Denouement

And the day would be proud of itself going on as if it hadn’t already collapsed, had not

been destroyed, riven, all the people mad and metabolically downcast. It’s around the

eyes, they said. It’s around the hearts. The city was reeling. People were coming out to

the street. In the way they wanted to see where the guy lived and boasted so as to mock

the event. It wasn’t over. It wasn’t going to rest. The guy was not real as the day as the

year the century the epoch shared, was not real the tribulation he ensued, was not real

but it was that affect that mattered, what would suffer. It was the warmest year on record

as if that wasn’t enough to make some idiot pause and pausing resist and if resisting

insist on being heard and calibrated so that measures were taken round the clock, ice

caps photographed melting and all the rest, a pole away from accountability. How ugly

would it go? Resistance. Had to resist. And it had already happened if you stopped to

think. Someone had gotten up and walked this far and then paused to take stock for the

last time. It was the last time the human had a chance, the last one, to be observant and

cry and stomp and take stock. And be like something like the something that had melted.

And if healing could ever be it would be theatre, a spectacle, come pay, like the kabuki

you just saw imitating the resolution between a sword and a fox, a country and its honor.

The last straw of honor. Broken on its back. And blue was invoked in the silk scarf that

draped the emperor’s chair where he sat timeless and waiting for the play to begin. We

were it. Played upon. But could that be be true and yet be denouement with hope still

streaming in, and then dark applause from all the centuries come

raining down.