I.
While lost in question,
the question of who I was,
a dream.
I cannot say when it
arrived
or if it was truly even a dream,
because it had just arrived in my memory
one grey morning eating corn flakes
in my kitchen’s neon light.
That is, it just arrived without
the normal tinge
of randomness or blurry, sleepy, tiredness
that dreams
or day dreams normally have.
In this ‘dream’
I remember the sharp lines of a walled street,
its seemingly endless distance converged on
my mind-self just standing there,
standing in the middle of its coal black road.
Strange thing was,
the road didn’t seem to be made of tarmac.
It was just cold and black and
flat, yet
with an eerie depth and distance like space.
‘Maybe my mind has made this place’
I thought.
And my thought had to be true,
because one just can’t simply ‘think’ in a dream,
can
one??
All other lines and surfaces were
similar in
that they were devoid of anything piquant.
And yet, everything but the road
was completely opaque.
It was like being inside a rendered
computer simulation
or some mathematicians equation.
Plato’s street perhaps, the mind of
a street that
demanded ‘straight’ so ‘curvature’ could
exist.
Everything apart from
the road made the very air itself seem
ubiquitously oblique with a grey
sort of conquer.
The sky was the same light grey
colour as the walls,
a distance over-caste and dull as
if
there was no such thing
as blue or birds or anything
anymore.
As if a breezeless ghost crow might
squark
and call this reality; ‘exact’ and
land on a power pole.
I looked left to one of the walls
and somehow knew
it was exactly 6.47 metres high.
The walls and sidewalk with
a dividing line were at intervals every 1.61
metres.
Black, necromancer-yawning gutter drains
were spaced every 12.94 metres.
Somehow I knew that everything in
this street
was ruled by the Euclid’s eyelid,
his golden ratio,
a math that precisely
quantified where day and night make
their mark.
“What is this streets purpose?” I
questioned.
Suddenly I became aware that
in some unearthly way,
it had been here a very, very, long time.
It knew the un-equinoctial divide
from its earth path
and had made its divergence long ago,
refuting the moons passing chaos with pride.
As I looked to the sidewalk I
remembered that
this street had Banksy’s graffiti once,
had
homeless smashed bottles of rum,
had
wooden crates where lovers met in secret,
and
skips with blood pools and dead foetal
shapes
born from the whore’s of Babylon.
But that was somehow all back
‘then’.
I somehow got the sense that this
street
was so far in our future, so far that
the people who presided over it now
might not be called ‘people’
anymore.
II.
With nothing else to do I started
walking.
And that proved really weird.
The whole world seemed to move like
it was a treadmill.
Like my feet would take a step yet
my torso remained still
and the whole world moved around me.
Soon I saw three black doors move
toward me.
There was one on the left and two on the
right,
each with classic Elizabethan trimmings.
“Good, at least something here has
style” I thought.
As if listening to my thoughts
a sudden deep wicked laughter above made me jump.
It sounded as if two large granite
boulders
were trying to win a wrestling competition.
Suddenly anxious to get out of
there, I tried each door.
As I approached, I saw that the one
on the left was labelled; Birth
in tiny silver, swirly,
black-adder
font.
The closest on the right was the
same silver,
yet labelled; Failure.
The furthest on the right;
Success.
Yet they were three locked doors… I
was trapped.
“Well I suppose I could go in
either direction”
I reasoned,
and I began to run, turning the
world back the way I came.
But there in the distance
I saw something that wasn’t there
before.
It was another wall, a dead end.
Then the same in the other
direction.
Truly trapped!
Was there a door hidden there at
the end?
I couldn’t see one.
Suddenly a creaking door opened
behind me,
and as the last echoes of it died away, I stopped, frozen.
There was a deathly pause of
weight.
“I can’t die in my mind can I?”
–this question haunted me, yet I
thought;
“I can’t let him stab me in the back,
I will meet the devil face to face even if he
rules
my acts to the very photon millimetre of my
soul!”
I was about 4 metres away from the
open door,
the only door on the left.
III
Suddenly,
a suit case and a balding business
man entered.
A large beaked nose, a black mole
under his left eye,
a ring of hair and a goatee -the grey oil
paint of age.
He was looking straight at the far
door to the right.
I could tell he was driven with
fast-paced,
long, even strides.
His phone rang in the middle of the
road.
He answered by the time he got to
the sidewalk
and there
he stopped.
As he talked in hushed whispered
tones I decided
to turn the world a little closer
and creep forward.
Immediately I noticed that his
black business suit
was seething in a black machinery.
It was made of black gears and
springs as if
a wind up clock had been left open on his
fabric.
I was so entranced by his suit as
it spun,
I had not noticed that he had stopped talking.
No business man had ever looked at me before,
so I guessed I was safe.
But in a flash he had locked his
fire-brown eyes on mine.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he flared.
As he said this he seemed to brush
away my very sight
from his jacket, as if my staring
had messed with its gears somehow.
“Hey wait, I recognise you, you
were at that protest,
what was it called? O yeah, ha! The
Occupy Movement.
How quaint that was…”
As he remembered the time I threw a
tomato at him,
he smirked a great oily smirk.
I had missed and struck one of my
own.
Yet as he was talking and smirking,
something was itching in my jacket
pocket,
I reached in, scratched it and then
had an idea,
“I won’t miss this time!” I
replied.
In my pocket I curled my hand into
the shape of a gun
and pressed it out, pretending to bead a
weapon on him.
As I did this, he freaked and
stumbled back a little.
Menacingly, like something from
Clockwork Orange,
I stalked forward.
“You… you can’t touch me here,
the police here can read your mind,
you’ll be shot before you even
touch the trigger.”
“Let them, I don’t care, you really
think that’ll stop me?
I know what you did…”
And this last part was true.
This man was personally responsible
for the big crash.
The financial crash that caused the
war.
I had to have my fun.
But it was too much for the old
man,
survival instincts kicked way past fun
and he reached into his own jacket pocket and
pulled out a gleaming colt .45.
‘O Fuck…’ I thought as we stared at
each other.
‘Ok, this is not a literal backfire
much…’
But then a cool calm came over me,
I don’t know why, because I was facing down
the barrel of one of the deadliest
hand weapons known to criminal kind,
but none of it seemed to matter,
my life or his life or any of it.
“Bang…” I said, just loud enough
for him to hear.
IV.
He was hit!
even though it was just a word,
he dropped his weapon and grabbed his chest
at the very spot I was pointing to.
He staggered back.
‘Heart attack?’ I thought.
This had to be true, and fitting
that such a man
would be killed by a sudden lack of rhythm.
Yet it was only true until I saw something
odd.
Where he had dropped his gun,
there were cracks appearing in the concrete.
Soon, as if on fast forward,
little shoots of green were appearing through
them.
As I looked up the same thing was
happening
to where he had stumbled,
cracks in the shape of shoe prints,
cracks with green spears shooting up.
They were growing so fast by the
time
the man had started to turn and run,
that the green shoots around his
gun
had become full flourishing ferns,
bushes and grasses.
As he fled in fear they began
chasing him,
getting
closer and closer,
he was glancing back and the man’s face was a terror,
distilled, purified.
Suddenly he clutched at his side
and turned to face them,
a stitch from too many steaks
perhaps.
He pulled his other gun from his
pocket.
He began to shoot at the flowers,
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
But the roses swirled in dervishes and
grabbed him,
twirling around his ankles, twisting in their
thorns.
As I turned the world to go and
help,
I realised it was
too late.
His feet and shins had already
disappeared,
this was
his fate.
Yet instead of the gore and
spilling blood that I expected,
I saw two neat black stones the
shape of shoes beneath the bush.
The man was now limping away on
stumps and
The avalanche of plant-beast pounced,
crumbling any concrete in its wake.
It had totally engulfed his legs.
As I peered beneath,
I saw that his leg bones had
become bare rooted treelings
that dug themselves into the dirt
and pulled themselves free of his torso
with a sick sort of ‘pop’.
Now he was merely
half a man,
holding himself up with his arms.
V
The half man stared at me with a
vile horror,
his only level of
understanding;
“you murderer! You’ve done this!”
And with this he pointed his
colt .45 death-metal conclusion
squarely at my forehead.
This time I was ready, I had seen a
miracle
and if my life was the price to pay
so be it.
I closed my eyes and waited.
Yet something replaced my martyred
glory.
It was merely a sound, a feint click.
I opened my eyes and saw
that a rose vine had twirled round his arm and
had
twisted into the gun barrel through the
chamber.
It had bloomed in place of the
death bullet.
As I was entranced by this
there was the sound of thunder
crack
and water splashing,
and immediately I saw his torso had turned
itself to a deluge of water and dropped,
falling to form a smallish pond.
Needless to say his arms,
shoulders and head levered back,
falling to the
ground.
I then watched in wonder as
his shoulders turned into wombats,
shaking pinkish skin into thick brown
fur.
His biceps?
-Standing and stretching into
little baby koalas.
His forearms?
-Platypus that turned, wiggled and
headed to the pond
as his fingers turned into finches and willy
wag tails.
Finally with another huge crack of
thunder,
his skull cracked in two and up shot
an enormous gum tree, spiralling
and stretching out limbs as if a
hundred years
had passed in a
minute.
VII
As I watched this father tree
grow to completion,
I noticed that the pool of water
was glowing a light bluish colour.
As I stepped over the bushes
and narrowly avoided a pair of
Bilbies,
I peered in the pool and saw
that the pool looked like a sky,
a real blue summer’s sky with a few
stray clouds.
Yet where a sun might be,
there was what looked like a
vertebrae.
Shining great rays of light it was.
Unexpectedly
I felt something tugging at my shirt sleeve.
I looked down and saw that
one of the Bilbys was looking at
me,
pointing into the water and then
curling its little black hand with
a grabbing motion.
So I concurred, and reached into
the strange pool.
The glowing vertebrae was warm and
yet very, very, heavy.
I pulled hard, and as if held by
powerful magnets,
it got heavier the closer it got to the
surface.
Finally, as if pulling a plug from
a massive dam,
up it popped and the sky in the pool disappeared.
However, soon enough
the pool started whirling and swirling,
draining away.
As I looked in I
could see
that the pools depths had broken
through
the ‘glass’ that was the black road
and all that
remained beneath was a massive sucking void.
Pulling back so as not to fall in,
I saw that
cloud from the over-caste sky was
funnelling down
into the swirling hole to nowhere.
‘Ok now I’m really doomed’ was all
I could think.
Above me the sky had darkened
and flashes of lightning could be seen.
Then, lightning struck the hole,
once, twice
and then countless times,
I had to get away but I was being
sucked towards it too.
I pushed my legs hard into the dirt
and wheeled back grabbing
a door
handle and holding on for dear life.
Then the wind rushed and reached
tornado strength,
I was horizontal to the ground as the entire
street
broke off into huge chunks and disappeared.
I closed my eyes.
I’m not a religious man,
but I prayed for my life at that moment,
I wasn’t going to wake from this
dream,
I was going to die.
Yet the intense roar of the wind
and
the near constant death-metal music of the
thunder
gradually ambled to a shout and then finally a
whisper
and then I was standing on my feet in a new
world.
As I let go of the door handle and
brushed myself free
of the remaining concrete dust,
I could see rolling hills in the distance,
a clear sky, a forest, even a farm with cows
and a tractor working away.
The sun was going down,
the moon was rising with a noticeable grin.
As looked over to the pool,
now just an ordinary pool,
I saw a glint of metal near a rose bush.
It was the gun that might have
killed me.
On a whim I decided to pick the
rose that
was blooming out its nozzle.
When I did picked it up and whiffed
its beautiful scent,
I noticed that within its petals was a key, a
tiny golden key.
I grabbed this key and turned to the door.
With one last grin to the moon,
I unlocked the door.
However, before I stepped back into
the neon light that I saw to be my
kitchen,
I noticed that the silver words had
disappeared.
In their place were the words;
“This is who you are…”
