The City That Watches Itself Dream

In a city where stairways go nowhere at all,
where the towers have faces and the faces have halls,
where the eggs crack to doorways
and the doorways breathe deep,
there dwells every soul that has failed to find sleep.

There is Dr. Beak-Nozz in his coat of dark blue,
with his charts and his compasses covered in dew,
and he writes in his ledger the names of the lost,
every soul that has wandered and every soul it has cost.

For the city, you see, is alive and aware—
it has nostrils for windows and eyelids for stairs,
and the towers that spiral toward heavens gone grey
have been watching the watchers since Judgment's last day.

Now the stairways go up, and the stairways go down,
through the gut of the palace and the heart of the town,
but they end where they start and they start where they end,
and they twist at the bottom and twist at the bend,
and the figures who climb them are climbing them still,
by their own grim compulsion, their own gothic will.

There is one with a harp where the dark water runs,
and she plays for the drowned and she plays for no ones,
and her melody curls like the smoke from a grave
through the arches and archways and arch-upon-nave.

There is one with a shield painted red as a wound,
and she stands by the water and stares at the moon,
though the moon is not there—
only arches are there,
only arches and stairways and nobody's prayer.

In the egg on the left sits a man in a hat,
hunched over his table, and that, friends, is that.
He has sat there since morning. He sat there last night.
He has sat since the candles forget how to light.
On his table: a scroll. On the scroll: one word. One.
He has almost deciphered it. Almost. Not done.

And the egg-shell around him grows thinner each year,
and the cracks let in moonlight and something like fear,
and the thing that he's reading grows darker, more clear.

Oh the towers! The towers! They lean and they glow,
with the blue of the midnight and the pink of below,
and they have little windows where little things peer,
little souls in their niches, little griefs in their gear.

There is one in a dunce-cap. There is one with a bow.
There are three in a rowboat who have nowhere to go.
There are cupids with arrows and nothing to strike,
there are goblins on stairways that end on a spike.

And they wander the levels. And they work the machines.
And they pull at the levers whose purpose no one —
not the scholar, not the sentry, not the king in between —
has ever, in all of the centuries seen.

But the one who knows most is old Dr. Beak-Nozz,
for he keeps every record of every because,
and his coat is the color of something not quite
— not the daytime, not nighttime —
that gap-hour. That light.

He has catalogued all of the doors that don't close.
He has sketched every staircase that ends where it goes.
He has mapped every tunnel that breathes through the stone. He has listed each prisoner. Listed each bone.

And his ledger grows fatter with each passing age,
with the weight of each figure on each crumbling page,
for the city keeps adding new levels below,
new archways, new arches, new dark. Always more dark below.

Now you may ask, dear traveler, dear reader, dear friend,
does the city have exits? Does the city have end?

I have asked Dr. Beak-Nozz. He looked up from his page.
He adjusted his helmet. He turned to a new age
in his ledger—
a blank one—
and he dipped his long quill,
and he paused for a moment extraordinarily still,

and he wrote one small word
in a very small hand
in a corner so dark that I could barely understand—

"Perhaps."

So the stairways keep climbing. The stairways keep down.
The egg-men keep reading. The drowned keep their drown.
And the towers keep watching with their eye-window stare
and the faces in arches keep breathing their air.

And old Dr. Beak-Nozz keeps his blue-coated seat
at the table of tables in the city's heartbeat,

and he writes,
and he writes,
and he writes through the night,

in a city that watches,
in a city of fright,

where the stairways go nowhere
and the nowhere feels right.