Non fiction

I.C.

The sun sets at four now; red sky rising over the hills.  Past the glass, chimney stacks stand out stark; branches like brushstrokes reach, seeking.  Lights ignite; glowing embers staring out at the dark.  Black spires and towers stand silhouetted

against celestial silk, pink and lilac, stretching edge to edge.  Darker now,

blushing.  Distance tinted purple; lights striking up; sparks scattered, strewn

across the dark.  Glittering between the latticework trees, a mass of inked

lines, map on map emerging, obscured.  

At the tram station, people wait.  Cameras watch.  Students sit sipping coffee,

talk, stare - at each other - backs to the darkness and the light, passing

pedestrians, orange illumination, headlights chained, gleaming fast.

On the hilltops, branches bleed into the horizon. Dragon, ombre chinoise, this land; curled around the basin city, toytown of cut-out silhouettes and shadow-play struck through with streams of red and gleaming gold. Shining squares and soft sky; purpled, pink retreats over the hills. where wavering wisps of lilac hang like smoke.  

Black on purple.  Subtle silhouette.

Café light spills away into the subtle night.

In the window, café lights stretch on again, doubled, phantom city faraway.

Twins twinned and overlaid, Picasso-land of half-dreamed shades.

Now indigo, beyond the rooves, softens flat-lined shapes.

Stark brushstrokes in darkest ink, block, bleed, trail crisply, filgree across

the silken sky, which ripples in folds and floods of purple, lilac, rose.

Lines trailing; tiny, firm, delicate, curved, tangled lines.  Like twine

twisted, written and scrawled into a ball between the branches.

The light is fading now.  Ink bleeds in.  A bleeding purple-grey, a dusk of

dusty blue.  Lamps shine out on the orange-starred earth.

[Ink has drowned the world.  We are in indigo night.]