The thesis to be proven: I am an immortal bastard.

I crawl across the brick sidewalks of this slanted city and strange mumblings escape my lips that are absorbed by the fallen leaves as they grind themselves into oblivion. You will catch me laughing, at the moments when I let my guard down, or on the occasions when my guard is most vigilant. My city walls are made of fly paper, my moat filled with ice. The gates are tired and flimsy, and the locksmith has been long dead, his trade forgotten. I live to see what fiends wander towards me to say hello, and I live to hear them speak of their own kingdoms, decorated, so they say, in purple fur and silver tassels, the colors of deep sea oysters and the shades of condensed stone. I listen and I catch glimpses of their worlds, so far apart from mine, their words emissaries of a land they seek to ignore with every provision at their disposal. But the skip in their step, the blinking of their eyelids, the loose strands of hair dangling from their pretty little balloons of emotion; I’ve seen these before. But I never quite give up. That is why I will not die. Cannot die.

The kingdoms never touch, or merge, or split apart, and when their advisors abandon those vain homes of gilded jail bars still the city will stay, javelins thrusting their silent heads above the ramparts. Only trickery. There is no defense. But the spikes will stand their ground as the intangible ideal they guard sinks further into the mire on which it was built. In time those kingdoms will be forgotten, but I will find, inexplicably, the remnants of those lonesome swaying towers rotting in the sun within my own doors. A single wooden beam turning to soil, coated with moss and smelling of summer jungles, or a rock from a church sinking into the pavement of my streets, or the shards of a lightbulb summoning blood from my bare feet that tread the empty pathways. And riding the waves of feeling all the way down I find new sewers and alleyways I did not build, flower boxes left in windowsills I did not seed or water, whole buildings inverted into the sand by their shame and sickness, trapdoors calling for a visitor.

And on the warmest of nights, I answer, and descend the stairwells to find lost paintings, their colors dusted over with age and neglect, hanging square and true on the concrete walls. And when I find an empty canvas, I am no longer so eager to shed my broken dreams over its silk and white. So I hold it close, speak to it, and carry it up the stairs and into the moonlight, under which it melts and seeps across my skin, and becomes itself skin of my fingers and palms, making them clumsy, calloused. Then I turn my restless eyes upward at the stars that hide their shivering forms beneath the grey blanket of somnambulant clouds, and fight the urge to pray.