The Last Cathedral

The Last Cathedral

Though ‘the ivory stadium’ has a good ring to it,

I doubt there are even enough elephants left

in the world to make ivory goalposts with.

This stadium is of a white synthethic material,

hard smooth shiny self-cleaning weatherproof

kind of stuff we called  ‘space age’

back when we used to have a space age.

At night, when it shines automatically,

it looks like a kind of Ayer’s rock made out of luminous fibre-glass,

an interstellar pegasus half way through forming itself

out of lightning and chalk.

It marks a meeting point,

or a face-off,

or a treaty between

the two last remaining

and practically endless parts of the world,

the practically endless city and the practically endless desert.

The desert is stupid but voracious. Like a creature

made out of only stomach and mouth.

It can do nothing but eat.

Whatever it eats becomes another eating part of it.

At night it sneaks up on and scratches at the glimmering stadium,

fantasises grinding it down and eating it, making it eat.

The city threatens the desert with mergers, water, sewers, shovels, asphalt, architects and angles.

No person can say for sure which place is more repetitious,

the endless city or the endless desert.

No one can tell if there are more

or less people in the city than there are grains of sand

in the desert. Certainly there more people in the city than

there are possible faces and poses and expressions

and even actions to go around. People are

always casually running into other versions of themselves

doing exactly the same things

at what seems to be, but are not,

exactly the same locations.

Some say that the authorities carry out massive secret culls

for which there is never any evidence.

It is also happens that, while gliding up a mile high escalator

in the mall or on your way to work,

you find yourself eye to eye with

a toddler staring back down at you

over her father’s shoulder

neither timidly nor with curiousity

but with that hard-boiled-sweet-eye

of contempt.

She lobs a spit or a ball of

snot or some other toddlers’ goo at you

that might land

like a  rain of snails on your bottom lip

or like ectoplasm on the collar of your shirt.

It is this practically endless city of

practically endless repititions that has cornered itself

with this white gigant of a stadium.

A million seater. Stands as tall as Manhattan was.

Terraces longer than your old style city-wall.

Screens the size of aircraft carrier runways.

Everything white. Totally white.

There are zero spectators, no referee, ground staff,

medics, cheerleaders, ball boys, coaching staff or managers.

I have often asked myself what it is this stadium is for

and I now think that it is either a reservoir

or a dump.

Though it could be both interchangeably, or at once.

Of soured hope.

Of stagnant wishes.

Of disappointed expectations.

A vast hollow full of extra gravities, the tug and voiding densities

of a city worth of failure;

the past, present and future of its abscences and lack.

Lack of eyes to watch, throats to cheers, fists to shake, hands to come together

in an invocation or a handshake or a clap.

Five hundred thousand klaxons of worth silence that if you were ever

to fly anywhere near in a chopper

would draw down and widen all the countless tiny holes

you are carrying inside of you

until the air closed over you

like a bodybag.

There are two teams on the white plastic pitch.

A female team and a male team.

All dressed and made up identically from head to foot

in white with no markings

and so impossible to humanly detect.

Though they feel (averagely, that is, since some

of them are fanatically convinced of it, others

not atall convinced) that they may be being observed

and having their movements traced and calculated

for points by electrosensory devices a very great distance away.

They do not know what kind of game,

if any, they are supposed to be playing

or how long they are expected to wait before being

told or, fat chance of it, released.

Some believe that they are robots in hell

who must forever undergo

the torture of nobody watching.

Others think that they have been put together

out of the free-floating limbs of torpedoed men

and ancient shipwrecked marble statues.

The only thing to do is stand deathly still

and be beautiful.

A few have flopped down randomly

wishing that they could go blind

and escape from all the whiteness,

believing that  the whiteness is a mask

of something dormant but horrible

that anyday now will unveil itself

and the purpose.

These white people of the stadium

yawn sleeplessly all of the time,

and can neither laugh nor cry

being too dried-up for tears,

too defeated even for dying.

They have that listless way of behaving

that polar bears have

after twenty one years in a cage.