I.
In the years my baby was young it made sense to stay up late and listen for the hum of empty air. A terrible slumber was over the surface of the deep. You could see it gathering outside our yellowed window in those awful hours between the Acts. Only thing to keep me sane was the pinball shack on Australia Street. You could get a pint of Mid and a fistful of steely balls for a fiver, and that cracking glass could last all night. Lived, I did, for the snap of an extra-ball. Sometimes the hipster goons used to loom over my shoulder pads and cheer. They’d buy me Carlsberg and crates of RedBull juiced lysergic. Nothing like ‘straddling the coffin’, as we pinheads say, while quantum cowbells are chiming up and down your arms in bioluminescent ant-farm formations. ‘Can you see your sweetie in the glass?’ I asked this one K-hole kid who’d started slobbering on my neck in the band-postered dark. ‘Yeah, man!’ he said. A vein wormed along his face like some pulsing parasite vagabonding for its chrysalis. ‘That’s no pinball game, dude!’ the kid screamed. I followed his frantic finger symbols all the way to a vision of every ex-lover you’ve ever known, all their shaking faces, comingling on an illumined multiball function flashing wildly in the centre console. And then I hit them, squarely with a scoop-shot ricochet off the bonus bumpers. Thunder rumbled, lightning forked the firmament, and Charlton Heston bellowed ‘Multiball!’ from a sudden mountaintop.
II.
The studio made all the Jakes and Joans sign contracts promising no eye-contact, but some of these jokers didn’t get the memo. The lenses of these glasses are so dark it’s hard to see what’s coming round the bend. ‘Mr Cruise?’ The bald guy with his clipboard needs to direct me somewhere all of a sudden. There’s too much sunlight in this studio lot. ‘You can call me Tom,’ I tell Clipboard, making a mental note to have him degloved and stuffed into a box of hot pockets. ‘In this next scene, you play a radioactive spider that wants to get back to his web,’ the guy says. He just won’t stop talking to me. ‘I do my own stunts,’ I insist, to try and scare him off, and then start climbing the ladder by the Wild West Bank like he’s just instructed. ‘No, Mr Cruise! We’re not on set yet, Mr Cruise!’ He calls out to me, but too late. It’s a long way to the top, as the saying goes. I climb until the night-gulls are nesting by my feet, and then I’m looking into my ex-wives’ bedchamber. They’re sleeping entangled together, beneath a slurry of satin sheets, like silver seraph in charms of moonlight. It would be a shame to slip down beside them with my spindly limbs, so I take my place behind the fridge. The night gas leaks on the fine threads of my loamy web, and these kaleidoscoping eyes are closed real tight because the heart goes on, and on.
III.
I slip a ring off my little pinkie and hear voices cry from under the pillows. And eyes, too? In the gloom under these covers? ‘Who is it?’ I want to know. ‘Speak your name?’ But answer comes there none. Down I go, under the caverns of our sheets with a flaming torch aimed toward the dark arterials of these catacombs. Far below the tasseled caves and coverlets, where the light of my frail fire tosses shadowy shapes on the walls with an amaranth eye, there are pale faced figures waiting. Their bodies are long and limp, and they come trembling forward. They are curled creatures, white and fat, glowing naked in the firelight. Hot are their open mouths, and wide, opening like sink holes of material fatigue. A fibrous melody pours forth from those pits, like spewed centipedes of wriggling incantatory ink. And teeth, with tiny, tattooed needles, and horned antennae which probe and probe my putty flesh. All this blood! Like a wash of watery iron, it runs a river red. Outside, flowing insect dark through this broken window ache, I recognise the tattered puzzle of our past. All its jagged pieces twisted, in little swarms of naked imagoes, fixed to twitch eternal against electric circuit moons.