City of the Future
From Ollywiki
Poetry of the flesh..
A fish belly white sky. The first drops of rain.
A Dirty Spring:
A dirty spring. Streaks of soot smeared across the starlings’ metallic green neck feathers. Dog shit smell comes up from the snow.
California:
Giant diplodocus cranes silhouetted against a burned out ‘Rainbo Bread’ sign. A blue cheese sky. Ragged petticoats of palm trees rustling in the back draft of long haul transport trucks. A limp wind sock next to a breast-shaped mound of gravel at the end of a long conveyor belt. In the distance, over the bay – sea lightning, flashes like it did at the beginning of time. A cluster of fetid oleander flowers quiver in the spume of a Denny’s ventilator. Another overpass, only this time with some split open garbage bags under it, lying the dust at the side of the road. A book on wound management is open on my lap. The strobing tail light of a descending plane. For hours, the lungs of those on board have been filling with formaldehyde from the off-gassing seat cushions. It has something to do with air pressure and cosmic rays. Unseen metastasis has already started, though death is still years away. In the motels around the airport, thousands of clock radios are turning off and on in sequence. They have formed some sort of interconnected super organism and this is their new language. At a cooler in a supermarket, a quiet woman in worn-out clothes unseals every yogurt and dips her finger in.
Catamites = prostitutes
Anti-gravity technology: It’s been here for twenty years but we haven’t even broken the speed limit.
Laptev Sea: At the lonely edge of the Laptev Sea, a rough man bludgeons a white seal with a rough wooden pole. He is drunk. The seal takes a very long time to die. Overhead: lenticular clouds.
City of the Future:
An overheated living room. Frozen conversations in the corners of the window like crusts of leprosy. Behind it, the infinite blackness of space.
As a clot of blood in the lining of my mother’s uterus, I was comforted by the thrum of television. Then they parked my crib in front of it so I could learn the language of the New World. I saw fever serpents writhing in electric phosphor seas. I felt needles of light in my black velvet headaches. 1966. It’s Hockey night in Canada. Television is in color, but not the color that I’m used to. Hockey players reassemble themselves into probabilities of hockey players. Over on the Chesterfield, the puffy white throat of Mrs Callan is quivering like an amphibian. She has carmine dew worm lips and her fuzzy Chiclet teeth, click from time to time against the ice cubes of her amber plastic cup. Rye and ginger. Scorched mucosa. Her husband beside her, is invisible, except for his eye glasses. A toilet flushes down the hall. The air gets thicker. A bowl of Cheezies appears. My are they orange! Against cloud sculpture veils of cigarette blue. At the centre of the universe, a large glass ashtray - its stubbed-out filters, the legs of children, imperfectly cremated. I lie on my belly and let the nicotine carpet meet the inflammation of my face. Not that into hockey, I glue vacuum tubes to a scrap of dirty plywood. I am building (I am sure of it) the city of the future.
