Ipsilon

Her words are too cold to comprehend. She smells of cigarettes and winter. Eyes like headlights watch your shape in dark hallways, guttering.

The spring thaw will not last. Winter will return.

The world is coming for your throat.

A hiss by your window. Restless cars drift like tides of foaming carbon dioxide, crashing headfirst into a desolate seaside town. Somewhere at the end of time, a lorry growls thunder. Sirens and red blue lights glinting in the dark like a lullaby heart rate of waves pulsating, pacing from left to right across the ceiling. 

Come morning, she is out on the streets without you. Walnut trees loom over the patchwork of bricks: grey and red. 

Westward - the cross on the hill is mute with its rustic days yonder. When the sun sets, they'll all be bursting into flames.

I want to feel like blurred sodium lights and raindrops on car windows. Like streaks of milk upon freshly brewed coffee, like pine cones dancing on the tips of green needles.

Soldiers in the night bolt awake at the sound of drums and rumbling thunder.

A black rain falls on the city and pours deep into the pedestrian underpasses, cold and dripping. Tram windows become opaque. Waves hit the concrete breakers. The crowds huddle at the railway station later than usual. Traffic lights sprawl across the drenched tar and gasoline puddles shimmering. There, among the blocks, is your home. 

Stay. Have a drink. Forever. Or is there somewhere to be? Who knows. This city is all that there is, but it's still something. Soviet blocks and all. Perhaps when the sun breaks, we’ll all be blinded and falling through the rips torn in the fabric of the world. Sliding down shafts of light. Vanishing.

And if a green light were to strike in the midst of all this shell-shock rhythm, it would shatter me like stained glass into pieces of scattered footsteps across the dance floor. 

And if a white light were to shine upon me, it would send me spinning into the wispy, mistful embrace of non-consciousness with nothing but the aftertaste of bitter abandonment.

And if a red light were to skin me, it would spill my insides on my outsides for all the world to see.

Strands of golden hair graze the scales of your hands with contour. A sulphur-toothed smile flashes into your eyes like fetid numbness as locomotive shafts laugh smoke through your gills. Eyes so wide that soul is leaking out in all its chemical capacity. Corrosive. Shameful.

Beyond yourself, the night, the coffee shop, the street. A girl at the terrace lights what must be her fifth cigarette. 

Meanwhile, the city shivers with its newfound lights. People go home, run away from home, they sleep, they drink. Silhouettes as far as the eye can see. Looking up, the air grows more somnolent. Lampposts lose themselves into the sepia toned sky. If someone were to push them over, then the heavens would stumble.

Traces of tobacco on your fingers. Lightheaded. Tongue on the inside of your cheek. Wine in your blood. More wine than you know what to do with.

Snow froths into the cracks of weathered bricks like cream. Some drifts gather up against the concrete barriers. The pavement glistens with a damp, metallic sheen. Somewhere in the city centre, a fortune teller approaches an unassuming young lady with blonde (in fact, almost pale) hair at the terrace of a coffee shop.

The cold dissipates into the vast anonymity of snowfall, embracing your parietal lobe with the declivitous minus of winter. Come, now. Cast my husk in granulated sugar and what have you. Scatter me all over what grey skies and

(utter whiteness silence, almost intangible mystery on the cusp of consciousness)

gently descend.

It's cold outside. Be sure to grab a coat, valentino. The hours of the night are many, and the days ahead of you are more than I can count.

Somewhere in the woods from across the street, past the house with maroon tiles on its roof, a single tree falls, but no one is there to hear it.