>Within its corridors and causeways, the gaping cityscape cradles living halls of moving, sleeping, thinking people.
Night on the earth brings bedazzled lights into the air (red, blue, yellow), and sections of the city settle and rest easy, keeping itself company.
This sea has many subtle stories—in one room within the museum district, a passing Asian honeymoon party, here to see the perfect place in all its beauty, sets down from a long day for sleep.
Illuminated portraits dangle on the wall and the embracing Asian couples lie on the floor looking up at them, whispering to each other sweet nothings (the special sweet nothings only Asians do say). Glowing neon lights encircle the images and flush flowing pink then blue yellow then green: the old faces flitter in oil, expressions forming to the colors, basking across the saturated canvass, unblinking, staring, smiling forever from the renaissance days. Painted so well, it’s as if they’re still living enough to stare straightly, as wisely as they were, out compassionately to the gathered romantic getaway Asian couple tourists.
Through the windows, there drifts in the gentle sound of the city humming, a toned-tuned whirr of precisely calculated mechanical production: the cars, the lights, the air conditioning units—all the city’s circulated machinery runs smoothly within society and hums together in community a synchronized rhythm of pleasing chords. The many engines sing harmony in progressions of C, F, C D, C, E, E for sounds of faraway echoes like a soft muted trombone, a vast cello sonata, an endless washing symphony. It sways over the Asian lovers, and they grip one another tighter, feeling its reverberations ripple deep within their bodies.
Soft foreign “I love you”s whisper into the newly bound ears, and sore bodies stretch together and lie on one another. Comfortable, dear, they wonder if such public places allow their intimacy, but the city seems not to mind, seems to urge them to calming caresses, and the soft and open air is sweet for breathing kisses close to skin. Long and easy, bodies grow undressed, and rolling happy along the floor, the men enter and the woman fill. Age-old masterpieces look on at so many ready consummations as mouths brush noses, tongues explore new homes, and the group grinds slowly to start, together, then apart, then together, then apart.
One by one they come, then they roll into a pile, shed from distinctions of who was who or whoever’s one, though still nervous as they suddenly feel so many slick skins of fellow souls. A many-toned faces-legs-arms bed collects on the ground and rolls over itself naked, exploring its many new sensitivities. What a beautiful day, they all say together, and some sit up for more sex, while others sleep, and the gentle gyrations continue long into the night. Men and women all finally settle into dead rest, and their bodies lay like a living death, and their minds wander into the darkest sleep, and their hearts pump eagerly for the new day of waking.
A breeze, light and fine, chills cold into the stark space, and the smell of so many musty bodies wafts up and down then out into the streets, where it mingles with the precious many scents of human inhabitation—a deeply scented floral perfume; a kissing couple; a bloody gash smelling iron and salt; a sharply fragrant family dinner; a cough.
The moon is clear and close, and its light makes out shadows and details along the skyline, and even beyond, within the mountains, and also above, drifting forever in the clouds. The wind takes up the air and sends it soaring out, over, around, and all over the earth. Into everything, the million-molleculed atmosphere expands and contracts its contents, and every tiny breath and body emission of scent or sound lifts up around and through to all time’s passages within the sky and the ground.
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