The Spectre of Lost Hours

Here stood the bakery, its cinnamon breath,
There, the square where children chased the dawn—
All dissolved to dust, save in the wraiths
That haunt the hollows where his heart is drawn.
A clock tower’s carcass, its hands rusted still,
Mocks the hours he’d bargained, begged to kill.

***

Three winters past, he’d marched through that same arch,
His coat a banner, brass buttons agleam,
While roses rained from hands he’d yearned to arch
Around his neck in dreams the war would seam.
“Return,” she’d vowed, “and I shall be your dawn.”
Her voice, a lute’s last string before it snaps—
Now every step through this necropolis yawns
A question: *Do the dead know relapse?*

He fingers the locket, cold as a slug,
Her face within it fading like the roads
That once led to her door. A thorn, a plug
In time’s throat—he follows the cipher’s code:
*Turn left where the fountain’s serpents hissed,*
*Right where the apothecary’s vials once kissed.*

***

The houses lean like drunkards toward their graves,
Their windows boarded with the lids of coffins.
A cat, half-starved, in a doorway behaves
As sentinel to shadows he’s often
Mistaken for movement. “Lyda?” he calls,
And the wind returns a jangle of chimes—
Or is it her laughter, skimming the walls
In echoes that curdle the milk of his rhymes?

A figure! There—by the butcher’s old stall,
Her shawl the blue of June’s surrendered twilight.
He stumbles, boots sucking the mire’s thick thrall,
But grasps only mist, and the bile of hindsight.
“Fool,” hisses the rain, “what’s carved in ash
Can’t be clutched, save by those the past won’t thrash.”

***

Night deepens, a surgeon sans anesthesia.
He finds the bridge where they’d carved their initials—
Now a splintered spine across Lethe’sesia,
Its railings adorned with moss’s initials.
Below, the river’s a blackened mirror,
Reflecting a skyline of jagged teeth.
He peers, and the water grows clearer, clearer—
A window to yesterday’s vibrant wreath.

There: Lyda, waving from the floral brink,
Her apron billowing with unborn daisies.
The clock tower chimes (though the real one’s extinct),
And the bakery’s scent wafts maddening, hazy.
“Jump,” murmurs the current, “the past is a door
Ajar for those who dare waltz with the core.”

***

He plunges—not down, but *through*, as if silt
Were merely a curtain, the river a hinge.
Sudden: the clang of a blacksmith’s hilt,
The clatter of hooves, a child’s whinge.
The square resurrects in a cataract of hues—
Pomegranate awnings, brass horns, warm bread—
And Lyda, alive, in her cobalt blues,
Threading the crowd with a wreath on her head.

“You’re late,” she laughs, but her eyes are graves.
He clutches her waist—solid, yet somehow spectral.
The market’s din swells, a tsunami of waves,
But her touch is a wind through a vault’s rectum.
“This is a mercy,” she sighs, her lips
Brushing his ear like a moth’s eclipse.

***

“The city you seek is a chrysalis shell,
A rind your mind grafts to spare you the gall.
Turn back—while the present remains a quell,
Lest you join those who’ve forgotten to fall.”
But he drinks her words as a parched root rain,
Begs, “Let me stay where your pulse still trills.
Erase the war’s watermark, the stain—
Let the clock’s corpse sing, let the spires climb hills!”

She fades like a psalm’s last vowel, and the scene
Unstitches—stalls rot, laughter sours to wails.
The river recoils, a serpentine guillotine,
And the bridge, once more, is a carcass of nails.
Above, the moon’s cataract eye lets fall
A verdict: *All mirages mortal.*

***

Dawn finds him kneeling in the river’s cough,
His uniform sodden with yesterday’s vice.
The locket lies open, her portrait gone off
To join the phantoms that eddy like lice.
The city, a mausoleum of fumes,
Absorbs his sobs as its final liturgy—
A host for the lost, where each soul resumes
The weight of what’s drowned in memory’surgy.

He carves her name on a sycamore’s flank,
But the bark seals the wound ere the blade is withdrawn.
No epitaph sticks where the past is a blank,
And the future’s a fuse that the present has drawn.
The spectres recede, taking with them his dawn,
Leaving a man where a martyr was born.

***

Years later, shepherds who pasture their sheep
Where the river forgets to remember its dead
Speak of a figure who wanders the deep
In a coat frayed to threads, with a ghost for a head.
He asks for a name that no tombstone recalls,
For a bridge that leads back to a square without stain.
They offer him bread, but he stares at the walls
That melt into mist where he’s etched her name.

And thus does the city, in ruins, sustain
Its most faithful son—a wound without suture,
A sentinel trapped in illusion’s domain,
Where love is both arsonist and the procurer.
The moon, ever watchful, etches his doom
In silver: *All returns to the womb of the tomb.*