Untimely #10 – City of Rocks

They left him for dead in the city of rocks, for the sun to kill him, or the heat, or the cold, or the wind, or the wound. The sun came up in a rusty red dawn, all mist and sand and wind. Then it was overhead and all around him sallow grey light too bright to look at. He pressed his head into the ground and shifting saw the blood thick and black and muddy where it pooled by his side and his shirt plastered down to his hip. His tongue felt like a block of wood between two stones. He lay on his side and closed his eyes and prayed that he would never open them. He held them shut a long time and thought of stories they used to tell of men buried up to their necks and covered in molasses and how the ants would clean the flesh off their bones, the vultures pluck out their eyes. OK, he thought, so it could be worse. It could always be worse. But still he kept his eyes shut and felt the tightening in his side and then there was a very great tightening and he thought that this might be it. When he awoke it was dark and there was a high moon and he was shivering. He couldn’t feel his legs and he tried to move them but he couldn’t see to tell whether they had moved. He was frozen all over and shuddering now and then he felt a surge of warm and then it was over.

Untimely #10 - Why! A Quit, Of Sorts.

Washed my face in the rivers of empire;

Made my bed from a cardboard crate

Down in the city of quartz.

Pleaded with every agency of temps,

Harangued the centre of jobs;

Brandished my Curriculum Vitae at every turn,

And got nowhere in the city of quartz.

I dined in the soup kitchens of pain!

Ogled the grand patisseries of the French quarter,

And began to quietly starve in the city of quartz.

Attempting to prostitute myself to the children of Caesar,

I was flung into the prison of punishment.

And there sodomised for scraps,

In the bowels of the city of quartz.

Toothless, wretched, my metaphors scabbing over,

I am sold, out right, to an ageing actor:

Tears, joyous and otherwise, are ignored by all in the city of quartz.

I wish I’d never moved here.

My diseases are turning my mind to dung.

I’m decanting my sense into the toilet and becoming a moron.

I’m fitting in to the city of quartz.

I’m in love with my actor,

Though I’m sure he’s cheating on me,

With some new tourist to our city of quartz.

I’m leaving.

I’m going to kill myself while I have the strength.

I can’t take any more of this.

Fuck you, you stupid old city of quartz.

Untimely #10 - City of Quartz

Parakeets swoon in

To roost on naked pylons

Under massed moon clouds.

Grass scratched tarmac seethes;

Freeway, sagging, crocodile

Spined, under moon clouds.

Corrugated cheek,

Cold against cool cardboard pulp,

Turns toward moon clouds.

Stray tobacco fronds,

Straggling on blistered lips, I

Stretch below moon clouds.

All extremities,

Finger tips, yellow toe nails,

Shiver down moon clouds.

Wrist knuckles click back

Through frayed cuffs, forage pockets,

Forgetting moon clouds.

Night time is my time,

Needle blind, tooth and eye time,

Hunger strikes moon clouds.

And out, out into,

Into quartz, into quartz tides

Under quartz moon clouds.

The dune teeming city

Subsumes me, the rowdy spume,

Moon clouding moon crowds.

Untimely Stimulus #10 - Guest Stimulus

The first Guest Stimulus is submitted by Spencer Tapia:

"Washed my face in the rivers of empire;
Made my bed from a cardboard crate
Down in the city of quartz."

- From "Sunken Waltz" by Calexico

Respond!