clockwork lullaby

A wild flower flickered in the Monkey King's palm—small as proof, loud as a crown He taught it tricks of wind and riddle-speech, to cart the dusk and tumble kingdoms down Its petals rewrote maps: veins as poems, each fold a compass that makes old borders frown So from that stubborn bloom a new legend grew, stitching history to song and earning its own renown

The bloom began to inventory the impossible: receipts for storms, a ledger of vanished streets and small apologies It listed a moon with pockets, a compass that read which childhood you'd be tomorrow, a church spattered in origami birds Rivers were filed under "waiting," mountains cataloged by the taste of their shadows, borders stamped with lullaby signatures The Monkey King watched the list sign

The ledger swelled into a directory of losses, each entry a bell sunk in tissue and paper, It named a dock that forgot nightly arguments, a bakery whose ovens cooled with someone's name, a bridge that grew mute, Petals folded over the margins like fingers pressing a pulse that refuses to stop, At each entry the bloom let fall the same quiet: we remember The Monkey King bowed his shadow to the page

Towers bound their throats in cloth; the hours arrived like small, cautious ghosts, Each absent tongue of bronze logged in the bloom's margins, a silence given name and seal, Neighbors traded watches for footsteps, measuring noon by the scrape of sandals on stone, The Monkey King laid a coin upon the ledger; the city's hush folded into a new, inviolable column.

He cradled the bloom against a palm of brass and prayer, anchoring tendons of wire to its stem; Petals were patient springs, wound to the Monkey King's cadence, each fold clicking into a taught rhythm. Benches inhaled; ovens hiccupped a measured steam; a bridge coughed the silence into piston-timed syllables. The ledger's margins began to flutter—tiny electromechanical heartbeats cataloguing who,,

The ledger's flap became a pendulum, each page a toothed wheel counting down a hush, Petals clicked like small metronomes, winding the air; each tick braided a cradle-song into the cobbled arteries, Benches rocked in calibrated sighs; the bridge hummed a berth-song and the ovens timed their last warm bite, Under that brass lull, names were catalogued into even breaths, and the Monkey King's shadow