By Scatter
Photo by Bess Hamiti
The pyramids are ticking in the North Sands.
I haven’t a curtain to hang or a door to swing through. They’ve stuffed my dust into pockets of black lace and strung them in the garden. Only the chains are left. The thunder outside is spreading its loud bag and the streets are sliding between the shimmer-lit shops and peep-thrill stalls. The mist slithers down the sides of sticky grey buildings.
Beyond the great shadows of the city, the hills await the evening’s sardonic onslaught and the air chills with the strains of a deep elegy that springs from the river’s fading light. The sun oozes a deep trickle of blood onto the horizon, which pours over the fields and clots in the tops of tall trees – great scabs of defiance that await the night and its sateless hunger.
Sunset.
The world is dark. The sea is confused with mud and sediment. The sky is dappled with riveted lead. The earth is dead. Nothing moves. Only the now-and-then bursting of a festering wound on the fetid ground.
But there is art. Here, in this foeticidal environment, art erupts with a thick hiss. It hangs and drips in the moist heat.
There is also inflammation of the intestines, disease of the character, classification of the species, shedding of the shackles, shade and shadoof, contamination of the organs….I am at home here. Like the Muses of the Heliconians, I am God of Art. I am the seven sleepers in a seventh heaven, surrounded by seismographs and sulphur. I am the seven free arts, the seven stars, the seven deadly sins, the seven seventy severed in fractions of…
Ideas!
The world cries out for new ideas, fresh conceptions, better expressions. The atmosphere is a limp rag, dry and creased. It thirsts for the softening flood of ideas. Words, thoughts, colours, microscopic translations, grease-slip spontaneity, cries of rape, murder, help me I’m falling. Everyone’s falling. I am flying. I’ve taken the lid off the pot and the steam is taking me higher. I am above tragedy, above the ground ice, above the common ash.. Why walk when you can fly? I’ll never come down. I’m going to fly and fly until the earth is a freckle on the back of the universe. I’m going to fly until the sky is scratched with my passing. I’ll fly until I’ve taken every universe under my wing. And then I’ll become the universe.
Here, deep inside the valley that is my real self, the fog is lifting. The wings whisper, louder now, closer; and, for a moment, I almost see it.
Then, the turning away.
Darkness.
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