Velvetier

An extract from a work created between 1991 and 1997.

   The further adventures of a man waiting to break a personal record in the unexplored sub Antarctic shampoo rivulet pathway rise bushes. I stared at him from a distance of about twenty meters, looked straight into the eyes on the back of his head and read every blink up to the moment of his sham oblivious recognition when he glanced sideways to me in passing without looking directly at me.
He was observing the gravel path as if he’d been watching an invisible man approach and was filled with exhilarated expectation. He had a spectacularly routed suspense action stance, cigarette burning in his hand, mud up his back, and I believe he was on the point of witnessing the invisible man and I passing through one another, our footsteps intersecting there where he stood watching on the gravelly path.
Raced back and forth, proof red the walk/don’t walk traffic signs, waved to every bus and car’s passenger at peak hour on the highway city road intersection like there was someone he wanted to see in one of the cars on earth some where and he might just find them!
I used to go there too but it burned down in a light rain at three twelve one morning so I woke at the piano and headed up the steps.
   They tore away those trees and bushes years ago and sealed his muddy path for people to walk their well groomed pedigreed pooches and ride their expensive bicycles on the week end, banishing him to some where we will never go.

There were two bluish pink pigment permeated concave arches of bending water. The fleshy living organism appeared cut away, stood five feet, with the pallor of fully living interior tissues that had both the contrasting details of a snail’s internal organs and the inner mechanism of a human ear. Each sectioned part brightly coloured and thus made distinct from the other like the models used by medical students in the study of anatomy. It was sitting neatly on the steel wall bracket frame above the coin slot. I didn’t make the connection in the dream, but there was an electric public barbecue next to it and it was there to be consumed, regrowing, of its own accord, the sections taken out and cooked. The coin slot took twenty cent pieces.

    Their innocently arranged domestic situation gave them both a subtle sense of ominousness. We caught the bus and I was driving some how we were back on the lawn and then in the city the elevator stopped half way between floors with made one of them a high ledge that we were forced to climb to exit, belting a rubber ball on a piece of elastic string from a paddle.

   We were at another bus stop I hope you’re writing all this down you knew I was going to say that watching the red dot blink on the hill carrying on a family tradition what ever you heard them saying over there I hope you got all that. What do I think? What ever you want for seventy five cents. I could do absolutely anything, I just knew it as soon as I got out of here.

   We’re going to call it, ‘The Australian Weakly’ and in our first edition we’ll profile a grated carrot as a replication device. In Australia where a famous criminal going down is compared to a political assassination.

He really did choke Joe and I said it before the dolphin on the arrow tip drum balancing on the beach ball. You must work fast to write down everything template. He has to go down and let us move in, he’s asking the Australian captain whether everything is in order. Swap watch, zebra placenta, I’ll be your little secret. Melodic harmonic with all these spaces for other thoughts to enter in some way, that would be the equivalent of the guard dog dropping the ball at the burglar’s feet.

   You were back there some where in the outer row nonchalantly bowing out with a group of alienated advertising executives scamming for another chronic noodle in a dock yard tin shed slop house fork full wearing your fully patented video sunnies with the three dimensional perception distortion enhancement regulatory chip blast pumping full bore, having had it modified to mother lode capacity, cauldron shot, mended corduroy jacket surveying the remains in the chocolate room he had to be removed and we had to get in there eleven fifteen earth time.

   That’s about as alive as it gets with commercial inserts. Gas blooms ragged tapestry, doomed to never return, beating the longest second, radioing the Santa squad to attack from the chimney.