The Idol of the Marketplace

A Gnostic noir in verse.

Here's the carny pitch, the righteous blurb - the serious city's only Consulting Poet-Detective Mr Fictor takes a case from the Grey Woman whilst in a hypnagogic state. Grey skin, grey as pre-dawn concrete at the tidal riverside where dead mobsters without mothers wash in.

An actor, with a jawline not too in-fashion, not too out of it, leaves the business after an encounter in the desert, starts a UFO Church. The authorities get involved, there's a siege and a deadly fire all television blue, flying-saucer silver. The trial gets ratings, the women sit on sidewalks and make the sign of a probe. Get me into the prison to interview him, says the Grey Woman.

Mr Fictor has started seeing demonic entities in packaging. Everything he knows he knows from logos. He meets a UFO whistleblower, a wood-and-paint prophet, who says I want to confess everything rapturously. I want to testify on my knees with a live locust in my mouth to a congressional committee.

In the prison the actor says I'm nothing but a jester with a head full of bells. I know what the UFOs really are and I know love is a dimension we move in.

Do you let all clients abduct you? the Grey Woman asks Mr Fictor. This is no abduction, I'm intrigued, he replies.

Caught in their own mechanised wind, the trains that do not stop at the station instill an agreeable fear lasting their relentless length.