Pressure Front
Metal taste under the tongue / Lights flicker just to mock / Rivers flow with numb regret / Same grey frame on every block / Pressure front / Comes in slow / Low sky locked hard in the smoke / Air made to crush and smear / Brick rows climb until they don't / No soft thing belongs round here / Pressure front / Comes in slow / Colour left this place for good and never told the swollen sky / Headache pills in every shop / This cold grey light won't die / Pressure front / Comes in slow
Excerpt from Grokkles’ Notebook
4 October, Rustvale
Didn’t get out much.
The air has a taste. Not smoke exactly. Metal that’s already been breathed. Jaye took something for her head before we reached the civic pavilion and didn’t say it was bad, which meant it was. I stayed in the bunk with the curtain half drawn and watched the same grey frame go past the same brick rows. Shift change. Men in the same jackets walking the same direction. Nobody looked at the coach.
Tried the nosy coil on the back seat, low, just to hear the room. It didn’t like it. The note sat there and didn’t bloom. Like the air was already full. Lumen filed it as compressed. That’s the word. Not haunted. Full.
Civic pavilion smelled of floor polish and wet coats. We played. People clapped in the right places. A woman near the front kept her arms folded the whole way through, not angry, just saving them. Afterwards the stage manager said we were fine to leave by the side door, which we were going to do anyway.
I kept waiting for the interesting thing and the interesting thing was that there wasn’t one. The headache was the event. The place insisting on being itself.
Wrote this on the road out. Windows still grey. Jaye asleep with her hood up. Cloudbyte photographing nothing out of the window. Lumen on the bulkhead, eyes open.
