The Underground Chronicles

Turpentine mushroom cloud insulation once again. I descend the dungeons and my hands become cold, yet my body cushions the heat of machinery and the migraines of trains that electrify perpetually through black tunnels.  I watch the eyes of the monster, its retinas blaring sinisterly at me, whirlpooling my hair, splitting my split ends to the end of destruction.

I breathe the bodies of strangers, detecting traces of their urine under their denim and cotton, sniffing the moist sweat beneath their deodorants. I sit between two Black Frenchmen, the reek of their bottled lavender strong enough to infuse my taste buds. They talk, laugh and stare- Paranoia surges and I shuffle with a book.

I hear someone speak my language, their desi-isms chirruping within the French fanaticism of my neighbors.  I pretend not to hear yet try to detain the cackle of the Frenchmen and let the Punjabi accented Urdu speak through, hearing it laugh and clap its hands as it jokes, oblivious to the jerks of the mechanical snake we inhabit.

Every day I venture on the backs of blue whales, watching the space between an armpit and a face; I watch the bacteria from their undulating pores squirm and wheeze in all the spaces in between.

Breaths that are vaporous with liquor, cigarette oxygen and cheap cologne often sedates the half-piss half- deodorant atmosphere.  Mucus clogged in nostrils, and discarded tissue papers stuffed in pockets. The mad ones then slowly infiltrate the loud chorus of train racket. They clamber in with their walking sticks and mysterious slur and always end up sitting with me. I shuffle with a book.

Before I know it I’m surrounded by one drunk, another hung over, one high and another schizophrenic. The damp muffle of their guts totters towards me, because I sit between their bobbing Adam’s apples and peer at their forlorn selves, trying to visualize them as children, because I am their Empress after all.

They gravitate towards me, two inches off the ground and find themselves in my common person demeanor, their South British East London tongues relishing my inner madness, getting drunk on my sobriety. Their fuzzy eyeballs of twelve colours get high by just looking at me, their stubble itching from my perfume. My neuroticism surfacing splendidly as I gaze at a reflection of a drunken man in the glass: our reflections overlap, creating a half human half creature entity.

To distract myself from the metallicism of their perpetual drunkenness, I sometimes envision them all wearing massive purple turbans and emerald gems. I thus laugh in the Kingdom of the Underground as I space travel through the dirt and they bewilder at their Empress watching her become the mad one, as I snicker at the white man’s drunken and bloody silk turban.

 

 

 

Turpentine Mushroom Cloud Insulation once again.