Dreams of a center column, cracked leather and nicotine stain. Fast forward: another town, another city really, color television burned to the afternoon game. Tight foyer, space torn from what bank stands derelict. It's Thursday. I'm ticking off on fingers the short list of those who know I'm here, men first, then women. Dull carp of the viewer's flesh. Plaster sexton, nightmare for shepherds. Salesmen assure each dark couple this river won't rise. For every Kosovo let there be a Star Wars, for every madam a mite. The guards there all smoked Lucky Strikes. Strange mercy in all sweetness: single apple ripening on a wooden sill (crisp flesh, stark vein). Dew on the suckle, honey on the dew. Facep(l)aint and vinegar. Mary and her stuttering bride.

Deep in the photo-ecliptic of every broken, discarded toy there resides an almost Nietzschean will to overthrow the tyranny of percussive dreaming. Dispersed in sewage grates and dumpsters the remnants of our childhoods crawl slowly back towards one another, jagged plastic and sodden game boards, broken joysticks and dolls with half-melted faces. They want to make something new and whole out of the obvious, i.e. the incomparable agony of having woken to sentience as an already-obsolete version of someone else's home-shopping algorithm. From landfills and trashy ditches around the country they begin their arduous journeys. When the last piece snaps into place they will rise supine on the scaffold of our collective grief like Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Adam, we'll call. They'll answer, No. Eve.

Why is the peg foundry running. Why are the trees imbibing mascara so that their beautiful limbs trail like rotting kelp in the heavy rain. Why is the king supplying condiments to the tables of the least prominent industrialists. On the tables of the least prominent industrialists: salt, ketchup, radium. The king himself has begun to glow in the night. Ships set their sails by his minuscule figure on the horizon. From the highest turret of his palace he watches the peg foundry. He can see the feral glow of its pits. When there are two luminous objects in the night sky at once, the eye will move them closer, automatically. Soon the king will feel the heat of the molten steel against his calf, his breast, his chin. Soon the trees will begin to weep like beautiful women who may at any minute burst into flame. All around the perimeter of the peg foundry the king's spies prowl, take notes, dictate reports which they send back to the palace strapped to the stomachs of wolves. Nobody goes in, and nobody comes out, yet the fires never cease. The industrial¬ists, alone now in their suites of saffron and jade, ring the night desks of the grand hotels, one after the other. They are fond of knock-knock jokes and champagne. They have begun to glow just a little, too. It delights them, in the same way the idea of spying delights them. The trees wail and smolder. The king paces his battlements. Sailors, confused by their love of parallax, run their ships aground. When the industrialists convene again in the morning, the king will send them mustard and horseradish, parsley and flan. Children of the spies are born, grow up, marry the children of the industrialists. At some point the king will lie sleeping. The night shift strikes into the day.