Vines

Archie Orchestra was a superstitious ape. His three comrades harangued him for it. They told him, grow up, open your eyes, think about it, get a hold of yourself, use your brain, you must be joking.

Archie Orchestra would not drink with his left hand or look a buttonquail in the eye, he wouldn’t touch yellow flowers or shake hands with strangers. He would turn three times on the spot if he smelt mushrooms cooking, he would bow down low to the bad moon when it rose unexpected and horror red and lit the whole evening in a graze.

Archie Orchestra believed that dreams were real things, like spit or piss or cod liver oil, that there must be a dream organ inside of every animal, a swelling, secreting second brain, leaking puss filled nightmares and syrup clot fantasies. He imagines his ancestors in the jaguar vines breaking their arrow tips into the toxic dream organs of tropical frogs, firing them up at black-billed sicklebills, who would fold up their feathers and fall from the furthest branches entranced in a terminal reverie.

The first night The Troop had arrived in the primate city - when they had kicked the harbour master’s office to ash and splinters and slept on its broken floor - Archie Orchestra had dreamt of the cloud forest. Dreamt he had been dressed in straw and yacht rigging, with a chain wrapped three times around his waist, its links pinching his skin as he padded through the undergrowth. The remainder of the chain stretching off, disappearing through the hornwort and the vinegar flowers, a mile and half in length with an anchor at its end, so tangled in roots and stems and bark and branches that it crawled across the cloud forest, uprooting, ploughing, leaving a soil highway behind it like some nameless long haired animal gradually eating its way in furrows across the world.

Archie Orchestra had walked and walked and walked through his dream. Dragging his anchor behind him. On his way he had passed other apes walking in different directions, some approaching him, some cutting across his path, each and every one buckled to an anchor, all of them sweat bristled and thunder delirious, drawing ploughed floundering lines across the forest like tired surgeons marking out in ink where their incisions are going to be.

At one point he reached the shores of the lake where he was born. Archie Orchestra sank into the water as though he was lowering himself into a bath. He shuffled across the lake bed, through the jelly weeds and razor oysters, piranhas snapping at him, carrying away his straw clothes, becoming trapped between the links of his chains and biting at his fur in a panic. His anchor ground through the silt, stirring up the settled dead and the greedy living. His gorilla eyes blurred with the dead lake blind effort of being. He walked for so long under water that he forgot what it was like above the surface, he forgot the air, the dry breeze. The sun was a rubber star that floated in the water. Its lights were blinding weeds that sunk with all the weight of their brightness.

Catch

Winter mornings on the dock were shutter down winds and squalling stone curlews seized to sheets of ice. They were hoarse prayers of thawing. At the gutting stalls offal curled frozen off the ground, poised like bloody vipers charmed from the bellies of abandoned fish. Eel heads, eyeball white and egg shell brittle. Shark fins gone sharp as glass, littered around, glittering with frost, looking like the slivers of some immense, unthinkable vase that had been hauled up in a fishing net by mistake and broken on landing though once it had stood on the deepest ocean floor and hummed soprano to the current and was a home to the blind crabs and lonely clubhook squid and animals would swim across a hemisphere to visit it and it was at the beginning and end of every story whenever a story was told about the sea and everyone said that if it was ever broken then the truth in everything would become obvious, boring even, though when it was broken all that emerged was a staggering, air drunk giant isopod who crawled up the steps to the harbour master's office and died rolled up under his desk.

The Never Night Haul

The rope creaked. Shaven Cromwell quite bright in the darkness, his two hands reaching out like snowdrops sprouting out of black soil. Furious Winston is almost invisible in his coal smoke suit and long, greased back black fur. The two of them have the weight of the rope between their fists and through the crooks of their arms. It moaned with the strain. The rope was bristled from where it had been dragged, grating over the dock’s edge. It was thumb thick and stretched groaning into the blackness. There was the sound of claps and splashes now and then from where it flung tense against the swells of the dock water. It was a tightrope into a saltwater nothing. A wet fuse to the slow ocean.


The apes strained. They had been there since dusk. Since night sprung around the docks like a taut rope. They had worked in shifts. Archie Orchestra lay snoring under an overturned fishing boat, his rasps and whistles inflating its folded sail, his croaks agitating the keel. Pete the Gamble was in the dice house, rolling audacious wagers against the sleep drivel baboons and guava anxious langurs.

Sweat and blushing determination lit up Shaven Cromwell’s pale face in the night, he pulled and pulled and puffed out his cheeks, ran his tongue over his canines, his eyebrows rising and falling in tides of concentration. He was speaking soft and breathless gibberish to himself, low words of encouragement.


Furious Winston was expressionless. Silent except for the sound of his breath that eeked in short gusts, crawling along with the meagre movements of the rope. He imagined that they had hitched their rope to the stars and were hauling on the cosmos itself. That he and his comrades had elected to compete with the black, humming universe in an eternal round of tug-of-war.


Furious Winston spoke and his words were his voice ropes creaking.


I can see it.


There it is.


I can see it.


Shaven Cromwell strained his eyes. Hauled them into the dark. He could see it too. The rope loosened. Waves began gushing against the wharf. Great, gloomy swells folding over the concrete landing. Washing over the apes, crashing against their knees. It was as though they had dragged in the dark ocean on the end of their rope.


Archie Orchestra awoke under a tide of icy water. He floundered and panicked, half tangled in the yachts rigging. Cracking his skull against the bow he was sleeping under. For a moment he was convinced that he was going to drown. His head appeared bursting, gulping from beneath the water, the hairy, bulbous head of a gruesome fish. His bleary fish eyes goggling at what he saw. The rope curling slack and abandoned on the flooded wharf. Furious Winston and Shaven Cromwell galloping through the water in opposite directions, fleeing from the prow of the hauled-in steam liner that was charging gigantic and unstoppable towards the shore.

Q and A

Q: What do you do?


A: I worry alot.


Q: What do you want? What do you not want?


A: I want to know when I am dying. I don't want it to be a surprise.

The Dire Dockland Boogie

Henri said that the sound of the wooden rowing boats landing on the echoing dockland one after another was the sound of The Big Swinger rapping his fictitious knuckles against the locked door of The Real.

Furious Winston said it was the copper boot-steps of a lucrative opportunity.

Pete the Gamble thought of the hollow poplar roll of dice – of risk and tragedy and a clumsy gambler’s ecstasy.

Archie Orchestra heard the metronome swinging and ticking the introductory beat to an entire, unknown opera, and he squirmed a little at the idea, feeling as though he was an actor expected to perform to a full-house without knowing any of his lines.

Shaven Cromwell remembered that when he was a boy he had seen flocks of coconuts dropping from the sky, cracking open on the craggy rock-pools at the edge of a wordless ocean. The coffin-knock of their husks splitting on the naked rocks. The delirious cries of the sea-birds responsible, so far above that they dropped their fruits from the borders of space and swooped down after as though they were chasing meteorites.

Non-Prayers for the Modern Bravers

Forgive the crayfish souls,
grey husks feasting
on the eternal smallness of the frail delicious.
Reintroduce the natives to the empyreal sewage.
Conserve the hirsute being of passed over mink,
coatless, shivering
in the nippy after tundra.

Forgive the Greeks. The Pagans.
Arrange us a meet and greet with Cro-Magnon Man,
Mr Habilis and Co.
Forgive us our peccadilloes and our callow nerves.
Give us gold teeth and little queues,
a sense for the senseless, start to the unending.

Let there be an after-water in this earned after-party
for the after-gills of perished giant squid to breathe.
Save the soft-shelled souls of the Cambrian extinction.

Carry the remainder in soul-recycling calculations.
Let slide like soap the contradictions.

Give the dead-lazy chairs.
Give the ghosts of confident men butterflies in their dead bellies.
Let ghosts of blind, dead women, see in microwaves and gamma rays.

Taps

When they knock down the alley house, he thought, they better collect all its shadows first.

Scoop them out with snow shovels. Soak them up with sponges.

When they built the alley house, he thought, the shadows had no choice but to crowd inside.

They should round them up and send them to work in the movies. Sell them to fashion photographers and to LASER engineers, to any profession engaged with the play and projection of light.

He’s been drinking bottled water since they demolished the alley house.

Since its shadows slipped into the drains and tainted all the tap water with gloom.