fields of sky

#1, November 2016 _______________________ An epic poem _______________________ A dystopian psychogeographic zine _______________________ Words + Pictures: Rhi Bowen

The funny thing is, no one ever even tried to stop it from happening.

It wasn’t like a car crash in slow motion; because even in slow motion, a car crash has obvious consequences. It was more... an electric blanket fire. Something that you fully believe is keeping you warm and comfortable, but that ends up destroying everything you love.

Quality of light is something that, nowadays, seems very important. The way it glows and reflects. The right kind of light, positioned correctly, when your eyes are closed; it can send you somewhere else, give you warmth, give you hope.

Really you’re stalling for time. The kind of light you’re heading for right now is an openness, a starkness, an exposure you don’t want or need.

Agoraphobia is a national disorder.

To keep your mind in check, you focus on the ground, a littered, comforting flatness. Always a constant.

Weave back through the drafty cold-smelling concrete tunnels, clattering back down flights and flights of stairs, round corners and through heavy steel doors that clang shut behind.

Just imagine it’s another big room, bigger than the Communal Hall full of those old plasticine-smelling red plastic chairs you remember from school.

You tread lightly, careful not to look up; a reverent, religious need not to look directly at what is above you.

Skulking rat-like through these underground alleyways does not prepare you for seeing, above ground, signs of life.

A single faltering light holds court in a window, as if just there for show, just there to lure you in....

You look away. Can’t be good.

Through wrought iron fences and pockmarked facades you see the ghosts of people, afraid to make too much noise for no specific reason.

Graffiti’d trademarks decorate the maudlin, unforgiving manmade-ness of it all; you pause despite yourself and wonder, are they marks of territory or marks of disownment?

A faint BOOM echoes through the close-packed buildings, visibility is difficult at best and despite yourself, you look up.

Only for a moment, your eyes deliberately unfocussed as if this will lessen the impact of the emptiness.

It does not.

The few vines and leaves that remain are out of place, ludicrous, even frivolous somehow. Why would life exist in a place like this?

If only for comfort you head briskly for the cover of another tunnel, another device to block out the true light of the world.

It is all less threatening when looked out at from a concrete cocoon. Yet your idealism, your hope to one day break out into some mythical world of nature, is always there in the back of your mind, a flickering light behind a two-way mirror.

You are a lways loo king down, hoping to s ee fields of s ky, gathered in p at your fe uddles et.