And it switches from a brow tinted, sepia filtered photograph to a multi-hued 3-D hologram, but only if you think happy thoughts and stare at it for half an hour, unless you do that, it's pretty much a frickin' photgraph. It's a still and lifeless reproduction of a living breathing, moving, wanking, horny, wishing-it-was paid just a little more chameleon.
You walk into a joint, there's little thing sitting there, smoking a menthol, you catch her eye and you walk on, you nonchalantly light up, a deep breath and it sets you free, filter the situation across your alveoli as the tar deposits and nicotine diffuses.
Then the haze lifts and clouds part, the city lights up under clear sky, where you're at, it's still overcast but it's like looking out of the tinted windows at work, everything looks cool outside, and you feel cool standing under the vents of the aircon. What fucking wonderful weather you think to yourself, you step out and fry.
Later, once the sun goes down on your life and the street lights flicker on and you tread into gear and you roar through the streets, the lights the sound the madness and all you see around you are the remnants of a decaying past, something that you try to scrub yourself clean of every morning, but it just settles back on you as the day passes, a gray soot that clings to your body, clogs your pores, in your nose so you can't smell, in you ears so you don't hear and on your tongue so you can't taste no more.
It robs you of all sensation,the stimuli that separate being from living. It's all about experience, knowing doesn't really matter, it's about being, feeling and connecting. A photo would never take you there.
I can't smell the hospital ward,the disinfectant, the disease, the beeping instruments, the nurses shuffling around efficiently in their soft shoes, the sympathy, the feeling in the air, I can't get it at all and all I can do is look and then look some more.
Then the bass kicks in and the backing orchestra floods the purple-pink sky with a haunting note, one that promises, there's so much more for you. You want to scream out loud, you want to bleed, too feel the life that you carry around with you throbbing and pulsing and coursing, spill, drip and pool.
It's forty degrees in the sun and I'm lying comatose on the roof, my mouth dries, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, my limbs are leaden, irresistibly weighted down to the roof, the water tank overflows and water trickles my way, I'm transported to a forest, a metal light tower in the trees, reaching into a faded blue photo-shopped sky, desaturated, edge-sharpened. I sit up and a satyr dances on my skull playing his pipes in my ear and there's little I can do to resist his invitation.
It's bittersweet bliss, limb aching, skull numbing agony, you're stretched out on a rack, stretched so your skin pulls, your joints groan and still she turns the screw, oh it hurts her and through the tears and the pain and the screams and the blood she stands over you, looks lovingly down at your tortured form and draws a nail across your taut skin.
You wake up on the floor alone and afraid, your phone lies beside you, singing songs of love, it's loose panels buzzing audibly, Wake up you silly bugger.
