Rosary

Eden ~ Kris Kuksi

Garland your sky with florid visions
Stations of the double-cross
Raise your hem show the incisions
Stitched with the hair of a horse

Spread your arms you junkshop Jesus
Crucified post-pixel priest
Declare your aphorism-cobbled thesis
The glory of a short-term lease

On hemstitched heels misunderstood
Your winged words ascend
Notching grooves on wooden heads
With nails not made to mend

Mishka's Recyled Aphorisms

We (Baltic Version) ~ Carrie Schneider

Pico Faraday never stopped to wonder if he was doing the right thing. Mind you, nobody was likely to tell him that actions infringed on some or other rule or ethic; not since Mishka’s death anyway; and besides, everything was in short supply.
To quote the lady herself: “Waste not, want not”
He dug the knife in, gingerly at first, feeling around for the bullet.
The priest had been dead for long enough for the wound not to bleed much; but not long enough to prevent it from oozing blackly at the tip of Pico’s exploring knife.
He used the serrated edge on the top of the blade to hack through the ribcage.
He wondered at his ability to abstract: the priest’s flesh represented nothing more than a goal; a means to prosper. The irony was not lost: Pico knew for a fact that this inanimate meat was no sacred vessel; it held nothing – no soul, no intrinsic value other than the material value of the bullet and the more altruistic value of the nourishment offered to bacterial and insect entities involved in the process of decay.
A glint of dull grey at the knife’s tip and the dull pressure carried up the blade’s length told him that he had found the bullet, the open chest cavity, despite being a gory mess, did not deter his seeking fingertips, he lifted the mangled blob of lead up to his one good eye; his shooting eye – bingo.
“The wages of sin” Mishka might have pronounced at this stage “subsidise the lives of desperate men”

I Have Seen The Future Brother...

Winsor McCay

The Living Haunt The Dead

Prime Time ~ Laurie Lipton

Rise with the flood
Bodies float in the reed-bed fecund
Clothes bubbled buoyant
The smell of my fears made real

Our digging ordered
To offer the end of your world

Nobody knows
About your burial anonymous unmarked
You went to the river
And never came back with the water

Our gunfire unprovoked
Announced the end of your world

You are the watermark
That marks my understanding my awakening -
The politics of control
Pays no mind to your life or mine

A Geocentric Model

Red dust explodes on the planet’s surface below
Far below
Further than yesterday
As in a dream
In slow motion
In silence equal to forever
I watch without reaction
Impervious to hope
My orbit fixed
My body frozen
I don’t care what they do now
Now that I am beyond redemption
Now that my future is beyond imagining

For I have no levers to pull
No wires to tap
The world runs its affairs oblivious
To the dreams of honourable men

Red liquid explodes on the glass surface below
Far below
Further that tomorrow
This is no dream
In slow motion
A scream contained in a vacuum
I watch my hand’s reaction
Frames cut from a film
My eyes fixed
My orbit freezing
I don’t care what they do now
Now that I am beyond redemption
Now that my imagining has no future.

Mercury

From "Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life" - be there.

The Hand That's Dealt

Little house I used to live in

What have you got
When you leave it all behind?
A handful of smoke; perfume on the wind

Walking up the hill with the kids in tow
In another life
The camera bumps against my hip

Graffiti on the bus shelter
Creative urge pulling; lifting
Like a toe dipped in a fast flowing river

It chokes behind my eyes
The sadness of all those photographs
The taste so strong; so lost

Today is not enough
I cannot make it suit my needs
Cannot rescue it from the past

Timeline Indemnity

According to the company literature, consciousness will migrate to the nearest alternative timeline created where synaptic activity is still present.
Johnny Tinder used his right to a phone call to contact his insurance broker.
“I’m calling in my policy,” he said, “I’m at the Utopia Sestri police station.”
He listened for a while
“Murder” he said.

The broker was as Johnny remembered him: brown-suited and ferret-like, smelling of cigarettes and tea.
“It is imperative that from this point onward you make all of your decisions consciously and with maximum intent” he said as he attached the wire-frame helmet onto Johnny’s just-shaved scalp.
The uniformed guard at the door held the expression of someone who’s just stepped in dogshit.
“See you in another life” said the broker as he handed Johnny his card:

Timeline Indemnity™ Your Future, Your Decision Sam Faulks Life Broker 0800-INFINITY

Johnny decided to place the card in his hip pocket and noticed a sudden shadowy edge to his actions.

As the days progressed toward his trial Johnny’s life became more and more ghostly with the possibilities that forked off at every decision he made. Most were variations that left phantoms of himself walking a few steps ahead or behind; in one he was stabbed by a fellow inmate as he exited the shower; in another he was beaten by a guard.

The judge’s gavel fell in a staccato progression of guilty verdicts and Johnny was sentenced to a thousand death penalties.

Johnny Tinder died at the end of every decision he made; the firing squad faced him through the clouds of cordite; the gunshots echoed down infinity and all his ghosts were laid to the slaughterhouse floor.

The coroner removed a thorny electronic net from Johnny’s scalp and from the back pocket of Johnny’s prison uniform he withdrew a business card which carried the name of an insurance broker.

In the loom from which our abstract perception of time is woven, there are only so many threads that will accept the dye of reality.

Educate Me

Sundial

Love cuts a new rung On the ladder of swords The trees steal the green Right out of the lawn Rain washes blood From the ladder of swords The trees bow their branches Submission to mourn And as the sun kills the moon Climbs the ladder of swords The trees throw their shadows The morning to scorn

Waiting for a Star to Cool

Patience is a virtue very difficult to practice. The mind is easily distracted from conscious thought, having so many duties to perform it requires silence and stillness to exist in its consciously analytical state.
Iskandor realised that she had had little time for thought in the years she had lived in exile; her day being so consumed with the source’s incessant need for more. Even her escapes to the desert to watch the stars had been little more than sleep. This star, however, gave here mind something to pivot about. She realised that she was no longer impressed by the source’s powers and that she was perhaps more important to it than it was to her. She noticed that the heat from the star had turned the furrowed sand to crystal; no doubt an annoyance to the source, it having then to cope with these unforeseen chemical changes – an added burden to its concerns.
Heat shimmered the horizon behind the star turning the sand to watery sky, Iskandor spat and watched her spit evaporate sizzling on the surface of the star.
Patience, Iskandor realised, is a reprieve from the world.

From Decaying Orbits

The Shrine

The Theatre of Hate

Somewhere behind the surface of the façade they could hear our voices whisper
“I don’t believe you”
At times like these a swift and solid response is required.

As the gunman places the muzzle to his chin, surrounded by blood hungry hounds who know that today they may legitimately wreak vengeance for one of their own whose bloody face the media exposed to enflame. The gunman finds himself overexposed at the end of the world.

As the demonstrators break the line of belligerent and action-hungry Kevlar; knowing it is their blood that is the commodity in a transaction of hate, the weight of the world leaves them circling Escher’s endless staircase.
Ever rising to remain, the ones who never broke the surface.