Paradise Lost

At night, the air moves slowly, like a dying breath, faint, humid, and voiceless. It creeps down the screen and rolls across the windowsill and sinks into the pillow. A gentle sigh, then stillness. There is no distinction between forest and sky at this latitude. Water blends with the air and you swim through your sleep. Then there is a cry in the distance, a faint scream desperate for a reply, so clear it is almost visible, like a point of light in the swirling mass of black leaves. I am startled from my sleep. It is a nightbird, a falcon. As if it were the last one on earth, its grief-stricken cry is a distress call, urgent, frantic, probing the wilderness for a response. Each time it pauses, only echoes return, mocking its call. Hours later, its isolation complete, it falls silent and stands still, a brittle black taxidermy wired to a dry limb, beak swinging in the wind.
This happens every night.
If I didn't know where I was I wouldn't know less than I do now.
My mouth stretches open like a Howler monkey. It is daybreak, market day for the birds. Thousands flock to openings in the woods and trade insults in thousands of foreign tongues. On the forest edge, tiny clapboard shacks with floppy tin roofs are perched on stilts like birdcages. Plastic bottles breed in the pools of black water beneath. I lean onto the windowsill and look toward the sunrise and see the marijuana smoke creeping down the valleys like a white anaconda, coiling down streets, creeping down alleys, entering backyards, and slithering over clusters of sleeping dogs, and passing by the drunks that huddle for warmth. Black mold smears the walls of every house, like the hand stains of a man struggling for his life. An automobile rumbles in the distance, like gunfire. A grown man wobbles down the road on a small bicycle, swerving to miss a skeletal dog rummaging through the ditches filled with burning rubbish. A small, diaperless child stands on the doorstep watching his mother's boyfriend drink and strut. He falls onto a bench seat by the papaya tree that was scavenged from some abandoned mini van that was set afire by young boys the other night. A tired woman sweeps tangles of small children off of the front porch. Electricity came here four years ago. It was followed by stereos, television, hepatitis, then tainted city water. Birds break from the trees. Music rises from the village. Seven punta songs compete for dominance.
There is no revolution. Disillusion is in the air.