David Dowker

GRIOT TROUSERS

         for David Hoefer

I'm navigating crosstown from my piece of the sky to the situationist bar
     - a bit out of my element perhaps but maintaining a participatory distance
    from the twin impediments of reason and mystery while being drawn into
    the argument like some cartoon character hastily scrawled in the margin
    for a quick fix to a sticky predicament.

The clouds overhead are digitized striation mappings upon disillusion. God,
    that tragicomic category-concept mistake, asserts its right to wrong.

It will take a miracle to make me believe in miracles. As it is, my senses
    have no filters. People appear as luminous eggs softly bobbing along
    the earthly stratum of the energy grid. A beatific salesclerk neatly
    persuades me to buy into the halogenic radiance of her smile, a series of
    explosions housed in one magnificent chamber.

I could case the library but why? One knows the consequences of a raving
    night spent in the coign of wisdom-saturated scraps of manuscript or iconic
    cardboard characters, crawling through the stacks, be wailing the lack
    of spiritual nourishment. The irony of the situation not unnoticed by those
    who wait.

So, a roiling sphere, I roll into the bar. Above the plush baize of the billiard
    table, a sign announces, "God does not play dice, but she does play pool."
    Here the drinks and the girls share names like Ultraviolet and Aurora
    Borealis; here the boys, clad in sheet metal, bang the drums of their
    armoured personalities.

What an occupying force of symmetry and imagination! Nursing my wound,
    I shine the distance from the table to the bar. "Innocence is only natural,"
    Grace muses, visored in ecstacy, licking her companion's apparently
    non-opposable thumb. Liana, mad acrobat of the vines, hugs herself
    and sucks the pucker from a lemon-soaked rag. Soon, I have enough of
    the atmosphere to extend the boundaries of my domain to include
    my wild friends dwelling nearby, in the Dreamtime Villa.

Suddenly the lights go out and "the ghost of electricity" can be seen dangling
    from a bare lightbulb in the back room. An attenuated voice says,
    "Place the essence of resistance in a jar by the door and ground
    the surroundings."

I grab my stack of hats and prepare to go-to the underflow back to my skyhome
    when the man in the quick-time poster asks me for directions to Alterra
    so I give him the mimetics and browse my way over to the interzone
    to get me a pair of those griot trousers.