Adrift across the dusk light, at the smoking end of summer. The air is hollowed out, briny, blowing across the palm like so much glitter. Midsummer distilled into a nothingness where even the car drove itself. Sweet harmonics fill these ears. All that is left is blood pressure inside the skull bone. On the corner, domestic and traditional ghost’s hang together inside shrouds of cherry flavoured vapour; their advice is holistic.   

Coming in closer, holding to the sill of crushed shells and random foliage sharp against bare feet. The old place in sight now; perspiring in stillness. Heat haze on the road hums with carrion and a carpet shade of pine cones, pressed under a seedy musk of toilet tissue florets and furtive debris. Tidal worn out faces, peer defeated through laminate windows edged open to ventilate hot nylon atmospheres. Taking hold of the footings we scramble over sandy clays bright orange with jagged shards of flint. Do we know the host that brought us here; what value is it to be worth something to somewhere? 

Out over the ghost town road jab the accelerator to outrun delivery vans. Value and quality collaborate in steel, sweat and then some. The place is artificial now; a memory museum. Old municipal buildings are now castles; rubble islands the nation’s glands; pulse entrails force open networks of sealed errors. 

Past the deserted bus shelters where long slow drones pulse; marrows grow to interminable widths in semi silent greenhouses burdened by hogweed and gamma rays. A voice surfaces through the hovering dust motes ascending into recognisable speech patterns like a jellyfish illuminating from the deep.  The sound of ceremonial gongs; a magpie clacking at the air behind the tree outside my window, “ Do yourself a favour boy, stop lying down all the time things get tough, get up and run, live like your life depended on it, go now, faster!”