Spring

Spring is rolling into town like the most disreputable carnival. Bring on the chimps and chumps, the barkers and the bastards, the stilt-men on unicycles and all the rest. It's been too quiet for too long and too cold besides. I want a New Orleans jazz band dirging through the dirty streets proclaiming the death of cold, the demise of slow death by boredom's sword. It may not yet be the lyrical time of renewed green but the nights are beautiful neon-fused tents of fog, struck up over the bones and corpses, rubble and blood that rain and flooding have drug from winter hiding. Get me a snake man with a sousaphone, a trumpeting herd of pachyderms, drummers beating rhythm on camels' humps! Gimme a bagpiping lion tamer holding his beasts at bay through sheer power of his hypnotic glissando grace notes. Tropical festival puts winter to the torch, lighting the sky with juggled flames and the eternal delight of Mr. Muerte's jungle republic of rhythm and dance and revelry. It gets harder to go to work each day.

Let's move to the saturated land of Mr. Muerte. Distracted by cries of love and moans of sorrow issuing from night's windows under noon's sun, we can stumble happily over the corpses of sad beggars.