Dot-Matrix Landscape Passing

Master Lambe & Mistress Woolfe ~ Galina Khatan

Down the path of least assistance by angled dust eroded
A spiral copper leaf marks the myriad march of days
A ghost house warped in grain and knuckle knot exploded
Shimmers in the migraine zigzag hollow heat haze

Travelling back I kick the dust and grit my wooden teeth
Crooked cross-eyed apple-cored this confession confidential
Waits on bended knee presenting a glass-blown wedding wreath
Angled upward aged acid-etched and accidental

I cross the sentinel line of nostalgic date-palms sweet
Passed dust bowl dreams and muddied memories of rain
Where our names entwine in a clichéd heart-shaped treat
Beneath sap and bark concealed the gesture yet remains

And drawing pins on maps and brochures chart the lines
Of journeys on from illuminated first date palm-sweat
Through isobars, borderlines, battles beat and harder times
To precious paired fruit cello-embraced in baby bassinette

Plainsong

Zdzislaw Beksinski

The ferryman’s voice echoes in the mist
The waiting crowd gathers into a fist
Sheltering in the lee of the boathouse A-frame
Wrapped in a collective cloak of guilt and shame
Faces etched in copper and ferrous ache wrought
From judgement day to the lacklustre lessons taught
By the brass handles on the black casket shrouded
In a flag of fabricated lies by prejudice clouded

And Lucifer stands alone to one side
Unable to join the crowd nursing hurt pride
For who would listen to this ill-bred bearer of light?
What profits afforded for those who own the night?
To send forth those who have everything to lose
Those with hearts misled and unwilling to choose
Between the devil you know and the psychotic crews
Whose camouflage hides more than the magician’s cues

Poppies red blemish the chests of the mourners
Symbolism no measure for the world’s dirty corners
Where the cards are discarded hidden in plain view
Invisible to the many, a winning hand for the few
So the ferryman’s pole cuts an arrow in cold water
For departed marked crosses in the field of the slaughter
The crowd’s fist is torn by the falling widow’s cry
The mist knits a veil that blends with the sky

Cabin Fevre ~ 7. Driftwood

Oak Tree ~ © Eyvind Earle Publishing LLC

There can be few men who have seen what I have seen. The branch that has formed in the sleeve of my missing arm has brought me sustenance. It is as if the scratching sound that constituted my wretched life - the sound inside my head that had been there for so long that I had forgotten it were there -had suddenly been soothed with green sap. I am filled with the rapture of an ancient forest. The trees gaze back at my thoughts with something that resembles horror. New bark rubs coarse at my throat and speaks to me of time less frenetic, a journey less headlong, one that understands itself to be nothing more than the continuation of generations without self; without any need save to be; to most effectively reap the sunlight; to breathe the earth’s future through green lungs of benevolence.
Despite the eloquence of all my past petitions, the intricacy of moral justification for all my depravity; the trees do yet welcome me into their botanic realm. I am belittled; awed; a mere husk of man before the immense power of this ghostly forest.
‘Tis a small mercy, this loss of God, for the wood lives a far more brutal morality.
‘Tis a torment that carries no less powerlessness than mankind’s toil beneath an inscrutable god; to be rooted in the seething earth whose unseen horror centres upon water; to suffer the passage of fleeting life forms in the upper canopy, or tunnelling insect invasions to the bark and core.

And ‘tis a cruel morality that leaves us, stranded as we are ‘twixt elusive water and unattainable sun; to witness the activities of man from this futile eerie.
And tho’ we creak and twist in protest, he heeds us not, this thoughtless creature hell bent.
And thus we speak through this particular man; once so proud to be a pilgrim and a puritan; once so quick to deliver judgement; to further the aims of progress with gunpowder and empire; he has no need now for those ornaments of civilisation – those beads and baubles so greedily hoarded – that which defined him as, above all else, a good man – a man of God.

Aye, William Fevre: driftwood on the shores of one existence, petrified in another.

Magpies

Untitled ~ Bogdan Zwir

In the Shadows where some bright ones walk,
In order for their talents to be more easily discerned
Lurk larger shapes for whom the shadows are an aid
to satisfying their appetites for shiny things.

Earth Mover

Lady Gaia ~ Saint Victor

The system carves your souls by halves
To feed the rotting tree

Then dredges the lakes of all debate
To starve the rising sea

Of pyramid schemes where dolphins dream
An alternate reality

While talking heads feed your dread
And tell you that you’re free

But who am I to toll your pealing primate bell
Decry your sea-horse trading man-ray splinter cell?

Your thumbs in showers of dust might just as easy fall
Into my hands that wring un-sung the beauty of it all

And mercury rising sharply in your fiercely treasured chest
Foretells a change of heavy heart that beats you to the test

That measures hope and lengths of rope for a hundred years of tears
With clockwork cranks from deep think-tanks the grit in all your gears

Those talking heads that feed your dread
May never get to see

These pyramid scenes and dolphin dreams
Where heart and mind agree

That dredging lakes and eco-debates
Won’t stop the rising sea

from carving deep canyons of sleep
the words trapped in the tree

Cabin Fevre ~ 6. Cabin 13

Howard Pyle

I am returned; my heroic last words reduced to nought.
I awoke once more in Cabin 13. My berth; my tomb; my box, with its crudely carved numbers upon the door, its timber walls now sprouting twisted shoots of green life as if even the trees that once begat this cursed vessel would mock my cruel fate.
I yelled at the knots that formed faces in the ceiling’s grain, every inch of wood as familiar as my name. I cursed my name; I cursed God’s name, His incompetence in leaving me here undeserving of such cruel punishment. I rose and in a blind rush fuelled by guilt and anguish, I exited my cabin and threw myself over the gunwale into the arms of the sea.
A quickly inhaled breath of tepid seawater returned me anon to my berth, unquenched by the sea, my bedding dry and the timbers groaning my name.
The stern windows are illuminated with visions of green. Once more at the Captain’s desk, my bloodless hand rustles the blood-dipped quill across these charts.
Everything has changed.
Some hours ago the rage that is my constant companion now that the hunger has left me, overflowed and in a fit of bright red I slammed my fist down on the desk, an act which, given the desiccation of my body, caused said hand to splinter and my descending arm to continue, leaving behind the hand on the desk. I stared as the hand twitched and attempted to drag itself across the desk using yellow fingernails as grapples.
And as it slowly began to disintegrate so there rose from my gut a strange choking sound, a sound and sensation long forgotten. A sound not heard on these decks since last landfall.
Laughter.
And as I laughed I felt weight lift from my mind; my lonely and demanding prison. My left arm emptied itself as dust from its tattered sleeve and the lessening of its burdensome duty made me laugh all the harder. The captain’s desk sprouted green tendrils that writhed their way up my so recently evacuated sleeve and bit hard into the dry flesh at my ghostly shoulder.
And at the core of my laughter a seed of truth was born, borne too on the waves of relief that shuddered in my chest.
The desire for all living things to return to their most vital state; to the purpose imprinted on their soul, their core, is what makes it all happen. It is a truth so bleak as be understood only by contrast to the hell inspired by the need to believe in the god of heaven & hell.
My laughter revealed that which my prison had so desperately tried to teach me: the hell I endured was a hell of my own creation.
Faith in God must by definition be unquestioning and absolute, for to question is to fall; to doubt. This pilgrim had believed his faith to be so, doubt he had hidden deep in his chest full of guilt.
And the spectral green life that shared my prison bubbled and laughed with me, even as roots bored into my dead flesh and filled my mind with visions.

Perhaps

Poison Sleep ~ Don Dos Santos

Perhaps life is just a dream; a dream with a skin so thin that it will become it’s own reality by the sheer act of self-realisation…

The Hamster Wheel

Courtesy of Cox & Forkum

Cabin Fevre ~ 5. Dust

Harry Clarke

Like sap in the majestic beams that form the skeleton of Aurora’s hull, blood is a substance of little use to a dead man.
It ran black from the deep cuts at my wrists and neck and where it landed it brought forth the grain in deck planks that had waited there thirsty since their separation from the tree.
And yet I stood on that writhing and hungry deck, the knives cold and black-wet in my fists, un-weakened by the ebbing of my body’s precious fluid, a prisoner still, unable to leave by even the most final of all methods.
It appears that my damnation is as deep as it goes – I have no further to fall.
I had assumed, foolishly, that I was free to leave the confines of this wooden tomb and to seek my redemption at the other end of the chain. Foolishly I was returned in a manner that would wither the soul of any man in possession of such an artefact.
Immediately upon completing my last entry in this journal, I made haste to the chain where I began an awkward horizontal journey. At my belt I had secured the knives and in my voluminous pockets, the last remaining grisly morsels of guilty meat rationed in the hope of allaying the hunger for long enough to allow me to reach some destination.
The ink has run dry and I am forced now to use the permanently un-clotted blood that has collected in the knots of the Aurora’s deck; a cruel reminder of the ledger of humanity that totals my profit and loss in cold increments of hope.
It was hope that grew in my chest as I wrestled my way along the chain. It was hope that allowed me to continue despite having consumed the meat; despite being unable to measure the passing hours, days or weeks under the unchanging light.
At times I heard, or imagined I heard, voices in the distance; voices raised in song, sometimes deep, sometimes angelic. Hope would turn to expectation and I would be spurred with renewed vigour to scramble ever more careless toward the chain’s end.
Cursed chain, even now it taunts me with low creaking, as if whatever exists on the other end is exerting some force on its crusted black links.
The flap of skin that hung from my cheek, a nagging reminder of my last transgression, fell away some days ago to reveal, in my salty looking-glass, a lop-sided grin too horrible to relate to the face that I once held with pride to be that of William Fevre: pious man.
The ship's timbers sighed as I reached down with a tattered hand to retrieve this grotesque morsel, and I was perturbed to find it to be feather light and dry. That which was once tender and pliable flesh, engorged with precious blood, did now turn to dust between my fingers and disperse into the ether as if it had never been.
Dust is what I have become.
And so it was that I clutched the cold metal of the chain to my sobbing chest and there rose in me a despair that ran deeper than any cut, deeper than the marrow that dries in my bones; a despair that overshadowed all that had come before. My faltering soul had all but given up and my hands were ready to release their aching hold on the chain and leave my body to fall into the inscrutable sea, when the voices rose once more, accompanied on this instance by the sound of regimented industry. A regular pulsing like the drums of savagery, only louder than any human drum, accompanied by the wailing and screeching of creatures unknown to mankind. I found myself standing in a cavern writhing with bodies in various stages of undress, their torture lit by the flashing of arcane white fire, their eyes aglow with desires cold and reptilian and I feared I was now truly in the hell described by Dante, even as I hungered for the abundance of exposed flesh; hungered and desired. My depravity, it seems, knows no bounds.
And there stood before me a creature of great power, his face pale his hair aflame, and he did smile at me as if to indicate his knowledge of my transgressions; as if to include me in his realm.
“I am the god of war” said he and reached out to touch the shoulder of a woman who gyrated at his behest.
My fingers loosened their grip on the chain and I fell, for an infinite time into the arms of the waiting sea.

The Onion

There is always more.
From explanations imprisioned in language to the visual evidence available to those species who use light to orientate their existence.
There is always another layer; beyond the known, beyond the understanding of parasites.

Catenary

Perched like music on transmission lines
Electro-magnetic halos no entry feather signs
Silhouetted in sunflower with linseed eyes
Painted by madmen on the cusp of the sky

Who glide on the wind look down and defy
Gravity’s rainbow and high nested cries
Who soar down seeking de-appled worms
Wisps of light the circling season’s terns

Who nest to digest the lessons of the day
To Sing and to spawn, enlist and obey
The songs of the sunset the loss of the light
Mortality creeps on paving at night

Rooks move in straight lines while sparrows fall
No one to notice, no hunter to call
A head and a tail a heart for cat’s-paw
Blood no quench for this ill-tempered core

Feed me no lies on the arc of your dive
Feathering falling calculated to arrive
On branch fractal fragile sing a fluted refrain
All love’s tomorrows your perch to regain

Cabin Fevre ~ 4. Demon Etchings

I leave these words for any unfortunate who should pass this way. Do not remain here; there is naught here save damnation. I have stayed too long, by preordination or by cowardice I know not which and it matters little for I have become what I always have been; a demon.
A demon for whom the flesh is willing when the mind is weak.
I ask what would I be should the flesh be nought ?
The answer I know not.
My home is an absurdity; all the elements are upside down. The sea no longer threatens the journey of this sleeping ship, the ship has grown soft in not having to resist to sea’s onslaught. In a sense this is perfect, life without physical threat.
Let these scraps of sepia parchment be my confession; my obituary should it be possible to find some other place where death holds no deeper horror than the end of existence.
My conclusion is as follows:
It is love that makes all things happen; this journey so deep and short; so woefully unforgiving and brutally lonely. And it is love too that is the only refuge; the raft at which to cling when the faith in God’s wrath does wane; a strawberry in a field of thistles.
I am in need now of the company of one whose beauty of form and spirit would allow me to separate them from all others, being neither predator nor prey, but mind of equal and opposite parts, whose shared experience would soften the way forward and allow to enter those open wounds of tender regard that the soul deems more valuable than all else.
But you traveller who by circumstance driven must pass this way, you who may have lived a life that did not concern itself with all the surrounding darkness, you whose faith is yet unbroken by this place, you need not heed the words of this lesser demon or greater god. What constitutes your soul is yours alone, with only you who will be its judge, jury and executioner. It is here that true power resides, here at the centre of a universe created for one god – the god that resides at the core of the human mind.
I am but a leaf, pressed twixt the pages of the days; the hours; the minutes. I am dust on the wings of the eons, blown hither and yon by the whim of whatever passes as the creator; not worthy of judgement; fit for punishment at the hands of my own desires and weaknesses. I am a shell for the hollow longing; a carrion marionette in this sideshow where lost souls go, their callused hearts to shed in laughter black and cruel.
I am not worthy of this narrative, for it is not the confessions of the damned, but rather the petitions of the worthy, that deserve the attention of Hope.
Farewell traveller, and pray that, on some ragged link, further down that cursed chain, you do not come face to face with the demon that resides in your own heart.

Truth is the Equation of Thing and Intellect

Photo from E.L.I.S.E.'s post Mai 68

The music phase-shifts, echoing, as he steps over the remains of the boundary wall.
Bobbi is waiting in the shadows, separate from the crowd, her body in half-silhouette and the coal of her roll-up glows as she inhales.
“This band is shit” she exhales a plume to obscure her face, her eyes flashing through.
“That’s what you always say” he hands her the package.
“That’s ‘cause it’s true,” she palms the package into her mouth, half-turning to obscure her actions, “and the truth is what it’s all about.”
The music stops abruptly
“There is no truth” he says into the new silence as he walks away from her.
The crowd yells its appreciation.