I have to find a new magic because it is telling me to find it, because I hear the thunder of running feet through streets and the crash of falling stone and broken glass and it waits behind all that, or just before.
It is easy to ignore, isn’t it, here where rivers carry away the dreams of sleepers down to the sea which drowned Ys, when the great floodgates broke because she no longer cared to keep their world together, no longer cared for their dreams that kept the world together.
I walk past their world and their dreams, along the rivers. I even ran, the earth surging up from my feet back from the city of metal scraps where they greeted me with warm bearded kisses. Their dreams taste foreign, are beer-drenched, hidden from view by shutters closed by generations before them, generations who heard a previous rumble: unlatched, unfolded, pulled tight, and latched again.
We are here again. I am here again, much bigger, bearing more fragments of selves (that are not me, that are become me) like clothing upon my towering body which cannot find a roof.
We are here again, the towers and their lords overlooking land worked by women and men who do not want them, who sharpen their scythes and talk in ever-less-quiet voices of what they intend to do.
I do not know what I intend to do.
I am here again, we are here again, and when last we were here the watching towers called for war. Dreams behind shuttered windows disturbed, bags packed, kisses from mothers on unbearded faces, ‘au revoirs’ when what was needed were ‘adieus.’ Elsewhere, other towers, other doors, other kisses, other partings to graves made of open fields where raven and crow picked clean their bones like Brån’s.
Where are their heads now? Where is his head now? Where will mine finally lie?
I met the Wanderer before ravens danced on the hill where I sat outside Oslo. A fucking glass eye like I needed the joke, I’m eating ice cream on a bench, and he asked me what I desire.
I desire to be here, I said, and he said he’d like to go to America, maybe be on a screen.
The Wanderer is here again, and we are for awhile each other. Brân fucked me by a lake, but he’ll fuck me on that tree, our eye sockets still dripping blood, looking before and after at what the dreams of others means.
Sometimes when I walk the crows hide me, but I remember watching Brâns bones picked clean, white like chalk. There’s a fucking crow staring at me now as I write, like some joke we’re all sharing about the man about to lose his head and finally become his own.
His own in the breaking glass, the falling stone, the terrified crowds seeking shelter from the towers who’ve prescribed this slaughter, calculated, budgeted the cost of lost intractable workers.
I do not know what I intend to do, except find that magic waiting for me past the running feet over cobble, beyond the slamming shutters, over the breaking glass.
Rhyd Wildermuth 