The Dying Man

Spiderwebbed folds hang from each arm as moss will from an aged cypress. He sometimes raises haggard hands as if he dreams of rising again, or to cover bleary eyes. The world is his mind. Daylight a brief fluttering against closed lids. Night floats above him, he feels a light-headed immunity from the gravity of death. Outside in the hard-wired clamor buses and trucks growl up droning hills. Order and chaos are ushered in and out of pallid pools of sunshine and the wheezing colostrum’s of a cloudy effusion. Most who travel are asylum workers, the old brick systems of sanity must be maintained, the matrix clipped, then the disused swept under crumbling foundations. The infrastructure, the fabric the kapok and pith, the nuts and bolts of an older age - it all needs workers. The dying man hitchhikes under a hand, feels the warmth of flesh in full-bloom. He sighs, the nurse hears only a gurgle, she is monitoring, the winking machines are monitoring while camara’s monitor everything. He remains in his world, always sinking upwards toward what he knows not, but it’s not here so he does not care.