Collapse of Deer City

There never was a Deer City. To speak of its collapse is foolish fancy. But it is an act of imagination to conjure Deer city before envisioning its fall. The despot of the city taunted his adversaries with empty threats & coy dissembling. This was a game to him. He was a master of the carved wooden pieces on the ornate board in the game room beside the bedroom chamber within the fortified palace atop the once-strategic hill. Now the hill exposes him. The squares of the board are redesigned by enemies. There is a circle within a circle within a circle within.... Deer City, below the palace has began to erode from within. But it's nothing I can see. The citizens play their own game, mysterious, seeming to consist of arbitrary penalties for violating contradictory rules, seeming to encourage contstruction in the form of disassembling, seeming to make no distinctions amongst the game's mirrors. Tidal pools. Shards of glass. Unfathomable quarries filed with the century's rainwater. Screens of disused computer monitors. The planes have come & gone, come & gone. The palace now a market. The game evolves, remains inscrutable even to the players, who with a despot's guilde dissemble, while outsiders attempt to divine rules & strategies. I have come to believe all the games there have ever been are divine jokes: despots are the fools, priests the jesters. Players are the very pawns they move. Writers & other docents? Errant folklorical scribes, mistaking the joke for a ballad meant to sing children to sleep & hum to oneself when fitful.

A Perverse Honor at That

The temporary city-to-be gathers rounds for the ceremony. I was taught years ago by the custodian of the temple that the gap is wide indeed between the ceremonies of power & ceremonies of the commons. On my own I've seen the many disguises of the ceremonies of power. Folk ornamentation. Plain speech & idle chatter between the ancient incantations. & the incantations spoken with neither understanding nor goodwill. Spoken with guile. an acid rain. We won't realize the effects until years from now. Why am I being honored? Why today? & why have I submitted to be used this way? Why have I consented to be part of the spectacle--the well-orchastrated circus that mocks our traditions while wearing its robes?

For the chance to speak.