Indescribables

What more to say impressed in a vast state of limbo by countless
taciturn soldiers wearing silver close to their chests, clutching
letters and rat's tails, languidly slurring some muddy sentences that
collapse still-born from their joyless mouths. I too march in line
wearing my own silly invisible uniform and swinging my individuality on
a string at my side. - Cleverness, rapid firing speech of thought
bubbles that I see above the mean head of a soldier all bowed and
screwed up - his string is there, knotted and frayed - and see, in a
second, a bubble appears that differentiates and then, just so and fast
as anything . . . crumble, and shadows shall grow deeper.

If I now, blown backwards and undefined, were to hear the tinny sound
of footsteps from behind me should I turn to see? You, once gone, once
returned, have left me just four out of seven and the remains of two
years learning to ride a bicycle, and still around every corner I feel
a craze of expectancy because there lurks your image to slink back and
turn to powder the second I round the bend.

And what thoughts I still have, even now, of the one-hundred strangers
who came together within me and left me just as quick to seek out in
their own precious time the helpless clockworks of some other
man-machines - and the far-up and god-blessed images of those thousand
picture book illustrations that when together and picked right and
flicked through quickly will play for you the Technicolor film of just
one event in my life. - And the thoughts I have of some musical notes,
re-arranged and repeated, needles and tape recorders, wallpaper and
dampness.

I know that this city has a sun and moon; and it has multitudinous
voices speaking perfectly loud; it has a shallow recess and spaces for
all the cars; it has a concrete skeleton and cracks in it's pavements.
- Despite this, this completeness, there is something missing,
something that I have never seen yet always known to be absent - there
maybe should be just one more voice, or sound, or thing that stands of
bricks and mortar.

- Listen . . . it is gone, that thing we look for is gone, it is stood
somewhere strange: on a shelf far away, tucked between two books about
history, lost in a desert or sea. And what now? - to march some more
and act the fool, to run in circles that spiral always into dizziness,
to just talk incessantly until something happens?

I am looking for a symbol. Beneath a rock maybe or the sole of
somebody's shoe there must be a clue lying in a pool of its own
importance, swimming like the tiny sharp thing that it is. I am
actively searching out signs, like all those marks on the wall that
rise no higher . . . There truly is a hidden language, deeper than it's
own abyss, that floats a few feet above its pinnacle - I would write if
I could of this thing, but I have not the light to see by.

I am looking for a symbol. Precious things rotate about me - systems of
hypnosis reverberate in time with the unnatural sounds that rise all
around. The great motion and recklessness of the city crashes cloudy
and storm-wracked against the finest walls of our construction, that
protect us, that waver now in the maelstrom. Passed and overlooked I
see the abolition of time in the date at the top of a newspaper and
cast down my own watch to the carpet of the earth. The smallest,
brightest pieces rise and glide in their own personal beams of dusty
light, and tiny, like diamond flies, they buzz around me and I am
haunted.

I watch every action of the street for a symbol. I gravitate helplessly
into the soft valleys of my progress; I walk, staggering, a path that
isn't there; silently things wash me with supple hands and tread me
down to a velvet cloth covering a corpse. A wandering motion keeps my
feet from stopping; ground is harder beneath me, though, for all this,
I feel clearly the way in which everything is turning. Yellow or red,
arrows are shot through with colour, they are rocketing in the air,
cutting at the very molecule, and they fall and shatter noiselessly.
Maybe it is the rain I feel, the uneventful tasteless rain pouring
through the gutters, filling the cup-of-the-world with fallen
clouds.

Piercing the wall of my surroundings with my own supernatural eyes an
appearance arrives of ultra-violet and radiation. - Sight hums and
boils over and snatches at other senses so the grey of this street
develops a taste, and it is bland, the wide and sublime sky is tactile
and rough, sandblasted and old. The last drops of feeling ebb from my
fingertips as I smell the bright impact of an advertising hoarding that
lights one whole side of the street with its neon glare. Hearing whole
spectrums of this void and realising that colour is silent - breaking
apart, things smash suicidally against the closed doors of the night -
glass and china breaks into shards and is flung into every known corner
and what's more rises again like tiny splashes of stars. - And with no
difference in time or place things are put back together again as form
returns and objects renew, as senses collide with themselves, sucked
back into their vacuum they recover completely and hear nothing more
than the insect hum of some distant crawling car.

I would go buy a token if I could, something with hieroglyphs, a globe
of old water run through with white hot flakes of snow, like pieces of
a coconut, my whole season in a glass. This I would hold up high in the
light and see I would the reflections and variousness of the world
through the one crystal eye of my souvenir. - Everything would become
icy; polar streets and glacial skies. I'd go buy this token if I
could.

For now though I'll walk onward, gangplanked and levitated, crushed and
repressed though sensing clearly the wide open spaces - and crawl, I
shall, taking every part of me and pushing it forward beyond the
compass tip of my nose - out there, far and fading, my whole world
thrown a few feet distant and I shall sit, soon, and from my vantage on
the point of decline, where this road could be a river, that lamp-post
a tower, where great things run past me galloping on heavy invisible
feet, where boats sail up to peer at me, are shocked by my indolence,
set sail fast again, where earthquakes rattle my ankles, where shadows
can be miracles, where anything that moves is wonderful. - From this
place I will sit and watch my whole continue, watch the colour of me
seep further forward alone.