Summer tomb

Vines crawl across the screen panel above me.  Shamefully pale, the night hides its face from us.

I’m standing at the deep-end of a drained pool staring at the scene in front of me; the algae speckled walls around and the moon peeking through the vines above.  At my feet there is a jet black puddle.  Cigarette butts glow like stars in the flotsam, then I’m no longer looking into a puddle of grime but into space.  I forget the party going on around the empty pool.  Their voices become distant memories remembered. 

I imagine everywhere else as abandoned as the scene laid out before me.

The rusted ladder squeaks horribly as I climb it to the surface to tell the people of my vantage point from the bottom of the derelict pool, along the precipice of a black-hole.  They look at me as one does the homeless doomsday prophets of the city or they look disinterested.

Someone says they’d rather not get their clothes dirty.  I notice I’m the only one here wearing a suit but I say nothing about it.  Instead I ask: “Don’t you want to know a freedom from yourself?  Wouldn’t you like to stand on the brink of infinity and look down?” but no one answers.  They are all distracted; laughing their heads off at a drunk who fell in a bush. 

”Haha,” they say, “haha.”