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Stories Of My Dilapidation
McDonald's 'restaurant' archways fill with lunchtime crowds. They hang over the freeway eating dead flesh and preservatives, murderers gloating over the victims. To give themselves a sense of power, they look down as if from an asteroid. The flow of cars and trucks are molten rivers, twelve lanes of traffic passing beneath their feet below, sixty kilometres out from the centre of Detroit which is inside me. In Melbourne, Australia the McDonald's are in the children's hospital. Liberty high icons with red and yellow gloved hands held up to the children who be coerced into eating animal corpses between buns. The friendly smiles of false clowns holding their spirits high into the smog, as if this clown's gigantic reaching were compassionate and soft like a prophet. One look closer will reveal that the gloved hands are full of junk food, the charred flesh and cream of murdered animals, in exchange for money and your ethics, all with efficiency and a smile to go with it. Creepy bad clowns like these are dropped from silent parachutes onto every city on earth. McDonald's going off like a slow bomb inside the stomachs of our children. It was like passing over into North Dakota from Manitoba, how the accents thickened and the Tom Cruise fighter jets were loop the looping over the snow covered prairie. The Canadian driver had said, 'When the animals leave, god will be dead. Then we can make the earth like the moon.' It's like the pipes in those damp old houses, CHACHACHAchachacha, trapped water banging the pipes along inside the walls, as it rocks its pressure through them. It's like the house is having a nervous breakdown. I am Detriot, the original dilapidated city, the inner section where the buildings haven't been looked after property. Rather than fix it up they move out and out. They move out to live in the crime free areas, and leave the city to the smashing of glass, the guns and the fires. I am not very happy about the situation. At this stage I can't find my way out of myself. When I was losing it, it was like all these little pieces of matter, say like slippery grey brain, were floating around in a tank of yellow water. One of the little pieces was still me, or it was all that was left of me. Then I thought, what are these other pieces bumping into this part of me? We are all aimlessly floating around together. They are as big as me and are floating with as much momentum. I have no hope of communicating or connecting with them. They have no faces, they have no voices. It was very lonely. Yet at the same time I was very crowded in. I then realise that they are all part of me and that it is my job to amalgamate us somehow. I wanted a man with crooked teeth, who could show me the crookedness inside himself, to teach me something about myself and why I lived so crooked. But his words became a landscape that was apocalyptic, and this is what I am left with. The buildings standing like crooked bone sprung from the mouth of the world. The yellow grey sun melts down between them like a filling. The crowds on the empty streets are as angry as a bag of hammers. I have learnt the lesson of crookedness and my back is aching and rounded. Now I am looking for the straight toothed people, my life sawn off like the base of a tree. The city was a glass dome, that disorientated birds shattered themselves against. 'You are Detroit,' it said. Thin glass reverberated in the panes of the buildings. I don't want to be the adult who has lost everything and grown old fast. The city speaks; the childhood glow has gone from my face. There is no hope and no one cares any more about my life or what it has been like. I reach my arms out and wave. I am in the centre of Detroit and it rests inside me at this point, until we can no longer be distinguished. We exist as indecipherable language throughout the public transport system and inside the buildings. Detroit is like a big broken down car left to smoulder, its engine growing grass like a kind old heart ripped out and buried in the garden dirt. The car is easily distinguishable from its surrounds, and someone might see the potential still left in it and pick it up. But I am speaking through every point of dilapidation, as if it were as numerous as pores in my skin. The city of Detroit is inside me. I was that screwed up that expecting me to have anything left of my sanity, or anything left of myself to begin with, was like expecting one person to clean this city up or hold it together. It's like something enormous is crushing you, a bad apple in the shape of a heart or a burnt out car falling out of the sky. I had as much hope of getting better as of reconstructing this city. I did it but what have I become in the process? What is this queer atmosphere of my new construction. I would die in this city, whilst standing straight up inside me, the buildings remained strong and tall. |
