Dan Enache Poet Free verse

Sometimes the Cities

Sometimes the Cities

Sometimes cities split apart in their sleep like amoebas dreaming beneath a wax moon,
some taking the shape of a glass lung, others of a blind ship,
while two wingless angels, stretched out on the ashes of spent time,
plot with a child's tools and spells forgotten by old witches
impossible cathedrals, towers grown from the bones of long-dead fish.

On the endless shore of night the fangs of a smoke-wolf glint, ready to bite the moon,
a herd of pregnant shadows grazes among rocks salty as a tear,
small shells hang from phosphorescent seaweed, like wedding rings lost by the drowned,
and the herd of shadows carries in its womb another herd, lilac as an old bruise,
overturned, yet still thirsting for liquid pastures, icy pastures, pastures of sky.

Waterfalls of grass tumble into the black ocean like locks of hair torn from the world's temple,
magnificent remedies for the fever that keeps our flesh awake in the deepest sleep,
and the virus, patient as a monk forgotten at the monastery gate,
waits for the moment to enter the shadowed, soft intestine of the city, elastic as an old prayer.

Beneath brotherly chandeliers, among quartz mirrors frozen in their own light,
the meanders blackened by the sawdust of water sing their endless litany,
there where day and night a giant drum of double monkey-hide keeps pounding,
and its echo spreads through the veins like a root that can't find its ground.

While the two wingless angels, stretched out on the ashes of spent time,
plot, with tools of their own, the terrible duel of eternal rent,
after which the cities will split apart again in their sleep, like dreaming amoebas,
taking shapes that no one, ever, could have imagined.

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Alison A Smith September 17, 2026 at 7:54 PM A mesmerising piece of surreal free verse, where cities become dream-creatures—fragile, proliferating, and haunted by their own unknowable anatomy. The recurring wingless angels and amoebic cities give the poem a powerful circular structure, while its startling images—“glass lung,” “smoke-wolf,” and “waterfalls of grass”—create an immense, fevered mythscape.