Open Wires

Dead Colors

Bring me out with your mother

in a conspiracy of fires

Go forth with your brothers

To the great mad coils of the 

electric spires!

We are home here

The sparks rain on the iron shores

and in a breadth of lost mountains

it endlessly pours. 

They carried the lifeless body down the thin path to the creek where the late sun shined copper upon the ponds and the streams were alive with  noise and swans bickered at each other in the distance. Something Bacchic about the haphazard way the revellers pilgrimed towards the water. They had an extra skip in their step, the rubbed amulets within the notches of their fingers, they held each other close and spoke not of old transgressions.

Upon closer inspection, the caravan took on a remarkably alien appearance, as though they existed in an asynchronous era known not in memory but in Egyptian Friezes and Grecian urns. A man in a taupe robe with its tail dragging through the soggy mud in the dirt canyon between the high grass of the ponds strummed on a miniature mandolin. He held a solemn look in his eyes and his tunes faltered, each one diminishing into an odd nothingness when the melody went out of tune. "I take it they're the original festivalgoers," I said. "Hardly," Shannon retorted, suspending a cigarette by her side, keeping the butt tied a string in her mind. "The weirdest thing is that they're new here. No one can really tell how long they've been here, but what we do know is that they're trying to blend in and that they have no interest in the bands." Shannon was burgundy incarnate today. Her dark jeans and patchy t-shirt, old relics of some emo era I can't speak too much about, glowed a kind of wine colour as the moon rose and the green grass took upon the soul of the isolated forest. "This isn't what the festival is all about," she said. But then again, I didn't know what Shannon was all about, or why this festival was even here in the first place, among the petroglyphs and the old caves of an isolated part of Ontario. You could feel summer, almost palpably, emit a melancholic atmosphere upon the land, moreso than in the bronzed aspect of the stone and the branches--it went far beyond that. Shannon's voice, like the voice of the revellers in the distance, reminded me of how raw cinnamon of cocoa pods smelled and the residue it left in your hand, that earthen tone not too different from flesh itself.

"Transcendatalism in the 21st century," said Shannon. "Another word for bullshit." "I wouldn't go so far. Word is that they're doing a lot more than you think." "If looking for nostalgic apoligism to the 90s is what they're doing, then maybe." "Look, Nick--if that's what I should call you--or Nicolas, if that's preferred." "Neither is preferred, I'd rather you just get along with it." "There is no such thing as a time when the transcendental urge hasn't consumed society, however stale it gets." "But what do you want me to take from these people?"