Endless coats of enameled paint have blurred the details of this ironwork. Some blacksmith, long forgotten, forged these guardrails, following exact instructions from a man also long forgotten, a man with too much money and no vision of tomorrow.

The guardrails wend along a staircase in a fibonacci spiral for three stories, each sweeping pass wider than the next, until culminating at the top; a vast expanse of the city.

"No roof access," declare the signs along the way. Don't believe it for a moment.

Three flights above the streets isn't much, in the end. The asphalt below seems distant; the pinnacles of steel and glass, monuments of industry, tower much higher. Falling would be preferable to climbing. And for a moment, falling seems an option.

No, three flights above the streets isn't much. But from here, a swatch of the city is laid bare, from 10th to Childers, along North and 16th, and all the sidestreets between. The skyline rises above it all, backlit, stormclouds coalescing. Windows picked out in light, here, there. Like phosphorescent survivors.

This is the city. Where street level is noise and confusion, culture and wisdom, all wrapped in decaying possibility. Where sky is stormy and thunderous.

This is the city, girded in concrete and brakelights and five million people's thoughts.

This is home, or so it is said. But without you it seems hollow sometimes.

This is the city.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled ranting and neon to bring you an important public service announcement.

Courtesy of Frightdoll.

There's a chain in all of it, really: neurons firing, analog thoughts, your fingertips tapping against plastic. A beat goes by, lightspeed, faster than the heart twitches. In that interim, fiber illuminates, twisted wires ignite, and switches fire, culminating on my screen in subpixel perfection -- imperfect analog representations of perfect binary interplay of two minds in the darkness, circling, wondering. From neurons to thoughts to fingertips to plastic to fiber to wire to screen, those pixels are your words, your votives and confessions, and reading them makes my heart twitch faster than the beat of light.

Peace will come to me in abandoned church pews, with moonlight scrubbed by stained glass across the aisles, and music heard alone, the rhythm of which is measured by silence and footfalls.

Note: This post contains a lot of bitching and griping about computers. If you don't care, move along.

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Winter left without you. Now it's spring; a time of renewal. A time of renewal, but where are those promises you left? Promises escaping easy from your lips, thoughts of wonder, thoughts of ritual, rites of passage, togetherness. Promises broken and left ashen on the floor.

Months have passed from miles away, but I still hear your promises, cast down copper and fiber. In my dreams I still hear those promises, so distant, and distance is something in which I'll never believe. Not when your eyes catch the light that way. Not when your hair cascades along your shoulders like that. Your lips curl knowingly and I can't believe in distance that way. I never will. Not like that.

"Who was that?" they might ask, years hence, sifting through piles of manila folders, tales handwritten on legal pads, on graph paper. Dusty stories of love, loss, and neon, undated, in no particular order. Poetry or prose, it never mattered; flickering into being and cast into darkness just as quickly. Ephemeral, they were -- fleeting, never touching their intended, and relegated to archives, like millions before.

"Who was that?"

Her voice slides off the edge of winter, bringing promise of warmth, holding back just the way I'd expected, season after season. "Belief isn't a crime," she tells me, glancing skyward, ignoring my gaze outlining her profile. "You'll find beauty when it comes," she finishes, and holds that moment.

Beauty, I have found, I don't tell her. Beauty is your hair in the morning, I don't explain. Beauty is the way your lips fit against my neck, I wish I'd said, and how your thighs interlock with mine. She'd smirk if I told her that beauty is your voice drifting into song because it struck your mood, so I don't. Beauty is your fingertips brushing against my palms, I can't say to her, those palms clenched with need. Why wont you accept that?

The question, never answered, and the moment passes for her, as it always does. As it always did. Eyes meeting, neurons firing into some distant eternal shore with a surf that flows by rhythms only she can hear. Her fingers, mine, twisted together, twitching to a pulse that is hers alone, and I may never follow. She says so without a breath, and I pretend to understand.

Understanding, I may never receive, and the comfort of her faith may be something in which I'll never wrap myself. But I believe there was a moment for her, maybe long since gone, in which she heard these words, and felt my hand tighten around hers.

The question never answered, the moment passed. Understanding, I may never receive. "Belief isn't a crime," she had told me, so long ago, and maybe at the bottom of this bottle I'll find the beauty she'd never let me find in her. I believe I will. Belief isn't a crime.

Smoke curls from her lips easy as her words and just as artificial; another day to her, another needful ritual. I've heard those words, the same empty tale spun into the nothingness of blank hotel rooms over and over. Another bed, another pillow, another moaning breath of affirmation, and it vanishes with a bill and signature. Powder cut in such pretty little lines, wiping it all away as soon as it's done. And so I'm done, her use of me complete, staggering rumpled and addled to a taxi on 14th. Somewhere a connection was made, lips pressed against skin, and obliterated by need -- not want, or feeling. Just the need, and the goodbye, caulked in dilated pupils. Just the need, as ephemeral as her touch. The need, and the goodbye.

Missing you is all I do, in faded sheets the twilight restless; an orbit's cycled memories edging towards a deep abyss where your absence emptied into longing. Another journey I'm embarking without you to carry me, though fantasy may find me shivered under blankets unforgiving of my own damned malfeasance, with your aching presence needed. The need may go unheeded but the longing will remain until that time again when your skin might touch my own. Missing you is everything; missing you is all I've known.

Let's screw until blind over cheap fireplace wine and wake up with coffee and strawberries and moments. Let's leave the lights low and the windows open in a high rise hotel. Let's make high drama in a roadside bar and leave everyone wondering who we were. Let's gamble ourselves away in Atlantic City, hold hands in Sao Paulo, trip the lights fantastic in London. Let's love each other big through the new year and beyond.

"The problem with dying," she tells me loudly in my ear, trying to compete with the thunderous music around us, "is there's no afterparty." I wonder how many times she's used this line, and how long she spent crafting it, or if it's just something someone else once used on her. I wonder if it worked. When she removes her lips from my ear to see my reaction, I can only offer a wan smile and another pull from a longneck bottle. If the unfocused distance in her eyes is any reflection of reality, she's too far gone to notice my lack of interest anyway, so I take in the view of this stygian grotto that passes for a club before turning my gaze back to her, to see I was wrong; she's noticed, and the pull at the corners of her eyes announce it louder than the bass of these speakers. Romance isn't found in a dancefloor gilded with leather and lace, I want to tell her, but don't, and we lose each other at one hundred twenty beats per minute.

I hate bad grammar.
I hate the caps lock key.
I hate bad drivers.
I hate bureaucracy.
I hate the whole world
And its stupidity.

Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.

I hate the customers.
I hate the Nanny State.
I hate computers.
I hate watching my weight.
I hate the whole world
And its complacency.

Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.

I hate the Randroids.
I hate the Chomskybots.
I hate Establishment.
I hate my broken thoughts.
I hate the whole world.
It's such a messed up place.

Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.

This isn't about me. This is about the way we two, you and I, tangled half-mad through haze of winter nights. The way our voices stumbled together in the dark. You had your secrets, I had mine, but the distinction melted into unity in those deep evenings of discourse, and we'd remember things together, as though there were anything at all for us to remember. Maybe this is about me after all, but it's also about the way my heart still beats to the syllables of your name.

Night gripped the throat of the sky like a killer's hand, intimidating all starlight to slink back behind the cover of clouds. I downed the last of the scotch and put the glass on the void expanse of the desk between us.

"I might," I told her, "but you'll have to be playing bigger than that." Her legs crossed and uncrossed beneath her desk, or so I imagined, and after four knocked back, I wasn't in the mood to tell the difference; she'd gotten to me that way, and she knew it.

Shadows played along her face and hair as she moved like poetry around the desk and pressed herself against me, with a voice like a steam sauna asking "How much bigger?", ruby pouting lips and hipbones in all the right places. So I did the only thing I could do. Shoved her off me and stood up, grabbed my coat from the wall hanger. Her eyes smoldered as she glared at me from the couch, running her hands down her dress.

"You want this done right," I said, "then it's strictly professional." Keyed the door and let it swing aside. "And if you don't," I continued, turning to step out, "you'll wish you hadn't ever asked."

"That'd make two of us," she said, standing, once again her poise in place. "And I didn't ask."

At that I paused, and made the fatal eye contact she'd been awaiting. "I never ask," she said, "I do. I take."

And sensing that was as good a line on which to leave as any, I stepped out, the door thudding heavy behind me. The elevator to the lobby was quick enough to spare me any thought, but the rainy streets ahead weren't so kind.

I saw her smile once in visions introspectively; the type of smile made me abandon reason and reality, willingly, in favor of fantasy and whimsy, well aware that sensuality was desiring futility and responsiblity would be acceptance of such a strange normality but then again, how could my own desire take me higher than scintillating words wrought over wire as she's blessed me in time of yearning always burning, vacant need she'll hear no more, turning blindly to the hope I offer crumbled on the floor. Still her fire I admire and I promise an empire she and I could build together if only wishes were fulfilled; beneath a sky of steel I ask the Moirae to reveal in their wheel a thread between us I can grasp and hold forever longing fast to wishes not so far-flung cast becoming somewhat less surreal. If such prayers are ever known to those who watch and hear my song perhaps with mercy they will find me next to her whom I belong.

She was there, and we all knew it, moving like poetry. Those delicate glances, chin down and eyes up with an awkward grin directed mostly at the floor. In another frame of mind I'd call it coy, but that depends on a certain realisation of allure, a realisation she denies herself. Two deft fingers point at a beer, the bartop, and as if by magic, her drink appears before her, expertly. Cropped blonde hair parting for her fingers as she takes a drink, all eyes on the aching geometry of her profile. All eyes but mine, fixated instead on pale curves that form the back of her neck, revealed by the ministrations of her fingertips aginst her locks, splaying cloud-pale flesh ready for lips and teeth. And somehow she senses my gaze, or so I think, boring scalding ever needing into taut pretty tendons, so she turns, and I avert my eyes, pretending to study the fixtures of the ceiling with nails digging into my palms.

If my shadow is the only one who will walk with me, then yesterday's sky, gunmetal heavy clouds intimidating the sun into hiding, doesn't bode well. Nor today's cold hard rain, nor tomorrow's lurking fog. Looking up into it, eyes set harsh against interminable mist, I might be as empty as that sky. That's the easy answer: blame the medium, critique the instrumentation, all bleak perfection and completely oblivious. The words in that milieu are the important pieces, the empathy behind them drawing the line between toying and sincerity, like a camera shutter closes and irrevocably separates there from here. But there you remain, adrift in your pretty little there, so from from here. The forecast calls for rain; no shadow walks beside me.

Recently at work I had to install three different operating systems on three identical laptops. I am forever bitching about how obnoxious Windows is, especially when compared to modern Linux distros like Ubuntu, but it's been hard to qualify my statements until now.

This post contains a lot of griping about computers. If you don't care, move along.

More...

Twelve city blocks through rain, heavy night sticking to me, stalking miles of asphalt to salvation from a savior never held, voice only heard, a presence that cares nothing for such a trifling plight. Headlights, brakelights, heartache, reality, the temptation to embrace flitting away from all I know is right. And in the harsh lighting of halogen and vapor, where's the angelic whisper which I've come to know so well? She is haunting the lives of those misguided like me, revelling in her freedom to break another devoted mind, and she'll never stop, and another is down, another broken. With arms to the sky, I meant the rain to cleanse me, purify, to wash away her song, and for one smiling moment I believed myself saved. Yet the grasp she has around me never wavers, never loosens, and my laughter in the darkness fades. Left once more in the shivering evening, I may seek refuge in dawn's foreign hills, there secretly to pledge to her yet another oath of all I have to give.