Chapter 1: Surfing to Hollywood
I can hear the rotor blades
of your imagination
whipping up clouds
of sand and spray around me.
But HOLLYWOOD is easy to find
because it has its name in big letters right next to it
just like on the map.
But HOLLYWOOD is only the first word in a million unfinished film scripts. A few catchy phrases stand out, advertising slogans lit up in neon, that hint at some superior reality. Images ricochet off the reflective glass of weaving cars and tall, thrusting buildings, down and across like some giant crossword puzzle in the corporate executive's morning paper. But they're all in competition and none of the solutions fit together. One billboard gets pasted over another and the words pile up in geological layers but with the accelerated timescale of skyscrapers, those cacti of Babel glued precariously onto the horizon.
Chapter 2: Lasso
insect finger
descends
columns of horizontal
numbers and names
soiling itself minutely
as tiny particles of ink rub off the coarse paper,
accumulating at random
in the rounded fissures of its ribbed abdomen.
It stops,
rises slowly off the page
and hovers, poised over the telephone,
paper target held in view.
Then, hesitantly
taps out the encoded digits
now translated into whispered electronic echoes of themselves.
In the receiver a far-off roaring of sea-shell held to the ear...
And now harsh ringing, loud and unambiguous,
with the insistency of a baby crying.
But as the sound repeats itself, it seems to become increasingly unfamiliar and distanced, as if it were ringing in some vast chamber where you would never expect to find it, a gothic cathedral or an undiscovered ancient tomb, where layer upon layer of lunatic echoes build up along with the dust...
And now above the ringing,
the sound of your own breathing in the mouthpiece:
tense spirals of breath
like the elasticated vertebrae of the telephone umbilical
which has been tightening its grip around your fingers...
As you replace the receiver the cord relaxes its hold.
It slithers off and curls in on itself,
concealing its coiled smirk.
Chapter 3: Pylon-walking
The cactus labyrinth of concrete pillars spiked with antennae unravels
into the wire-frame turrets of pylons.
There are no people in these structures:
they are automatic sentinels,
rocket launch towers with no visible missiles:
they span the country like the masts of sailing ships
rigged together into a huge ocean bridge:
they are church spires
holding aloft the strings
of a colossal musical instrument.
And yet we ignore them.
To us they are static exercises in geometry
which blend in with the lines of crops
and automated agriculture
like alloy stick insects.
The eye is drawn instead
to the whirling motion of the water sprinklers
and, as we near the coast, to the wind turbines on the horizon:
giant twin-petalled flowers like massed propellers
on a continent-sized wing
warming up for take-off.
And the time is coming when the continent will tilt,
the pylons will stop supporting their Atlas-like burden
and with a million electric blue lightning flashes
they will snap
their chains and march
on the darkened cities,
toppling buildings
and crushing cars.
Chapter 4: The Fish Palace
(i)
yellow rubber hands
scoop a writhing specimen
up off the deck:
hands weigh up the argument
and hands make decision:
hands throw writhing specimen
back in the sea.
hands give a signal
and as hands discard
their yellow rubber skin
thousands of silver fish
slip from the trawler's grasp:
no catch today.
(ii)
My meal today, as always, is fish,
which my servants shall prepare.
Eating in my condition is scarcely
a biological necessity, more
a foretaste followed
by a slow, painful digestion.
My abstract tongue trails
saliva over the marble table and finds
fishshape in the cold steel of a knife,
fishflesh in the rounded whiteness of porcelain and
fishbones in the slender prongs of a fork.
They have finished wiping the table
and now the fish is brought.
I wait a while and watch the steam
rise to the roof of my cavernous villa.
It is, after all, only polite
to permit the soul
time to vacate the body.
Sometimes I have not the energy
to manipulate utensils
and must be hand fed.
But today I am a surgeon
making delicate incisions
and with consummate skill
I remove the inside of the fish
and put it inside me.
As far as possible I take care
not to disturb the bones.
These appear first as cactus thorns
strategically placed to catch the unwary:
then as roots growing in the soil of the flesh:
and finally, when fully uncovered,
as the white pine needles
of a petrified tree.
I leave them for my cat
to lick clean and to dry off in the sun.
Then I can add them to my sculpture.
The hall of the villa is shaped
like the belly of a whale.
Over the years I have covered its walls
with fishbones
which I have embedded in the plaster
so as to form an organic mosaic
like a fantastically intricate rib cage.
Over there a small space is made ready
for the latest component
in my vast calcium circuit board.
It will link into the whole,
bringing the two-thirds colonisation
of blank space
a step nearer completion.
In the beginning I ate feverishly
to build up coherent defences
against the sheer white expanses.
But now I hesitate to proceed,
mesmerised by the mesh-like texture
which works feverishly on my imagination
until I am overwhelmed
by the sheer extent of the intersections.
The bones remind me of a fossil record,
millions of years compounded into one room,
closing day by day around a space reserved
for the brittle bones of their executioner.
And I fear
that if it were ever to reach that stage,
I might order it to be torn down
so as to re-establish blankness.
But I am old and decrepit
and it really is too late to change.
I don't know what else I would do.
I notice that my cat has ignored today's offering.
No matter: she will doubtless return when hungry.
(iii)
clear plastic hands
hold the writhing patient
down on the stretcher.
I can report this because
my eyes are on stalks, Venus flytraps
swivelling periscope-like
above a body submerged in pain.
Trapped in my stomach
harpooned whales moan,
buffeted by gaseous bursts from the tablets
which depth charge my intestines.
Yet I feel strangely calm,
even hungry . . .
And my eyes close
on a final image
of the path which stretches
from the villa down to the sea,
where a thousand tiny silver surfboards
are washed up on the beach.
The cat picks distastefully amongst the glistening mass
hauled out of the poisoned water by an invisible net.
The smell of dead fish is repellent.
Chapter 5: Lament
o
where
is our harvest ?
here
on the surface
we find only
thorns
and plagues of insects
digging in the ground
we find only
gnarled roots
and snakes
the helicopters
which circle
overhead
offer no rescue
the wind
from their rotor blades
blasts away the topsoil
in clouds
of mocking dust
for these wires
these fields
of antennae
do not
connect.
they
entwine impale and spread disease
we
have
failed
to nurture
and respect
them
as we should
and now
these wires
these fields
of antennae
contain
a bitter
unforgiving
poison.
Chapter 6: In collapse
tremors
erratic at ffffirst
then cccconvulsive
and the lines on the map have become cracks
my feeble word skyscrapers crumple
along the fault line
and slide into the ocean
and I'm lying on the ffffloor
shshshivering and ssssweating and sssscreaming and sssspitting
and not making sense any more
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