19: Hatch

That Old Time Trick 2: Pressure Points -------------------------------------- That night, there was a greater urgency in the haze, they pressed their convoluted message scripts, the purest practice speak my ears had had to swallow, vomiting it through the world’s radio transmitters, kinda flipped a switch in the adults, so parents began placing stove on stove to keep the schools heated, tottering towers of wood burners rose up out of the landscape, children forced to sweat at the altar of learning day and night. Word sums drilled facts in to them with ever increasing insistence until it became only individual letters, numbers, then flashes of shaped colour pressed into their faces with what looked like a waffle iron. Geez, I can’t take any sort of holiday without something odd ball going on. Yet it stopped when the communications were cut. Well, I tripped on the wire getting off the sun lounger unplugging it; took the credit and the shuttle bus back to the studio complex. 'Am I a co-worker?’ Something spat on the return ride screaming me out of a flash-fire sleep i’d only just ignited into. I still had some time before I’d charge again for writing Anna’s screenplay, so I spent the day perusing through my little basket of misunderstandings. “Sure, sure, that’d cook!” I thought holding up the times I mistaken writing words for a meaningful life. Spent some of a gentle stroll I was owed in the fresh vegetables looking for tortoises. You see, they wrap themselves in the spinach sleep blankets I grow. Found one that afternoon, Catatonic, bathed in the seasoned pink light. Sallow City ----------- pt:1 ---- The corpus which houses our cultural infrastructures needs composting. These eighteen hatches to whatever City they lead to, me tending each one all day and night, without anyone coming or going. But another hatch, number 19, found me chasing the first remarkable find, and I stepped on the edge and out of my City, those indeterminable years squeezed behind me. Dressed in my finest, I slunk away at night. Was it a game or design? Or was it only perfection sensed independence, a slow something saw a new brighter opening, that hatch 19, and bound off, escaping through that small door that housed an untoward yet intoxicating City. Briefly turning back, it looked to me as though I was leaving a catacomb, people assuming the position, while still alive, their bones would be found in. pt:2 ---- But nothing arrived from the life lived away from that place; I was moving against the flow of everything I passed, perhaps they were drawn to that point I had recently bolted from by some potency. No, I only stepped on the edge and out of the city, that anaemic city. Looking for accuracy somewhere in there, smell trapped by morsels on hooks. But had I sensed independence? Glee puts our perceptions beyond awareness, at arm's length, gestures to start walking towards something, some bright opening a design on a distant billboard, chasing the first remarkable find. Until I chanced upon a small hatch; A thought cast: Is there something locked behind? I had felt a heaviness in my pocket, grasping from the outside, I made out the shape of a key sown into the lining and, drawing it out of a tear in the bottom of the coat, it clicked into the lock ... Is there really nothing inside? Are the echoes released by the creaking hinges it? or an alarm for what is to follow? That Old Time Trick 1: Sounds ----------------------------- She played me some sounds , “been many years in the making” she exclaimed smiling Geez, those sounds, I’ll never forget “sound one” she pressed the tape deck button “That’s a loop of echoed digestion.” I said “Lucky guess” “sound two” ... “wet hands clapping.” “Near enough” “Sound three”... “sounds like an audience of kids, barely audible, eating lunch while exploring the slow explosion they’d set in motion ten years previous, unfolding in the schools American style canteen, 1950s if I’m not mistaken” “Some ears you got there sunshine” She ended the whole show and tell with a rendition of ‘Goodbye body ham, forever here in spirit’ “Played that at my mums funeral” I shrugged, “must be watching over me” I burn up some situations real good I’d been at the money, so every night people partied at my expense Kindred spirits, or so they said “mind you your vibration’s inept” she spat I’d read that place like some two bit rolled up pulp trash dropped out a back pocket “It’s called unlocking practice speak, that’s my game,” I barked over the vhs of some kinetic eye flick called ‘screams feel hungrier’ grainy on the wall of ten cracked tv screens, seen it a thousand times or more on 12 1000ft canvas walls at my nieces wedding “Alright alright I need stories, people to talk...” I said “you from some film studio? do yoga.” She quipped I nodded, twice “that proper name appeared over night on those pants,” she said pointing at some framed underwear above the bar” I’d seen the wider games going on, not just in this dive, no point in lying on my part “what you Dancing around it all for” I questioned “That’s not the story, now listen This exploding turtle Remember? he was a small time thief, a tortoise in fact, I think, scales the outside of your external staircase, the haze, slowed his thoughts, those obsessions he’d assembled of a world where there was nothing beneath him, just ephemeral patterns of celestial silk, it was all the same body to him, yet his hit the sidewalk and swirled out from the epicentre, fine flecks caught in gossamer, shell spinning on cracked paving slab... She looked unnerved Or was it a spider scaling the bath tub? I remember now, it was a small time tortoise thief, stole one resting in spinach from a cottage garden, went for his weekly bath next to surgery staircase, by the hatch propped open using the doctor’s slumbering body. One slept, one bathed. That’s until the haze that leaked from the domain of the sleeper slipped into the others clothes, once that swop was made they played catch outside with our tortoise friend, splashed it up the wall like Tommy Quakers Her teeth bit against her wrist-points my armpits were frenzied, crying out a warning about the whole bar that was queuing up to constrain me Distracted, her hand shot out and crushed my mind “You overwrought carrot topped coward, get out my bar!”