Smoke Fifteen

Like a hawker trundling bananas up and down the laneways, the RFK broadcast begins, its strident rhetoric pock-marked with apaches of radio static. Blue days and green days, orange dawns and summer frosts; all part of the terraforming mandate. Unfurling fogs along the coastal waterways and islands, the mandate encompasses both canals and streamlets, giant hydro-powered works and pipes, radiant dikes and estuarine fisheries. In the city, the tanks of restaurants scramble with the product of this hyper efficiency, this sea dis-ease. I check the wireless updates for live feeds but find no point of interconnection, sitting in the bar’s steamy light. No switches anywhere, and no need, not even at night. Broadcasts that re-appear on Windows at dawn, backed by soft jazz. Pre-recorded night sounds and soft applause. Korean streets, stalls. Plastic money, plastic watches. Echoes of Buddhist teachings curling down a grimy laneway in reverse.