CHELM

The map of the City changes each night, but the main features of its plan, its intent, are always there. My clouds of sparrows operate as distributed camera networks-- simple screeching retinal dirtstorms sampling the topography of surface streets and freeways, skyways, and bridges. Bridges to somewhere I'd still be familiarly unwelcome. My little bushgangs of birds tower up and hunch above the traffic cameras, bending double like wretching Christ, scrambling to pull the plug on his slated reboot, but rooted, frozen in dipshit shock at his own handiwork. Unable to unsee the orthography of the streets as they route themselves in blasphemies and obscene curlicues, glinting in the fool's gold sun.

I watch the spans of the toll bridges spread away in their arcs, delimiting the river in chopped up parts-- a great serpent strangled by stone block thighs. The legs of the freeway are always spread wide, in pretensioned labor-- tapeworm masses of interchanges stretching open like lips, like birthing mouths-- there are the crowning heads of trash monoliths, about to mewl, about to suckle, about to factor themselves into our calculus. Sparrow Christ pulls out his beard one whisker, one infected feather at a time and drops them behind, a trail for his movements, his housecalls; roving, trying to catch each birthed bundle like the Great Physician should, but he has no hands because he is made of stupid birds. I record everything he shows me in my files; wait for my next chance to sleep.

I kill the connection. I stretch back far in my broken chair, pretending to relax for no one in particular. I don't need to look anymore. The topology is always the same, even if the map changes. The features of the City are merely externalizations of the scriptures writing themselves inside us-- merely an expression of something unsayable, like some greying spectrum of decayed qualia; like some metastatic, dragonesque heart. I try to imagine what passes for love here-- some specialized form of protracted, asymmetrical combat. A low-intensity proxy war. Bleak beacons beating out to each other and bludgeoning each other numb with encrypted pulses, as vehement as they are uncrackable; message content jellied to noise-- only metadata; frequency, number of hops, time-to-death, packet size, nodal origin, transmission protocol, hardware signatures, nude microwaves-- none of the poetry everyone supposes is inside. No actual communion. Everyone dragging their heavy weapons through spiritual mud, cutting permanent trenches in it, from the flat, sprawled shitshow of the pan-faced outskirts, all the way in through the meat, through the cytoskeleton of the megapolis, to its grand nucleus-- the double horns of the twin towers, sucking off the light in mute, negative flashes, wreathed in flexing tendrils of champagne mustard vesicant. A beating heart in sustained collapse-- or maybe there is final destruction somewhere. Somewhere even here perhaps the infinite dwells-- in some sub-basement between rental trucks stuffed with fertilizer explosives, there is a singularity, couched in mountain ranges of denial and black-body gloom, slowly sipping all this away, as we just can't help but mattress-surf its slowly shrinking horizon.