quivered maplines
Rows and rows. Straight, die-cut lines, emanating from diamond glare, placed unfalteringly in alignment by the precise hands of a tooled specialist under road and planning permission and council counsel. All the little namespaces joined together by struts, wheels, spokes. Thin capillaries of life winding their way in treelike form, through to twig, wider branch, arm and trunk. Fed and watered. Bled and excreted. It lives.
It lives under cloud, under green canopy, under flatroof, under tile, underfoot, under ground, under sewer and tube, and under crust and core.
Your left hand becomes like a mousepoint, an indicator. The stern black steel-tipped stick that every lecturer could wield for precision and explanation. Take this to a square of mapped skin surface and draw it across the paper lines. Each and every single dot will be connected to the next cell, brain and organism in some acute way. Next-door, near-to, around-the-corner-from. Little habitats exchanging trade for talent. Exchanging word for picture or thought for dream.
From the back of birdwings high above this hazel hue, linefinding, the wingcraft descends to a less vertical height. Fingers grip and grasp, held on by sheer luck to a sign, toppermost of a dark vehicle, snaking its path along a red-lit streetway under vivid ultramarine. Each vehicle coughing in clouds, staring forward. The walls have eyes. Don’t peer inside.
The last occasion ended in quiet disaster. The chugging diminished as a cold hill was ascended, jutting out from suburbia, but the red brakelight turntrails through time still remain. As far as the incline let me climb, I fell back down when faced by piercing eyes looking for goodbye, at a dusty concrete step. In for tea, rising to the heights of treewhispers, but stabbed by my own knife and spiralling into drains, drilling the depths, when the room echoed of nothing but my own breath. And even then, who can be sure that one’s own breath is not a cruel trick played by the mind’s charade?
Return to the backwards letters of rock jutting out carelessly from the sea, holding these isles out of the water. Another dot on the horizon. Another town, another time. Another life, but is it mine?
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