Rituals

Birthmachine - H.R.Giger

She looks across at him and thinks about the gun in her shoulder bag; the one that lies across the table, having spilled her pack of cigarettes. She Opens the pack and offers him one. He smiles; takes one and lights hers then his own. She exhales upwards, while putting the pack back in her bag.
The forces harnessed in the firing chamber; the alchemy of gunpowder; require that a firearm be constructed from material of substantial weight – both material and ethical.
The gun in her bag is small and has a dull blue hue to its metallic surface. It carries six rounds in the little magazine that slides into the handgrip.
She has fired it exactly once and the noise – so disproportionate to its size – had made her feel like this was something she could not control, she hoped this constituted respect for the power of the weapon, but in her heart she knew she was afraid of it.
And yet she had kept it, afraid of tempting some fate by getting rid of it, afraid of the moment when she would regret not having it there to protect her. It was a feeling, she realised, very similar to her feelings about David – always weary and often distrustful of him, but unable to give him up for fear of losing that protection he offered – both emotional and physical.
She hated David, she misses him.
“So what’s your star-sign?” she asks above the music muffled behind dark glass, then holds up a finger, “Wait, let me see if I can get it.”
He grins, runs a hand through his hair as if preparing for a photograph.
“Yeah,” he says “Go on, tell me.”
She wonders if she’ll leave with him.
“Scorpio” she says, taking a drag of the cigarette.
He sits back and nods his head slightly, his mouth turned down at the corners.
“I’m impressed” he says “It’s Aries, but you were close.”
She rests her elbows on the table and blows smoke in his general direction. She thinks about the gun in her bag.
“And you’re an Aquarius” he says, tilting his head to one side.
She guesses she’ll probably be leaving with him.

Exerpt from 'Markov Chain'

The Curse

Who am I to make these judgements, clad as I am in clumsy clown shoes and non-conformist hair-shirt?
I read the words of the educated; so confident in their dogma; their answers exclude all opposition with sharp in-jokes and sarcastic put-down.
Who can separate proper nouns from Oxford dicks?
I see around me small town arrogance that wanders through life oblivious; without indicators or headlamps.
Who funds these experiments in bio-diversity and drug dependency?
I watch as the full weight of the law comes down on single mothers with unpaid television licences and on mentally deficient black men in southern states while blind eyes are turned to crimes of global proportion perpetrated by white accountants and lawyers and children of criminal dynasties.
Where are the arms that reach down toward those reaching up from the maelstrom?
I see fascism masquerading as culture; consumerism as democracy; revisionism as historic fact; money as spiritual truth.
Where are the voices that speak up for those who have no voice?
I hear testosterone posturing sold as rebellion while the music of change is in-traded unheard; pop idolatry prostituting the spirit of protest through words distorted by marketing managers.
Whose heart is this that beats between the electronic rhythms of progress?
I feel the cold wind of war on the back of my neck as I flee Europe in fear of the future.
Why, in this small town of farmers and fuckwits, do I rail against myself in pointless navel-gazing self-justification?
The laces on my clown shoes are tied together for tragic effect and my hair-shirt itches like a thousand lost ideas in the well of futility.

Who Are You?

Talk through your nose, spout ignorant, inane, mindless and un-thought-out opinion about matters of no importance to ears that bleed with deceit.
Mobile phones twerp loud and ridiculous, as if it makes sense to announce an emergency with a ditty.
In your cardboard cubicle you spill early lunch crumbs across your keyboard in the vain hope of making some profound difference with the possibility of misfiring communication between rabid fingertip and radiating useless screen. Perhaps you'll get a pay raise this decade.
Who knows? Maybe they won't fire you from the 13th floor toilet window.
You dash through streets populated with vacant self importance, counting lunchtime minutes on nail-bitten fingers thrust deep in suit trouser pockets.
And later you bump shoulders with city-slick small-town big-shots in the self-important gallery of art-class banality; a thin patina of lurid oil on cliché canvas from wholesale culture and unimaginative glass-eyed perspective.
Fair Trade my arse.
Fare trade your ass for the busfare home, and dream a dream of a gas-guzzling oversized crash test dummy, hell-bent on twisting your chassis around a substandard light-pole in an overpopulated suburban neighbourhood crammed full of anal-capitalist shit-gatherers paying over-the-odds ransom to suck on the nipple of television pigswill propaganda-laden psychodrama.
Peel your lids back to watch as Jack-the-lad has '24' hours to torture the truth from some Evil-Arab-Muslim terrorist hell-bent on destroying your real estate dream while the good and moral man/woman deliberates sanitised world events in The West Wing.
Be thankful for your cardboard cubicle crumb-dusted keyboard and screen. Believe in the air-conditioned real estate dream. Give your children what they want.
Just don’t fuck with the Man - 'cos he’ll take it all away from you.

Looking Up

We are afraid of stars.
We are obsessed with Stars.
References to stars litter our life: gold stars; shooting stars, I bumped my head and saw stars; superstar; star signs, mega-star; stars in our eyes; a twinkle in the eye; twinkle, twinkle little…
Yet at night we make light - light, light, we need more light – we make light of… so much wasted light that we blot out the stars.
Perhaps it is not the dark that we are truly afraid of, but rather to stand under the night sky, without the glare of progress, and gaze up at the stars.
Is it because we are afraid of the insignificance of our species?
Perhaps even more frightening, for those who wish for reasons, is the concept of some god, some force out there that, unlike us, is in control of things.
It’s a man thing, I guess, the need to control; to be in control.
Each star is a singularity, you cannot look at one and know them all.
Contemplation of the sky requires patience. (Arcturus) There are those who gave and give the stars names – the names we hear are a chart of our rise. (Cassiopeiae) These names are a testament to how long we have been conscious beings. (BD+38° 3238 aka Vega) Capable of instilling meaning into symbols. (QZ Sagittarii) Names for the burning balls of flame that lie out there in the greater part of our environment.
Insignificant yes.
But understanding this makes us less insignificant.
Surely there cannot be any greater gift than thought.
It is thought that makes us equals to the stars.
We are all stars.

Guantánamo Baby

The Lion-Tamer gags on his homemade custard
And reaches for more of that extra strong mustard
He’s seen all the news that Fox declares dead-right
And regrets that he ever subscribed to that satellite

In the Sword-Swallower’s dream
There is no need for the clowns
Behind the inconsequential screen
Where they tie up the hounds

In the Trapeze-Artist’s delusion
The nets are of bluegrass
For to fall in seclusion
is to cushion your own arse

And In the Ringmaster’s cabin
Arranged for distraction
The trophies of peace
Glow green with inaction

His hair writhes Einsteinian
With equations of chaos
He speaks with authority
Of the things that delay us

Late buses and bosses
Early chainsaw destroyers
Loose reigns on the horses
That drag us to lawyers

Unmatched socks and pink towels
from the tumble drier spastic
Lost car keys and snapped vowels
In my waistband elastic

For this circus can’t run
Without the gullible punters
That turn up each night
To witness the stunters

Masquerade their cheap tricks
For our‘aahs’ and our ‘oohs’
While behind the big top
They’re oiling the thumbscrews.

Prophecy

There was a branch on a tree – not particularly popular with the other branches – not a horizontal branch for the hanging of a tyre-swing, nor a vertical branch for the sunshine quest; nor a particularly hirsute branch for the gathering harvest of light – but a sturdy branch nonetheless; a branch that balanced the tree nicely on the steep angled slope; a branch that thumbed its nose at the rigours of evolution; a singular branch whose purpose was yet to be fulfilled.
The branch is you; the branch is not you.
It foretells the music of stringed instruments; the moulding of wood with water glue and skill cello bass violin.
And this music of future sorrow fills the heart with exquisite ache.
This nihilistic joy; this shedding of burdens long carried.
And from the green light ahead; the branch that beckons to the peace of surrender where concerns turn to insects that flutter at the light, their negligee wings question the eye of all myopic solutions.
And in the soldier’s mind-eye as he storms the bastion of senseless and apocalyptic cause - the gates of hell’s construction and heaven’s delusion – is a vision of the corpse seen through the green-glass radar; a lens for time’s tracking black hand.
And the chains that hang there in this chamber of verse; this speculative glass; hang for all possibility, at the behest of that soldier, that singular cutting edge on the cusp of time’s wave.

Change!

It is unfortunate, but it appears that we must depend on the American people to steer us away from the danger that lies ahead.
The red; white and blue; the star spangled banner; symbol of freedom and democracy has been draped over more than two thousand coffins; has flown over the indiscriminate deaths of tens of thousands of insurgents; dissenters; grandmothers; pedestrians and children; has fluttered in limp support of the gang of murderers who follow the same path that destroyed the tribes of North America. The much lauded ‘civil rights’ victories of the past have been laid barren by the actions (or lack of action) of these men in response to the disaster in New Orleans.
The loss of hard won labour and privacy laws, the huge amounts of money spent on weapons, money much need within the country to address issues of social importance, on and on, the list is endless.
The positions of Republican; Democrat; liberal; conservative hold no relevance to these men - who knows what they seek, for who can need more money, more power they already have? - all I know is that they steer us all toward a future bleak, or no future at all.
Those who speak of change cannot agree; they spout all manner of revolutionary jargon but are too busy climbing over one another to make any difference.
Who knows whether democracy actually works, whether there is even such a thing.
The American people need to put aside all that divides them and remove these men from power.
Stand up, speak up, get them out.

Knowledge

Photogravure from 'The North American Indian' - Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952)

And those who are drawn to the truth may wish to gouge their pineal eye in order not to have seen what is inscribed there on the carcasses of the past.

Evangeline

We watch from barred windows
In the halls of the free
We gasp at the antics
Of the men in the tree

We live in a time
When the world can be run
By a number of maxims
From the book of the gun

They stand in the light
From the activist’s glory
Now he’s long dead
They own the rights to his story

Break open those windows
Let scepticism breathe freely
Watch for the traps
That lurk in the TV

In homeland security
or gross national pride
with torture and murder
racism and lies

with rape and with plunder
they leave us our fate
to scrabble from under
the empire’s dead weight

And although it be treason
For us to remember
The historical reasons
For the eleventh of September

The reasons remain
For no action was taken
To address the root causes
or pacify the Kraken

now the plains they are strewn
with the corpses of children
yet Evangeline loiters
With bullets and with napalm

Her head has been emptied
Of all of the reasons
that lubricate the wheels
that destroy all the seasons

and the killers they lurk
in halls of corruption
their hair turning grey
as the worms feed inside them

So watch from barred windows
In the halls of the tree
But save them a cell
For their fall from the free

The Lovers

I promise to be faithful. I will not consider the possibility, for to consider the possibility is to take the first step toward infidelity.
I promise to be trustworthy – and I will trust you in order to be so.
I promise to be honest to myself in order to be true to you.
I promise to resist the temptation to lie my way out of wrongdoing – lies collect like green corrosion on bright copper, a barrier; a distance.
I promise not to take myself too seriously since my pride may only be fed by the harvest of your approval, the light from your eyes.

Markov Chain

My mother’s number in the little green window of my mobile. Marty ejects a bitter laugh at my back, lost in his own thoughts. I flip the phone open and raise it to my ear, narrowly missing the out splayed leg of a woman in the next booth.
“Mum?”
Nothing.
“Mum”
I look at the screen: little read handset icon tells me the call has ended, prompts me to return call? I thumb the button, pause, blocking my left ear with a noisy finger…
‘You have reached the voicemail service for Oh… Seven…’
Shit, technofucked, I try again.
‘You have reach…’
One of the filler subjects that I took at university was Statistics – a subject of mind-numbingly boring proportions, and achingly difficult to find relevant for a mind rather more creative bent. One thing stuck however; theory developed by this Russian mathematician called Andrei Markov. As I understand it; any future prediction is only determined by the present variable and is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. I never fully understood the mathematical implications of Markov Chains, but on a philosophical level I took it to read that any future we foresee for ourselves depends entirely on the present as we understand it. I didn’t do too well at Statistics.
I order two beers at the bar, still too early to be too busy, and dial the home number, no reply, feeling myself getting more and more pissed off with it all. More and more concerned.
The North West portion of the nearside of the moon is named after Markov – go figure.
“What’s up?” asks Marty when I return to the table with two beers and the phone clenched in the crook of my shoulder, “You look like a boy who’s lost his Mummy in the supermarket.”

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

Monsters

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare

All those flashing coloured bulbs; the drunken music of the wurlitser; the wrinkles on the ticket seller's cheeks; the dodgems' ozone perfume - the carnival suspends all hope of ever seeing the sunrise.
You lift up a childhood rock to find the shed skins of long dead monsters there; monsters that couldn’t wait for your adult arrival. In some ways their absence is more horrifying than the fright that was their original intention. The pain and patience of their death is made null by the wind that takes their dry grey arachnidan remains and scatters them to dust like the sword swallower's dream of innocence lost.
And as the carnival moves on; oblivious of your hurts and fears; impervious to reason or logic's cold blade; it takes with it some piece of you, some piece you weren't aware you even had.

Prozac Fuck-You

Tell me again
About the songs of the free
Assure me today
I’m not outta my tree

When the music played loud
through your iPod tonight
won’t let you decide
if you’re wrong or you’re right

But there’s a moment you miss
a conjurer’s trick
‘tween the high cymbal hiss
And the bass drum-kick,

a moment that lights
the cogwheels and the springs
that lie out of sight
of all living things

Let me shout it out loud
the details of this crime;
the thing that they cloud
with politic’s grime;

the weapons that point
with empire’s greed
at humanity’s joint
where young and old bleed

and when will we free
the green sap of our labours
Diverted so openly
to the pockets of slavers

to concentrate daily
on steering away
from a future too bleak
for the cold light of day

Don’t let me be described
as a fool full of hope
Don’t let me be prescribed
pharmaceutical rope

Lithium; Prozac; Ritalin & Viagra
I’d rather take a barrel
Off the edge of Niagara
Than enter their trap, this ignorant quarrel

Immigration, stem-cells, terrorism and abortion
just divert our attention
via media distortion
from tortured detention

of innocent and guilty
from death row stitched-up
black men in the south
to the imminent demise

of mankind’s mental health

Collateral Damage in Fallujah

Soul Food

Dig down Demon Dan, down through the strata of lies and defences, down past the humiliation and triumphs, through days of sad longing and masturbation, past years of aimless wandering and directionlessness.
Here at the kernel where the driver sits encased in the husk of his original seed; levers and pulleys at his fingertips to manipulate the outer carcass of this meat puppet; this stone tree. Through layers and filters of dead skin and scar tissue; calloused defence against the schoolboy taunts and adult humour.
Here is where your truth is etched in weeping bark; tattooed on damp skin.
Here is where your freedom sucks moisture from deep strata of accumulated hurt; chlorophyll for a soul forgot.

Eden

Let me tell you about Eden:
Historically a one-horse town where passing travellers were cajoled into buying souvenirs; now a strategic mover and shaker in the country’s twenty-first century commodity; bullshit – or more commonly, information and the money it generates.
This town became one big suburb at about the time I became a teenager - all rugby posts and teevee antennas, bored kids hanging around at night smoking and drinking. Ahead of me stretched years of high school, ducking the rugby players and gangboys. Man, it was awful, aweful and empty. At the time I may not have been able to see the wood for the trees, but I could sure hear the chainsaws revving in the distance.
Sure enough, the eighties brought the boom, and money turned Eden into a city. And boy did she revel in her new wealth – everything that a modern city should have, she got. Museums, monolithic government buildings, glass office blocks for insurance brokers and city bankers, phallic war memorials, new motorways for flash new cars to jam on, nightclubs for the young and up-and-coming owners of those flash cars to spend the money they earned on the markets and show off their possessions while powdering their noses in mirrored unisex toilets lit by the dust of success.
Eden got the works – civic pride and neighbourhood watch; traffic lights and parking meters; the retail hierarchy that comes with prime real estate; bank charges and spitting cash machines - the green blood of the system flowed in a sacrifice to no tomorrow. A city built by the various money-based industries; insurance; marketing; lawyers and accountants; with their various links to government and the sale of arms and aid to third-world dictatorships.
Every city has a character all of its own; all have their dark secrets – their little quirks; foundations built on corruption or wet mud; megalomania or socialist good intentions. Older cities ramble absent-mindedly through twisted streets on hillsides or riverbanks lined with ancient trees whose bark has been wiped on the arse of industry, their buildings thrown together – granite and glass – by mad dash through the ages of progress. The younger ones have been laid down in a grid of uniform blocks like an idiot savant’s solution to the complexity of existence. Their buildings aging by the day, designed by committee and built by the lowest bidder; crumbling before their tenants even get to move in.
To the east, where some claim the real Eden lies, the city tapers out through warehouses and more and more disused railway sidings, to strip joints, massage parlours, factories for dubious pharmaceuticals, film studios that cater for the type of consumer too far gone for pornography, and casinos, seedy by definition, where money preys on the greed taught in suburban schools.
And to the west – by some weird Capitalist bylaw it’s always to the west - to the west those very suburbs, the malls and bowling alleys and grids of manicured lawns; the air tense with teenage psychosis, the dishwashers whirring to the nicotine inhalations of housewives in mid-life crises. When it comes to the suburbs, I know what I’m talking about; it’s where I’m from.

Eden, city of opportunity, the future starts here.

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

The House on Blue Hill

Sphere - MC Escher

Thoughts tinged blue with extinction’s mould
Repeated echoes of historic refrain
Bitter meals from bars of plundered gold
Unbidden you ride disenchantment again

Here thoughts like empty glasses yawn
To be filled with sentences of logic shawn
Words euphemistic from aphorism spawn
Empty your head they’ll do it just the same

Left like sugar to melt in caffeine rain
Divided by mind and manner born
To hang by fingertip in chambers of pain
Never to see the enlightened dawn

And from your window in a house already sold
By the masters of all to mean caretakers lame
You spy the one whose stories are told
Of the end of time and of thoughts insane

And were it not for those grains of hope
That fly on the wind of tomorrow’s light
You would roll you blanket tight with rope
Woven course and strong with clear hindsight

And head out here where the pavement ends
To join the others whose equilibrium depends
Not on wisdom handed down like cigarette ends
But by the light whose flame licking tends

To blacken the litter strewn from cathode screens
and putrid waste from ancient schemes
The light that declares in moments bare
I am afraid…

… is this what freedom means?

J'Adore Sagittarius

She fell into his arms
Like she really couldn’t help it
Having tripped over the shoes
That lurked in the carpet

She slipped her hand through
The great chinks in his armour
And opened his heart
With the keys to her karma

They fell with the passion
Of the ulterior designer
Their contact sent waves
Through the chips in her china

And the love that they made
From the grains of past fear
Grew like yeast in the spiral
Of the mankind’s deaf ear

And there it gestated
On the sands of dark stars
Blown by red wind
Through rusted engines of Mars

Whose wars had descended
On the planets and seas
Leaving the lovers endangered:
Whales; tigers; monkees

To be born in a future
Long lost to those vampires
Whose paper trail led them
To the destruction of empires

But the thoughts of demise
The lovers swept to one side
Disturbing the carpet
Leaving the shoes to decide

Whether they’d be responsible
For telling the grandparents
About the misguided policy
of nuclear deterrence.

The Boy with the Bullet Holes

Time transfixed; the painting hums kinetic, sandwiched as it is between the leaves of the glossy art book in the school library in the past.
The locomotive hangs steaming from the fireplace below the mirror, its smoke a solid path to the chimney. The black clock on the mantelpiece reads seventeen minutes to one. The mirror reflects nothing of the room. The candlesticks at either end of the mantelpiece hold no candles. The grain in the floorboards stands out in paranoid detail.
Time transfixed, devoid of feeling, life of no consequence – a place outside of human experience.

Time Transfixed - Rene Magritte

It is impossible to confine guns to any laws or rules; there is always another bullet in the chamber; another finger on the trigger; another victim to fall; another chance to add your tragedy to the piles of rotting newsprint, eyewitness reporting, fading photographs and memories.