OFLUXO

I can feel the fever closing in. Rain dropping on the heated steel plate – part of the factory’s conveyor belt system – vanished with a hiss into a steaming cloud. The twin vaulted arches of the collapsed roof, growing dark from the fire, pointed up into the leaden sky. Like clenching fingers or claws – as if some giant hand wanted to grasp the whole charred area.

To shake hands with ashes.

(To flounder is to circulate) …so I circulate between symmetrical layers of seemingly contradictory phenomena. Blind maswerks, gables, vesica piscis, fish bladders. Artifacts from circumstantial trial, that is – fabricated evidence of the lost futures and all those persistently sweating gnarls suggesting the breathing processes of emergent technology.

And I again squint at the metal surfaces – the red-hot steel. This imprints within each landscape – ruins of bygone eras and extinct paradigms. Greyed out curtains and night vision eye – hidden infrared illuminator – survival against the very darkness squeezing through the cracks of walls. Mechanical gargoyles, post-anthropocene gothic, pyrocene. The upcoming and the very last flame. It only needs one look to slam steel shutters of continuity.

A replicating bestiary of forms traverses the times. It bulges in the places I look. It bends and lures me away. Ornamental floral motifs/ lost garden. Clumps of weeds protrude from between the scorched earth. Thistles mingle with creeping cables. Aluminum spills across the floor from too much heat.

In the distance, from between the trees untouched by the fire, a dog looks at me – an ordinary mongrel.