imaginary cities: cloni --

Downtown in the city of greige skylines: muskrats grope for cinnamon oranges in the shadows of a giant air-conditioning outlet. Who can see, who can ever tell. I yawned through the catalogue of an important import-export agency and then left the quiet surrounds of the riverside precinct for the subway station. Here, one finds the computing museum, decked out in industrial grey, drab as the hair of a dead willow in the rain. Visitors may inspect the pre-orwellian desktop devices, the shining racks of digital arcana and a real-life approximation of a c21 drone factory. Dust is a major issue here, causing all sorts of outages and re-routing work, work that will never be done. Outside, in the rusted evening, I enjoyed a performance of what someone claimed was an original folk-dance, all cyber can-can and goofish pule. The faint druzzling in my ears kept me enraptured throughout the performance. I became increasingly aware of the machinations of your heart, at its terminus, waiting to exhale. Our tickets slid through the machismo reader with all the fanfare of Buffy re-runs, chewed up and spat out, leaving us with the smoking stubs. Behold the concourse: the crowning achievement of Cloni's previous administrator, now tanked up, waiting for cryogene. Similar sentiments erode the transports' glamour, though our connection is swift and the port's air is, at least, humid. Sausages glow in the dark alleys of the IT district, now a ghetto for ex-cardboard kings, mutual fund refugees and self-made bankrupts. Over all, the hairspray dusk. Whittlers find work in oxymoron workshops, while salads are tossed in the up-scale city market halls, a mere pretext for the more serious business of roosting. Imagine a full-scale, daylight savings hijack: terror in each eyeball, a flashlight for company and a fade-out pass to die for. Shudder in the path of the robot parades. Sanctify your glimpse of the pre-metal star. You're not the only one praying for dawn.