Ruins

It’s weirdly tropical in here. Coldly tropical. It’s not right. The seasons are topsy turvy.


Is it cold or warm? I can’t quite tell.


A microclimate. A ruins climate. A posthumous climate.


Sound doesn’t travel properly here. Retarded. Delayed.

A kind of bruising of sound. Sound smeared.

Slowness. Sound sinks here. Sound waves can’t be bothered to reach anything.


A glowing of the walls. A throbbing of the walls. A fever of the walls. They’re hot.


God what are we stepping in? Some kind of humanities mulch.

Shiva, you’re soiling your brogues.


Some kind of sweat – is that what it is?


Where did those boulders come from?


There must be some mud worms somewhere.


Like there should be dinosaurs, or something.


Fronds. Ferns. Mole rats, all curled up.

It’s fetid. Sticky.

And it’s drizzling … something.


Something wrong. This isn’t how things are supposed to be.


A bunker. An incubator.  Like where the Moher alien lays all her weird eggs in Aliens.


It’s, like, aggressively damp.


A very wet void. A sopping void. A humid Nothing.


Something’s running down the walls.

Something sticky. Spermy. Ejaculatory.

Something drooly. Something that should be wiped away. As should we.


It’s realer than we are.

Were we only ever a dream of this room. A fever dream?


What is this stuff? What’s it doing?

Fermenting, I think. Like some kind of kimchi. A sauerkraut of the void.


Is this some kind of saliva? Is it digesting something?


Stuff’s, like de-evolving.


There seems to be a river. Someone left the taps on.

It seems to be meandering. Through all the … debris.


The walls are, like, bruised.


Things have hatched here. They’ve left behind their old kin.


There are mosquitos – winter mosquitos.

There are winter wasps, I think.


I’ll bet there’s some really unique terroir. I’ll bet the soil’s been watered by postgraduate tears. By the sweat of postgraduate study. By unknown postgraduate suicides, buried in the sod.

Dead postgraduate wine.