Take Me To The Summit So That I May Take Another Dive

Stańczyk ~ Jan Matejko

I stood on the crest of the dune, gulls reeling around my head in feathered chaos. My mind could not escape from the gap; the raw aftermath of my own disrepair.
The id-interface felt, to my weakened self, as if it were deliberately exposing all of my insecurities at once; a fact that was further exacerbated by the frenetic monochromic activity so close to my face.
“eeee,” they cried, “eeee-jit!”
Further down the shore I could make out the haze-obscured figures reaping the plankton fields and I wished for some special sustenance to lift me from this despair.
It came to me that to mess with ones own circuits in such a self-destructive manner is not only ill-advised but blatantly stupid, especially since I have learned this lesson on so many a previous occasion.

A Thousand Miles and I’m Getting There Too Soon

Inke Essenhigh

I am a one-way street
Traffic combs my hair-shirt hackles
You are the ghost highway
Where horsemen headless rattle shackles

I am the vampyr moon
Eye teeth arch behind plastic lip-gloss
You are the Aztec sun
Cooled to rage by empyre and cross

I am the evolving ape-man
Chisel-tooth necklace and sharpened stone
You are the will of the forest
Breathing light and decaying bone

I am the padded cell
Danger contagious no lace in my shoe
Decorate your walls in calligraphy

You are a two-way mirror
Quicksilver for the passing through
Of light and lacklustre astrology

You are the will of the forest
Fetid rotting insect moon
I am the evolving ape-man
Lost his mind, found his voice too soon

You are the Aztec sun
Stone trees silhouette the reeling stars
I am the vampyr moon
Blood 'n' guts nightclubs, singles bars

You are the ghost highway
Blue lights flash against your will
I am a one-way street
This glass city flows but I stand still

Title from “I’ve Been Let Down” by Mazzy Star
"Catch a train on a silver afternoon
A thousand miles and I’m getting there too soon
Take me there when I should be going home
Tell me why I’m still feelin' all alone"

Clean Desk Policy

Possessed

The Demon Tumbler ~ Michael Hutter

And somewhere between her self and her senses, her body was lost; stripped away of all flesh, the pain and the biologic adherence to survival.
Iskandor: her very name became a collection of ciphers, a bracket of sounds from which all meaning had been bled; all cultural reference distilled to a molecular level.
The Source sang within those bones, vibrating Brownian motion that fluttered in her mind now no more that a peripheral to the great force that knew all things from the planet’s core to the black dust that passed for sight in the Oracle’s empty eye sockets. What strange visions had those decayed eyes beheld in antiquity; what lost hopes and withered dreams?
Iskandor felt her own eyes lifted, now opened winder than the arcs of her lids in wonder.
Would these decaying orbits yet come to see that which the parallax view lays bare; the depth of vision that clarifies which maternal graces have served to provide and which to detract from the business of societal engagement, a sense of belonging - a process of elimination where reality is revealed through pain and separation – separation of flesh from bone; separation of mind from its comfortable misconceptions.
Through the myriad fingers of the forest canopy the universe spun on its axis, whispering words with syllables measured not in the click of a tongue but in the rising and collapsing of stellar empires; the voice of dust and the language of rock and fire.
Incandescent faces of those she had known appeared before her to remind her of who she was and who she had been; she felt herself returned to herself in a rush of beautiful familiarity as if returning to a warm bed after being called by the bodies need; returning to the serenity of existence that exists between sleep and waking.


Recent lines reaching escape velocity from "Decaying Orbits"

The Persistence of Memory

Jade ~ Tony Notarberardino

Where are the rusted keys that wind these crooked clocks
Where time lies stalled in pools of solder cooling
And tepid waters rise to overflow these worried locks?

Who times these tides of plankton that ebb your eyelid shore
And overflow to traverse your cheek describing
A platinum arc that crowns slo-mo in dusty parquet floor?

What wisdom lies in teardrops teeming with galaxies of thought
Myriad objections, obscure and off-the-wall
Declaring null the gospel saints you wish you'd never bought?

Why cast oblique reference to that second-hand for hours
Whisper 'wait' then holler "all aboard"
When bound for heights but hellbound sent, equipped with earthly powers

Protection

Cold Heart, Warm Hands

Eli W. Buel ~ Top Hat ~ 1870 (via the hamartia disease)

Seems I slept through the lucid dreaming
My symbols clashed with those fields of rain
I was overburdening and unrevealing
I never got the rules of the game

You stayed up all night demanding
That the morning bring another day
Bought yourself some time by stealing
Futures from the underlay

Now I sleep through the great undermining
Of all I once stood for and all I now know
I am not the soul worth mining
No room here for seeds to sow

You work nightshift on nursery rhymes
Rather than to face the day
When all your work-wise clocking times
Leave your heart with nought to say

I’ll sleep through this numb acceptance
Of every mirror shard and hardwood shaving
Slipped from the foundry to factory fence
I’ll not scold them for misbehaving

You won’t sleep on this luxury bed
Stuffed with reminders and counterfeit notes
Lost to the garbage that'll fill your head
With promises, escape-routes and antidotes

The Subterraneans

Siddhartha ~ Dose Green

These children of the ancient tribes
Their cards dealt to the wheel
Ride the subway to oblivion
And tell you how to feel

Shaken by these earthquake days
Where there's nothing left to need
My unforgiving thinking ghosts
Have all but gone to seed

Reduced to the haunting hallways
In those sketches of the past
Allowed to surface daily
childhood flavours that won't last

Reduced to night sky watching
In a whole another time
Reduced to speaking Russian
On the rose-red central line

These predictions of a coming war
And tense truth-tax evasions
Piss in the halls of justice
Stall trains between the stations

They don’t question fast-track changes
To the languid laws of convention
Not in the ink mouths of the media
Nor a shortened span of attention

So down your football sedative
Take away the world’s hard edge
Pretend that you don't know me
The thin end of the wedge

Health & Safety

The Reliability of Objects

Future Children ~ Agim Sulaj

“Markov IV” The carapace’s readout announced in a pale typeface alongside the warning “System Integrity Low”
In the back of my mind I made note that that particular warning was not one that I’d ever seen before. Most art-life systems were powered on ultra-low friction recuperative technology, backed up by thousands of f-years organo regenerative colonies, so are reliable to a very high degree.
Markov IV filled my vision, yellow ochre with a band of green/blue around her equator; I sucked in a deep breath of carapace air – no longer reeking of my shit, but fetid nonetheless.
Markov IV……shit
Dredging up a few rudimentary strings of mech-language gathered from f-years of having to depend on art-life I attempted to ask the carapace why it had brought me into a contaminated sector.
“System Integrity Low”

This is an extract from "Decaying Orbits"; a novel taking its own sweet time in the writing.