Prohibition Tableau; or, The Cathedrals We Inherit from Barricades

The sign reads DO NOT ENTER; and so it is ignored—ritually, repeatedly—by figures whose limbs articulate in forgotten tenses; their cloaks stitched from ordinances annulled before ink could dry; their faces lacquered in municipal dusk—smiling, perhaps, though only in the way that static smiles at the disused dial.

Above, the balustrade unspools into recursion—red silhouettes balanced on spindle and spit; half-pilgrims, half-mannequins, all bone-marrow and melted wax—ascending not upward, but inward, into the very concept of ascent; their progress measured in degrees of spectral debris, detritus of unmade ceremonies, annulled parades, spines ground to pumice beneath the weight of unfinished blueprints.

And beneath—always beneath—something hunches; scribbling glyphs across plywood with a finger slicked in industrial runoff, muttering through the latticework of its teeth: To barricade is to pray without language; to nail shut is to confess what the throat fears to leak.

A gust convulses the scene; it smells of singed peacock feathers, municipal paint chips, the ghost of metal left too long to consider its own oxidation.

Somewhere, past the cyclone fence—where the horizon rusts into a dull bureaucratic smear—weathervanes contort like charred arthropods; twisting, shrieking, gnashing their copper tongues against the unspeakable forecast—

(Always rain; never arrival. Always dusk; never evening. Always close; never through.)

And the ground? Silted with failed petitions; clotted with the cartilage of forgotten oaths; a membrane where doll parts and bishopric bones and vertebral cogs ferment into a theology of refuse.

It continues like this—because it must—

The signage multiplying; the barricades breeding; the spiral tightening until the parlor collapses into its own vestibule—

A place neither inside nor apart;

A cusp;

A hinge;

A throat clearing itself perpetually of the word enter.

And still they gather—

Wire-limbed; bronze-jointed; tongue-bitten—

Scratching elegies into the plywood with scavenged orthodontia,

Awaiting, if not exit, then at least punctuation—

Some final semicolon with which to delay the ending

Indefinitely—

Lovingly—

Never.