Winter came and in collective memories flew as fast as ginger-brownish foxes, flashing across the foliage of everyone’s dim consciousness. For that brief passage the southerly points grew a muddy, bitter cloak; I oft hid behind its remnants as brewing city-flavours sparked more apparent, occasionally tarred with bad stains: agro, after-work timidity, desperate lust. Yet underneath the gooey ubiquitous layers a fascinating district was exploding and transforming, to be used in the after-event for useful evidence by the last roamers who manically rejoice at the truth that the deeper boroughs evaded. Stark definition; their beautiful roots lay in an always-in-motion sub-energy, boundless movements, the core untracked.
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In a seeming symphony, the multi-headed waves of harmonies came – industrial-hefty noise shudder splinters, in-time micro cacophonies of chaotic traffic elevated above and then echoing through the shapes, the suburban grilles, and a rising phalanx, urban-infused coos of disenchanted singletons, or trapped, lost expectations, maybe from those still here, festering in the shadows. Throughout those black, lights-on months, the boxed-in days, such sounds gathered – miraculously, in hindsight – as a single, serene slab and without reason, and these were not the musics of the radio, the manufactured memories, but slithers of an ingrained fabric, a soundtrack to a big-vibed landmark, available to always return to, to rely on.
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If the topography spaces would have enabled it, I may have shouted to my friends across the chasmic expanse with great ease. As it was we struggled between previously not-there mega-blocks or whole-glass edifices, cubes and cheese-graters, springing from bulldozed vastness, shifting and hardly ever remaining in one place, fluctuating landscapes and city furniture, growing forever and confusing casual bystanders who wanted to own this particular map but never could. So our voices became warped and tangled, and the true meanings of our now fragmented wishes or words of hope splintered too, away from us, and shielded desires, while the big place morphed towards a greatly unsettled future, mocking the past and any visions of it we’d frozen.
© Copyright 2018 John Maher