaking his head in befuddled psychological amusement:
"I did my best, boys."