Say What?

			In America everyone is writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, texts - but no one reads
							Gary Shteyngart

Lobsang Rampa Taught Me to Fly

Learning to understand your own cultural prejudices is like trying to swim in a vacuum: there are few push-off points:

The boy was picked up by a black man in a two-tone Ford Corsair.
He’d slept for a few hours on the floor of the ladies toilet at the petrol station where his last ride had turned off the main road.
It was a cold sunrise and the sky was streaked with red cirrus; he was still six hours from home.
The black man wore a brown suit and hat, he made polite conversation as he drove and played a Jim Reeves cassette on the stereo.
The boy felt awkward in his uniform and in his white skin but he could not put the pieces together in any way that satisfied all angles.

For the 18 year old conscript from the coast, the Transvaal was a melancholy and bitter place; dry and red and yellow with a sky that changed expression from big and blue to big and dark in the blink of thought.

30 years later and I still can’t fathom what possessed that man to pick up a white soldier in the middle of nowhere.

----------------------------oOo----------------------------

Perhaps I should clarify a few things here:

• The picture is the cover of The Mars Volta's difficult second album "Frances The Mute"
• The Ford Corsair I'm referring to is the one from the 1960's; the one that looks as if it was designed in the 1970's.
• Jim reeves music is sad - and I don't mean that in a good way
• Many things have changed over the least 30 years, but some have not.
• This post is Bio-related.
• Oh, and Lobsang Rampa wrote books about his adventures on the astral plane - I never realised he was serious.

Carnival Rides

The Slave Market ~ Gustave Boulanger

Follow the grave and shallow American model
Shadow cast catwalk cardboard and fragile
Raise a glass to the acolyte sky
Painted golden sunset
Pay entrance fee at exit turnstile

Questions grave for the shallow American model
May serve to surrender to the alien heart
Measure the distance between us
And the dust on our fingers
Pay the ransom agreed from the start

Dig a grave for the shallow American model
Profit now and pay with tomorrow
Raise your eyes to see above
Your sad soft shoe shuffle
Pay the guilt fee in charity sorrow

Intelligent Design

Larry Gonick Cartoon History of the Universe

Hypotenuse

Chandelier VII ~ Yuichi Higashionna

The cat curled like an inverted question mark.
The tree offered her shelter from the just-started rain.
She watched me watching from the yellow window.
My face a question she had no intention of answering.

Dynamic Tension

Mike Shaw

He wandered out into the runoff zone, his feet tapping tango on the travelators, a tattoo of indelible sadness.
The sentinels gave him grace, knowing him to be a man without political purpose; knowing from the data in his chip.
How was she to know that he would not be returning? She, like all the others, had to trust that the PTB had some system; some consistent parameters for the harvesting of malcontents.
He was dragged through the night puddles with blood on his knees, buildings obstructed the moon, cast black shadows across his kicking legs.
How was he to know that the PTB held no allegiance to process; their techniques were distilled from centuries of subtle manoeuvring; manifest in the duality of presentation to the public by the voice of reason; obscuring the machinations of power?

She wandered out into the runoff zone, searching for his footprints; for scuff marks on the travelators; for blood on the concourse.
The sentinels gave chase: her chip flagged a ballot violation.
How was he to know that she would follow him into the fray? He trusted her judgement when it came to the laws of probability.
She was dragged before the Kangaroo, charged and sentenced with blood still copper on her tongue and the moon was a silver echo in her mind as she was taken into darkness.
How was she to know that the PTB held no allegiance to reason; their techniques were distilled from centuries of subtle manoeuvring; manifest in the duality of presentation to the public by the guidelines of process; obscuring the machinations of power.

Say What?

			Odd how God insinuates himself into every last one of our wounds: Like salt, with an agenda.
							Unremitting Failure

Civilisation

Photo by The Visions of Kai

The outcast was never informed of his sentence.
No gavel pronounced the full stop.
A jury of his peers could not find one among them willing to take the responsibility.
And so he wandered among them and they remained politely non-committal.
He came to the conclusion that he must have said something wrong.

Iskandor

Lilith ~ Jeff Simpson

At the centre of her chest there was a knot. Not the kind of knot that would hinder your daily routine, but the kind of knot that has been there so long that it becomes a part of your ghost: threaded through your thoughts and your temperament like gold filigree in the weave.
To those who knew her – and they were few - the knot was what defined Iskandor as one who would accept no less that clinical honesty in her dealings with the world and with her belief in the inherent truth of the Source. And for those who knew her well enough to care – an they were less than the fingers on one hand – Iskandor’s smile, when drawn forth by a chance irony or deep absurd observation, would release the knot momentarily, allowing her shoulders to drop from their customary square defence and letting free the light that shone within her through the lens of her crooked white teeth and the downcast rays of hope in her eyes.

From Decaying Orbits

Vegetables

More? Go to Ape Not Monkey

Sand in the Gears of Tomorrow

As words escape down alleyways
I hum a tune half-remembered
Rising from sandy seabed memory disturbed
All mannerisms and salt encrusted poses
For a man who has no failings

From canyon corners caverns caves
Echo back a second out of time
From hotel room fake fjord walls
Loaded lullabies of nostalgia and regret
Presupposing a yet unmade bed

Chords established ingrained and entrenched
When struck will vibrate through time
To afternoon rooms sunlit and stagnant
Postcards from a past
Folded stitched hem embroidered

Scarecrow

I once read a book and I was contaminated by its contents...
Now within the cage of my chest there beats a second heart.
An arcane construct, engineered in miniature brass rivets and braided copper membranes, silver tubes, gold valves and steam hissing subsonic.
No blood here; the medium being pumped is an abstract rendering of emotion; a word on the tip of my tongue; a memory of perfume.
I am no mystic; no third-eye me; but the feelings evoked by this machine bypass what I say I am and what I patently am not.
As the heart runs its tiny articulated spider-like fingers over maps creased from being folded closed for too long; makeshift bandages over ancient wounds unhealed; I lift my hand to wipe the tears in which my vision struggles to swim.
As chambers echo the erosion and the lifelines, the rusted clock cogs and toys without eyes, the memories that exclude words, I cry out to the night and to the howling moon.
And having read the contours of my life the heart proceeds to project an avatar of that life upon the screen of my day; adding street signs at left turns unturned and tinting the lens of my calling.
I am no more than a simulacrum for the days I have that lived and the mistakes I have made.
I once was content for the book to read me...

The Stranger