_____________________________________bright - by adire___

Sometimes I wonder why I return to this city.

Fond memories blind me when I am away, but reality always finds me again, and I ache to think that I called this place home. Everything is bright here--bigger and brighter, gaudy faces leering at me in bacchanalian temptation, importuning me to drink this, drive that, buy these. City of lights, smiles, and color-painted masks, so pretty, all to hide the decay underneath.

This is a dying city, rampant gardens flowing over rotting wood, and they call its ancient age "charm". They walk the streets, bright and noisy and boisterous, and pretend that there is something to live for, that the streets beneath their feet are not the paths of graveyards, that the towering French-revival buildings are not engraved stones bearing the inscriptions of their deaths, looming with silent-sentinel angels in cold, unfeeling white. Happy....so happy they pretend to be, their loud voices and dialects like spices and gold, their laughter of desperation that barely covers the constant fear underneath. We are children of the same city, they and I, but we are not alike.

Sometimes I wonder how I could be born of this place, how it could have made me from its glittered fabric, sewn my form and color from its debauchery and splendor. I, the quiet child of still nights and death-silence, of shy eyes and pain-promise.....how did I bleed from the shadows of golden city lights, fall into the cracks of ancient sidewalks to creep through the soil beneath unwary feet? Chaff upon the wind, tossed from the grain-baskets of the south, these golden people of liquor and laughter and disease-dark blood falling back into the rush-tight weave while I float upon the breeze, borne to the ground of rot, degraded into the loam of earth.

The city sits upon the green darkness of death....and below it all, mother-dark entropy waits, eternal and slow.

Child of the swamp, born of the flesh and blood of this place, with my eyes the murky green of climbing moss, skin the maggotous white of a bloodless corpse, hair the color of night, the color of sin, the color of the cold, cold depths where the sucking mire awaits to draw one into the thick muddy eternity of its embrace. My lips await, black as water so deep that the sun might never touch it, wait to kiss the breath from struggling lungs, the blood from pumping veins, the life from sweet, sweet bodies of thrashing movement.

I am the swamp, the dark, decaying swamp lying beneath the bright dustiness of this city, slowly swallowing it within my white and soundless embrace. I have been here before the birth of mortality, and will be here at its end, to consume the city in my cold, cold womb.

Yes, it hurts to see this city, hurts to come home, to scratch sharp nails against its polished lacquer and see the decaying face of my mother peering from beneath. But the pain can only last for so long....and one day soon, I will find my true rest from this ceaseless wandering--mother and child reunited, the barriers of civilization and human flesh stripped away.

Together we will swallow the city......and then I will be home.

Site design and graphics copyright A. Sanders 2003. All content copyright the respective artists and authors and is used, in most cases, with permission and may not be reused or distributed(beyond reason, no one says you can't tell your friend "Hey, look at this cool picture I saw!") without said permission. Any content in violation of copyright will be removed upon request. Phew. Okay. Done with the legal jargon. At least it's not as bad as the actual copyright page.