Wordshapes vibrate my stapes. The glamorous glowing gloaming.
Twilight over the husky earth, the dusky death of the day, the dearth
of day darkens on the dirty hearth. The sun sinks through the curtains
of distance, in the sea-eyed sequined veil of distance, dead into infrared
death. Waiting for the morgendammerung in the drumming, ringing,
dusky sunset.
     Velocipede in the velodrome. The Veil Nebula rizes on the horizon.
Pedaling home through the seining braining wind. Twilight mist
settles like vast smoke rings on the hamlets. Men stand smoking pipes
where the leaves lie in drifts, chuckling, consulting pocket watches.
The watchtowers stand silent. Even now, sentries stretch and slowly
climb onto the bottom rungs of long metal ladders. At 6 pm, a weird
electronic ululation — siren test. Echoes from everywhere through
pinetreetops. A flying squirrel snags a passing branch and whips away.
     At night, the sentries pray, chant and mumble, while overhead the
Pleiades rises and sets. Executioners in cuirasses appear in the dark of
the morning, dragging heavy cutlasses; if the sun doesn't rise in the
morning, the sentries do not live.
     The sun rises like a ball of yarn, a glome. Yarn and kittens and
words and frogs splash through the streets in the hours before human
logic returns. The sentries climb down — a bell welded to the ladder
wakes the executioner — they nod perfunctorily and walk away home
in opposite directions.