The whole city is exhaling
Hissing like swans in earnest
Amp’d to the acoustic echo of cloistered coastal caves
My ears as if muffled in seashells new upon the beach
Cold from the abandoning tide, glowing warm with the energy of longshore drift
The biggest collective sigh of relief: ahhh...
…..and relax
That hollow-bend noise we make in home crowds at the match when the awav team suffers a near miss
Getting away with it
And wrapped in a clarity that informs the piercing silence with her shrill metallic urgency
Ringing out campanile vibes (the thing about anglophile scribes...)
Or, coming up from underwater: the instant your ears clear
Or, when they un-pop as the landing strip jumps up and the plane wheels unfold themselves beneath your actual seat
Present and expanding
Out of the bag
Let loose
Bounding in to fill the inevitable void of natural pressure deficits
Live music events: that sound in your ears the morning after the night before
That follows you around like a host of ghosts gone haunting
Can you conjure it up?
Yond comely jail-break swoosh?
Rare as my land-locked lovely when I was a pirate sailor
The caprice of infinity: her lemniscate lullaby grooves
The pulp-scudded mist that rises in summer off hot city streets in the steely aftermath of a hard-hammer rain shower: how the flagstones sweat to catch a breath; tongues hanging low like workhorses ring-fenced in a shrouded mesh of coal-hot steam from the workhouses
Take a beat: we need a moment to regather lest we never shake free of this jungle lather
Ahhh
Listen up now!
My night sky is a blue darker than black and offers up to me a neon majestic trembling jelly of city lights
Green, yellow, white, red: the photon codes of altitude
Low to high as I take her in
Dimmer, populous, converging and twinkling at base like gaping acres of oilseed rape
Peppered with rows of uncanny green-for-go’s in the small hours of urban freeway emptiness; the lush hour
Clinician whiter for brighter as we move skyward: bigger-piece-of-the-pie-ward
Powerful red beacons at the top; non-negotiable bastions of impression
A kingdom of light I am being served; and up to me too, for I am above the entire giddy feast, or seemingly
How can that be?
My night sky, taller than cliffs and wider than sunsets, is my waiter and each evening I sit at my desk in my concrete serious lounge and turn hard to my right
Up he steps from below, silly as clowns and palpably nervous
Shaking like that
The incompetence of novelty?
He’s hardly new to the job; I should know
No, it’s not the fear of the L Plate driver
It’s the pure simple raw giddy-ness of so much life so tightly compacted
Who’d dare to contrive her?
Wound
All year round, down the second hand and back up the minute hand of all the clock faces in every faceplate tower of every town hall from here to Nepal
The all-at-onceness
The very now of it
The forested nuclear impact of modern cities that only residents and hoteliers know - day in, day out
Not your here-for-the-seasons and business pitchers and dirty weekenders: revellers sans maisons
We who constitute the bulbs of essence
The rampant stow-away stash of being; when stars collide and chemicals stream
Vertical columns: the upper floors: the wide windows and great fireplaces; the marble ante-rooms and gold leaf chambers in teal satin with views of other countries
Oh, the curvature of the earth; we didn’t let that stop us
More comprehensively earthward - the neat buzzing ‘hoods
Stacked decks container-like, primmed and trimmed full of Chinese goods
Why not just sail them up through Suez and Panama, pile them high on street corners, cut out doors and windows and move right in: what's with all the quaint unnecessary transit?
Scandi-style elevated roof barns and post-modern what-the-hecks in Dutch boatwood and galvanised steel
Somewhere between trick-turning underskirt lechery and the grateful atheists revenge: architects being creatures of god so all this but some slick smoking gun proof of His divine treachery
Mazy parks and densely jumbled districts that arc and stretch and bend and loop back and overlap to create an intersecting dialect of light
Such brilliance, relegating the broad acres of the dark fields
Pushing even the regent realms and the old squares of swagger with their halls of high dudgeon into the silhouette pastures of moot
Lonesome lamp-lit lordship lanes
Dull witches
By day, the calm and green heart
By night, dull itches daubed and mottled by beanstalk freaks
Their bevelled-off levelled-off lines the upshot of CAD software glitches
Blazoned images in gilt and glass
Ahhh
Do you receive her siren greeting?
An illusion fluid and filtering - if not for the time-being fleeting
She was a song that imploded and this is what you get now: the non-sound of us, grinning wide and wiley and loaded with the ifs and tomorrows of mass potential
Ensemble modernia
I intuit the colour, shape and cry of her twisted upper-echelon privilege only because I am implicated in her projects
At the wrong side of her tracks
I am a piece of her
I am her witnessing joy from within and as such, I get to read the energy
So, just as the entire city is exhaling, I inhale, lips pursed and deep through the nostrils with both force and longevity until my diaphragm is a dome fit for bursting
I ingest and analyse any number of exalted glimmering, simmering cubes
Each piece clawing like cats with the centripetal fervour of in-crowds
The riches of avarice
A dangerous, sugar-spun shot
Riven, if you could pull her apart, only in the very singular insecurities that we conjoin to make waste of
Brimful and almost too much to contain, like blackbirds in a pie, disappearing upward into the dusty quizzing rafters so quick after the cut
Were they ever really right here at table with me just now?
Those birds?
I squint up through clouds of descending pastry and cobweb
Are some things really possible?
Anyway, I always accept the wobbly offer
Always
For what am I but life itself, not so much pulled by the magnet of species toward this massive winking icon thing, as a part of the thing that pulls?
Dancing forever to the piper’s tune and hungry to devour any course, of course
Any time
No starter
Skip the sides or bring them all
Let’s get straight to dinner, Mr Night Sky
Wheel in the fun
Elbows out, head down, use of hands permitted, no talking, there’s a job here to be done
I’ll pretend to scan the menu in haste before plumping for, once again, once more, the implausible honesty of Everything Is Illuminated
Dish of the night
The gourmet a la carte
No need to ask
I’m predictable as dripping taps
Same seat, same time, same small-town ceremonies
Up she comes
My jet sorcery eyes dilated
Gooey and wondrous as newborn babies
And tonight Matthew, I’m gonna be …… Ta dah!
Blinded by the grinding glare
Out of genius rhymes
All fur coat
Good times!
I am an animal designed to track physical movements and so my eyes stare forever, adjusting and refocusing through the very noise pollution they address
Feeding on the endless friction, like hunting hounds pulling living meat from the bone with glee
Animal as me
On and on I go
Further and further and faster and with an eerie largesse into the ocean of lights
Into the deep I’m on dizzier heights
A moth to the flame most nights
Murdering it
Wolfing it down
My tapestry of proof-of-life reflections polished off with the relish of northern industrial appetite
You see, we are appetite: you and I
Plumes in the velvet night
You know that, right?
At some point mid-feast my waiter doubles back to plant the quality enquiry
Yes, Mr Night Sky
Don’t you worry at all, now
And thanks for asking
Believe me: it’s more than satisfactory
If, I might add, scarcely deserved
Oh boy, am I being served?
Hey appetite, you’re mine!
Alas, I retain a perpetual rain check until the effluxion of personal time
…
gK
