The City of Black Marble

An experimental prose poem covering my creative period from 1986 until today, (30 January, 2016).

  For the three weeks he sheltered from the tumultuous rains in the abandoned farm house, he strode around the rooms full of broken furniture and carpets of thick dust, pondering the found traces of the identities of those who had left it, obviously many years ago.

He felt like there was someone trying to show him something, but he supposed there was no one to show.

When, at last he escaped the house, he crossed the nearby paddocks and stood out on the shoulder of gravel beside the highway, hitch-hiking.

Two dewy hills on either side were speckled with grazing sheep.

He was picked up by a dam investigator who told him of the local community’s plan to irrigate via a bore they planned to sink.

Most of the fertile land would be ruined by rising salinity within twenty years but the locals wanted a swimming pool in town, so they didn’t care about the risks.

Feeling the rasp of the particles filed from bronze monolith birds in the pores of his skin, he upped the stairs and sat with his back to the smouldering fire.

So, something had happened today.

The mercury clock resounded its ancient sounding ticks.

“The note you sent was so romantic.”

“I was busy working. It was important.”

But still, no one came to see him, and he stayed there alone.

   On this spat part of the highway where the town opens and leads out into the plains there stand airline signs which say, ‘Why don’t you get out of town?’

The back fence of the technical college, grimy with industrial shadow, and the pylon fountain, surrounded by circular strips of lawn. Gaudy, muddy coloured, flood lights hidden, submerged in the water, cheaply emblazon the animation of the water droplets as they splatter.

Windows became larger, losing his shadow in the streaming flow of headlights, after they dropped him off at the side of the highway.

The Moon was tangled in the hanging strips of the stringy barks in a Sunset sea of tarnished bronze.

His back closed on the empty street and he directed the key to the lock.

The door so close to the street that he feared the whole city’d be sucked inside if he didn’t close it quickly.

The vacancy of space in the exhaust powdered air of the hallway greeted him with the regained fragmented traces of his moment of departure a week earlier.

The window’s glass made the stars as cold as Arctic sea submerged iron.

The flaws in the old glass distorting them into over size obelisk flares.

He leaned at the back door and examined the twists of barbed wire in the wind in the backyard enclosure, funneling itself against the brick walls, with the stars in the sky quizzically still, through his blown fringe.

The door frame had been layered with many coats of paint to cover over where the cops and the thieves had kicked it in, obviously many times, before he came to live there.

The drawer’s corner was split.

There lay a smear of earth on the floor with pieces of the broken roots of a potted plant in it.

He coughed and squinted in front of the empty fireplace where once the mantle piece stood the lower half of a broken bottle against the wall pinned torn remains of a dog eared circus poster.

The kitchen door at the back of the house had been knocked from its hinges and now lay in the center of the kitchen floor.

The floor and the pillars sheltering dust, shadows ebbing, reeking with the death of the moth, (the fun’s just starting), chandeliers ebbing in the finality of the breeze.

He never screams, only looks, and the streets chew up the sky with their false, dry frailty.

“The shabby purple Moon, alas” his lips numbly creak, lost in the jungles of space.

That night he dreamt that the house had damned him and the future had been closed.

That night he dreamt he could not become, in this warehouse of black marble, as warm as a freshly shaved scalp, now empty, fried gel coated electrodes hit the floor.

Gone like the face in the pool he left there, the sheets still crumpled and ticking the sweet virus, as he falls to his knees.

Knowing them in history it is not something as real.

She lived in a small town, one of those where the Sun comes up on one side and goes down on the other, keeping it from becoming big.

She had a copy of ‘Suez Canal Technology’ on the floor and wasn’t worried by the incense marked as 'strawberry' but which actually contained sandalwood.

She was in possession of the much sought after orange key tag... and wasn’t yet sixteen..!

(Just like his first love... who ended up turning seventeen..!)

He fell in love with her and she to him.

Though the lock on his heart bore a stinging soldier’s sore, catapulting a killing rhythm of bloodied nostrils and the rush of the impossibility of the lock, he never found.

All they asked of him was total allegiance to the company.

He would rather go home and let his children wash him.

Who shall wash them,

the breeze?

She joined the army.

He thought she was someone who had come to share in the warmth of the fire in place of all the marching around.

And he took his blushing bride,

amongst the leaves of the green butterfly tree

Autumnally making their flight

in lines

to the Moon

and leaving

the skeletal frame of the tree

on the icy ground.

When he awoke, there was a rash shaped like a map of the world upon his body!

The sky was clouded: one side grey, the other, white.

He thought he saw a kite but it was only a deceptive shape in the clouds.

Having his first drink for the day was like spraying a fly with poison mist and it buzzing so tormentedly that its presence was no longer in any way distressing.

A miniature bat, floating, freezing, thinking about spraying season, but not knowing, it is dying.

There were blood-stains in this bed.

“You will be an actor.” she said, “You have white tennis shoes.”

Someone asked him what he was doing here.

“Just waiting for the throng to part, so I can see the nothing.”

“ ‘More’ is my favorite word.” she said, turning the pages of the photo album.

“That used to be the dog’s blanket,” he said as he pulled it up, “we had to shoot the poor mongrel, because the ticks.”

It was as if there was someone else there with him in the cellar’s catacombs.

“I... I can’t be all alone here.

Hello there!

Hello!

I am alone.

Only my echo.

It’s a city of the dead.

No! Keep away from me!”

“I warned you.”

A junk jewellery street vendor becomes a ghoul

to the confused hitch hiker,

touched by, 'The Green Hand'.

We left the satellite and almost burned the house down!

The horses close by, didn’t seem to mind.

We were looking over our shoulders, running full pelt toward the barb wire fence. Out to tear down The Wishing Flag.

The wall calendar in the black and white movie dropped pages, until, in the speech balloon, she cried,

“Friday the thirteenth!”

He sat for an hour a day, five days a week in the hardware store's takeaway shop fattening away his youth with the rot of ages, pouting mushroom spirals, in vacantly mystical rings, spindling what the fat encased within him, from the end of his cigarettes, while the waitress played dumb.

After her aerobics class he kisses her and tastes salt.

She is lilac-scented.

Plastic fur ruffled his neck.

TV snow foamed over the gutters.

He watched the third storey window.

He knew they were entwined in there in the red blanket... and he loved her.

Maps of the cosmos

(on the baby’s bib!)

The mouse stood still on the tiles

with the light of the fluorescent tubes reflecting in its eyes.

He stood, leaning against a statue of a man with a trumpet, poised to meet his lips, dipped in stars.

He wondered where, he would again, meet his friends.

The wind,

tangled,

hill-top’s, leafy hair.

Somewhere they played, far below in the city valley, amongst the maze of street lamps...

The high tension wires stretched,

atop steel wicca-men,

lined in rows,

down the side of the hill,

in a rough hewn ravine.

The little lights were arranged in a cluster, in the arena of the valley’s, bowl-like layering, upon the lowlands, in the valley below, at night.

(The remnants of a bubble bath of light, heaped over its plug hole. Drifting out over a sea impossible to see, but known, through so obvious an absence of lights, in the liquid black expansive distance of night sky.)

The gum tree he leaned against had been gutted by a bushfire.

Last winter he had slept inside of it, not wanting to go home that night.

They left the little boy alone and he accidentally killed his grandmother when she came out of the closet dressed in a white sheet.

She threw a series of sketches entitled, ‘Weird Scenes on Space Station Veta’, down the department centre escalato, and went to watch the doughnut machine drop its uncooked dough into the broiling oil and really, who wouldn't?

In the year sixteen sixty two, there were meetings in the hut at the edge of the thicket, where wild parties went on, and the flagons were left, with the others from previous evenings, on the earthen floor.

One, who was disposed to such activities, sought the locale of this hut.

The tobacco company had recruited a task force of derelict alcoholics to create this, its ‘Selected Butts of Europe Blend’.

"Vomquillia airlines flight number one hundred and thirty nine, destination, Space Station Veta."

Marked by the century.

How folly with the greatest art form?

Does your TV do good by you?

Carousels of cartoon, cathode holocausts to slit your late night eyes?

Terror courting skies, full of vampire lines that cleave the draught from treasure maps burned, to tell lies.

Multiplying locusts and bumper stickers

and blue bottle flies

wait for burning flexes

to march

on the rise.

The shrinking cauldron’s bubbling demise.

Cackling squadrons round the fire.

The screeching, acrid, electric lyres.

Children forced to keep warm

at the back

of the brick works

brick oven fires.

He discovered how to fly by falling over and then trying to miss the ground.

Once, his feet were above the ground he forgot to concentrate and clipped his shoe heels on the top of the fence.

Technology ticks the dial back over to a row of zeroes and pounds

obsolete circuit board prints into our breath.

When I awoke I found that in the night from my ears had streamed a collection of rare jewels. They covered the floor and piled the corners high. I rolled from the mattress onto them and put one in my mouth.

They were all made from sugar.