facet liturgy
Wild Flower of the Monkey King
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
So the bloom began to pare the ledgers into three-breath prayers, each entry a small sky pocketed moon emptied river holds a child's name until morning opens its palm origami church bows
A thin frost hems the bloom's edges, each petal folding like a closed shop window Its ledger exhales white filaments into the lane, listing which doors may dream through winter The Monkey King tucks his laughter under a down coat and listens as leaves file away their names The flower files the year like a receipt, stamping every memory with a patient, polite forgetting
Petals become panes, thin cathedrals catching the sun and holding it like confession Each sliver rings with stolen laughter, a high, small tinkling that speaks of loss in clear notes The Monkey King's hands trace the ledger's frost and lift out names now crystallized, immaculate and precise So the bloom arranges mourning into facets—every remembrance shaved to clarity, unbearably lovely
Petals slow into mineral syllables, naming quartz and mica like bead-prayers in a palm The ledger trades ink for pebble; each entry rings as if struck by a small, devout hammer The Monkey King counts the clinks—names settling into granite registers with a slow, solemn gravity Streets answer in geode echoes; winter hardens into garnet and flint and forgetting takes on the patient weight of stone
The bloom arranges itself into a vault of prisms, shelves glinting with patient memory Each facet files a single sentence, catalogued by angle, by the way light forgets and remembers The Monkey King measures the panes with a fingertip; a lodged name fractures, spilling a small, clean bell So the old ledger dissolves into a registry of refracted moments, each shard keeping its hush intact
In the chapel of panes the prisms keep time, each angle a small bell that remembers how to pray Registers unclasp; names lift like birds, like coins, like winter taking one easier breath toward day The Monkey King lays the last receipt in his palm; it burns to ash, then to seed, then to a road's soft fold So the bloom remakes itself into a single map-seed that knows all angles and lets every old—f
— The End —