from dream to soul
Once upon a time they dreamed a city
Threw a wall around it, stuck a tower in the middle, filled it full of all the things they loved and feared and ran to and ran from and all the strangers whose lingering eyes they met and held on subways in libraries on rooftops at shows. And the city lived, grew until it held the hearts of its builders and changed from dream to soul. Somehow, walking those streets, they recalled the memories of every thing they’d lost in every thing they found, traced the lineaments of their lives on stone and in water, heard their stories sung by artificial birds caged in dim alleys as they stumbled past, drunk on a wine pressed by amnesiacs.
Pilgrims came by desert and sea to pass through open gates, to wander in streets that never led to the same place twice. Some settled and joined the city’s artificers and cut and bruised and burned their hands on complicated machines with equally complicated purposes, some moved to a street of weavers where they fabricated verdant sheets woven from their sleeping visions of the forests of their homes. Some became the beggars on the corners playing music with the bones of the city’s dead, melodies that haunted the miserly, that brought luck and light to the generous.
Some left– those who came looking for a city that was less than a collective wish, those who came expecting the familiar, the details that comprise the structure of home. They left the strangers and the stranger labors, the wild thumping of the city’s heart that wove its way through every line of music, the slinking pad of dog-sized cats, the bookstalls crammed solely with texts of an interrogative nature. They turned their feet outside the gates to retrace the same weary road and after a shorter journey than they expected, found themselves surrounded by their own lives again and filled with a regret that burrowed like a live stone in their chests and they lived ever after with the taste of ash in their mouths and their children, growing older, inherited faded memories of a city that drew them, over mountains and seas, through deserts and valleys, to itself like some impossible and foreign star.
it reaches down into the deepest part of his person
http://www.robertmontgomery.org/robertmontgomery.org/11.html
overheard in the city
“Get the fuck out of here! Get THE FUCK out of here! Dallas killed Kennedy! Get the fuck out of here! We’re escaping this shit!”
“My friends all think I’m on suicide watch but really I just go downstairs and throw my phone at the dumpster.”
“we the unwilling”
“hindu ghouls”
“it’s over”
“I went to my friend’s house and he had this gigantic flat screen tv and this stereo system and all this STUFF, you know? And I was thinking about how much stuff we own and how it traps us in these lives that are built around the accumulation of all this stuff and I thought about what it would be like to Throw It Away. To just live simply and it all just seems so…freeing. All these things we don’t need that we feel we have to live with to be happy.”
“This bookstore is like a sanctuary, something to do in a town full of nothing to do. This is a safe place. Sometimes I think of how I left this town and how I came back and I wonder if I shouldn’t have left. But I’m back.”
“Do you have money to live? Do you have a place to stay right now?”
“I’m so glad I saw you. I knew that you were the only one who’d really understand what I’m saying.”
“I know. I love you.”
lightstopshere 