a swarm of moths

So it's you against me again, Dusk. Or you with me, as the case may be. I eye you, with your obsessive punctuality, alight from the sky like a quiet swarm of gray moths, and smear yourself thick over my already grayed city.


(Photograph by Jill Greenberg)

I watch the monkeys in the market-place, and children. Monkeys and children. Fair, almost albino, children. I watch the men watch women. Not so much out of lust perhaps, but out of sheer habit borne of boredom. I look away.



I start narrating the tale, and it begins to take. It begins to take shape like a magical conjuring, an ectoplasmic effusion in a virtual seance, mostly in our heads- yours and mine, but sometimes in real time and place. And sometimes, ever so often, the tale tails reality.


(Painting by Jason Randolph Burrell)

Like this particular tale laments in resonance with the soft sobs of our mother, the land, buried alive under this monstro-city- a dead heavy coagulation of asphalt, concrete, iron. Choked to death by vaporised metal. Nailed to her coffin of dead trees in a shallow grave flattened immaculate by monster machines.