tom taylor - the wall of the town

“The wall of the town sinks back into the moat from which it was dug.” Dwayne “Fight” O’Clancy reams his horse back into its tiny stand under his bed beside his worn-out shoes and stiff, dirty socks. It’s time to relish his favors in undertones of presence, as if now were not soon enough for a present moment to occur, let alone be perceived for what it is in the arena of forces at play. Now would be the opposite of the meaning it normally preserves for its own dignity, like a peasant in the uniform of doubt, all in blues and reds, with the hand demon-flag waving over the field of battle, a sacrifice and a boast.

At once the egg diminishes from large to variant, a number and a sign at the same time, as though ‘for sale’ didn’t express the true situation here, where the moon grows fuller each night and the cars gradually disappear into the night, their cats’ eye tail lights deceiving the warships overhead, death in the night without any warning or possibility of escape. Bits of flesh covered the car each morning, filtering down in the cool night air like a rafter in disuse, like a poison in the sink…. Any true story would be also brief and complex forcing the issue to retreat in memory from the rigors of perception, of remembering at all how this came to pass, this hour of doom which is at hand….

Rogue metallic shards revived all spores denied furthers, he couldn’t forget the dog with its jaw shot off running around spraying blood in front of the horrified family, tears filled his eyes as he recalled this again and again, night screaming heats and burroughs aligned beneath the heavens’ silent stare. The column twisted into the night the smell of shit in the air, the other soldiers shooting bursts from their weapons. High on gin and methamphetamine, the boy soldiers were slightly shorter than the weapons they carried the red the blue and the whites of their eyes glided over the surface of the day without pity or scorn. Nostrils swung from the lanyard around his neck. Anonymous pity.

At once the bits of flesh started to reign along the roof of the van in which they were mounting one camel after the next in imaginary races to the top of the noon-time play of forces around the room they found themselves inside but not identified as friend or foe. The largest day was still ahead in this moon of routs. The lines across the sand criss-crossed so many times that a spider-web pattern emerged with intersecting zones and no distribution to mark off another rude awakening at the edges of doubt and sleeplessness. Hope was a distant diamond in the rough opportunities made and abandoned for the forward rush toward an uncertain further on than not.

What made the sign desirable was its ballast on the signs of plenty and hunger. It’s no deal of mine, he thought, that this short story grows shorter by the hour, if only they’d let me sing at the top of the day, roistering into the morning’s foggy bottoms a senator in his underwear was enough to dream her faces hanging through the sky with colorful scene serene atonement the likeness of a narrative, maybe a tweak or two at the sign of the rooftop and bling, diamonds in the ruff and peat of the mosque he’d asided into oblivion with a single pop of his launcher, that’s gonna slow ‘em down, he thought, and slept again the uncertain skies neither welcome nor hesitant, but still the songs kept coming with no meter in the madness of the hours waiting to be fulfilled against his well & terror.
This was the other side of the moon, the darker side, where the tempos slowed to non.