The Chinese dragon swept infant's hopes
underneath it's flailing mesh body.
The still rising sun omnipresent like a foreign God in the skies
as time flooded the streets with scant regard for domestic lovers
under the white cotton afternoon sheets.
If romance was limiting itself to the past masters
and forgotten renaissance
then the swoon in the eyes of the balconied couple spoke of love and passion
ignited by the festival flames
as the pyre burned they soaked up the heat in an abolition
of social retrospect and social norms.
Do you classify the swelling crowd as a blood clot of mass hysteria
or the outpouring of a small nations fight against depravity and it’s government’s corruption?
The journalist and artist interpret through sight,
the photographer through absence of light and presence of humanity.
The flashes made light of the past years struggles
and the dance went on,
swaying dangerously into the night with reckless illuminated beauty.
A child on a doorstep in brown nylon shook under the weight of his family.
Disinterest and neglect had started seeping through the cracks in the clay
and the cracks in the mother, father, brothers and sisters.
Dias de los Muertos had come and gone and the celebration had returned to mourning so great and heavy
that the brown nylon child was
compressing,
compacting
combusting
with the perceived guilt of the blood on another relatives hands.
The dragon swept up the last of the debris left on the silent street
as another soul folded in recognition of its past.
Misfortune rang like the call to prayer
and the infant's hope was a drowning ,static memory,
completing the oil painting hanging on the subsided massacred deck.
Lovers lay spent on hardwood floor
Delivering line after line of forced connection
‘I’ll love you forever’
‘I’ll always be yours’
‘I’ll never leave you’
‘You can always trust me’
In linear time it can be certain
these words will be swept up by the dragon.
They will be that debris
on that silent street.
An omnipresent sun dieing slowly
over an unnamed, guttural State.