What Passes.

I decided to clear my head from atop a municipal parking garage. Above the people, above the grimness of reality, I knew I could escape. It was nearing dawn as I climbed the stairwell that smelled of piss, left by various drunkards and bums. I was clutching a half-empty bottle of wine I took from the party. When I reached the top, I took a swig and made my way over to the edge. I peered down, watched the world like a hunchback, as the cops came and went from street to street. I wondered if one of them might be the one who stopped me a few weeks earlier while I was walking these same streets below. He'd asked me what I was doing. “Just walking,” I replied. Then he informed me about the bums who would gladly slit my throat “For a dollar.” “If I only had a dollar,” I'd muttered under my breath.

Deeply rooted in the here and now, I stood quietly and watched the moon disappear. Ah, the mystical moon, Lorca's moon, I mused. The revelations that crept into my mind, like the veils, were long and black. I took a long pull from the bottle and watched the buildings race each other into the sky. From behind and below, I could hear someone beating out rhythms on bucket drums. Whoever it was, they were calling out to the spirits. I glanced up and gazed at the Hotel Florida, with its dark, sad, visage; it stood alone decaying, a forgotten corpse of a time I knew nothing of. As I took another long pull, I turned, studied the lone black car parked behind me, imagining there was a dead man inside it. If there was one, would I report it or just walk away, leaving it for someone else to discover? If the door's unlocked would I search the corpses pockets? I didn't have answers to any of these questions. The situation seemed rife with possibilities and all the potential actions left me feeling morally ambiguous.

Words and tricks have lead me to this place -- left to drift in thoughts and memories -- passing through days and nights, people and places, hoping to transform sweet intentions and bad interpretations into something more meaningful. Standing over a rotting, pointless city, where over the years I've met prophets and con-men, seen visions and horrors. But there has to be something greater than this, I thought. It's like Antonin Artaud once wrote, “It's not possible that in the end the miracle will not occur.”