Flicker for miles

Nightbulbing

Opening track

Feedback cackles like a firecracker and the dull scent of gunpowder bleeds onto the rattling, glowing streets. Strangers drift across this weird amphitheatre that has no edges and I see their eyes blossom on sodiumlamp. Every now and then bulbs shimmer on the shore while I try to navigate the icebergs, then fog, then cinder clouds. Will I make it? Tired now and melting inside. No noise inside the houses and I’m getting sad.

And where’s that dripping coming from? A trickle rushing in strong but I can’t work out the source: maybe it will always be unseen, always an invisible acoustic. You’d better not go down some of those alleys - don’t know what’s lurking beyond the barred gates, don’t know what’s the other side of the barbed-wire convenience stores. Maybe a disenfranchised pit bull and maybe something worse. The satellite dishes beacon across the tundra of high-rise galaxies. I can see them flicker for miles. They are lone boats swaying in seas that I’m drowning in, creaking and coughing to some undercurrent heartbeat rhythm which plays on through every night, on really low volume. I am someone’s icon out here. Maybe someone’s soul mate and they don’t even know, tucked up away from the growls of this outside world. There’s hundreds of people like me, right now, trying through all of their day-to-day pain to figure something out; to believe that they mean something and someone else is placing all their trust in what they do. Trying as well to get home, wherever that is.

I’m hoping that there are others in exactly the same position, just as undecided, just as courageous. Souls losing - but not quite having lost - themselves and still clinging to the premise that things will be ok, that youth will not fizzle out eventually, that we will have hundreds of chances to live our desires, to not settle for second-best and maybe, once, get it right. Maybe soon. I am probably living in a dream world though, asking for too much, asking to be perfect or to rip it all at the seams and start again as someone new. It’s dark, but every now and then the security lamp up above, horrible white, catches a tar-like puddle and gives the squalor a paradise-shaded mask.

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