#surrealistic

gensou no hi

A blinding flash— The sun strikes black top. A brass cymbal crashes. Screaming. Shouting. Plastic slides melt. Midday glare. Tag! You’re it! Laughter rises, A bubbling fountain. Twenty paces away, Chain-link rusts. Cardboard collapses. Concrete beams press. A frozen world. A forgotten breath.

Smell that? Mock-orange blossoms, Heavy, suffocating. White petals spill. Bumblebees whir, Drunk on gold light, Past razor wire. Yellow shorts flash. A runaway ball. Sneakers thud. Under the overpass, Elderberries swell, Bloated to bursting. Purple juice drips— drip. drip. Sodden synthetic. A sleeping sack stained. Spine bent in a crack. Petrol chokes fruit.

Look closer. Neon billboard flashes. A luxury watch glows. Brilliant, expensive gold Over a hollow cheek. A cough of rust. A grey hand trembles. A suburban dream floats. Pastel chalk clouds. Lace dress swirling. Strawberry ice cream. Clean linen scent. Lavender, fresh lawns. They step over green. Glowing chemical puddles. A castaway shivers. Ruined winter coat. Toxic heatwave bakes. Pristine white sneakers Glide past like angels. Dandelion seeds drift, Whimsical, delicate, free. Soot and engine oil.

Listen. An ice cream van chimes. Warped, childlike melody. Ethereal echo. Post-industrial hell. Screeching metal. Hydraulic presses stomp. Iron demons crashing. Acid-bath fumes hiss Into a lilac sky.

Clang. The school bell fractures. Sharp, manic joy. Juice box wrappers. Littered green grass. Stagnant canal gleams. Oily rainbow sheen. Overburdened clover Fights through gravel. Dead zones painted. A trolley for a bed. A discarded lottery ticket. A losing number flutters.

The air thickens. A sudden pressure drop. The sky turns bruised blue. The ice cream chime screams. Hydraulic presses double tempo. THUD. THUD. THUD. The playground laughter sharpens. A fever pitch of screaming joy. The mock-orange blooms explode. White petals raining like shrapnel. The neon billboard glitches, blinding. GOLD. GREY. GOLD. GREY. The bloated elderberries burst open, Bleeding thick purple into the chemical stream. The heatwave snaps. A catastrophic gust of wind.

And inside the poet's skull— The grey conformity cracks wide. Like a living burst of technicolour Shattering a static, mid-century screen. A silent, spectacular psychic detonation. No fire. No violence. Only release. The mundane architecture unmoored. Look up.

The sky becomes a slow-motion museum. Plastic dreams float in a lilac haze. A pastel wardrobe sails overhead. Glossy magazine pages flutter like wings. Television sets broadcast silent static. Boxes of breakfast cereal burst into neon. Loaves of bread, designer sunglasses, chrome, An entire empire of manufactured comfort Dancing in a kaleidoscope of weightless debris. The provincial grid dissolves.

The eyes track the debris expanding outward, Past the factory smoke, past the lawns, Spinning into the black velvet stratosphere. The consumerist junk thins out to dust. Revealing the deep, terrifying vastness. Stars burning through gaps of broken plastic. A sudden, blinding awareness of eternity Swallowing the petty noise of the market. A cosmic orchestration of light.

Then— The hammer falls.

Silence.

A single dandelion seed settles. On a frozen eyelash. Suspended in heat, Winter’s ghost waits, Sharpening its teeth. Ready to bite. The left-behind.

The sky dissolves into a ceiling of ticking clocks. Fish with human eyes watch the highchair from the hallway. A ladder made of smoke rises toward a crescent moon. The floorboards twitch softly like a dying cat.

Men in bowler hats catch falling teeth in paper bags. We walk through doors that open into locked nurseries. The shadows on the wall are longer than the room. Memory is a typewriter clicking in an empty trench.

A piano plays a military march under a canopy of white feathers. The mirror shows an empty uniform instead of a face. We wade through a river of unwritten death warrants. The clock strikes thirteen and the walls turn to glass.

The furniture drifts two inches above the floor. An open umbrella catches the sound of distant artillery. Trees grow upside down, rooting into the pale clouds. The silence here is heavy, shaped like a guillotine.

A tiny tyrant sits in a towering highchair. He snaps his plastic toys to erase whole populations. The map on his bib is stained with spilled ink. He giggles as the miniature cities turn to ash.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, The dictator counts as the dead cities fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men, Will bleed in the mud again and again.

He counts his casualties on a plastic abacus. A million shoes march without any feet inside them.

He pulls the wings off flies to pass the afternoon. The playground rules dictate who lives and dies.

Sociopaths in oversized suits pull the marionette strings. They play a game of chess using real, silent lives. The ledger of the lost is written in invisible ink. A nursery rhyme sung by a chorus of ghosts.

Ring-a-ring-o'er the burning town, A pocket full of ashes as the sky falls down. Atrocity! Atrocity! We all fall down.

We trade our voices for coins made of frozen rain. Birds made of razor-wire untangle the horizon. The staircase leads only to a room full of tide. Strained static electricity of the ending tastes like vinegar.

Inside the tyrant’s crown, the maggot of his soul wakes up. A wet, white squirming that smells of burning hair. It eats his vision from the inside out. He blinks and hears the bright screaming colour of the slaughter.