By way of explanation

Life is broken. It must be. How else to explain that the glass never changes, that the reading on my face is always the same?

Seasons come and go like gas-inspectors. Do they not sense that something is wrong? Or have they deduced that no one lives here, that the line has been disconnected?

And could they be right?

I leaf through the Collected Works looking for a number to call, but there is nothing. What meanings there were seek the camouflage of pages, disguise themselves as words. I try to smoke them out, but they would rather die than be revealed.

I shut my eyes in panic, obliterate the text. But the colors of these sentences scream like ghosts behind my retina. Language is a wildfire that spreads through my brain.

Must I put out my own eyes then? In my dream the goddess atones for her silence by sending us a library. But the thieves come in the night and steal it. The books disappear into the darkness like crumbs into an anthill. When the dawn comes the shelves are a second crucifix, a skeleton picked clean.

We have come to this land by way of Explanation. That is all I can tell you. You must not ask me what it means.