MY LITHSOME PRAYER OF ENDINGS

56. MY LITHSOME PRAYER OF ENDINGS:

I turned away to look back and realized how I DID NOT want to see anything after all - low smoke from some factory chimney the old screech of a thirty-year-old sound bad memory of a torrid event piles and piles of people walking across some stupid high-school lawn and NO MATTER the reasonings of the crowd the cheers still went up and in the narrow darkness I saw the dead - I saw how so many of them from the past years had passed onto another world of living and growing - spirits in some delicious night of abstraction stellar attractions beaming back like starlight on some carousel filled with giddy children screaming forth about TRAVEL! and where they're going while in reality they're going nowhere and every horse is tethered to a pole which rides them up and down and round and round : what better way (I told the doctor) what better way is there to decay ? and he smiled back and lit a pipe and inhaled deeply some florid smoke which wreathed his face and I swear I swear I saw his spirit try to choke but he held it in check and kept on smiling instead - the forced smile of the Parson at the pulpit the forced smile of the prisoner in the dock the forced smile of some tired groom at yet another wedding - and everything I saw was senseless and fake at the same time but as I delved into it more and more I saw its reality just as much - the antique store with one hundred ancient doorknobs made of glass the chipped mirrors holding blue reflections the crooked old ceiling lamp made with flat steel and textured metal and a wiring harness covered in woven-cord insulation I saw the wardrobe and the chifferobe and the dressers and the bench EVERYTHING taken on faith from a million miles away - Chinese tiles red-glass globes candle-holders with the faces of angels cherubs and saints old bannisters worn down from peoples' hands going up and down for two hundred years window hardware that fit nothing any longer and ten or more men's tophats with nary a head to be found to wear them - silk and satin leather and lace glass and wood porcelain and paste - no mistaking the envy of the new as it gazes back wistfully on the old the old the oh so very old.