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The rain pours down like it knows. He feels the tingle of its acidity on his fingers. Hood up and coat zipped, He trudges through Hong-Kong Long; a two mile stretch of the most repugnant things the orients have to offer. It isn’t all bad, but if you didn’t grow up eating mammalian eyes, brains, or balls it wasn’t the place for you. He ducks into an alley; the collective neon paints him a hundred shades of blue, pink, and red. He began trudging through the slums, passing shattered doors and broken windows. The stench of the gutter filth didn’t bother Him; He had been a priest for so long that He honestly preferred it to the smell of all the shit that came pouring out of people’s mouths.

He acquires a collection of glances, glares, and gazes as he made his way deeper into the maze of low income housing and side street businesses. Any natural light that had made it past the cloud cover had long been obscured by the tightly packed buildings, and the umbrage of cables that stretched between them. He moves like you would expect a lifelong city dweller to, weaving gracefully around person and object alike.

His leatherette boots click quietly against the ground as they make their way from slab to slab of the cracked and shattered pathway. A handful of eras could be observed in the ground he treads. Asphalt and concrete from the information era, plastics and carbon fibers from the second enlightenment, and the collective fuck ups of everything since that would come to define this era, regardless of what they would choose to call it.

He sits down, His coat tails drifting along the surface of whatever puddle lurked below him. For once, the stench abates. The smell of freshly spun noodles greets Him. He is at Tau-Lo’s Noodles. A 6x6 kitchen built into the back alley wall of some ungodly large structure. It has seating for three, but it never needs more than two. Tau-Lo looks at the priest, smiles, and begins making the usual. Our priest reflects on the moment. By some strange stretch and bend of reality, this noodle cart has become more of a safe place than the very walls and pillars He has dedicated his life to. But before He can think on this for too long, his Lo-Mein is ready; shreds of onion, two eggs, light brown sauce, red chili flakes. His hardships have come to a momentary end.

We are weighted.
Stricken by undaunting mistakes.
Curled fists and telephone calls,
left unanswered to the monotone beep of recorders.
Let to float, back in way of slurred movement and speech.

I am cast here; amongst isles of rotten ships, and memories of dead shepherds.
I sit upon these damp and shattered hills,
while the red light of towers warns aeroplanes away from me.
That same red light that blinks on your answering machine, intermittent in its gaze.
I am weary, but not beaten.

Yet I find myself alone.
For as waves crash upon the shore, the rhythm of that force holds me,
brings me in and whispers a comforting pain.
One of tired truths.

Cold nights in broken stone keeps, long since abandoned, are that which wait for me.
As letters I write, will never reach you, never be torn open in absence of a letter knife.
Never be stained by your tears, or spilt tea.