midnight/dawn

we constructed a new topography from the ruins, ashes and indestructible manufactured goods scattered across the landscape like colored candy wrappers, a rainbow of trash haphazardly speckling what was left of the earth, after the fire stopped burning the flesh and the land. little could be said at a time like this. a unanimous vote was issued: language was of no further use and was discarded immediately (the uselessness of a wet paper cup). like all other things not evoked repeatedly over time, language was forgotten, and then became nothing.

no, it became nothing's negation; it was so disused that it was everywhere, trapped in and by its own silence; bits of dirt in crevices of chapped hands, the stuff that clings to discarded dental floss, tiny relics of human bodies mixed into dust bunnies: bits of peeled skin, eyelashes, crusted snot, fallen hair (long and short), the hangnails, toenails, and fingernails.

(time was the reality of the curse.)

voices turned pale from inactivity, becoming albino like the creatures that once lived so deep in the sea, away from the self-righteous light. the sounds of digestion and cracking knees when squatting were louder than a concert of any utterances that had once been made.

temperature became important again, as did the nerves just under the tender outer shell of skin.

we began to feel the cells of our lungs imbibing oxygen for the first time, as they had always done, exhaling as much as possible each time just to see the chest rise again and then again. alive. (how lucky.)

some of us developed the ability to wiggle our ears. a few already could move at least one. this proved to be an advantage as these individuals taught the others, eventually founding a new army of auditory ability.

this corps received the transmission of our sins, hearing the green-blood pain the earth was in, as it rocked itself back and forth, curled up in the fetal position.

the sound, a deep yellow-green monosyllabic tome, was translated into gestures made by bones moving to invisible vibes, dancing without deliberate design, motion projected into the marrow by the dying pulse of the land.

this is how we came to re-learn ourselves. we didn't write the history of what was, nor did we construct a diary of the transition: language got us to this point and it was never to be the conductor of the orchestration of our lives again.

the ticking clock of seasons was lost. but out of it the gain was immeasurable. a shattered sea within the frozen crystals of the previous mind.