from Avenue

As if one thing were certain: Brick permission. Tender concrete. Laminated rose. Wood and tin weave. Crossed with a temperate street all but collected by a burst of lead acid and steel through the picket lines. Wind of winds drifting through gauze of shiplap; arches gone the way of cavalry—where no shadow is cast like that of white paint in need of distant suns’ stellar grief. Pax suburbiana. Straw houses in the promised land. Warring meridians of town halls and halls of mirrors. The iron roofs form on the corrugated slopes like dew; the dew on the iron roofs growing like grass. Qualities of light define the transit from dive bar to church yard; bookstore to community garden—cold in my nose like smoke summiting the overpass. The streetfront moonlights as the very possibility of home lost in the uncanny valley.





                                                               See yourself in a pool
                                                            of moonlit carpet and
                                                            feel helpless to the
                                                            point of mythological.





For doors can only truly be approached after dark. Each lit up window a piano burning in effigy; the concealed blade of every glass pane yawning without a trace. Shadows cast the lawn ornaments and hedgemazes like mineshafts—dancing in the street without so much as a canary in earshot. Shipwrecks of trees; a multicoloured object possessed of its innate weathering: all anatomy lessons that cannot help but fail their darkness or light. All ages golden and dark. Nothing keeps you awake like the dust settling on your body in the night. Moths themselves become flames in the murk woods of mown grass.





                                                               Decorate only with
                                                            flowers stolen from
                                                            wealthy front yards.





At the risk of reality: the plaster sky is crashing down. Roads delirious with their own markings and the event horizon of train tracks running out of sight splits earth with the silence of vision. The dreams of private cathedrals arrive at crossroads and revolving doors with the tea leaves of currency; domestic Platonic solids of burning trees and watering plants. Distance has become a stranger leaving the house like shedding an exoskeleton taking on space itself as a prosthetic. Pierced by the needlework of chimneys: a papier-mâché sense of scale for all the routes walked home alone after funerals—when there were other options—and shops where nothing lasts more than a few months. Denizen fatale. O nuclear option O mushrooming city. March at waking hours for all roads are war roads.





                                                               A spiritual quest is so
                                                            cliché it has become
                                                            impossible not to do it.