the bassline from inside still in me beneath the neon sign outside
I flick a menthol into the road my shoelaces loose
I look for an ATM

breezing down the queasy street bathed in floodlights and thuds
from the chrome nightclubs couples fighting climbing into ubers
men in tight white tees dropping the guts of kebabs in the gutters
my phone buzzing
selling me myself again

colours clash madly above us on the big screen
cop cars scream past vomit cakes on the pavement
while someone’s ghost shimmers
under the streetlight in the carpark in someone’s mind
in the middle of a drug deal midnight
it’s a good night
DJ’s beats and undead romance
if you’ve seen this city from above you’ve felt the freeways orbit around northbridge
the slick cool mechanics of train carriages banshee through the streets beneath us
anonymous faces obscured by pints of saturday plastic

listen close
to the symphony of thumbs
tapping texts tapping texts tapping texts
and messages into the mainframe
Murdoch! Murdoch! Robot Apartments!
Murdoch whose love is endless oil and stone!

can you feel the hive mind lightning racing through your brain?
these pills are communion
bones of the angels
vanilla coke cold and ready and replicated
waiting patiently at the top of the fridge at the back of the servo
where the shop keep reads a magazine all night in the paypass buzz
and a list of cigarette prices

bucks nights bold and boisterous busting out of party buses
girls wiping tears on 21st dresses
Samsung galaxies cracked on the nightclub bathroom sink
dancefloors sticky with drink

and I couldn’t make out my own face in the violent blue light
couldn’t see my own face for the scratches in the mirror steel

this humidity
is killing me

but I need
NAB commonwealth westpac suncorp bendigo redi ATM
I stick my card in round the corner
stick my card in

the machine pulls in my fingers
rolls my hand flat
sucks my arm in
my torso my head my legs
I’m two dimensional
digital pancake

now I’m flowing through the photons of information with my matrix face
surfing binary waves a human virus in the database of bank accounts
I slide up and slip down mountains of manufactured money
cruise in and out of number tsunamis
flick through cyberspacial tubes
and I
roll across the news ticker
in MSNBC finance reports
I waaaaave
as I’m dragged across wall street ribbons
at the stock brokers lost for words
in a storm of receipts
I dart back and forth
between resource sectors
pharmaceutical sectors
insurance industries
nations of inflation
I show up on the scroll of the arms dealer’s iPhone X
flat and bewildered
I’m catapulted right into the core
into the motherboard

I take a bite
out of the bones
in the wrist
of the invisible hand
and it opens up…

across the world
ATM errors
they burst their banks
and spit out notes
and notes
and notes and notes

and I’m thrown out onto the street
in a shower of fifties

I’m 3D again
back in reality
back on the pavement
I get up and look around

but alas!
the world had already ended.