City of warm breaths and gentle men. City of pencilled notes begging forgiveness, expressing praise and cementing friendship. City of shared liquor. I met a man who told me his name and with that simple act declared his genuine sincerity. We walked by the river and talked aimlessly, covering neutral ground just as easily as…

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 landing strips and vertical automobile repositories filled with carcasses of crashes long extinct, shards of steel bone and empty rearview mirrors.…

City of sleepy subways and swift downstrokes. City of empty apartments and overcrowded hostels. A city without inhabitants, only visitors. Disgruntled in their winter jackets, following memorised but outdated itineraries, tourists wander but do not take photographs. Information is posted on streetcorners but it has been superannuated. City of scripts and small change. Sweet rays…

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…

Autumn in the city of snow-stolen leaves. City of donkey’s eggs. City of the never-sleeping conduits, of seasonal employment as a street-painter. Reporting for duty, I am issued with a broom and a facsimile of a work of art. I am told that I must re-create this work of art by sweeping selected leaves from…

Lost city of the broken draft, Cadu is a pile of turnips rotting in the moonlight, begging for a trundle. Sagacious as a small pea, its typical inhabitant wears a crown upon his head to hold his mirrors in. While the powers of the crown have been disabled, still its physical properties bear mentioning. In…

Go back to Basi. Get silly fresh. Tidy your hair. Check that every memory you can recall is actually yours. You may not get another chance to protest at the passing of time with such rigour. In Basi, where all the men wear shoulder pads, hoaxes are committed on a daily basis. Don’t be worried,…