and the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row — Bob Dylan
The ships of state lay mucked afoul and in black water listing.
A failed armada moored by ancient cable rubs against the wharf where Dead Roads end. Down their ropes a stream of rats is fleeing. The mass infests a silent port from which a prouder fleet in brighter times once sailed. The diseased rodents are drawn into the broken effluent pipes so thickly that they push a viscous offal sludge backwards through the sewers up to the high cisterns of a suddenly but irrefutably doomed city on a hill.
Patrolling by the shore at night, and in the day as well, is a ceremonial guard of hunchbacked throgs festooned with razored axes. The peacocked army served ready in pomp but unwilling in flesh to sever the black ships’ cables. Stalling but for courage they must fail their oath entire to defend a gibbous empire from incesticidal parasites yet debarking down the hemp rope lines.
The poisoned ships ride empty at the pier. Their terminal expedition was crewed by a dryland priesthood of dementered sodomites. They lately flew the carrion wind to dredge forth ilk while running blindly out to sea in nightmares. Upon return they claimed the hilltop citadel in duty for a plague they brought to town as treasure. They rule anon in joyless rant before a fly-faced porcine lord.
The city shakes as one in silence behind hasty bolted doors. Under brimstone walls the rat-corrupted gutters rise to their headwater throne. Up the mons through coal-smoked glower-windows a palace campus throbs and moans beneath the darkened stars. Whether their chaos is from rage or their chaos is from rapture the lower peons cannot wish to learn. For the higher castle hosts a separate knowing there. By distant view their hilltop seems to mock a grand Versailles. A burning hill illuminated more by charnel-perfumed smoke than by any wisely focussed flame.
In the palace champagne flows and chocolate fountains mark forking paths between the many secret chambers. With the civil works so clogged every fountain bubbles forth putrescent fecal mud. Passing it off as normal the junior agents of the order rush between mean summonses to the flooding privy lairs. Deeper inside acrid bile and venereal mucous stain the doltic Regent’s private cell.
Having sold their reason to a glutton and their religion to a satyr the cultists genuflect in feigned ecstasy at the dysenteric trough beneath yon Francophillic Boor. In anti-rooms a witless throng of lipsticked Penil Nuncios claw like sack-drowned cats just to read aloud in tongues from his lunar gibbered scripts. His sycophants share common lust for any invite to the midnight worship of their syphilitic king.
They feast on night soil in the hope that they might break their teeth on flecks of Judas coin their patron passes forth as favor. Eventually some prove enough loyalty by such acts to be granted access through the famous Hall of Mirrors. In that sanctum blank-verse ritual fills them drunk on catatonic vitriol until they join a vomit lubricated onanistic orgy.
Once self-sodden they are free to pace the gild-framed passage where the stupor of their plague compels them to mistake those walls of mirrors for a gallery of windows looking out. Here, at the highest ranks of power, their only duty is to gaze longingly through those frames upon a populace they cringe to witness and then pray aloud for greater strength to marshall fear against. Behind the drapes they murmur that they might extend their lease by punishing the people in the glass with yet a higher fervor. By violating their own reflections in this manner they recycle their ranks. They make so much noise that they come to think the world beyond is silent.
Tyrants always hear the silence of a people they have stunned as if it is an honor. They think such silence, always false, is history’s moral praise. On this hill, as on so many others gone before, they are deafened to the warning of a bell which does not ring. The truth is that their crowns are only cogs which rim a wider wheel. History is the rope that turns the wheel. History anchors all our ships to the ocean of our past and it drags us forth enslaved to our every future’s clay.
In the towers proud debauchers whoop.
Within the mirrored hall they see no world beyond them spinning. Their purpose is their din and in their fervor they are howling. Out at sea the fleet still floats but it is moor-less drifting. On moonlit docks are weapons stacked and they are tear stained rusting. The rats are seething silent now and for a feast are writhing. In the square a tower stands where stolen rope is rising. From its bar a bell-forged blade hangs toneless and is gleaming.
Behind stone columns waiting sits a sailor’s widow darning. She is teasing rope for rag to clean the cobbles of their weeping. She is knowing as she darns and in her knowing she is waiting.
The ships of state lay mucked afoul and in black water listing.