9906. ALL TELESCOPE, NO STARS

ALL TELESCOPE, NO STARS

I can prance with the best of them sounding

out my charms and dislikes. Entitled to an

attitude, and privileged to have it go past

whichever thing it is I want  -  whistling

past the graveyard with a shovel in the

ground. There's a definite lunatic in

mausoleum #510. I come here in the

hopes that  -  at this deep night  -  it's

maybe the darkest place around. But

it turns out it's not that at all : The same 

streetlights and airport lights and factory 

illuminations as everywhere else, except 

now they're not factories just parking lot 

lamps. And even the dead here are gone.

-

My own veins and arteries are broken. I

should just live in one of these boxes, like

that guy I mentioned in #510. I see him

sometimes  -  he's been here since 1907,

prancing about for hours at a time in the

dark of light, escaped or crawled out from

whatever he lives in. If he does. When the

dead re-awake, it's past frenzy, past any

excitement at all. Like terror in some

grocer's aisle, tomatoes talking, heads of

lettuce rolling dice. You should see this guy :

A really rapt form of self-absorption.

'I used to smell,' he says, 'but now I'm

dried out, my bones are brittle but no

matter to that for I've got no body for 

them to hold up. And that odor's gone.

Oh Death, be never so proud as me.'