[John Riley]

Matador

I am no longer led astray by spun journeys. I have wandered too far, too many times. All I saw fell dead before me. Dead like old wood on a beach. The journeys have ended. Now I wait. No ship in sight. No wooden-wheeled carts loaded with dead corsairs pass by. How did so much end with nothing to say? Nothing to present? On each of my journeys, I was instructed to remember how time is collected—there is no end to the ways to divide and collect what cannot be held. When the end refused to present itself I turned to dust again. The empty journeys I took up and down the globe are gone. No circumference was discovered. I wait and dream I am a bull with a matador's irons—a cape made of ice and wind.