O wakes once
more to no-one, and there is nothing;
only the fall-ing, the immediate and the delay, the concatenations, the folds in time and space, as staccato hand-claps beat waves push time, endless memories of door
slams, loops in time and space, crow-crack of cold October; trigger cocked, pulled
back, the tense readiness of the fist, breathless expectation of the explosion,
and the entropy: the white dust and the spinning pieces hurtle in space from
the big bang; with nothing more than these marks - between this one - and that one; no shelter, not even
the cold comfort of the rock; he knows, he knows, he knows: the smothering dust,
the choking annihilation – white dust print of the moth, rubbed out between
finger and thumb – wild feet, mazy running, grey chaos; silent screams on
sidewalks and the twisted faces of shoppers running madly by shopfronts from
the falling towers; dissolve the borders of time, and the space between self and other, here and there, then and now, gone in the blink of an eye; fear of the familiar, for the alien, the impossibly
foreign and the violence of the now; falling into the vacancy, the open, toothless,
empty O; sifr; cypher; O - O – O … Oh; each day, another falling and the unsteady crawl back on scarred and bleeding hands and knees,
only to fall once more, the eternal return; the boy who is nothing sits in a
white room, as blood drains, and then the final folding of the cosmos and the
pop and he is gone; the boy who is no-one sits at his corner table in the
Chestnut Tree café, nods to David (shrugs): ‘Where
the f*ck did Monday go?’ Weak tea grimace, shrugs back: two hippos in the mud: ‘I
keep thinking it’s Tuesday…’; he knows David’s white face, knows David’s dying - sun, fire and rain, and me and you will soon be gone: we know, we know, we
know - I’m dying too - nursing his disorientation, getting used to not getting used to it, up here in the mountains, far,
far away, far above the tiny town, and hopeless with a cough, blank and expressionless
like Bill Murray nurses his Japanese whisky; lost in white face, Buster Keaton,
clowns, clowns, clowns, or Stan: Oh Olly, Olly, Olly; Oh, Olly. Like the pretty
nurse behind the shelter on the roundabout, he feels he’s in a play; he is
anyway […]
