the writing machine

There is a secret that we cannot face directly, you hope it isn’t true.There is a doctor that can help, but his address is a vacant lot, old houses leaning together and filled with strangers. You go to find the doctor, there are flowers in their own glasses of water, you begin to gather them for your children. Your wife tells you you have not noticed, the way people are lead off behind a curtain, the misdirection of gum wrappers, of a test, so you follow the three, who take off through the maze, the streets of the worst part of your town, suddenly unrecognizable. There is a house filled with the ghosts of children, speaking gravely, there is a hollow tree, with a rope and a counterweight, and within the tree are books, but you cannot read them. There is a house, smothering in silence and in the house are bottles of something that will let you see the things that squat upon the rooftops and drink our sorrow, the terrible kings of the earth, but there is a sound, and the streets are a web that runs in terrible filaments back to the dark heart of the unsayable thing. You run. There is a man in black with a book, with a film on a dead medium, there is black ice cream, and something falling.