I tell myself that I think I will not speak. The world is moving thousands of miles an hour, faster than the light penetrates my eyes. I am tired. The wind whips around me as a tormented soul, trapped by gravity and the floating debris of human intervention. Around me, this quiet Sunday morning, the tiny Filipino women scurry by, in tight bright skirts and blouses, dodging the dust and motes of time that attempt to hold them back. Church is calling them, as the flame brightly lights their way home. I turn back to my journey of cement and trapped courage. The words fail and fall, as memories that never desire to be linked together. I forget, at times, who I am. What I am. Where I am. What is to become of me. A life of simple taste is difficult to embody.

Regardless of the wind, the sun is bright. Fiery temptation is burnt waxy wings. Icy temptation is the desire to fall into an embrace of dark. Neither has much appeal, though the heart will seek a cold embrace one day. Breath traverses centuries. What was once used by some has come to me, to be reused again. What will I do with it? Do we share the breath of our ancestors? Perhaps of ourselves? I want to believe. A very Duchovnian logic, I know.

Ancient fingers type at keyboards of sound and light. Air is fulled with light dots of crystal blue and purple light. It’s not my vision that is marred – it is the tease of promise of lies of taste of something… tomorrow. I see the gaps between the ages filling with dusty sand and firmer rocks. Granite, to pour itself into the hollows of time. I see the old men with slightly greasy gray hair tucked under their pork-pie hats and wonder, so insistently silent, is that the best there is? Is this -all- there is? Coffee bean roasting beside the fetid water of last night’s garbage, the city brings the darkness into the open, kicking and screaming. It houses Death, as a hipster with a skateboard at the bottom of an asphalt hill. It houses Fate, slipping into dingy corners with an inimical glance. Oh, but she has no alliance, you say? I disagree, for those who decide that Freewill exists, she laughs. Variant and true, she is fickle and at home in the City.

Her neighborhood is the terrain of human strength; a will steeped in Hope and planted in Beauty. How speechless must I be before I can come to terms with my voice? That voice, so quiet in the hollow of my heart, aching to be dancing on the beams of vowels and consonants. A self denying. Not conscious. Sleeping. Shhh. Please wake her. She is waiting to Live.

–TDD