Likestarlings

Prologue/novel

'I’m looking for ideas to stand around like things do'

In an open field, chrome city streets. Blackhead pus of cars circulate round New Alipore golchakkar. Excavate gutters, fisheyed. Estuary of streets, five rivermeeting, holy water. Necklaceshaped streets, comfortably closed in by shops and stores of endless kinds selling groceries, electricity, fresh goatmeat, flowers, wine, cutlerycrockery, armchairs laced with silk dragons, telephone cards, marketed music, magazines, pets, paints, wallpaper, midget fashionwear, lampshade gas chambers, violin vultures, rubberplant fans, cowfart methane, crocodile plants, fresh humanmeat gingerspiced, leather eyes in boil, chandeliers, ice cream, glue, fresh hothot cars, jewels in ice, illegal immigrant-American alien-stamp you on forehead- barcode your balls-and-soul silicon chips, newspapers, health and safety global warming instructions, hotn’soursoup, kitfo, spicy chaat, cricket bats, milk massage, bloodpressure monitors, dialysis edges, psychiatrist, autoeroticality, laughing bamiyan buddhas, frozen fishheads, neatly packaged Qurans, calligraphy flowerpots.

Maximum megalopolis, futurecity. Its walls plastered with communist propaganda, sicklen’chain, hammered light, nebulous neon, jeans, massshipped and shaped botox being, shirts and evening gowns stepping into dark bars, streets of cement littered with nondegradable plastic, starving stomachs running like dogs for shitstained bread, computer parlours teeming with paranoid atoms, subway stops sucking in omega supernovas, brick buildings with grilled and thatched windows, glass buildings vomiting suitedbooted workers, buses bleeding, cars hipping, rickshaws and trams, menwomen white-black-brown-blue, street musicians transnational incorporated, guitars, ektaras, djeridoos, pots, pans, electric wires, cockroach antennae, stretches of steel, cosmic cafe spots, cigarette colour cholera, balloon stomach dysentery.

Estuary of streets, five rivermeeting, holy water. New Alipore golchakkar. Dogman with dog around. Anarchists assemble, watching. Dog grows fangs, body skinned the colour of brown mud. Tail tattered, paper peeling. Ribs tensed like sharkmoves, bloody. Dogman master, loses control. Chain splits, voice curdles like milk. Dog revolts, anarchists clap. Dogman shuffles, calls out like a slavetrader, orders immunity. Dog dynamites. They both, ringed by onlookers, prey each other, circling. Dogman reaches, hands stretched to canine drips. Dog dynamites, bursts like a landmine, cannonfires, chop chop. Tears off the man’s face, rips with cartilage bleeding. Man howls. Fights dog. Dog tears his face off, again. Man becomes Christ, momentarily. Bombs explode, horse appears.

Man chases dog on a horse, swordhailing. Megalopolis fuguehorns into cracks of light. My dream becomes a circle.