the song is over

As far as I can remember, he was taking pictures of the children of mindless glee, who would have followed the Piper up the mountain and down the cliff, if he were to come… if he were ever to come again.

They all knew the story, they all feared him, they all went to sleep stringing enchanted tunes on their minds Picco, Tristu, Xirula and Chiflo. In their dreams they were pipers themselves, playing the tunes of an awaited world, which had forgotten to look back, and thus never cared to compare itself to the worlds it had left behind.

No,

He was in fact standing against a windswept hill, looking like a photograph of himself. Not that one on the table. One quite different from that, in fact. He was looking down at a looped path, humming out of tune. I tugged at his nose, he winked. Many years later I wanted to say ‘that was our little game’.

It wasn’t.
It was just that once.

In the monsoons, when the rooms hid in their own corners of fuzzy darkness and furniture’s smelled like long-lost pets. When the battlefields, where language fought the ghost of Ginsberg the night before, lay strewn on the floor with only the last stanza beneath a coffee mug

that was the year my peers complained

how their childhood heroes were going out of fashion

while in rhyme I could remain cryptic about 

the gradual loss of the credibility of my own

that is the might of the ink, that is the pretence of the pen

the power and the beauty. Amen.

…when streetcars slugged, when theatre gates yawned in desertion, when nothing moved the city besides the rain, I came back home, opened the book and found he had up and left.

Of course, that was his way of saying ‘This is our little game’. But it wasn’t. It was just the second time.