Freestanding, eminently wandering, emanatingly wanderable, these refuges providing shelter for the homeless, the broke bust heimatlos, whom society seeks to destroy and now more than ever before, have been set up on no money, only grudging permission, and’ve decayed from the first, becoming less about honoring the provision of the Law than about finding any loophole providing, then — inhabiting it, a temporary noose, looser than most. God Above, how excessively fringed, how faded: intention, respect, a sense of place, standing, a feeling for land. Debauched without habitus, amid the spiraling mud. Though it’s important to make this distinction: this city of refuge is not a city qua city, classically speaking it’s no city at all, only a gathered mass of land, of lands, and their refugees, formed to the give of a valley, the left mess of leftbehind people, outcast undesirables sleeping on each other, waking up on each other, as each other, eating and drinking one another, it’s sick: with no aid from the outside, no intervention, how these people have become their own beds, knives, forks, spoons and cups, transportation, people are shelters from the unaccustomed harshest of elements, people as floors over the earth, people as roofs, sexual implements, sites of excretion, means of execution; the people are the city and the city is the people, and so the decay it’s transmittable, transmutable, how it follows them, waxes and wanes with their migration, their wandering devastation as if they’re a swarm of locusts, not a disorganization of parasite humans — destruction the legacy of this city that’s no city, the sole and so lucrative if ever desired export product of Refuge. And so the exact, on the map location of this city of refuge, of all the cities of refuge, of all the cities that are the one and only city of refuge, up and moves often, is moved, inexacts itself, imports itself then takes leave, wanders and roams widely with its refugees and as them, too, in their tight, evasive spheres, their madmuddied paranoid spins and loops, backtracks and longcuts and yadda and blah — and so the pleasant, peasant mensch with the poor horse stuck whose route of trade takes them past or around and around the Refuge wherever it is often thinks to move the sign, an oaktag placard of his own design if and when his ride obliges; his ride that is his trade, and his only possession: he’s been trying to offload the horse now for moons. Traditionally, though, the refuge roams itself coast-to-coast, accumulating refugees all the slow slogging while: wandering’s forever, as people that tightly knit and wound, grouped for safety, survival, braided and dreaded in curls, they tend to trip each other up, sort of fall for and backward over one another, on top and under, in an intoxicated and intoxicating to participate in or even observe stigmatiferous staggering from platz to plotz, it’s hypnotic.
