night carnival

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 turned the coin until its circle sounded like a rosary of small silences, Each petal answered by striking that tone—one syllable repeated, a litany of names and doors, They stepped in that slow meter: King, bloom, empty balconies, the city learning how to breathe in time, By the end the ledger read like a hymn; margins became mouths, every folded name a mournful refrain.

Petals begin to draft whole rooms: a teapot crowned into a tower, a mitten filing fingerprints on the city's map, The ledger's margins puff into neighborhoods; stamps unfurl into small sovereignties of lost verbs and opened windows, Coins sprout lungs and take up whispering debts in dialects of light; ink staircases climb free and fold into palm-sized markets, The Monkey King tallies each added un

The Monkey King tallies each added undoing; sums breed ladders that climb their own sums, Petals hawk inventories by the handful: lullabies with receipts, keys swearing on dim porches, Each entry births two more—streets become ledgers, ledgers become streets until the whole city thinks in fever, At midnight the book coughs up tiny sovereignties; silences are counted, stamped, and begin to sing.

Petals strung themselves into pennants across a midnight fairground of lanterns and ledger-stalls, Each booth sold an absence turned souvenir—keys that jingled with old names, tickets stamped Remember The Monkey King cashed his last silence for a paper bird that, once released, recited every folded street until the city knew its own voice By dawn the map lay open on every threshold; the ledger lay