city of nowhere (edit)

in dark shifting ink
crosshatched by lucent white
are the artifacts of lost cupboards
where wooden apple and scissor bandage congregate
in the musty corners
of an unknown unrelated to the coroner. 

thatched and tiled roofs, sepia and maroon
cross sectioned
and geometrically torn
are the only artifacts of wisdom
in the wide map
that resembles spilled paint
stretching over that parchment canvas
leading us to knocks in a corridor
and the curiosity of a glowing pear
kept under an old lampshade
with shoes arrayed in some dark splattered hallway
that suspends itself above a whitened orb.

gather that people's projects have fallen under here
and instead of unraveling
became consumed by a deep murk that dulls auras of objects and intention
like a fool's last wish disappearing into a stadium of echoes
and but for the odd splash of marble
you would think this place dead in light,
all the lipid flow obscured in smoke like behavior
begging at us
to both forget and remember edges
as the cause of old sarcophagi
work through purple lanterns
which floated in on thick lengths of chain. 

love here begins as the swath of a stain
caustically taken to old terse cloth,
the blouse of an 18th century maid
or the lapel of some dead lieutenant
carried over from the back of a wind up stationmaster's watch.
only a scrap
instead of a parcel or an exchange of fulminating light.

there we have it,
finally,
too dim to see in
the cats call the streetlights dead
and cobblestones etch bad design in detail around the arches of a crimson tower,
there, that is the capital
all the nonsense from nowhere conglomerating into a sea of swamp
beneath the last outpost of order
the sameness of nothing
moving on and below and even above
reminding us somehow
that we had that verve were our skeletons lay empty
like cathedrals to the dismal Gothic statement
that life may support only an iconic cruelty for the sake of pursuing Death,
and my
how we long then for a cupboard
or a postage stamp
to set our frames back and away from dark rasps of half-visible ravens
and old boots becoming undone
there
on a dull black stage
and we could say finally
that life lost its shine and vigor
when we discovered this place of moths
eating into space like hot ashes sown over linen
while the directions of the compass melt and give way
to instead the simple symbol of old dead wine without a year,
those days
those years
this nowhere city bereft of love or fear
as stark as a dead pier languishing over the rot of a night sea

and then when you return, you see past the veneer of experience and its baubles
nothing left there but ghostly blackened tatters winding through the old wind without geometry
our old eviction notices crumpled yellow
and left in a shoe box
as the final souvenier
for useless struggles, transient demands, and pale extractions
that take with them the beauty of the blood coursing through our hands
and deeply weaken the architecture of faces
into hollow odds and ends
where we had seen the cartography tattered black.