I crawled deep into the crypt, hoping to find some answers there, entombed in the time before brands walked the earth like Gods, smiting all meaning before their benevolent strides, full of smiles and pleasures of hearth and hope. The nacre lay beneath the dusty webs and musty air of the damp departed. I crouched for a telling moment, the awful shriek of the rusted gates still echoing in my ears like the tortured photons crushed beneath my oppressed palms of a teenaged night sky. I remembered the swaying, the rattling rocking of a hundred miles of spring-weary seats in the flashing back roads under the dark night sky. The emptiness of those full buses sated with half-tuxedoed rocking passengers before the abyss did not comfort like the weary tomb of colorless silence and granite before me. Each step made its own music in the harsh quiet, each breath pushed back the shadows and silence deep in these recesses hidden from love, nectar, and daylight. The candle I placed in a recess of stone and ash, lighting it quickly while heartbeats hesitated in the dark detritus.
Are those roots? Some oak, perhaps, seeking as I seek, finding only a vacuole behind the rock ceiling it bore through in hopes of water or nutriment? The cracks and dirt midst the vault are less loathsome than the sterile vacuum entombed by the once-polished rock banks on either side. The fluid flame illuminates a dozen shades of grey, all retreating to the darkness that shrouds the banks of bone-colored biers beneath the stone sarcophagi. If my purpose had held, the spade and pick I brought would have pried off these stone lids, but the first ring of rock against the metal blade jarred me back into consciousness. How can I pry away the covers, how pull back the lids and reveal the coffers’ secrets, how thrust elbow-deep my fearful arms into the wrecked masses therein? To what end? A solitary pursuit of the madness from whence I came, to make a talisman of bones against the lowering dark and the enfolding night. A cicada dies above, crying and starting suddenly at its own futile revelation. We dream of diaries and photographs, a plaything of the past, pored over remnants of lucid nightmares that might reveal the voices behind the throne, on bended knees the supplicant waits steely-eyed before the three tests, but a lone cry of stone on stone had ended the challenge before it began.
Are there sinews, or bindings to hold bone to bone? Or a loose agglomeration of sketched out fragments in dirt or vermiculate satin? Is the nacreous moon shining through the gaping stairwell down which I have come? I tasted the sweat on my upper lip, salty in the cold air. A vision reaches me, pulls to me vanished friends who never again will we see, mock, avoid, lose, call, touch. Only these missing guardians could understand and report back the urgent silence of three AM. The absent mirror holds itself before me, a lingering doubt shivering the reflection in the too bright candle light. Only the choking fictions remain in the sepulchre.