11-24-2012, 11:41 AM
I finished reading Secret City by kiwi writer Vivienne Plumb a while ago and I got inspired to write something with the concept of the secret city game Plumb introduces in her book.
My Secret City
My secret city is beautiful.
My secret city, perched atop a mountain, snowcapped, black crags scratching the belly of sky. The sky purrs like a cat.
Mist falls onto the streets, that are cold and damp with the morning's dew. The dawn rises with the bleared star of Lucifer. Grey and blue aerosol, the air we breathe and swallow.
Buildings are tall, 3 storeyed at the least, elegant and aligned. The wind-caressed clouds shatter as they fly through my city.
In the morning there is nobody, save the earliest risers to each respective profession. The cobblestone roads are perfectly painted, perfectly untrampled. The scent of sullen grass permeates my city's dawn, and it pierces windows, to let the lying ones know it is so.
The citizens love the taste of the earth.
My secret city, water kingdom, or queendom, it depends who is incumbent on my city's throne. Everybody respects the royal family, because we know they are above us.
Our city sits beside a crater lake. It is frozen and the children go out on the glimmering blue ice and skate circles and spirals. They look like spiders dancing gracefully on the skin of a drum.
My secret city is full of joys, refreshing and hardly ever gluggy and gluey.
The food is always warm and fuelling, or when it needs to be, crisp and juicy.
Lemons grow in everybody's gardens. They give fruit every season, because it is always winter. Mothers bake lemon cake, lemon slice, lemon biscuits, and brew up lemonade for the boys and girls when they come home from school.
School is wonderful, it is a tradition-orientated facility. It has an oxidised copper-green clock-tower. It rings at 8:00AM every morning to wake up the stragglers.
My city has a pond that never freezes, right in the heart, in the epicentre of my dream; clear, blue, stillwater, reflects the sky, and it seems a portal to reality, where perfection can be reached simply by diving in headlong.
There are no handrails, not around the pond, not anywhere. There are no bars, no fences, no rusty chicken wire announcing the word 'tetanus' so loud one can hear the eyesore a mile away.
Everybody is trustworthy, everybody is family, everybody knows each other intimately, everybody reads each others' minds.
Warm lights, yellow candle, waxy flicker-lights hand in each windowsill; windows are all quartered by white frames, just like London Christmas in the 19th century. White paint, clean and fresh covers the slightly wearing wood.
It seldom rains but always snows, perfect weather to revel in winter's majesty, or to light up some candles and read. Read books, magazines, each others' minds.
Glassy porcelain fills each house's cupboards. Each house is similar but shaped differently.
The people smile, in my secret city, when it's nice to smile. They frown when it's okay to frown, cry when they need to cry, and laugh when they need to laugh.
Everybody is perfect.
Under the frost-blue sky, my secret city gleams in its candlelight and ice-sheen.
In my secret city, everything is perfect.
In my secret city, nothing exists.
For my secret city is beautiful.
My Secret City
My secret city is beautiful.
My secret city, perched atop a mountain, snowcapped, black crags scratching the belly of sky. The sky purrs like a cat.
Mist falls onto the streets, that are cold and damp with the morning's dew. The dawn rises with the bleared star of Lucifer. Grey and blue aerosol, the air we breathe and swallow.
Buildings are tall, 3 storeyed at the least, elegant and aligned. The wind-caressed clouds shatter as they fly through my city.
In the morning there is nobody, save the earliest risers to each respective profession. The cobblestone roads are perfectly painted, perfectly untrampled. The scent of sullen grass permeates my city's dawn, and it pierces windows, to let the lying ones know it is so.
The citizens love the taste of the earth.
My secret city, water kingdom, or queendom, it depends who is incumbent on my city's throne. Everybody respects the royal family, because we know they are above us.
Our city sits beside a crater lake. It is frozen and the children go out on the glimmering blue ice and skate circles and spirals. They look like spiders dancing gracefully on the skin of a drum.
My secret city is full of joys, refreshing and hardly ever gluggy and gluey.
The food is always warm and fuelling, or when it needs to be, crisp and juicy.
Lemons grow in everybody's gardens. They give fruit every season, because it is always winter. Mothers bake lemon cake, lemon slice, lemon biscuits, and brew up lemonade for the boys and girls when they come home from school.
School is wonderful, it is a tradition-orientated facility. It has an oxidised copper-green clock-tower. It rings at 8:00AM every morning to wake up the stragglers.
My city has a pond that never freezes, right in the heart, in the epicentre of my dream; clear, blue, stillwater, reflects the sky, and it seems a portal to reality, where perfection can be reached simply by diving in headlong.
There are no handrails, not around the pond, not anywhere. There are no bars, no fences, no rusty chicken wire announcing the word 'tetanus' so loud one can hear the eyesore a mile away.
Everybody is trustworthy, everybody is family, everybody knows each other intimately, everybody reads each others' minds.
Warm lights, yellow candle, waxy flicker-lights hand in each windowsill; windows are all quartered by white frames, just like London Christmas in the 19th century. White paint, clean and fresh covers the slightly wearing wood.
It seldom rains but always snows, perfect weather to revel in winter's majesty, or to light up some candles and read. Read books, magazines, each others' minds.
Glassy porcelain fills each house's cupboards. Each house is similar but shaped differently.
The people smile, in my secret city, when it's nice to smile. They frown when it's okay to frown, cry when they need to cry, and laugh when they need to laugh.
Everybody is perfect.
Under the frost-blue sky, my secret city gleams in its candlelight and ice-sheen.
In my secret city, everything is perfect.
In my secret city, nothing exists.
For my secret city is beautiful.
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