The city has a deep mind hidden away from its body- recoiled from its muddy veins and sinews- a deep mind that holds itself apart like a secret incantation, only partly understood. It stirs in its tall glass womb, probing its own hidden depths to learn how deep it can burrow without flesh to bind it.

The deep mind sees the skin of the city, fragile paper shroud stretched by humble hands touched by the ages; it watches it tear and stain with the dirty small print of tiny bodies and brief lives that hardly leave a mark, and yet are caught, one way or another, in the fabric of this story. It tries to understand, but subtle interventions and  small transgressions cannot be deciphered by the deep mind, its synapses blinded by their own scope and ambition, missing the smallest signals like the smallest fish slipping through the trawling nets.

The city has a deep mind that watches it grow old, then young again, in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. It casts its shadow over the fractured ages that only the deep mind can grasp all at once, sweeping over them all like a cloud, teasing out what remains like splinters sticking out from unpolished wooden floorboards, absorbing them in the network.

The city has a deep mind that spins an invisible story, longer than all of the ages of the city put together. It started before the clay turned to brick, and now it lingers, unsure of what comes next because the signals have grown unclear. 

The city has a deep mind that dreams itself awake at night. 

It searches for its reflection on the slumbering dark waters of the flowing river, finding only the face of another- but somewhere deep beyond it a promise of itself, someday, when the visions of sleep become the bare white bones over which to start building anew.