In the Dark

 

There could be something under the bed

 

There could be so many stars...so many I can't believe how many there are

There could be a soft sweater and soft flesh if she would let me

 

There could be a bumbling, flashlight scouring, over-turned clothes caddies and racks that would obscure the crouched and frightened girl hiding from the intruders

 

There could be the smell of pine and a piercing yowl as I slammed my bare foot into an uprooted root

There could be the 'shoosh' of the door opening against the pile in the carpet.  A slice of light from the hallway and the sounds of her sad feet shuffling in towards my bed.  She says she is sorry for my whole life.  Her lips blubbering in stark contrast to how tightly my eye lids are shut.  Forcing my whole into the darkest hole I can find

 

There could be a meal behind two sets of thick curtains.  We all trained into the black each holding the shoulder of the one in front. The first shoulder, a truly blind person, leads us into a Parisian meal that we will never glimpse...thus the blind leading the blind or the blind feeding the blind.  Taste buds heighten, hands wander unseen, things squish between the fingers and find there way into our mouths

 

There could be an area, oh about 4 feet in width, between a sink and a bed.  In a small apartment in then Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, the boy who lives there steps back and forth over the visiting boy laying in that space inside his sleeping bag.  He washes a glass, brushes his teeth, sets up for the morning and then turns off the light and gets into his bed.  In this dark there is no light to readjust to, no 30 or so seconds later when you can make out the window, a chair or anything at all.  There is no street light, porch light or sign or even the passing lights of a car driving by, no there is nothing but black from the outside - no stars even. This city can't afford any of that. This will be darkness.  The boy has offered the traveler his bed in what seemed a wonderful selfless gesture.  The traveler is now uneasy in the bag on the floor.  And once again comes the offer above him to share the comforts of the bed

 

There could be a city known as a beacon.  Truly can be seen from the outerworld, the world where the sky lives.  There you can look back to us on earth and you will see this city as it lights up its portion of the planet.  It encounters though a storm.  One of the new kind.  The ones now come hard and heavy.  They hover, create havoc and fucking destroy shit.  They have the swagger of being let out to show off their stuff.  And they do.  And this city is one of the playgrounds. This city of stages adds a howling to the streets and a drenching prance to pavement.   The city loses half itself to deepest of darkness.  The height of its buildings cloaking out any possible luminescence that might be.  As told to me by my friend who worked at one of those stage once you dropped past mid town, you were off the planet.  His bike lamp would bump and turn the only light as he found his way out the lower half of the city.  Frightened and elated at the same time, he would ride this theme park adventure out to Brooklyn.  His heart might shoot out of his body when and if he paused to hear the quiet of this darkness and suddenly a match would light up a face maybe 3 feet away from him.  Very dark but hardly alone

 

There could be a trail to dark against the cliffs of the great canyon.  And you are a lucky one.  You get to be part of a traveling group centered on a German television project shooting in the great Southwest of America.  Delivering our magnificent landscape back to it's hungry to wander people.  And you are at the bottom of the world.  You are at the side of a river.  You are not even a needle in this haystack of rock and mountain.  From down here you watch light leave the planet.  It is indecisive somehow.  It jumps about on the various crags and hinges that tower over you.  Shows itself out the door in slivers and great splotches and wide bands that illuminate and shut down the canyon at the same time.  Light is leaving the planet.  A slide show, a game of chance, the light shifting as the little cups hiding the ball in a flurry of hands that would relieve you of $100 in one hot minute.  Where is the ball?  Point at the cup! The light moved out like that.  Like a trick.  God's show.  And the actual darkness that followed:  ahhhhh that was certainly heaven.  

 

Then there could be a dark place in your head.  Many rooms in the house - the brain.  And then one day you have a child.  A lamp in a table in a room in your brain comes on.  There there will never be darkness.  There the light will always remain.