imaginary cities: fuga —

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.