Cascade / The Circus

I uploaded the Circus. The company filter
took less than a second to kick me out
with a kidney stone and a bad credit rating.
I woke up on the 500th floor of an imaginary business
under a sky the colour of a dead man’s helmet.
My nose felt like someone had filled it with antifreeze.

“Shit,” I said. It was the year 2000, or possibly 3000.
It was difficult to remember what my penis looked like
in amongst all those fake memory implants. The government
was changing the slang name for cigarettes every month
just to keep the time-travellers nervous.
The only thing I could trust was Scottish weather.

I looked out the window so hard I could identify
subatomic microprocessors hidden in the glazing.
By now, the Circus would be threading its trapezes
into every suicide spot in the city. The bank
would flip inside-out like a nail bomb. And yet I knew
I wouldn’t live to see this. You can’t outrun an idea

that good, especially a funny one, as my mentor
had learnt the hard way: they’d dropped a breezeblock
on him during mass. I took two Okie Dokies,
barricaded the office, then checked the street below.
Import-export agents were streaming out of the lobby,
their eyes like ransacked briefcases.

My peroxide engineer flickered onto the vide-screen.
“So, this is it,” he said. He was already engulfed in the Circus.
Over time, it would unpick every one of his characteristics
until he looked like a waxwork of David. “Perhaps,” he said,
“you should think about hiding your signature somewhere.”
His face was turning into tiny ideas and heading for the coast.

As usual, I was one step ahead of him. My autobiography
was already hidden inside a microdot, that I’d hidden
inside the i of “microdot”. Nested functions
were somewhat a speciality of mine, hence the Circus.
Janice, on the night I wrote the Circus I did not come
and speak to you and put my arm around you and ask you

if you’d take a walk with me under the shadow
of the great tetrahedron, hover-freighters
snaking through the night like radioiodine.
Forgive me. I was too busy murdering the happiness of robots,
So that now, when I press RETURN, nothing happens
and now I wonder if it ever will.