This was originally written in response to one of the "prompts" in wesmdow's "I had this idea..." thread (which is now a sticky, at the top of the page). However, I've polished it a bit since posting it in there, so I've decided to give it its own thread. As always, I would be interested to hear people's comments / suggestions. 
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City is a swine forever in shit, overgrown with aim high stoppered by success, eyecandy hanging within reach; this disappointment. We are children though, so we can slip between its spells. We are winged, light, without artefacts. Innocently, we unzip our teeth for shouting, we climb everything, we work the signs; this is what children do! There’s not enough of nothing; we are looking for zero – you think it’s a good idea? It’s a treasure hunt! We go looking for zero in the random urban spread, shantytowns, inner-city ghettoes, overcrowded housing projects. We play hide and seek in the planet of slums. There is no eye-quenching zero to be found, only clichés set to repeat: squalor, crimewave, insecure havens. Here are the thousand wrecks and the people claiming their spaces, hurrying into the heaven, the wormhole, that is spiraling out of sight.
Radio says an invisible army, radio says trust the dollar, radio says the butchers that we are. We are children so, being chased, we don’t buy a gun. We turn and face the ghosts, whether they are lifelike or not. We are no longer capable of reading. We’re so magnified that we can’t decipher, we are no longer legible, dancing in the glory of not knowing what we’re doing. This proximity will drown, this clicking of sore tongues will drown us. We dream of an insistent hush, of walking face to face beneath cities reborn from memory, no longer needing to carry supplies of ice. We wake, always, to the siren slicing the traffic. Each morning we are blessed with animal intelligence.
We are waiting at the beginning of the future. Foiled voices tell us that fifty years from now, two-thirds of children will live in cities. In the dimmer hours, when the roads are no longer torched by sun, two billion slum children, their feeble legs dancing on the grave of the petroleum economy. And even now, the reptilians maintain that the city will be a frontier space, the blue sanctuary it always knew itself to be. All the ways technology loop de loops, irresistibly spun around our tongues. We’re children because we have to be. The newest, the most, the latest. We’ve got to bloom creative, invent new games for streets of suffocating dust. Our dreams arrive shaped like a room, where at last we sleep, far beyond the buzz. We dream ourselves sleeping safe. We dream the spacious dream, someone who calls herself the stolen mother, and the unhurried invitation of her body.
(c) Stu Hatton 2006
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City is a swine forever in shit, overgrown with aim high stoppered by success, eyecandy hanging within reach; this disappointment. We are children though, so we can slip between its spells. We are winged, light, without artefacts. Innocently, we unzip our teeth for shouting, we climb everything, we work the signs; this is what children do! There’s not enough of nothing; we are looking for zero – you think it’s a good idea? It’s a treasure hunt! We go looking for zero in the random urban spread, shantytowns, inner-city ghettoes, overcrowded housing projects. We play hide and seek in the planet of slums. There is no eye-quenching zero to be found, only clichés set to repeat: squalor, crimewave, insecure havens. Here are the thousand wrecks and the people claiming their spaces, hurrying into the heaven, the wormhole, that is spiraling out of sight.
Radio says an invisible army, radio says trust the dollar, radio says the butchers that we are. We are children so, being chased, we don’t buy a gun. We turn and face the ghosts, whether they are lifelike or not. We are no longer capable of reading. We’re so magnified that we can’t decipher, we are no longer legible, dancing in the glory of not knowing what we’re doing. This proximity will drown, this clicking of sore tongues will drown us. We dream of an insistent hush, of walking face to face beneath cities reborn from memory, no longer needing to carry supplies of ice. We wake, always, to the siren slicing the traffic. Each morning we are blessed with animal intelligence.
We are waiting at the beginning of the future. Foiled voices tell us that fifty years from now, two-thirds of children will live in cities. In the dimmer hours, when the roads are no longer torched by sun, two billion slum children, their feeble legs dancing on the grave of the petroleum economy. And even now, the reptilians maintain that the city will be a frontier space, the blue sanctuary it always knew itself to be. All the ways technology loop de loops, irresistibly spun around our tongues. We’re children because we have to be. The newest, the most, the latest. We’ve got to bloom creative, invent new games for streets of suffocating dust. Our dreams arrive shaped like a room, where at last we sleep, far beyond the buzz. We dream ourselves sleeping safe. We dream the spacious dream, someone who calls herself the stolen mother, and the unhurried invitation of her body.
(c) Stu Hatton 2006
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