imaginary cities: velo

velo city, the velvet night trips me, i can't see jack via fistlight. this causeway's all gone soupy, overpasses to nowhere, streetlights disappearing like forests or an empty highway. how they thought they'd inhabit this sprawl of a mountain, i don't know. thirty five ke-los from one end to the other, grand population: zero. even after they blew the place apart four times in a single century, it remains a planner's daymare. space, trace, place. velo city, a case in point. built on the shingled remains of a night market, down on mindil beach, the hawker continuum taken to the nth degree - box atop bento box, this site once thrashed with movement, speed, colour. mostly asia - a continent built on momentum, fast tripping, pixillated shotgun terminals, tantric tofu. a night bizarre, a conflagration of wok-heated histories, five cents a plate. velo city, a case in redundancy. no shouts have marred its laneways for a neon now. that's no mistake: a neon, an eternity, there is no such thing as "eon" anymore. trust this diction, suppress false grammar, my mosquito heart traces me an arc of madness. how it gleams, seamless. i wander alone carrying five cents and an empty platte, tectonic in its satellitic movements. velo city, a mistake, a triple sister city: vera city, tena city, velo city. speed, their umbilical constant. amphetamine cities, draped in the red dragon's light, now dark. just sitting here, next door a clanging bell, an empty wok, no clocks. no time either, just a string of boxes, paper plates, lanterns tattered and corned. corners shattered and crumbling, shadows of the box. velo city, city of boxes, rev headed nowhere, tell me i'm putting off the inevitable line of flight. i am terror. i am transparency in governance. i am a silhouette on the radio. my station is no longer above me, i am a mosquito in this heart's cage. nothing to save, no thing worth remaindering here. velo city, honking cycles. brims of water and the morning, sirens from the soft ward of someone's conscience, eradicated. First published in Going Down Swinging (2003)