These agitated periods of sleep-speech were mercifully brief.
And when they ended she would subside for a time, sweating and panting as if,
Into a state of dreamless exhaustion
Then abruptly she would awake
Convinced in her disoriented state,
There was an intruder in her head.
There was no intruder.
The intruder was absence
A negative space in the darkness
All was lost to her, like paradise.
Like Kashmir
In a time before memory.
Trapped in this city
She had lashed out in despair.

In such a city there can be no grey areas
Or so it seemed.
Things were what they were
And nothing else.
Unambiguous,
Lacking the subtleties of drizzle, shade, and chill.

Under the scrutiny of such a sun
There is no place she can hide.
No mysteries here, or depths;
Only surfaces and lies
Yet to learn the city was to discover illusion.
This banal clarity was nothing more then, nothing.
The city was all treachery, and deception, all the same
A quick change, quicksand metropolis.
Hiding its true nature from those staring at its name.
Pretending to be content
Guarded in secret
In spite of all its apparent nakedness and bleakness.

In such a place, even the forces of destruction no longer needed the shelter of the dark.
She burned out of the morning’s brightness, dazzling the eye and stabbed me with sharp and fatal light
Loveless, and blind
Born in the midst of the firestorm of courage.
Twisted and ruined.
The lands of possibility misbehaved.

A dishonest nursery
The blueness rich with sorrow, which filled the evening sky
That made the world look childlike and pure. Such an unnatural disguise.