Through the glaze of snow falling from ninety-nine cent aluminium, we'd taken the remains of a novel formulation to remove the stars from the sky and plant them in a field. I took crushing endlessness and the heat of leaves growing in moments to make the autumn of a town I hadn't yet seen. This is how I escaped from the sealed-elevator flight plan the first time; talking had failed me, pinned against the face of a fleeing infant. His mother could never find a way to paint him as a forgery, a skeleton, and make it stick, so he coughed rough and eloped from the schematic with his brother as their father remained on the ground, paying out the parking lot tower fees, unaware that he, himself, was only a figment.

and I, just another figment, ventured off into the village, the leaves cascading and trembling, the gold of their hues dissipating as the flight crew shook a lifeless husk, spent lives ago, now, with the clamour of shells dividing, each split or junction or birth yielding arcs of light as my sister tells me how the strings she pulls around her wrists tell metric time whilst I brush my hand against concrete and glass, leaving traces of skin within the grain, sloughing away finally in the small moments as I float through an antique dealership: mahogany gods, carved tall as redwoods, and bathed in mist like the western coast at dawn.

and I, indifferent to the television sets implanted between memories, broadcasting coffee-stain eyes lost midsummer years ago, still indifferent.

as I finally reach the elevator, the last level, the depth below, struck me. I am the test subject, my irrealities are just trying to get out, to survive this feigned life, to be born into the world I frequent. They are abstractions and know it. I have not said a word as I step out onto that plane, amidst the rising roar of engines and the row of the crowds and the swell of my emptiness.

I breathe in and become the field, at last.

the overcast window haze casts shadows over farmlands at distance, past ferns and cottage solemnities out on plains cold and alive; meanwhile, concrete and preservative-laden once-trees cage in the zoo-horde of humanity this lovely city is built upon, through the steep divides between the walls of foreign strangers, still neighbours, calling telephone lines to the lover that makes their heart shrink in the cool sheets at a distance of eight thousand leagues under kitchen sink designs where drips escape onto a blue-grey dishtowel, strategically placed to avoid having to address the issue over farmland holidays when stormclouds gather and sleep 'til the grand show, back over the alps, as the fallabout planes drift under blue over grey with distorted fantasies sandwiched three abreast internally, whispering "you'll be here, I'll be here, seventeen minutes" as the black gown of evening bids its farewells to the long-worn ball of flame we call upon for life's little affirmations, the skin and bone we call home, the constructed caves we wish we didn't, and, letting frost's call begin, the last of the seasons hauls its bulky frame over the horizon and clusters on the fingertips of tree limbs, coercing: "let go, it's late, it's so very late" and so the sidewalks choke with debris under the wearing off of summer feet, and the declination of that peach-pit feeling of sanguinity as the blankets pile up and the distance consumes once again, long after delusion gave up the chase; we all want to be left alone and want someone to pursue us at the same time, we all dream of the grandeur of timeless monuments: the desert road, the glint of illuminated heavens, the mist's rise and fall, the electricity in her eyes.