Contrails knot briefly
in the air describing disastrous impacts from parallel earths.
The knotting
intensifies, fresh sky-lines seep out of the blue.
The sky fills for a second
with every possible disaster from every imagined world.
Packed-in simultaneous
crash marks make a flickering second dawn like the rising of a predatory alien
sun.
A skyburst of inverted
antiverse electromagnetism ignites every streetlamp in a radial mile.
The sodium filaments
burn negative-image black and the blackness surges for a moment like waves from
an unlikely tide breaching the defences of a shore.
Inside the colour-swap
zones hanging from each lamp like burning flags, teeth and eyeballs gleam like
polished jet. Pupils, bruises and sensible shoes shine like full moons.
Often-invisible
citysmog clogs like scabbed-up blood around the daemons claws.
Catalytically converted
carbon oxides forming the cities ultralight fullerene shell react badly to the
active touch of livings things from beyond any possible existence.
They bunch into oily
scabwound snowflakes and drift from the creatures mid-air footfalls in a
toxoclastic rain.
Pigeons feel the
magnetic weft of the world spinnereting.
Flocks lose their cohesion.
Abandoning their rigorous
sense for distance, movement and time.
Birds approach too close,
land on, and fly through crowds, they flee invisible threats and dash upwards
into the faces of commuters, under papers, into cars and cribs.
The death-addicted
winds that endlessly ride the sides of buildings and the fronts of trains,
waiting for a suicide, snap round.
Their feeder-tendril
zephyrs taste the air.
Semi-gales converge
from every side, whipping through the rooftops, making the wires hymn, heading
all towards the central spot.
The daemon gasps out
breaths with semi-independent life.
Doomed, these wraiths
fall dying with each fresh exhale.
They stink of burning
plastic, old fireworks and bad wounds.
Each dying vapour, born
embryonically curled, awakes on exiting the mouth, grows eyes and features,
realises its fate, and screams.
Aware of its inevitable
entropic dispersal it watches limbs form and drift apart like soap dissolving
in a bath.
Remnants of them sucked
back in upon the next drawn breath.
People hear the
parasites on their skin and everyone senses the scurry of rats beneath the
street.
Movements always
present but ignored, wiped from our awareness by the homophone world.
Now the rat claws sound
like train-tracks and our voices and screams are the piping of bats.
Death winds flank the daemons
walk and tread the duellists skin on his approach.
Contrary vapours shiver
in his clothes and tangle up his near-black hair.
A puddle holds the
footfall of the red track-suited man just as he turns, portraiting the daemons
form.
A fragment of grey sunlight
hits his scalp, a
I really like " People hear the parasites on their skin and everyone senses the scurry of rats beneath the street.
ReplyDeleteMovements always present but ignored, wiped from our awareness by the homophone world.
Now the rat claws sound like train-tracks and our voices and screams are the piping of bats."
the mundane with the volume too loud is the uncanny