Why is this on my Timeline?
I trip down the staircase of corporate medicine, wrestling with red light insomnia, and lace my hiking boots to a Stone Age snare drum. I feel sheer delight as I hang from electric waves, and as the scene fades, a microbe haunts the selection of Nazi memorabilia—then the mic is cut.
Next up is the holy war with a milk carton kid, dancing to the hiss of a desktop computer rattling along a German highway like a fragile toaster.
Beneath a dusty camera lies the picture book trees, the night club vapers, and the TV knives drenched in sand.
The threat of a free press and an hourglass figure, lurks.
Further down are the alien visitors embroiled in slave trade lotto, and letters from the government stinking of bad breath.
In a way, chaos reigns over a grand piano, and the future of a lightbulb sobbing by a hotel window, hangs in the balance. But there’s hope—outside is a carpark teeming with Covid dinosaurs giving blood.
If you search carefully there is a pattern: youths jump through glass and eat cigarette ash, and as the death toll grows, fugitive armies yo-yo through the sickening mist. So, the rules are simple—never venture out of your home without white lines in your pocket, or a mirror and a razor blade, or else ghostly apparitions will want their wallet back.
The Cemetery and the Asylum
A girl named Rachel Sunshine had a birthmark. It smelled of bruised apples under native trees, sinking into the soft earth. Rachel’s gravelly voice carved the sky into cigarettes while her feet were tectonic plates stomping on lost Coke cans.
In The Night Heart Hospital, an asylum for submarine junkies dipped in pots of boiling gum, Rachel flipped coins as ballerinas set eyebrows on fire with Zippo lighters.
Opposite the asylum was a cemetery for dystopian hitchhikers who travelled under buckets of moonbeams with tobacco scars.
Rachel escaped to the graveyard every new generation, where hipster grandmas knitted pillars of salt and tangled candy floss. Rachel sucked the dirt from her fingernails and then aborted her husband.
Stoic nurses spat jazz and then carried her fake body home, letting her flop into her room where her bedsheets felt like sawdust and wax.
When Rachel wasn’t dreaming of fashion houses and opera finales, she was staring through a chain-link fence with all her junky soldiers, taking a final look at the fallen regime.
Why do we fiend for aspartame and girls in windows? asked Rachel. And when can I go back to the source?
She gazed into a lagging clock and saw ancient hysteria mocking her frustrated mother. It was a simple game of arithmetic: all that mattered was the tinnitus leaping down sand dunes and how the noise arm-wrestled braille into submission.
Television
Come seek TV wisdom with me and we can blast Noah’s Ark into a brave new world. Let’s fix the leaking pipes in the local skyscraper and spread cash like an aging troubadour.
A crime channel freezes.
Where have you been? a lady with white eyes asks a deformed detective resting on a bench by the lake.
He says, Take me away from this horror and place me in the real world where water tastes like ginger ale and the trees wear blankets of rain.
On another side, three children play rock, paper, scissors, and explode dark matter with their dreams.
Hold tight, their mother says, we have each other for twenty more minutes and even that is not enough time to dole out lots.
They cry together as music builds.
An advert appears from the depths of the sea—crawling, creeping, groaning. Ha, ha, ha, it says with satisfaction.
In a small aspect of paradise, nudes lay on boulders as the sea camouflages drag queens and baby powder on a mirror. The smell is putrid.
At night footballers play to the beat of a restless brain, brimming with antipsychotics and chocolate fudge.
It’s time for bed, the lights go out—but soft cushions and a firm mattress can’t hide the tire tracks of a day’s TV. The blare of the screen from the flat above, watching replays of the shows you saw earlier that day, means you’ll never be able to forget. You’re not sure whether you want to.
