Layla

My father was Albert W. Van Dijk/he was an architect and all around good fellow/albert smoked ciggies his entire life/he was a twenty per day ciggie monkey and he was super self-conscious about his giant feet/he felt they were terribly ugly feet and that they lacked grace/personally, I am no judge of monkey feet/as far as i am concerned they all look about the same/stubby-toed/ridiculous/badly designed considering what they need to support/my father also liked his coffee and his whisky/in fact, he enjoyed a number of vices right up until the very end of his life/when old age finally killed him/this happened on the morning of his 84th Christmas/the last thing he saw was a little bird on the window ledge of his study/but wait!/hold your horses/we are getting too far ahead of ourselves here/when my father was still young he and his sister Claire escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe/they travelled from the heart of the horror out to the edges/returning to sanity/along the way, they saw many things which were strange and disturbing/bodies frozen to the ground/the abandoned machinery of war/the black pillars of smoke on the horizon/they saw the chewed up ruins of their old world through a slow moving train window/it was like a long film/all herky-jerky with grainy black and white despair/reeling monotonously past their window/imagine that mud and wreckage/All those cored out buildings/and all those displaced monkeys in rags on the side of the road/where would all those poor monkeys go?/this was a question that troubled my father at the time/anyway/that messy old bastard fate put my father and his sister into the vast and turbulent bloodstream of the world/moving him by train to a camp in England/and then by oceanic liner to a place which was relatively untouched by horror/the golden shores of Australia/and this was where my father started his new life/and/at first it was a hard life because my father and his sister only spoke the Dutch language/this would account for why my father spent so much time inside his own little monkey brain/thinking about ruined buildings/about how a city might develop new appendages/and this led him to draw several versions of me on paper napkins and on the inside of cigarette packets/then, after my father had learnt English and began working for the architectural firm in the city, I was drawn on a big piece of semi-transparent paper/in my father's controlled hand, each line perfectly realised in pencil and then in ink/this was the way they used to do these things in the old days before the microchips and the mobile phones/they were all serious monkeys in those offices with their muttonchops and flared trousers/they smoked Marlboro cigarettes as they leaned over their angled drafting tables, stopping work once and awhile to reach out and pinch the ample bottoms of any female monkeys who happened by/such a ripe peach! The males would laugh/boast/leer/the sexual revolution had served the male monkeys well but presented a dilemma for the females/yes/the females had been released from domestic servitude only to enter into a resentful, male-dominated work environment/and in terms of sexual congress, females were free to copulate without biological repercussions but now they had to deal with emboldened male sexual aggression/my father worked in this kind of environment/these same male monkeys/his colleagues/with their mechanical pencils and rulers dreamt up the architecture of the city/and once I had been designed in intricate detail/and approved by the money monkeys/then the worker monkeys turned up with their cranes and their concrete trucks to start construction/the two-dimensional drawings where becoming a three-dimensional structure/and up I came out of the ground/this was in 1967/in Potts Point/overlooking the city and the harbour/i was new and I was modern/no boring neo-classic columns and plinths for me/no scrolling bank cornices carved out of marble/or sandstone/no sir/my father and his colleagues used a new language which relied on words such as "biomimicry"/and "curvilinear"/and what did all this jargon mean?/well....it was all to do with replicating natural forms and patterns in man-made structures/forms/while still showcasing the manufactured character of these structures/once they had built up my skeleton, they poured my re-enforced concrete shell/and i was beautiful to behold/with flowing homogeneous tracery/i was a vertical poem celebrating man's audacious mastery of this new design and form/i was born out of my father's head and my mother was the dirt/i was the future standing tall and proud/inside i had minimal interior supporting walls/and therefore I was characterised by large, sweeping open spaces/i also had bold sculptural features/starbursts in metal and glass/everything in this world is born of a father and a mother/this was reflected in my final composition/this balance is necessary/essential/and with this in mind, I had subtle design features like shade hoods and doorway frames which could have been modelled on a delicate human philtrum or the sex organ of a flower/cantilevered platforms conveyed a floating/feminine delicacy/i had mirror lined elevators and high end wood trimming/i was characterised by what was missing/absent/concealed/i was sculptural and lean/yonic forms inside a phallic structure/a white cylinder rising up above the decrepit terraced houses of Woolloomooloo and the dive-bombing city cockatoos/anchored in the wrinkled knuckle of the hill, I could see out in all directions at once/i was 18 storeys tall and crowned by an octagonal penthouse/and/at first I was a hotel with a piano bar-restaurant on the ground floor/many famous monkeys came to stayed with me including Mr. Frank Sinatra/old blue eyes himself!/oh boy that was something/he tipped members of the staff a hundred bucks a pop!/what a guy!/all told, I was inhabited by thousands of monkeys over the years/i was witness to endless monkey shenanigans/and/as result, I have learned the following things/: monkeys have an average lifespan of 80 years/they usually have one or two marriages/2.5 children/a job/and an automobile/and they have sex intercourse with soft grunts of pleasure/very often resulting in new monkeys popping out of the lady monkey/a process which takes on average nine months/monkeys often break their marriage vows copulating with other monkeys in privacy/these indiscretions cause everything from minor self-doubts to full blown life changes/sometimes monkeys will throw their entire life away hoping to escape into a new and exciting existence which will inevitably only serve up a new set of problems/although their lives are short, monkeys engage in many time wasting activities including thinking/dancing/sniffing under armpits/talking on the phone/slowly brushing teeth in tight little circles while dressed in their white underpants while staring out the window/or at the TV/monkeys love watching other monkey on televsions/and/monkeys oversleep and wrestle with nasty hangovers/they hit reset button at the beginning of each new day with the big morning defecation/now times all this by 27, 325 days/the average number of days in a monkey's life depending on lifestyle and genetic toughness/and you have some idea/I have learnt that monkey life is basically a repeated pattern of these kinds of behaviours with some variations/depending on race/economic & social status/natural abilities/and in many cases pure luck/in other words, monkey life is like jazz on two legs!/endless variations on the old standards through crazy improvisation/and the physical instrument of this monkey music is their goofy looking bodies/what an eye-sore!/they have loping arms/hairy legs/a belly/dangling sex organs/protruding ears/bulbous noses/ knee caps/fat heads/plump torsos/pointy elbows...../to name but only a few of their external features/basically what we're talking about here is a hideous bipedal design/upright, stumbling around/ blinking against the sun/with bad breath..../don't get me wrong/there are some clever design features like opposable thumbs for gripping and language for the communication of abstract thought/admittedly they are adept at a range of activities other animals can not hope to master/they can make mechanical pencils, automobiles and guns/but instead of using these special design skills with humility, they seem to need to punish all the other creatures on the planet/an/now that they have split the atom, they seem to be consumed with mass extinction/these are the things i have learnt through my observations/the things I hear and I see/i am a place/and a thing/but more than this, I am a conduit/a vessel/a stage setting for all the interior thoughts/and voices/and emotions/and fears/and joys transmitted/expressed by all the monkeys who have come to stay with me/all of these things have collected inside me over time/in my wall cavities/empty spaces/in the vascular system of my plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems/and/have been witnessed by the unblinking surveillance cameras that guard every floor and stairwell/some monkeys believe a place can be haunted/it isn't quite like that/have you ever been in an old building and had a feeling like someone was standing right behind you?/about to trace their finger down the back of your neck?/yes?/that the place you were standing in had more to it than just a collection of walls and a roof?/then you know/you understand/it is simply the residue of past habitation/trapped energy from all the other monkeys who have occupied a space before you/mass Deja Vu/there are no sad dead monkey souls hanging around, waiting to whisper "boo!" in your goofy ear hole/it is just good and bad energy/monkey pollution/trapped/echoing/the squeal of a shoe leave a room/the trapped reverberations of a heated conversation in an enclosed space/echoing out over time/this is not to say there has not been much sadness and melancholy within my walls/all hotels have their share of woe/i am a place of temporary habitation/the staging place for everything from drama to comedy/and/a new performance occurs every time a new monkey checks in/sticks his/her/key into the room door/walks into  the room/drops their luggage on the bed/action!/and not all of it can be comedy/or even black comedy/over the years there has been two monkeys who self-expired by auto-asphyxiations with the belts and the self-inflicted erotic manipulation/one in the room closet and another in the shower/this method is always morbidly interesting to the public/especially when the person who has self-expired is famous/it is the little death which/by mistake or design/becomes the big death/and/there have been six monkeys in the bathtub with pills and razor blades/and/there have been five monkeys who have jumped to their demise from balconies or from the roof/i remember one male monkey who was very sad/deep in his heart/i can not go on, he was thinking/he had reached the point of self-extinction/he checked in and did nothing at all for two days/he just sat in the lobby and watched other monkeys drinking and laughing at the bar/he drank too much alcohol at night/he wept sad monkey tears into his pillow because he was already missing everything/the sky, the birds, the cars, the sun, the rain drops, the faces of monkey children, the telegraph poles, the ocean, the city...../the list goes on /and on/forever because there are just so many things in the world/and/all of it would stay behind and he would be gone/into the blackness they call 'death'/but still/even with this realisation/he could not keep on going/it was all just too painful for him like a ship breaking through an endless frozen ocean/the prow becoming blunt and dull on the ice/so this sad/sad monkey just sat there for two days contemplating the end of his existence/peering out over the edge/and/then on the last day/in the final moments/he bumped into another monkey coming out of the elevator/just a normal looking monkey going about his monkey business/heading out into the street/please understand, this was just an accident/no big deal right?/and what did this 'normal' monkey say to the sad, extinction bound monkey?/something nice?/something like, "are you okay buddy?/why are you sad?/can I help you?"/no/instead, the so-called 'normal' monkey said, "watch it asshole"/the fact was he was an arrogant/totally unempathetic monkey/which is often considered the same as 'normal' in the monkey world/anyway, this was the straw that broke the camel's back/the sad monkey became super sad/and/he goes up in the elevator/to his room and he pours himself a little drink from the minibar/some champagne from France/the sad monkey takes one little sip before opening the balcony door/and in one graceful motion, tossing himself over the edge/he goes down as fast as a sports car/down in a straight line until suddenly he stopped falling/bang!/he made a body imprint on the roof of a car parked at the kerb/the super sad monkey was dead on arrival/dead as a doornail/and also he had inadvertently killed the monkey who was sitting behind the wheel of this parked car/both monkeys had expired from blunt force trauma/and the monkey behind the wheel?/oh yes/you guessed it/it was the arrogant monkey from the lobby!/the arrogant monkey had just climbed into his car/and he was fiddling with the radio/waiting for his lady monkey to emerge from the restaurant/but now he was also dead/is this cosmic justice?/maybe/if the cosmos was dishing out a particularly hard form of justice on this day, then yes/sure/i happened to think it is all random bullshit/wrong place, wrong time stuff/anyway, screams began to rise in the throats of the monkeys who were congregating around the entrance/what a tragic scene!/oh no!/monkeys turn away in horror/ahhhhh! they scream/it is like a violent/high-speed collision from above/all twisted metal and spider webbed glass!/and sure they were all well accustomed to the horror of seeing brains dashed out on TV/and in the newspapers/the bone shattering/artery draining damage wrought by the bullet, the explosive and the petrochemical incendiary agent/all these ghastly things that were there to see on the six-o'clock news/which was piped into their living rooms from the jungle battlefield/from south-east Asia/but this was first hand "real' violence!/reported back directly through the onlooker's senses/anyway/some of these onlookers were horror-struck/some wanted to inspect this macabre mess in detail/what is it like?/they whisper inside their own heads/to exit with such personal violence?/with such speedy resolve?/and what if this arrogant monkey had simply said, "are you okay mate?/do you need someone to talk to?"/maybe it would have been different?/maybe/but who knows?/too late now/anyway/they both expired instantly from shared fatal injuries to their heads and necks/a double lights out/long lost congenital twins joined at the head in death/i could have stopped it but what is the point?/listen/a monkey can occupy a place and a place can occupy a monkey/this is another thing I have learned/this was an understanding that came later/after much observation/i am a voice that is made up of many voices woven together like looping feedback through a loudspeaker/so yes/i could have intervened/i could have pushed/channeled/different feelings/colours/memories/through the sad monkey/distracting him from the edge of the balcony/the problem is that this would have only amounted to a temporary measure/he would have just attempted it at a later date/anyway/do you know what?/in all truth?/after all this time I have never really cared about any of these monkeys/not a one/not until Layla/until Layla showed up i was completely indifferent/i just watched/and listened/and learnt while they played their mad monkey music/but then she came along/Layla/can a building/a man-made structure such as myself love a monkey?/i am here to tell you that it can/yes/yes/yes/i slowly became aware of Layla in the lobby/then having her luggage taken up to the penthouse/then standing at the window/her face reflected back in the glass/looking down on Sydney/Sydney still growing/expanding/the sprawl moving outwards/but still not quite reaching the heat crumpled horizon line/not yet/i remember Layla waking up in the mornings/wine bottles and magazines on the nightstand/Layla watching television/riots in Paris/American intervention/countdown/rock and roll/smiling advertising/coffee/it was more like she had come to live in the penthouse/her stay extended beyond the usual length which most guests usually stayed for/even the visiting entertainment people/and the mining barrens/and the rich eccentrics/a few days maybe/a week/two weeks/but this was turning out to be a much longer habitation/see Layla framed inside an accumulation of ordinary moments/see her making these moments of time/even the nothing/utilitarian/boring ones/seem iridescent/vivid/amazing Layla/she was inside me and I was inside her/the yonic and phallic interchange/and as time went by/and the longer she stayed with me/the more I became capable of/interested in/determined to/keep her happy in the same way a drug increases endorphin production/i turned up the colours/i maintained an atmosphere/a mood/a slight intoxication/a background euphoria/i became a happy place/it got so that/comparatively speaking/the longer we were separated, the greater her anxiety became/by comparison, when she was down on the street, the outside world seemed drab and pointlessly complicated/but upstairs/in the penthouse/it was a different story/every time she returned with bag of shopping from the city/ascending/riding up/a classic beauty to my gentle Kong grip/her allure reflected on forever/from all angles/into the cold infinity of the elevator's mirror-lined interior/as she returned smoothly to the contained sanctuary of the penthouse suit/and/she would begin to feel that familiar relief wash over/through her system/because this was love/a chemical reaction in the brain/this is how someone becomes addicted to someone/or something/like the chalky trail of a capsule going down the gullet at eleven am/a taste which is followed by an unexpected/sneaky eyed/sidewards pivot into a new state of consciousness/a place where everything has become angular boxes/and disconnected white noise/and warmth/and safety/a place where you are astonished to learn that everything bad/and uncomfortable has been drawn back to the vanishing point/has become a tiny speck in the distance/in other words, not a concern/and you are equally amazed because everything good is happening as if for the first time over/and over/and over/and over again/Layla/this is how a place can inhabit a monkey in a good way/and/where are those particular stories?/in the movies, houses/apartments/buildings are always shown to terrorise these monkeys/why can't it be the other way?/i think it is because monkeys are naturally drawn to the edge/the inevitable conclusion/s/their morbid curiosity demands that they be dangling over the precipice by their ankles/in any case/as the weeks progressed, Layla allowed herself to enter into these enhanced spaces/zones/states/which I provided/and/as a result, Layla became something of a recluse/she preferred to remain with me/in me/for increasingly longer periods of time/like any successful junkie/to the point where going outside becomes problematic for her/agoraphobia, they call it/i called it love/i was enamoured/Layla....god/she was beautiful/her blue eyes were imperfectly aligned/and she projected a natural radiance most monkeys do not possess/or only possess in select moments and with considerable effort/these flaws in her physical appearance only served to heighten her beauty/if those flaws had not been present to provide balance, she would have become a grotesque list of perfect attributes which ultimately would have added up to nothing/as it stood, she was perfect/stunning/etherial/it took a while for me to realise why she was staying in the penthouse/that my Layla had made herself available to a property developer named Max/an influential monkey with bad judgement when it came to female monkeys/poor shrunken Max was filthy rich/Max owned a quarter of Sydney/Layla was in his bed because Max was attempting to recapture the feelings he was missing from his younger days/feelings that had dried up/disintegrated/vanished/because Max was an old man/and/ Max had business partners and a wife/he had three grown children/and now he had Layla stowed away up in his rented penthouse/his bit on the side/because if you don't take care of yourself in this life, Max would say to his leering cronies at dinner or on the phone, who will?/because Max took much pleasure referring to the conquest and possession of desirable Layla/in his mind, this was the reward he rightly deserved for accumulating all his money over the years/and besides/the hippie kids and students were fucking with impunity so what about him?/where was Max's sexual revolution?/well..../old Max was going to make sure he got his/up in the penthouse/on the king sized bed/in front of the mirror/and not just the conservative styles and techniques his wife allowed/Max and Layla would take the phone off the hook whenever he came around visiting/they would remained in a bubble of sex and room service for days on end/and in doing so Max would momentarily regain the vitality that seemed to have slipped out of his grasp/i never begrudged Max these physical acts with Layla/monkey sex is an odd thing/all that effort for such a tiny little reward/a brief tingling of bells in the nervous system/it amazes me how much importance they place in this one sensation/for Max this tiny explosion and the warm sex afterglow was a necessary reprieve from the advancing mortal chill/the chill that gets deep into certain monkey's bones/rattles them/makes them run away from the precipice as fast as they can/and then/later/beyond just the mad monkey sex, Max began to develop genuine affection towards Layla/for this reason their relationship extended beyond the physical/and Max continued to keep Layla tucked away up in the penthouse for weeks on end/and at great personal expense/because this way he knew exactly where she was/and no handsome long hair lothario with a guitar would distract her from his bed/and he could drop by whenever he needed her love/a love that was fast becoming his drug of choice/his reward/rapunzel, rapunzel let down your golden hair, a voice on the telephone was saying/so beautiful was Layla in mornings/in the sun drenched bedroom/in the mirror/her body perfectly defying gravity/held aloft above the sleaze of the Cross/above the neon signs and decrepit pubs/as i said, it cost Max an arm and leg to keep Layla in this elevated position/but as far as he was concerned, it was worth it/there was one problem with all of this/Layla has a secret/a hidden agenda/she was in cahoots with another monkey/a male who was approximately her age/he was a good looking monkey, the kind females responded to/but he had a rotten little heart/a selfish heart/they had met in university drama class/four years ago/they both had movie star aspirations/they were both decent enough actors/they could stage highly convincing and emotional scenes on sparely lit stages/they explored social injustice through play acting/and/they became sexual partners/and/ultimately success did not come their way/similar to most of their classmates, they transitioned into more realistic and statistically profitable professions, dispensing with their artistic ambitions/but the conman boyfriend did not want to take the conventional path which he felt was lined with drudgery and a predictable decline into mediocrity/he was thinking, how can I use my artist skills of deception to make money?/to make a life worth living?/what short cuts in this world are available to me?/he was what the monkey world refers to a charming sociopath/rapunzel, rapunzel let down your golden hair, he would say into the phone when she picked up/just checking in/checking in on his investment/calling from a payphone down on the street/or sitting in a cafe/with a newspaper/or a pocket sized edition novel/watching and waiting/as they had planned from the beginning/waiting for the opportunity to take Max's money/in a scheme/a scam/a sting/and they were in no rush/they were preceding with the upmost caution/and/when the time was right an old friend of Layla's/an american/would show up from the past/long time, no see!/and through casual conversation, he would present Layla/but really Max/with a unbelievable business opportunity/the american would be played by another colleague from their acting class/a guy who had done a few car advertisements but that was it/and/the fictional investment had been carefully researched and drawn up by the conman monkey's crooked lawyer mate/mining for precious metals in South Africa/palladium and gold/for the sake of authenticity, the fictional proposal had everything/swore testimonials/geo surveys/fake government permits/a creditable back story/Layla would facilitate the meeting between Max and the american/then she would sweeten and continue to validate the deal through pillow talk/in the monkey world a hard penis often means a soft, distracted brain/originally this meant that after copulation, the male would not run off in crazy pursuit of a different female/or a sabre tooth tiger/he would hang around the cave and see to the female’s needs/and because the reward was so good/compared to the rest of life's hardships back in caveman times, he would become addicted to the feeling/DNA coding communicated through erectile tissue and testicles/and bonding would occur/setting the stage for the protection of the offspring/anyway/this was the plan/to take Max's money/but there was a further unforeseen complication/the more time Layla spent with Max, the more she also came to care for him/especially seeing how i was enhancing her mood/pushing happiness through her for my own needs/and with this growing affection towards max, she began to realise she could accomplish her goal without her conman monkey boyfriend/why not?/after all, she was the one who was doing all the hard work/she could simply marry old Max and have the same result/money and long-term security/she would simply take the place of Max's wife in that big house up in Vaucluse/no more office bottom pinching/no more wolf whistles from construction workers on the street/no more leering drunken married monkeys with alcohol breath as they rode the trains home/anyway/she had made her decision/she was out of the scam business and into the second wife business/the love fiction was becoming a reality/so one day she simply stopped answering the conman monkey's increasingly neurotic and pressing phone calls/and/the phone would ring/and ring/and ring/and/but no matter, she would simply marry Max for real/but there was the problem of the conman boyfriend/he was not quite finished with her yet/frustrated, he grabbed arm in the lobby/we had a deal, he muttered through clenched teeth/i have invested time and money into this deal/into you/you were nothing before me, he said/typical sociopathic control behaviour/as if he had made her with his bare hands/like some kind of god/to which she pulled away because they were in a public place/so what could he really do?/but then later/when she was relaxed and her guard was down, there was a knock on her door/was it room service?/no/it was the conman monkey boyfriend again/forcing his way inside the penthouse/the  argument continued/shouting/a broken chair and some glass/and then in a rage, he threw Layla off the balcony/she went down/down/down/flicking past windows like a woman in a zoetrope/her face frozen in disbelief/how can this be happening?/moments before she had been standing in a well-lit, comfortable room/plush white carpet beneath her nail polish adored toes/and now she was hurtling through space/she reached the concrete before she could reach terminal velocity/bang!/it was terrible/horrific/the conman boyfriend monkey was still up on the balcony/looking down/gripping the railing/the curtains billowing back into the room by the updraft/by the virtue of my height, I had helped murder beautiful Layla/there was nothing I could do/the boyfriend conman monkey escaped/when Max found out he was distraught/he answered the police's questions/the whole thing became news fodder/a local scandal/Max came clean/he was very sad/his chance at happiness was gone/I channelled more and more dark feelings through him/I pushed despair into his mind until he felt like he was drowning in octopus ink and guilt/his poor monkey heart was broken/as a result, max hired a private detective who performed extra services/namely he did bad things to people/if the price was right/he looked like a fat tourist/somebody's harmless uncle with red, rosy cheeks and a jolly belly/santa claus in the off-season/dressed in a Hawaiian shirt/Ho Ho/he was expensive but he always got results/this special detective monkey caught up with the conman murderer sometime later in an America city/San Francisco!/the pretty little city on the bay/the detective wore black leather gloves and managed to find a pass key for the conman monkey's room/Max had made only one stipulation/that the method of extinction should be/if at all possible/from a great height/in the same way Layla had been killed/and so/the conman monkey came out of his steamy bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist/and/he had a few seconds to wonder why the room was so damn cold/and why was the window was open?/the Santa Claus killer was waiting behind the door/there was a struggle/the bedside lamp was knocked over/splashing light across the ceiling/the Santa Claus killer monkey was older but he had a hidden strength/after slugging it out for a few minutes, the naked conman monkey went out the window/falling backwards and down/screaming eighteen floors into the alleyway/the Santa Claus killer monkey composed himself in the mirror/straightened his shirt/and then put a typed note on the nightstand/a fictional explanation of guilt/and a confession/and/that was it/job finished/it is done, said the fat Santa monkey killer into a pay phone on Broadway and Columbus/before he went off to play tourist down at Fisherman's Wharf/Coit Tower/union Square/blending back into the throng of tourist monkeys/as sirens began to howled in the distance/and as far as i am concerned?/i will never fall in love again/monkey love is impossible/can a place be haunted by a beautiful dead monkey?/i never used to think so/but/i have come to understand that it can/i can/so much feeling invested in such a fragile thing/a monkey/the song cut short/the music is suddenly over/the shuddering echoes of Layla have stayed with me for many/many/many years/grief/those iridescent moments trapped inside me/i had no control over them/i want to be free of them but I can not/for many years now all I have done is grieve/sleep/dream/and ignore the monkeys that have continued to pass through my front door/and in doing so, I have let the time get away from me/it has gotten so that I have fallen into a state of disrepair/there is damp and crumbling concrete to contend with/brought about by the salt and moisture in the air/decades went past/and/eventually they made me into apartments/real estate monkeys with hard/artificial smiles showed up with their little clipboards/i was sold off, section but section/and then later, all the husbands died/and the old lady monkeys with their big sunglasses and little dogs lived on/female monkeys/grand dames getting older/shrinking/until the last occupant remained/up in the penthouse/she was an old female/a university lecturer/a writer/she had a strong mind/i liked her very much/i showed her Layla from time to time/fragments/echoes/iridescent moments/she was never scared/seeing a floating girl/being in the same room as someone who wasn't really there/she/the tenant/would go to places ravaged by ecological disasters/she provides the science to help local monkeys cope/this was back in the days when they still tried to correct the environmental problems of this planet/and/as you can tell, I still think about Layla/right up until now/these last moments/i have come to understand that sorrow/grief is a stone dropped in a still lake/that the surface of this lake wrinkles/and is never perfectly flat again/in the future/which much to my surprise is suddenly here/on this very day in fact/this here and now/in which i am communicating with you/i will also die from a great fall/gravity has been waiting for me all along/pulling me down towards the centre of things/my internal load bearing walls have been rigged with high explosives/my upper windows have been removed to prevent dangerous projectiles/salvage teams have stripped my guts out/i am now a series of empty spaces/concrete boxes/square caves/in the last silent moments before the explosions, the demolition crews radios chatter to each other/see my rooms/corridors/staircases/mezzanines/elevator shafts/roof gardens/balconies/the restaurant area/kitchen/bathrooms/see the now empty penthouse/see Layla's afterimage up there looking out the window/from way back in 1968/but also from now/she turns/looks over her shoulder/maybe she is aware that something is there/in the room with here/

                                                        /just a feeling/

                                                                    /and then the explosives are detonated/


/and the walls buckle/

                         
                               /and all the interior spaces fill with smoke/

                                                                     
                                

                                   /and rubble/  

                                                                                    

 /and i am stumbling/

                                                                  /falling/ 

                                                                                                                    /in progressive stages/



                                                                                 /a monster collapsing in on itself/                             



                                /folding/into my own footprint/            

                                                                                    


/I concertina downwards/

                        
   

                      /flattening with a roar/
                            
                                        


                                                        /as black clouds of soot/                       



                                                                                       /and smoke are forced outwards/