ceaseless taronja

photographs by John Clayton Lee

because i had slept outside, being alone was the only way that i could be because those speckles in the blue black sun only let themselves feel me from the inside

when an early morning jogger stopped beside me at 6am and told me that i might roll off the hillside, but i knew inside myself that the only caring creatures were the

roaches and ants that would burrow their head beside mine in that dark ceaseless night when the sky became blue it was so deeply black

i woke to the burning, and the shaman woman with the dark cool gray voice asked me where my home was, i told her right here below Irene’s window I shall live

forever

and i only started to feel real

come back, but it will also be kind of strange but comforting and cool and yellow and golden, and the diamonds will shimmer in the dust from miles away, and then when you arrive and search through the grey brown dust that seemd to cover every detail, the wind will pick them up and scatter them all about into the brown ocher reds, then you will see a man on a motobike pull out large blocks of shimmering white ice, and the little cambodian boys from the brown restuarant ran to him as he pulled out a large machette and began to hack the ice into large geometric slates, and the boys were exultant for their lives and for all the dust that would get picked up by a dusty red pickup with teennages wearing face masks riding on the top and on the hood, and somehow inside of them all bore a ceaseless remorselessness so true: the same inquiry that the pluming orange-pink-glow of the sun would ask the brown wooden crumbling houses when the dawn began to tread over those distant dark trees