Love-scratches, drugged-out rants
and other deranged scribbles that
had been scraped into the sidewalks
next to apartment buildings, the so-
called poetry that drips from the bricks
of alleyways, these were all as ephemeral
as the missing or wanted or advertised
lesson sheafs stapled to telephone and
electric poles and to trees throughout
each neighborhood. These were city
segments once noted with amusement
and pride by the city’s inhabitants, as
well as the people who crowded into
these denizens’ personal living spaces
during each peak season. As the larger
buildings that once held these countless
citizens along with their friends or families
or newfound flings from faraway places
melted into liquid metal during this
great erasure, the rivers of lava that
formed momentarily held the spirits
of those who’d lived within. These
were quickly let go, disappeared into
the vapor with the loudest hisses and
moans ever to have been heard, would
they have been. No ears here, however.
The screams belonging to the beings that
had such instruments are long gone,
skin and flesh being the most ephemeral
of all of the ephemera. So, in a soulless
manner, this scalding swamp holds no
reticence with regard to their demise,
is as wild and full of freedom as
anything has ever been flying
hurly-burly into space, vaporizing
in all directions until all is nothing.
