As of Late

Painting by Tyler Shrake https://www.instagram.com/p/BaFzkULFmsm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The bricks about me have taken to becoming lost things, as of late. Their proper spaces within the walls that separate my perspective from the open air above Monroe Street have become, more often than not, seemingly replaced by the thinness of air itself. I wonder where it is that those rambling bricks stumble off to when my watchful gaze wanders.

I’m nearly envious of their unconcerned sense of humour, those happy imps.

Other things have also gone astray in the absence of my viewing. Just yesterday, a bustling market lay in the lot across from my humble sacristy view. But as I now gaze out now through my translucent perspective, I see nothing but weeds and dirt abandoned to the land’s natural disposition. It lies surrounded by a chain link fence with a sharp wire lining its pinnacle edge. I thought I saw a snake quiver into a hole within its circumference, but as I check again, I see that the lot has been filled by a flamboyant taqueria wafting heavy scents into my curious perspective’s chimney.

Culture puzzles me more than my former youth would allow, or understand, it seems.

Enough of gazing out into the world. It’s become so capricious in its ways. And yet, even as I turn inwards into this cathedral’s inner workings, I find similar inconsistencies amongst its internal designs. For even now, as I turn to open the sacristy door to patiently muse through the halls of the building, I gaze downward and find not the carpet that I distinctly recall, but rather an empty space proceeding a long descent down into casual rubble below. How strange a prophecy the gaze portends, for the carpet must be experiencing the very same discontent as the bricks that holiday when I am not present to hold their cementation in sturdy place.

Things sway more these days than are polite, I dare say.

On the rare occasions when I descend the stairs, when they make themselves known, those slippery discontents, I rise to my pulpit to find its wooden platform to be frivolously disheveled into crumbled bits of advanced entropy. Such a terrible ruse it seems to play upon my sight and sensation. I, for one, find it’s jests to be nothing more than popular rabble consistent in its triviality with the music I hear played upon the streets beyond the walls that surround, although, even it spins a different shifting tune every time it tempts my ears.

As capricious as the whims of a diva are the winds of popular music these days.

But my most joyous moments, as of late, come from my casual dwellings within the belfry above. I sometime run my fingers along the bell's cast bronze and whisper into its reliable and consistent form. “Why don’t you hide like all the rest?” I ask. It never tells. It’s a cold bell, and although it shares not, it never forsakes my company. It speaks less riddles than the walls and floors abounding, and yet, it feels distant in ways I cannot claim to understand. It looks out into the world alongside my own gaze, and it and I together marvel, unmoving, at the shifting and playful whims of the world that dance past our shared reception.

It’s a marvelous thing to have such a friend in this snow globe of shed skin. All else seems to leave one in ennui; left to coat the shadowed crevasses of the world.