City of emphasis mines and gravity bombs, assassination attempts and mourning news. City of lightning and turtle boat people. City of city slickers in emergency ponchos goose-stepping through puddles of rainbow-infected grease. Monumental city, shouldered with statues of great and far-flung revolutionary bandits. City of the comet Kohoutek and the Sun King. Wave your pink fronds in equal time, denizens. Men in short-sleeved shirts and ties as if this is Dallas in the 1960s; women in traditional dress and immaculate make-up and perfume. City of bombs reversing into the cargo bays of silver aeroplanes. City of cricket operas and cicada sonatas. Drizzle falls along the motorways, while distant guardhouses flicker in the dim fog. The self-important jeeps honk and rattle, slowing only for hairpin bends, or mountain curses. The pyramid, fashioned from the jetsam of a streamlined war, remains unoccupied. Even great leaders, it seems, must wait for sanctity to be betsowed upon them by temporal high priests. Bloodclots of wire strung along the tight hemisphere of the alleyway. Hold your heads up if you dare. Run willy-nilly backwards. Hit the extradition running. We have erected a gigantic wall to stop the winter from invading us. Our dear icicles splinter in the air. Our agents are everywhere, tracking your predilection for political rants with just the slightest hint of slaciousness. What is your reliability rating? Has it changed at any time during the past three days? Watch your step and don’t say you weren’t warned. Why are your hands cold? Where have you been? Midway through the historic annullment of our armistice, I took a sideswipe at the moon. In the end I only clubbed a monkey. Fishing plastic bags from the sky, a green boy with a swollen belly. Phosphorous flashes. The inner and the outer circle of an explosion. When will you cross that line thatched with straw, mountainous with geese?
Category: Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs (page 5 of 8)
In 2005 I spent four months living and working in Seoul, Republic of Korea, thanks to the University of Melbourne’s Asialink programme. During my residency, I visited approximately 40 PC방 (PC bang, Internet gaming rooms) and ‘live-wrote’ a series of prose poems about imaginary cities. Combined digital and print reissue scheduled for 2025.
City of sandy streets in a lonely tear gas nation. City of secret cities and minimal identification requirements. City of corkscrews. Dawn breaks across the children’s playground, the eerie neon of the all-night soju bar casting a sick light over the kerb’s exchanges. As I work my way through this alien’s alphabet, I take solace in the cheerful smiles of advertising posters. Inside the club, the space is dense with the sweat of foreign girls and couples lining up for the coatcheck. I order whiskey and coke for myself, then try to dance. Some people – mostly girls – can do it easily. I stumble through the first of many traditional techno-climaxes. Dancers mince and groan on the stage, grinning at non-existent admirers, or perhaps their own unchronicled secret one-liners. City of thrash and guitar experiments. City of miniature pizzas served in paper cups, full moons folded in half. City of night explosions and odyssey marches. A city that cries like single men coming home from soulless clubs in taxis. City of strange circadian rhythms resembling sky thermals, arms resting on car windows, taxi drivers laughing at woollen hats. City of disappearing small businesses and recurring multinational chains. A repressed memory of police violence reappearing unexpectedly in a gold tooth. Who knows how many of these old men were once agents of the imperial holocaust. All together now, into the fearless pitch black of death. City of wine imports and plagiarised conversations. Men in suits wearing sashes across their chests, smiling at strangers. Christians. Cheesecake promotions clog up the footpaths, while clouds continue to flee from the droning skies. I look inside myself and see only shadows, extinguished candles and a leaflet explaining the atrocities committed by my forebears. Emo blasts from the crib of some cryptic anagram mouse on marzipan. Encores by the unwelcome gusts of spring. Sweetstuffs dressed as racks of raw red meat. Caught in the updrafts of belching subways, a new mythology to replace the reverse dream.
First published in Stylus (July 2006).
City of dictator beige and magic honey. City of forbidden city kisses. City of pedals, of monument-scrapers. Torn away, postcards of atomic revenge from the wreckage of timecodes for the lonely or the plain-old bugged. I yearn for a simple light. Swollen on a gland, mimicking bubble machines in the air. The pressure makes my ears pop, and some gaseous liquid escapes. Capital punishment city. High up on a spire of desperado gumption, I look down and see hard-core. Deep within the bowels of the supermarket, a stock-taker contemplates her emergency scanner and gives up counting down the nanoseconds. Out on the floor, her colleagues scramble to mop up a mysterious slick of kerosene. Who’s that peddler of cheapskate delights? Someone should buy him a dream mattress. We practice riding in carts on jelly plasma, then snack on midnight and dried fish. I look up and all I see is glass squares animated by a malaria-yellow flourescent light. We all look tougher with our shaved heads. We’re football hooligans looking for a burning pitch. There is romance even in the boot slapping my splattered face. Your torn tight jeans and our trophy scars. This tantalising mission, fired by an anonymous battle scream, accelerates into plutonium pipelines of on-screen sabotage. Please return that stolen dog to its little space of sunshine, by the fire escape. Someone’s out there looking for her, calling her name, mobile accessories jingling. The trace-warp showed up nothing, at least on this level. Cover me while I descend to some other luxurious singing chamber. I look across and see you’re breathing heavily, though the stairs were ever-elecric and in perfect working order. Punching the transparent seal separating my face from the air, I can almost taste the sulphurous mildew of phantom marches. You’re an irreversible machine, a signpost on the road to scattered sands, where treacherous bandits lie in wait. Let them come. I’ve turned my safety off, having no further use for disguises, stealth or radioactive hair, Fuga.
Turning upon the incendiary maple, coming down on an avenue of triumph. Hitting the kerbs with my new street sweepers, modelling my hips on the alpha nerd. Lips close tight on immediate gum. I’ve got a fistful of angry bleeps. Hiding noxious jugs under op-shop jackets, entrance to the club is a necessary bore. Fake mist spat out of faker speakers. Monkeys climb stacks to bellow injustice. Here in the city of Fero it’s icy. Just ask the cab driver before you pass out. Melodious treacle sets the temperature bleating. Anarchy core is a pre-made fact. Turbo boosters propelling windshields into unobjecting masses of turgid rap. Tear out the postcodes, summon my raptors. Edible shrimp plastic anoraks. Sickening blows over dinner swap meets. Candy blossoms on the faraway streets. Include your numbers in all correspondece. Mine are 34, 4566 and 711. Call me. I’m out. Some serious error occurred deep in my mind-wipe and I’m currently cynical as to the make-up of glass. He threw a leftie at innocent lamplights. Suburbs suffer under the irradiated glare. Pop-up consoles instruct the dim masses in the art of discarding underwear. Behind the garbage truck depot three men throw coins for an imaginary dare. Someone peeks out the window, with the lights on, then disappears behind a rapidly-falling shield. We remain on moderate alert for curfew steppers but don’t be surprised if the situation doesn’t change. Can you hear the whoop-de-whoop? That’s my angel, watching over the bears. Meanwhile, in the republic of our consciousness, fury beats a crippled monk. It’s not your fault that you weren’t there. In the corner of my eye a dumpster diver. Time for your innoculation. Embrace the warmth of the wooden floor. Rise, ferocious ones, rise like damp. The city is full of us – fistfights galore.
City of hunger and dirty palms. City of manicured lawns and torn shirtsleeves. Evening yawns, the comforting sound of soccer commentary like little grains of rice on a tin roof. City of red meat patties and yellow potato pancakes. City of invisible beggars. City of cigarette survivors and pitiful shrouds. Well-to-do media students shoot movies of fictitious street vendors pulling barrows and wearing ghost masks. Oblivious, the city’s sprawl of empty threats swirls around them. They are in the eye of the western dream. Strange scruffy bums viewed through full-length mirrors terrify the burgeoning fraud classes. Beneath the unnecessary expressway overpass, girls in short skirts wait for pre-destined but still unknown tricks. Eternity is a flattened cardboard box in the gutter. Birds with jagged blue wings like fighter planes. Fighter planes like the ones that flew over the opening ceremony. Text messages alert the stone throwers of the likelihood of a demonstration. Embassies issue alerts about bird flu and the likelihood of police violence at demonstrations. Demonstrations come around the rotary bends like turtle boats heaving to, fire spewing from the megaphones, banners and placards the iron shell. Foreign troops roam the city centre, their shaved heards like soccer balls. Up above, the mountain loses its leaves like a balding man. I am the opposite of my own name. I haunt the sleeping hours, feeling the cold draught on my feet, my pulse racing with sickening suddenness towards a conclusion I have no word for yet. I have already packed my bags. A long line of imaginary cities stretches before me, like a family tree in reverse. Must I populate each street with more than poverty? Must malnutrition be bartered in exchange for nuclear security. You’re out of your head. The delay on the line bounces between capitalistic continents with greater speed than the man selling bananas can imagine, though he owns a phone. It’s only for receiving calls. It never rings. Birds bomb the innocent. Money strafes us all.