THE TOWER

You are speaking now already in the future-feudal tense and broken stone of The Tower,
lightning struck, Italian suited, reference veiled, lusting into the plastic centuries. Stone and yet
everything after, in every deck following the Devil. It finally reaches a temperature hot enough to
melt its frames (still stone but by now steel) and centuries of hooded cavalry charge, full tilt,
through an open window.
Crusaders return home to find themselves out of work. Free lances, hooded and
thrusting, join the shower of sparks and metal shavings. It’s a ronin economy: skeletal faces,
bodies twisted into runes, land owners. A masked man sells wares in the shattered glass. Pale
dancers grasp hands and join in a hooded circle, singing and dancing and dancing and turning
and turning. They seem to ignore the flames. This frustrates you. How could they not notice? It
reeks of entitlement. You hear ringing bells. You hear the scrape of steel against steel and the
sound of breaking glass.
You stay at your desk.
The collapse of The Tower is no excuse to stop working.
Its records must be maintained.
If you’d like we can call it bearing witness.
Every new pane of shattered glass must be accounted for.
You stay at your desk filling spreadsheets or writing poems. The difference is superficial.
The manager who assigned the task has long since fled the building.
Your life passes before your eyes as The Tower crashes around you- the alephs, the
oxen before the house, the horse tied to the wall, all those nights at the kitchen table, your head
in your hands, talking about money. The table is blue, sky blue, blue like the sky before it started
filling with smoke.
It’s now or never. Are you willing to burn to avoid falling? You watch as the pale centuries
recede, as the window gets a little smaller and the shattered glass around it gets a little sharper.
The stone is still stone, the glass is still glass, and worst of all, you are still you.

ALL THAT DIRT FOR SLEEPING

Rotten wheel wooden wagon
Run ragged, spokes in the dirt.
All that for sleeping
And dry dirt for speaking:
It rolls off the tongue
Back to the start, where it began
And onward.

Rotten wheel,
Wooden wagon,
Stolen lowlands, burn blackened
And choking on ash.
All that to ask for swollen matches
To light and swallow.
It rolls off the tongue.
The tongue, swollen and hung,
Burnt from the start
And onward.

Rotten wheel, the real, the there there.
Water: it’s everywhere dying of thirst.
Spokes in the dirt,
Ruins mapped onto,
Ruins raided,
Reading the pages and waiting for ravens,
Speaking of hope in only dead language,
Spokes in the dirt:
The dirt where the runes were drawn.

Jacob Stovall is a writer working in Chicago. He is the books editor at Apocalypse Confidential and runs the reading series Vow of Silence.