Lost Room from Sleepwalker by Hourloupe

The emir had become preoccupied with birds

Sparrows threading the morning air and the vista between
The columns in the outside porches

The shadows of buntings
Undulating across colonnades

Such that the room at the back of the Alhambra

Decided it was time

It had been for some while transfixed

By the fragments of the singers
And guitar strains drifting in
From the gypsy caverns at night

And so slowly, over seasons
Worked its way free of the palace structure

Hairline cracks in the marbles at first
Then gaps into you which you could sink a finger, then two, then a fist

While the emir watched the birds and walked in his sleep

And the four lions pulling in the compass directions
Held up the waters of all the earth
Mythically in the basin on their backs

Then by the light of the moon
The room was suddenly, appallingly seen
Halfway up the hill
Perched somehow on the south slope

And a messenger was about to enter the bedchamber of the emir
With a warning whose wax seal had already been broken

• Alternative
• Experimental
• Poetry
• avant garde
• experimental rock