beneath the surface.
layer
beneath
layer -
story
subsuming
story -
chasms,
caverns,
unnatural bottomless wells.
He knows,
but does not know how,
that should he
- fall -
he will die so
- falling -
thirst and hunger working,
until time passing ,
perhaps years,
his body turns to dust,
to fall
now gentle slow
forever -
or till the Dark City end.
He remembers many roads,
rails, bridges, tunnels.
Huge gates, black toothed,
portcullis, Dragon maws,
greyfire steam breathing,
bluefire flaming.
Chains and cables,
pulleys and sheaves,
great engines shrieking,
howling, banging,
drip black water,
run midnight oil.
He is driving?
riding?
He is not sure.
It is elusive this memory,
dream?
He crosses many bridges.
Massive iron beams,
square bolted, round riveted.
Not welded - wrought.
Steel blue, iron grey, carbon black.
Like the old bridge
above the Penobscot
at Bangor.
They destroyed that one.
Cut it with shaped charges
Dropped it into the river.
Gravity reworking the iron in seconds.
Over one hundred years?
Gone in seconds.
He wonders -
to what will he tie his memories?
when they've taken it all away.
Beneath the City,
turn massive Machines.
Untiring, unresting.
Eternal mechanisms tower.
Weighted hammers fall,
to pound massive billets
at the command
of unseen masters.
There.
It is.
The place of hotblack oil,
and steamdark metal.
A great foundry,
forges aglow,
radiate cold blue heat.
There monstrous presses
stamp endless, senseless,
meaningless shapes,
from secret greyblue metals.
eternally hammer and pound
in endless,
mindless,
fabrication -
forever create,
useless things -
for pointless ends.
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