Postmeridian Thoroughfares
by
Adam J Murray

Sparks of steel wheels and a metallic banshee shriek shakes me awake. 
Pulling down on the shutter it flaps violently upwards pinpricking my pupils as the kaleidoscopic sun tunnels through my cerebrum. 
Already we are snaking through Snake Valley where the spectre of modification peers out from below raptor wings and oozes through wormcasts. 
Our advances are sneered at by the distant black metropolis of awkward framework and mezzanines fading into white darkness cast from fluorescent tubing that ebbs with afternoon shadow at each flicker.
The continual insect drone of dentist drills cut with gurgled screams in the circular glow of third floor window. Below crouched distemper foaming canines brutalize each other under leaden dental amalgam fallout caught in the pedestal fan foul breath and blown through blood stained lace curtain.

A skulking serial killer hunts crones, a cold-blooded callousness moving across pavements and rooming houses of the city, slipping silently into bars to shake the water from their raincoats. 
The doors swing in a silent clap as brainsick miners scratch at their faces terrified of the falling night, scared of the dark from what they’ve seen in the earths womb. They stagger through wearisome postmeridian thoroughfares feeding on rolled oats in horse troughs hung on old west facades of theme bars. Snarling animalistic under napalm combustions in the eye twinkle of cabaret girls stumbling on drunk heels. 
Painted fingernails unbuttoning whalebone corsets revealing an endman naval officer aroma of malaria tainted estuaries and bubonic plague sweat lustrous bilges, lampblack scratched into their pallid flesh by chewed fingernails now healed over as primitive tattoos.
The late afternoon becomes a mackerel sky, light bouncing from its scales in an endless embarrassment of stars that close their eyes in burnout to archipelagos of refuse pissed on by amusement park niggers. 
Those blacks blacker than the ace of spades with an endless vaporous rhetorical concerning these funny looking tourists as they shepherd pesticide stinking conundrums of twisted endoskeletons and gossamer gilled creatures from the back door of the freak show. Each tied to the other with a rusted piece of barbed wire. 
A flashbulb explosion of an 1890’s photographer capturing the masquerade in a final picture postcard diminution to send to his thespian boyfriend serving a prison term for sodomizing a Clydesdale. 

The deluge begins on the already muddy streets like God is trying to piss away the entire town for its every sin.

Croaking junkies of the burning climax produced under an abortion-inducing drug pull at their throats Their bodies ejaculating continuous fountains of dead youth as pubic louse itching bruisers gorge themselves along the windowsill of the sushi bar as they peer into the sheets of rain with a dumb bestial curiosity. 
A battery operated postcard lights a halo around baby Jesus’ head in a miniaturisation of Bethlehem clutched white-knuckled in a bundle of dead letters delivered to the Turkish baths and cathouses of uptown by an arduous meter reader.
Downtown near the dockyards factories pull into themselves with corrosion and across the grease black Gila Monster scale sheen of the port flagship patrols hold monsoon soaked stool pigeons at cutlass point on the plank. Each keeping a wary eye on the circling scorpion-fish and moray eels of the radioactive waters below.  
“Execute this hombre as his story is a crock and he is clearly a scumbag with such a preeeeeety mouth, senor.”
The art faker is edged off the plank by blade tip. 
A cardinal reading in a dull monotone from a bible outstretched in one hand and scratching needle scars with the other, an ancient tattoo coursing through his sunken veins.
Flamenco dances clicking aging castanets cast ambiguous shadows across the obsidian waters from the Loco Cabana. Swilling tiny umbrellas in cocktails overweight retired judges wearing tartan golf pants and suspenders practice their putting averages along the bar with a rusted golf club. 
The club is a Caucasian hell of pre-rut for the ambit assertion of Moroccan adulators that tap feet and lounge before a huge panorama of a tropical shore complete with overhanging palm trees and hula girl. 
A tourist wearing socks and sandals, pith hat and a suitcase covered in stickers of all the places he will one day go stumbles in and has his vocabulary centroids involuntarily cut to ribbons into a Columbian necktie by the doorman with a flick of a soiled switchblade.

Across the street under yellow, blue and orange fluorescent lights heads bop to chrome jukebox rock and roll and are served by girls wearing yellow bobby socks. 
Through the grey deluge the Loco Cabana is an object for castrated authors to ponder from below slick back hair as they pound at portable typewriters. Plot-less manuscripts pock marked with coffee rings, the paper starched from cigarettes that burn themselves out in full ashtrays. 
The writers each pause to push an alcohol soaked outfit into the animal tissue of neck, injecting pen ink as they cannibalise creativity with hypodermic quills. 
Nodding in and out they inhale dream vistas of Mercedes driving advertising executives in grey rayon sharkskin suits standing on manicured lawns at house auctions. 
A group of neo-Nazi children street urchins, chocolate caked cheeks and branded swastikas, tie a retarded mossback to the overhead railroad tracks. The midnight express looms down, eating fire and exhaling smoke with a roar like the dragon slain by Cadmus.
In the caboose a chocolate éclair sours the stomach of a watchmaker with nimble fingers delicately piecing together with inhumane lecherousness a Great War timepiece oddity.
Beside him an obscenely obese woman in a muumuu juggles a naked infant upon a lopsided hot-water bottle breast, feeding it with the milk foam of a cancerous tit. 
She smiles around black stumps at a fruit in a white cowboy suit that plays strip poker with a black horse, purposely losing consecutively and reaching across with a salt lick and a soft chastise to every pony win.

The carriage rocks indolently like a steel ship on the rolling tide as I match-flare a cigarette. Loosening my tie with a quaking finger and wiping sweat from my temple at what I already have seen of this God-forsaken mining town. Squinting out of the portal window at the scenes below my jaw slides open absently depositing the cigarette into my lap.

Old men in Yankee Doodle costumes with tasselled elbows ride velocipedes in the muddy, horse shit stinking thoroughfares blowing out stars by shooting circa 1812 pistols into the nite sky. 
Captured in a portal window I stare out from in the last train as through a crackling speaker the driver with wild hacking laughter announces termination at the next stop.