2am: sleep has not come for me. Bells thresh against the double-glazing like wheat. The air-con whispers of towels in a drier. I lie stacked beneath layers of strangers like eggs frozen in ice-cube trays. In my mind’s eye a numbered ball slips pipe to pipe from floor to floor down thirty-five floors to the city’s sewage. Another hairy, farting, scab-nosed child has scorned my offer of mortality. I am a bag of feathers lying still, reading the pillow menu. I wanted you to embark on me; climb on my shoulders with your sandy feet; make me the stone in a rich stone soup. Hours pass. Again I conduct myself over the white tiles, cupping a hand, and crouch, confiding my hinge to the ear and dark throat of the drain. On this chock-a-block earth I am an ill-planned city that has built too many tower blocks for industry that never comes. Along both sides of the street houses march, denuded of gardens, piled like debris in the forks of trees years after the last flash flood has passed. Cathoel Jorss
