"Moribundance!"

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me."

For weeks I was talking about the end, always talking about the end. There was an inevitable end to something in my life, and nothing was really beginning. Now I have reached that ultimate end, and there is nothing here. I have reached the edge of the still and motionless horizon and I have stumbled upon another equally constant, equally colorless path. Hm, well that ain't what it was supposed to be. I was supposed to feel sorry, like I was dying and like I needed sympathy. I was to be sacrificed before a crowd. The crowd was to weep and sing my name in the streets. But now, the big little moons, spinning on their ends and melting like wax...they bring me to a milky-eyed complacency of sorts. I am happy with things, or...Luke Wilson is happy with things. I am content, but there is a black rainbow and bank of gray clouds rolling atop me, eclipsing Claire's good sunlight. There is an army of ghastly soldiers marching through my streets, shouting silence. My people's wooden windows are shut and their wooden doors locked. The water...oh, how it is black and below the swishing surface you are deaf and unheard by boats and swimmersby! You hear nothing...I promise, it isn't excitement. What does a man have to do for something sweet every now and then?

There is no defect anymore to exploit within myself. I was once a muttering, incoherent creature...I crawled around with my voice screeching and my eyes rolling around. I thought this might give people an idea. But now the moons and their little gravities and their little waxings and wanings have sanded me smooth, grinded me up into a fine powder that will be blown away with the slightest breeze, I assure you. Perhaps it's the coldness in my knuckles or the stillness in my pupils that frightens you. Heh.

These days I can only say the word "Monkey", and I always feel as if I have forgotten something. A little death, a small one, this is; I have reached the end point, and there is no limit to this limbo. Extravagance is gold and your chatter is silver. I exchange what I have and you give me a bank note. What am I to do with this? It is a peculiar thing that you do. You are a mole in my government bureau, a drop of paste or glue upon my flawless model. I work at you like a small bit of wood with a cutting tool; I believe I went too far. You are soft, too soft. Brittle, you break.

If this is clarity, maybe I have reached a plateau of creation. I am no longer the wild-eyed, studious prophet of manic depression and an acid tongue of fury. I cannot write scathing shots at you or him. I cannot enjoy or rise above the damp chambers of the oceanside caves. But then, what am I expecting from these chiral weeks? They are parallel, unchanging, and worn thin. My head has fallen to the pressure of the outside air. The balance is equal and there is no solution.

A lone boy once exclaimed, "Hey!" and approached the crowds of men and women, when all about them came a flood and washed them away.

There was a lock with no key in the dark, and then a bloody Summer of rose-red faces, a coming Fall flushed with golden things falling down when I wept in my bed, walking places and talking to talkers and swallowing little moons, the fallout of babes and the death of knights, the desperate tenacity of my descent, the end and the end and the end and the end until there is nothing more to see here, nothing left to lose. I'd rather be dying than dead.

GONE ARE THE DAYS.