Cold Feet

The pond was cold and surprisingly deep beside the worn path where footsteps seldom fell in the chill of late summer nights.
She lay at the bottom looking up at the moon, its full circle distorted and filtered through the gills of eight metres of water; murky and abundant with microscopic life that floated like dust in the blue light. The digital silence allowed nothing to enter her ears; not even the sound of a bubble that rose from her gut to break the pond’s bright surface; not even white noise.
It was late September but she knew that her name was still June and that Mars had taken something from her; something more than blood.

The knife that he’d drawn from the sheath strapped to his ankle and the engorged flesh, already unsheathed, that he’d used to take what he had no right to take without her consent, where more than just weapons; they were objects of change.

Extract from 'Markov Chain'.

...a work in progress

Rolling Stoned

The carnival is in town; the carnival of twenty-first century dreams.

Roll up folks, roll up for wonder drugs and genetically modified fathers; for freaks who foresee a new world order, where money rules; talking guns and listening walls; the hierarchy of salesmen; roll up, roll up, we got ‘em all folks.

Roll up for the race of beings that function adequately without need for thought; for the bearded lady; the oestrogen fish and the child prodigy (poor kid).

Roll up for the snake-tongued preacher and his suicidal acolytes; child killers and morally superior bankers; for those who’ve been left behind and those who wish to be left behind, for those who strive to be at the head of the stampede and those who prefer to be trampled (as long as there's money to be made).

Roll up for terrorists (no more freedom fighters); for insurgents and militants; for fundamentalists, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, pig-headed world leaders and the words ‘trust me’.

Roll up, but keep your eyes peeled for the CIA; MI5; IOU and paranormal paranoia.

Roll up for Middle East oil and right-wing activism. Right-wing activism?

Roll up, folks, take a free sample; it’ll tantalise your taste buds, it’ll tickle your fantasy, it’ll suck you dry. Let your friends and children know – the carnival is in town: and it’s downhill all the way.

View from the Treetops

Kiss the depilatated butt of your System; pampered and perfumed with velvet toilet paper cut from huge swathes of third world forests with scents so sweet as to be scraped from the scrotum of humanity with the sterile scalpels of science and technology.

Kiss your System square on its puckered anus, so scarred by the stress of its rosy success in ridding the world of all morality save the morality of firepower and allowing the blind justification to drive the vehicles of our demise.

From the treetops I look down with brother moon at my shoulder and we see our mother Earth so ravaged and debauched, exposed to the cosmic elements. Kiss her goodbye at midnight tomorrow.

Kiss her goodbye in the sound knowledge that you too are responsible for what is happening around you. You animal lovers and charity givers; you accountants and lawyers who bend the rules so far; you philosophical drinkers; you salesmen in dry dreams of empty material gain; you who wouldn’t hurt a fly; you money spinners, pension providers and insurance conmen; you art critics; oil guzzlers and book reviewers, humourists and whores; you with your religion of forgiveness and tolerance, you are responsible for the actions of the empty shells that you elected to power. Do not attempt to claim the moral high ground against the enemies that you are complicit in creating in order to feed the System whose butt you must now kiss.

The Pavilion of the Red Clown by Robert Williams

Hello World

It’s a scraggly branch on which you balance the precepts of your existence. Scraggly as the razor thin wedge of time that holds your mind free of the void.
From up here where I hang by my tail, I pity your species; you allowed evolution to claim your tail, leaving you to walk that branch, trying not to look up or down or side to side for fear of the despairing truth that yawns there, ready to swallow your hopes and dreams.
You can only look back at the tree, your memories sweetened by sentiment, or forward to the light, seduced by the wishful promise of forever.
And to distract your feeble intellect you procreate, kill and destroy with dry abandon, waste your seed and the sweat of ancestral labour, uncaring of the possibility of separation from the tree - the very tree that you are meant to nurture for your children; the future of your species. Yet you molest and pamper them by turns, good cop bad cop, fill them with fear and ignorance and emptiness.
And by standing between them and the tree you leave them only the prospect of a narrowing scraggly branch.