“The Big Takeover”

One sweet October morning and the city line
Pierces the sky into pieces:
A jagged half-face with jutting peaks
And the trains roll in. Thunderous
And melancholy, ferrying in standing selling-men
From over the river and through the mud-brown plains.
We snickered and sneered, because we would be artists
And never sacrifice ideology.

Too late we realized
The glowing intimacies of fireflies
Were used to rationalize our unhappiness -
‘If there’s so much beauty in this, then…’

They came infrequently.
Summer let them lift up like daffodil heads,
Like a million miniscule nuclear revolts,
Their obsession the fission of a million atoms - they were fearless freaks against the sky.
Against the cool disinterest of platinum shells
And the husking, whirring automotive machines that ferried past them.

The faint rhythm of a cricket’s heartbeat
Keep our feet walking when faltering seemed the only hope.
But it was easily snuffed out.
And we were left with the violence of neon lights and revolving rubber.

Oh, but this is hipster heresy
To be only more lost in the city –
But when my stiletto heels went through the wood grain
I didn’t think about cool.
And when the car horns shattered the illusion of passion
I didn’t give a fuck about fashion.

Until, beaten-down, we stopped blinking at bad things.
At dawn, did we think a steady stream of alcohol and nihilism
Would set us at home? Burn away the taste of sterility in my veins?
Did we try to buy our way in?
Like Tom and Edward’s clumsy switch, though we never looked the same.

But you’re just human - with wives and children!
The adverts remind us when
(We think over the heads of the clouds
And we see the beaming faces of continents
The arrogant grins of turbulent seas.
So did Athens fall – and we see Paris on the precipice. Waiting for the order
The soldiers warmed young hands frozen by the Ardennes.
One cracks a rude, full-scale joke that we don’t understand.
This city might not survive us - we should finish it.
So that we can be the fatal love affair that none recover from)
We think too much. Let’s lay some traps down in our apartment.

Laugh at my insecticide. ‘Think of the creatures as that terrier
You always wanted for some
Neglected Christmas, with sad brown eyes and a waggly tail.’
They’re not - not to me.
They are the everlasting clicking plague.
They survived each extinction with emotionless, blank fatigue.
They left their old legacies on lazy, opaque buildings
And our cramped misnomer of a bedroom.

As the furnace gave a sputtering cough, we would
Tumble furiously - if only for heat.
Ah, but we stifled then, in
Summer time. We awoke, dazed under dew to find the rain dissipated
And the roaches clicking their way in.
This fort, this squalid den of protection we built up
In what was once a miserable city.
You said - this is ours, and it was theirs
And you meant the teeming masses that once yearned
A century away. Now it pays
To murder the twitching things and blast whiteness onto the walls.

Read me the rights of the city -
I lived where men died and I don’t feel guilty.

When the sun rises we burn, when night falls we chill.
And we long for their uncaring, dead-eyed thrill.

Oh so boho, darling – dangling bangs and bug-eyed shades
Won’t this make a perfect home if we crush
Down the wall next door and expand
Like an inflatable balloon, a building stretched round and tight
Like a drum.

You can’t own this place - not me, neither.
You can’t own the roaches - they’ll outlast you.
They’ll weave holes in your blue jeans, they’ll bury you.
We reached an uneasy peace, me and the roaches because
We want the same thing.
We want it as it is.

The new tenant reminds you of Claire - she mussed your
Hair like your mother. (Fifteen and she thinks she loves you)
So you balked and you fled and you licked the asphalt from your gums.
Leaving plumes of grit behind in a shimmering dust.
You got smart. Older and wiser.

And so clever to force-fed me the need
To trace the weaving wind of the underground.
We the information rushing through the cables
Carrying us to our points of call
So we could be understood. The reprimands of those with knowledge
That we left them unsatisfied
They called technical support, but the phone wailed without response.

Cough me up-

When you found me (look at you forgetting -
Watch even the rodents nibble at noble Mnemosyne.)

I was lost. Not no more, not no one’s, not nobody’s nothing.
When the potential of pot holes reared an ugly head, you
Might’ve looked back. Orpheus taking one last perilous look.
O, to be worth a perilous look.

Instead we watched the swirling masses from our private spectacle,
Your hands holding my eyes closed from the horrors of the world.
And behind the cool bars of abattoir windows I went unfulfilled.

These iron, these elegiac testaments of brick carved by
Long-dead bones. This, this was our home
Now we sell it. And for little, for less
But we owned it.

(By extension, did we own the roaches?
Or even the sound of wind whipping through? Did we own
The shadows laid by our withering bed?)

Oh God, Oh God, Oh God
Let us sell the shadows, take our pittance and flee somewhere together

I wave goodbye, just like a Queen
As the car shuttles me out, rickety and heaving exhaust.
Today I am Aquitaine, ready to be shut up
Where I must lay.
But I will not bow to your failure. We get so tied up in masculinity
That you could not grieve for our lost home- it was
More child than we would ever see. We built it up. With our own hates implanted
For the seeds of another generation.
Left question cracks and ink stains on a bedroom wall.
So if you cried, I would not think less of you.
At least I tell myself this – Feminist rhetoric sounds good in a burnt-out car.

The sinews of the wind through the window’s crack feel
Like my father’s car, like fleeing the suburbs at a tender age, like
Meeting you in a crash-zone when the powder and dust left us all white
And we paused with meeting eyes, a chaotic blitz as
We thought our Metropolis ended.

I lose my memories to the sound of the last rustling tree
And the only living boy in the city.

Poor faith of a dead thing! It could not stand the smog. Nor the roaches.

Now I picture violence while imagining my nails.

One day these fingers will be arthritic, and with my insomniac lips,
No one will know of you.
You’ll be another sad-sack story of the city.
You’ll be another glitch in the saga of the American dream.
Picket-fence paranoias will go unredeemed.

When your mother found your number, you mocked her-
At the younger, you sneered ‘am I my brother’s keeper’?
No, you kept no one. All fish flipped around under your hands. They gagged on oxygen.
You misfed them.

Now I dream of swarms of Blattidae
Inflicting their infection upon the blades of my body
Suckling on my bones, they make me a martyr for the building. Who would
Take her now? My fingertips dissipate, so they do not know me.
Jane Doe, left by the night clickers. You would not remember me,
I have planned it.

I will drive away from this building and its threats. I will leave the city.

We dreamed the Seven Pillars of a kingdom all our own.

We got a bag of bones and a worn-out moan.