Life in the balance

Thirteen miles of island packed with history and memory fills with strange ghosts. Generations of the artsy, eclectic, ancient and insane flood the night spaces between clatters of train, honk of cars, crackle of garbage and rustling of blanket to find two. Two of so many people on this old island, many doing much the same thing for so any variety different reasons. Two are lost. Lost to the world of honk, clatter and crackle their feeling bleeds them into the silent space of those ghosts who are left to watch. They’re lost in the fleeting touch and the elusive taste of consuming one another in reunion.

Our ancestors tried to kill each other, but here we’ve come to this. Not bad, not bad at all for human progress that, having fallen from the trees like some overripe fruit, to then prodigiously stand upright and now to dance. We dance the repose of drinking from each other is if both were the tap of the fountain of life. Not bad for human progress at all.

It’s taken us billions of years to get here, me and you. Through primordial ooze, ancient forests and burning skies; through lost on the subway and cold streets we’ve come to balance on a single strand of time. Here butterfly cheeks surrender to mammalian mouths and human hands each grasping, pulling, biting to sate our ancient hunger.

I always worry a bit that it won’t work.