imaginary cities: vorti --

<------ A city of terminals. << This city with no streets but networks of amputated limbs. << City of burnt grass and black limousines. << Go back to Basi. << Lost city of the broken draft, Cadu is a pile of turnips rotting in the moonlight, begging for a trundle. << Autumn in the city of snow-stolen leaves. << Downtown in the city of greige skylines: muskrats grope for cinnamon oranges in the shadows of a giant air-conditioning outlet. << City of sleepy subways and swift downstrokes. << City of miniature cities, laid out on lawns like picnic lunches, skyscrapers made from sweetstuffs, syringes for telecommunications towers, lights blinking away the loneliness of miniature people gazing up at the stars. << City of warm breaths and gentle men. << Sister city of the radiant golden hair. << City of incompatible systems, apocalyptic notations and superannuated evangelists. << City of riotous dance halls and movies that never end. << City of hunger and dirty palms. << Turning upon the incendiary maple, coming down on an avenue of triumph. << City of dictator beige and magic honey. << City of sandy streets in a lonely tear gas nation. << City of emphasis mines and gravity bombs, assassination attempts and mourning news. << City of vapour trails and suns that set like eggs in a sky of brandy. << City of radiation and pliers. << City of garrets and all-night nature rants. << A film-strength city situated, obviously, deep in the marshes. << City too big to be called a city. << City of the big one, the whopper and the raised eyebrow. << City of dread, of shanties and loam. << The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. << City that encloses many other cities, like a lunch pail filled with multiple containers, each of which holds a prescribed number of foodstuffs - nuts, sultanas, rice, meatstuffs, tapioca, croutons, larvae. << Once upon a time there was a piece of paper through which the words printed on the other side could not be seen, a piece of paper so thick it might have been made of wood. << Stripes of dry land trapped beneath a pale halogen daymurk. << It's just been built but already you can see the tyre-marks on the roundabouts, the skidding tales of midnight smashes and the crumbs of shattered glass. << Alligators crawl through the slippered streets, punctuating the monks' marches for alms. << That vision of you standing in the snow was my secret talisman, a lucky charm to ward off bad weather, frosted lips and crunch hips. << There was a trumpet somewhere but it was tarnished and could only play the theme from F-Troop. << The ajumma comes to the end of her story - the slicing of a giant onion into irregular chunks - and looks up at me as if I am about to leave. << City of sadness engines and wet kindling. << City as weary as a tree that cries leaves. << City of organisms. << The velvet night trips me, I can't see jack via fistlight. << If Velo wears a cardboard crown then surely Vera appears draped in green. << Viva! 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Viva! >> Vera blissful and breathless in daylight's profusion, singing through grass streets stretching seawards to the pipelines, shoves the matter deep in her coat pocket and marches, unfollowed, along cool bitumen avenues, her feet seeking skin prints in the improbably husked net. >> Brims of water and the morning, sirens from the soft ward of someone's conscience, eradicated. >> Human city of bacterial plants, filled with ripe organisms, dead organs and the ghost of a tissue, like a frozen sheet of snow, in the smudged sky, the toxic sky, called home. >> Clothe me in the colour of my departure, then sew up my eyes with city needles, urban thread. >> Dusted with a subway smear. >> We will make stories from the pork and vinegar, roll these in the plotlines of sesame and salt, dip once into the ever-changing vinegar bowl, now greasy with pork fat, picking up where we first left off, being sure also to grab in our shining silver chopsticks without story or meaning a small sliver of white onion, and then taste the whole mysterious historical combination on the ever-unfolding storyboards of our pink wet tongues. >> But in the city of Rau all of these instruments have been silent and sad for a very long time now. >> This is your guarantee. >> Zookeepers have forgiven animals for lesser escape attempts; now comes the time for you to size up the wend of the wires. >> Alone, in the chamber reserved for you in this newest of love-hotel streets, you switch off the flourescent bulb instead, before cracking the set-list in your imaginary, trembling hand. >> Driveways old and empty, bollards wrapped in multi-coloured wire. >> Twenty eight times upon a time there was a dead city called Opa, and this is how many stories you will have to endure before anyone is willing to tell you behind which screen or on which page it even exists. >> A multicity referring and cataloguing itself again and again, until even the patterns of its forced assimilations begin to resemble constellations, beehives, shrouds, lives. >> Odes and elegies, sung in minor keys. >> For once I hear nothing. >> Typical. >> Strawberry soju forever. >> The burning resin between us, behind us, in our heads. >> Lonesome peaks, jagged. >> They can be compared with the other cities, existing (as we do) on warped and tortured scales. >> These are the times when you would like to run. >> When will you cross that line thatched with straw, mountainous with geese? >> Caught in the updrafts of belching subways, a new mythology to replace the reverse dream. >> I've turned my safety off, having no further use for disguises, stealth or radioactive hair. >> The city is full of us - fistfights galore. >> Money strafes us all. >> You. >> Something tells me no one would try to stop me. >> Splashing, exhausted, into a pool of algae and carp, because no one was there to catch me when I fell. >> A city no one living in my home town has ever heard of, nor ever will. >> Await the final outcome. >> This little piggy stays home. >> You're not the only one praying for dawn. >> Couples stroll under the avenues of greening trees, whispering lines of poetry, like thieves unhurried in the dark. >> Blast. >> But their dreams - ah! If only you could see them, feel a sleeping heart's beat! When morning comes, be sure to keep a map beside you, if only to reassure your nocturnal half that Basi is real, just like the obscure system of pressure points that is said to lead to another most ordinary city, that of the smile. >> Behind us, mountains; ahead, cartwheels of conversation, opening. >> Shoulder arms. >> Night comes, and the neon day begins. ------>