Pearls

Pearls drop into my head. They sound simple and clear as they ring and trickle down the hollow of my head. In fact my head was not hollow. It had to be made hollow. It was filled with intestines – the insides of a human or something.

But these pearls drop. They dispel and melt the intestines inside my head. It's like when you drop a solvent into a glass of muddy water that makes the water become crystal clear. I can smell the fumes escaping. The stench of the dross that filled my head leaving me, running away in fear. 

I am not in Venice. I am not in London. I am not in Praha. I am not in Cairo. As much as I wish to be.

But I know discontent dwells, thrives and prospers in these cities. I know for all the love they make, all the songs they sing, all the wine they skull, all the sights you see, in Rome, New York, New Delhi, Wellington, Gold Coast... For all of these, discontent still reigns unchallenged and unconquered. 

Frank Sinatra, what do you mean you did it your way? What way? Your way? 

Venice's canals echo sounds of unhappy happiness. This city's streets sigh of lost dreams and lost fights – I walk the streets every night and it tries to smother me every time – lost dreams, dead corpses of hope they litter the roads lit by streetlights. 

How do I walk on the streets that no hope grows on, and find hope? 

Unless the pearls that dropped into my head, brought about by ravens, ravens that do the bidding of God, unless they take root and become a tree. Unless the pearls fall and dig that well from which a river will pour out. If anything, I may just have enough hope for myself to get by my seventy years of existence – or if you like, some bit of hope for the streets that are lit by orange streetlights where dead hopes lie like corpses, immobile and lifeless.