In Sips

Bonfires, hair, rain.
The smells that make memory, what do mobile phones smell of?

Footprints in the snow at midnight, everything new and soft. No days are alike when you’re young. Winter is your friend, not something that delays trains. Foxes circle the lawn as low thunder breaks

Fear the dark and the silence, feel safe with hi vis neon and megaphones

Hunched and ashen-faced in mines of computers, lights and alarms go off and on; we emerge blinking with strange new customs. Untethered and adrift, flecked with violence, together alone, like suburbs

Statistics, systems, resources; I could be any old doll whose hair you burnt

Mid-century wood veneer cocktail cabinets, mannequins whose plastic skin has turned airplane-orange, lone ashtrays, kitsch throwaway dreams

Unstable and unheard, existing precariously like wildflowers beneath the pavements

The rain and the night have vinyl’d the city, taillights bleeding sickly rivulets in the streets. We wait for machines to move us from one place to the next. Space invaded; with headphones you won’t feel it

Bull fighting, tulipomania, football. We are no longer safe in numbers

Friends are not what Aristotle thought they were. They sip each other, editing the senses; they feel guilty about time and they share in isolation, tapping the hormones at weddings

Desires whispering along fibre optic cables to be mined like resources; cities like circuit boards; connectivity and obsolescence; you can feel it in your teeth when you watch TV

Broken cots and abandoned suitcases; something in the shadows beneath the eaves. Innocent eyes darting with feigned invincibility; unfinished homework. When you look back everything is in sepia, propped up by a shrouded figure

Escalators, cars, office chairs; the atrophy gets designed in

Driving past the Society for the Preservation of Useless Objects you wonder if this is what will remain of us. The conclusions they will come to with our snuff boxes, doll’s houses, colonial photographs and mummified rats

Power isn’t a man or a manifesto; time and space are currency; identity is a commodity and so is debt; drones and bots the agents of will to power

We meet through the interface while the organisation watches; lovers pacing the circumference of a snow globe; slivers of self for consumption; nostalgic distractions to ease the transition; reality refracted in shards of simulation

I returned to my old house fifty years later, ivy creeping silently over cracked window panes, the once red bricks faded. Foxes wait in the tall grass while a crow watches from the rusty aerial. The hatch at the bottom of the garden; the apparition; the sad spot where baby birds fall from their nests.