0
Poet abruptly pulled off to the left side of the road. A car came from behind him blaring its horn at the sudden decision, then its taillights could be seen shrinking away; its sound also, like an expiring instrument, decreased, as Poet sliced across the second lane.
His car moved delicately onto the gravel; its tires, inching, sounded the slow crack of an expansive skull.
The headlights washed over the diminishing path. At its end, Poet finally parked.
He turned off the engine, and considered the view from the secluded cliff side.
Then Poet slept.
––––––––––––––––
Poet opened his eyes and exited the car, moving toward a large stone positioned neatly beneath a tree.
Arriving, he sat familiarly on it, his eyes trained on the horizon. There, he lit a cigarette and immediately extinguished it. Then he lit a second one, this time smoking it.
Lunar silence approached like a fat drop, and Poet’s fragile heart beat like thin paper.
1
The city lay beneath its virginal smog, curling lustily for Poet.
Extinguishing his cigarette, he extracted a bit of paper and a frisked his pockets for a pencil.
Then Poet began to note the things he saw:
Its tallest buildings speak in accents,
and its vehicles hum, bleeping glitched permutations
of a microchip.
The city is all sound and motion, but it never moves,
never, as the sun comes down swiftly beyond it:
descending to its watery seat,
once more as it always, always does.
Poet stopped writing for a moment, and observed the city from his elevated position.
Then Poet began to note the things he saw once more:
Lights igniting, one at a time, then lighting up in groups: circuitry, glinting and exploding. In minutes the city will be wholly lit, buzzing, with its vehicles multiplying, rodent-like and enchanting, grinding to an imperceptible throb, like ink-black bubbles glittering at the lips of a deep,deep mouth––all of it so nearly swallowed.
He began to write more quickly, flitting his gaze from the surface of the crumpled page spread out on his knee, to the broad landscape beneath him. For each shift of his eyes, several symbols were inscribed. He sat writing for a while longer.
Lights are beaming skyward and bulbs are blinking down from passing airplanes. All wired.
Everything is excess, like dividing cells. The whole body is now endless spasm. Ceaseless eroticism. The city is lighting into life: a spray of molten bullets appear in a train across the night sky.
Flash.
All of it is luminous body, a trillion bulbs hissing electrically on the lip of a deep, deep mouth. Inviting: come. Breathing in its observers. Breathing them up to the electric blackness of its surrounding mountains ofabandoned caves and hollow trees. Aluminum mountains where cold wind flies off snow and ice, howling paindown ––
He fell asleep.
––––––––––––––––
A while later, he opened his eyes and read over what he had written before. His eyes shifted from line to line, at times going over the same set of words, at times skipping back and forth over the page. He chewed his lip. Then he began to erase his words.
One by one, the words were removed, leaving behind faint yet resistant traces.
After a long look at the pencil, he finally turned back to view the city once more.
It lay there, still decorous beneath its putrid smog.
He began to write once more.
Its longest coast littered with lost messages,
and its people nervous, perpetually chattering,
the mathematical din of crickets.
The city is all symbols and meaning,
but it never expresses, never,
as the moon shows forth above it: rising to its peak of evil
once more, as it always, always does.
Poet stopped writing for a moment, and observed the city from his elevated position.
Then he began to write once more:
Words are dribbling, drop-by-drop, then washing away: currents, twirling and destroying. In minutes the city will be drowned, bloated, and its people will be turned, fish-like and mesmerized, suspended in a black net of light, like the shocks flying out of a cut fuse atop a high, high tower––none of it with any meaning at all.
He began to write more quickly, flitting his gaze from the surface of the crumpled page spread out on his knee, to the broad landscape beneath him. For each shift of his eyes, several symbols were inscribed.
He sat writing for a while longer.
Currents are swirling up to the surface and bodies are falling from passing ships. All inscribed.
For a stated term all will remain moist, at first just the edges, then the middles, like scrunched sponges. The whole body will be drunk. Perpetual intake. The city will choke fluid: every vampire drinking and drinking and drunk.
Waves.
All of it is aquatic luxury, a trillion molecules melting into one, all dancing like the scales of a netted fish. Imposing: captured. Tying fish. Tying them to each other with their 15,000 hearts beating cold blood sent like some prehistoric kiss. From a prehistory that was and will always be cold, frigid, careless and indifferent.
He stopped and went to sleep once more.
––––––––––––––––
A while later, he opened his eyes and read over what he had written. His eyes shifted from line to line, at times going over the same set of words, at times skipping back and forth over the page.
He chewed his lip. Then he began to erase his words.
One by one, the words were removed, leaving behind faint yet resistant traces.
Dusting off its residue from the face of the crumpled sheet, Poet saw that the eraser was finally spent.
After a long look at the pencil, he finally turned back to view the city once more.
2
Poet was unable to sleep, yet his eyes remained closed.
Behind his eyelids, on the inner side of his skull, he could see the city, stretched endlessly before him. Its different aspects coming together in shapes, shapes that concealed the city, animating it, characterising it, making it a place Poet could know, a place built for his unending look.
But his look was even hungrier than this. With his imagination he tore these shapes off the city’s body and rearranged them: placing what was once there, here, and what was here, there.
Then, as he continued his work, he allowed small figures to drift down onto the face from on high; down onto the city, in their miniature parachutes, the figures crept. Little black figures shaped like small arches, little knife-cuts coming down a curtain, like question marks harassing.
Little black figures with needle legs, legs that cut. They came down onto the city, the city that was being rearranged like a pretty girl’s face. He committed this violence to the face of the city, as though rearranging the features and parts of a face. Like slicing the face of a young girl. Beautifying it. Cutting faces out of a face.
The surgery was in full swing by then. The face was to be remade entirely. It was, in its current form, to be destroyed.
All the figures had finally touched down; they dispersed and were hidden soon after that.
Poet remained unmoved on his stone, beneath his tree, focusing his imagination as it set to its task of dissection. His mind followed the figures as they spread across the city, fulfilling their tasks.
Her small girl’s eye – beside the other one – brought forth a difficult face for Poet to look at, a face ambiguous for Poet to question. This face:
“How does it dissolve into a head? Do the eyes close and curl like ears? Do the ears come forth into a clap? Do they pinch a nose out of breath? Does the mouth open wide over the forehead and swallow her hair? Strands floating up like an underwater plant, its tentacles spreading eyeball pupils and eye lashes and small hairs sprouting; all this just to fall into the wind spreading all over the smoggy sky?”
Poet hardly stirred as these thoughts cluttered over each other in his mind.
“They were like lashes on her cheeks; lashes turning into lips, turning into eyelids, peeling back over an open mouth screaming between inhalations that other black figures could slide down. To slide down in order to find their place back at the tip of her tongue that is holding up a single eye, a hard and watery eye that casts a blindness out onto the languishing horizon. What is this face that is so many faces? It only disfigures and reconfigures so to disfigure again.”
These things Poet thought about obsessively.
Then Poet cut off. It was difficult to persist.
For a time he no longer directed the figures.
He sat silently observing.
Then he slept, and in his sleep the figures persisted.
–––––––––––––––– i
There: black steel is roaring quick on a highway; a car faster than a scream.
It came around like a knife travelling from her eye to the corner of her mouth.
Inside the driver is tapping his thumb, and the steering wheel is shaking. A stubbed cigarette hissed. Beside him was a skeleton clutching a purse, its transparent hair tied up in a padlock and its eye sockets flickering a film deep within. The film was of gunshots and collapsing buildings, shattering glass and bullets.
Rat-tat-tah.
Rat-tat-tah.
Rat-tat-tah.
tah-tah-tah
Drops of violence were smeared all over her skull, a shot of potent death smeared over its eye sockets.
No words, just a beat and speed, just like that, a car faster than a scream, then it smashed off the road.
Blood. Blood. Blood and dripping fuel.
The little black figure had escaped the explosion was running.
–––––––––––––––– ii
There: two men on motorcycles snipping the a street in half.
The face’s tears coming down like twinning defeat.
For each there was a leather jacket and a weapon. They rode up to a building dozing on a quiet street. Motorcycles hushed, they leaped off like horsemen. Through the gate and up three floors like rats, then through the door and down the corridor:
Rat-tat-tah!
A spray of blood on the bed, wall, ceiling and rug. Screams in the house.
Bang. Bang. Bloody bed sheets. Bang Bang.
The high-pitched drone of motorcycles erases everything.
–––––––––––––––– iii
There: Three girls opens the doors of three different cars and into each a black figure slips in as well.
Like a blinking from fear, but the threat has already slipped under he eyelids. There is no scream for that.
They drop their bodies into their cars and each finds a figure. Deserted parking lots, and cut waistbands.
Snip. Snip. Bloody car seats. Snip snip, while the windows muffled three curdling screams.
4
Poet stood up from his rock and walked away from the cliff. It was now very late at night and the city beneath him had begun to slow down, to relax its tempo.
All of this had happened a 1000 times already. Every night, poet did this.
Having walked to a point far back enough in order to see not only the city below but also the tree and the rock framing it, Poet extracted scissors from his bag. He held the scissors up, and staring at the city, the tree, the rock, he pushed the blades of the scissors into his own eyes, pressing deep before opening them inside his skull.
Snip. Snip.
Ø
The city purred vigorously from within its virginal smog, glowing like a fog-light beneath its mantle or like a smile pushed into a pillow. A skeleton smiling at the door, beckoning with its long, long, finger.
Sprawl. Drone. No end.
idiotic investigations 