See C Card, the seasoned hack,

Chasing insects around with a little sack.

What drove the down-at-heel gumshoe

to such an endeavour, you may ask,

Well, what other reason is there than

because it is C Card, of course.

 

It would all unfold like a badly ironed shirt.

On a dusty, dusky night late in September, 1953,

C Card had been reduced

to guarding empty cups in dinners

before the waitresses moved him on.

Our defective detective wasn't a success.

 

In Babylon that dear head had led life like a king,

To great the praise those grateful citizens would build

through statute a statue of marvellous proportions.

He would watch it grow and climb with hands and feet,

metres and yards, ever upwards over seconds,

minutes, hours, and days, awaiting the construction with anticipation.

 

So, he sat watching dinners dine,

Collecting thoughts and avoiding glares.

The next big and paying client was coming around the corner, he told himself,

He just couldn't drift away,

Stern when he needed to be,

Our C Card.

 

And so, in walks a plot device…

 

In the shape of a dime,

Ten tiny legs propping up the shiny, silvery whole.

This was C Card's ticket out of here,

Though his eyes weren't the only set

on the glimmering prize.

Money attracts all sorts.

 

“I may have a task for you,”

The dime’s dame owner offered.

C Card would later recall perfectly the curve of her breasts and the fullness of her eyebrows, the shape of her ruby-red lips and the dark, brunette waves crashing in her hair, the scar by her eye and the not-quite-covered-by-a-scarf deep purple bruise around her neck, and the delicate firm warm soft cold touch of her fingers pressed hard against his hand.

Yet of her request he remembers naught.

Whatever words fell from that silken mouth

he heard none.

 

The bill and her contact details held firmly in his anchor-like mits he drifted

to his most familiar city.

Answer came quickly and plenty in Babylon,

Even a necromancer's assistant's apprentice's underling’s flies could tell him something.

 

Flies and 'roaches, that's it,

C Card thought as he wandered along deserted streets.

In this part of town even the Bay's thick, sticky fog refused to visit without a second weather front to keep it company.

These streets, with hushed whispered names,

Scared scarred sailors and

harassed harmful hoods.

 

While both cities slept

and considered the external question of life and masonry,

Our selectively defective detective thought about his more pressing debate,

How can I catch a group of flies?

A sack won't work unless

I attract them to me.

 

With C Card we set off to find

the nearest grocery and housewares store.

Yet he'd have no luck, no company nor shop wanted to sell a product that brought flies into your home.

Laughed along streets by till hands and housemaids,

Our detective slipped from his task

and further towards Babylon.

 

Yet in that city of temples and templates all was not well. No one was collecting the dead from the wide avenues, no butchers’ offal taken off the streets, no market waste swept away. What is wrong, asked C Card, why do my subjects desert me and leave this fair city of doctors and documents? And the answer came with heavy lead hands and kicking gold clogs. Every time you return to that Bay the city of Babylon crumbles, the longer you do not visit the more our city vanishes and vanishes and vanishes.

 

The Babylonians' speech grew

quieter and quieter

until the slightest sighs struggled

to rattle around the vastness

inside C Card's head.

 

C Card had a choice,

You do too, which real world is real, Bay or Babylon?

While you decide in this poem C Card is about to become victim

to a terrible fraud involving bug spray.

Tricked out of his minimal money

to purchase insect repellent.

 

And the Babylonians continued to whisper...

 

That won't do yet here we are.

Our ineffective investigative sleuth, repellent in hand,

Chasing flies around lounges, ‘roaches through kitchens, and lice and earworms along bar stools and booths,

With a can of Keep-Em-Away, the only choice,

“To get those pesky insects

outta your residential complex.”

 

And the Babylonians continued to whisper, growing quieter…

 

With every step forward, spray brandished,

The insects retreated further from our luckless lacklustre PI.

Though there was nothing he could do C Card continued to spray and chase, spray and case.

The dime and its owner, the dinners of the Bay,

And all that happened the night before,

Lost to a repetition, spray and chase, spray and chase.

 

And the Babylonians continued to whisper, growing quieter,

Until the whisper, whiper, whper, wher, her, er, r.