Charity

[Extracted from the files of Mark Time P.I.]

Rankin

“To look at you. Mr Time, one would think you could not investigate your way out of this shabby room you call an office.”
Some people have no net to stretch between their thoughts and their words. Perhaps this is a virtue since it is these voices that keep people like me awake.
“What can I do for you Ms Anthropy?”
“I need to know if the rumours about my husband are true or not. May I smoke?”
“Please do. What are these rumours?”
“Don’t you read the comics Mr Time? My husband has, it is said, been overcome by a philanthropic habit. It is a habit that he has publically denied on a number of different occasions.”
“Quite understandable” I said, “to admit to such would be to invite attention from the wrong quarters”
“But, Mr Time,” she blew smoke into the room, “I fear that he feels it is his duty, as a very wealthy man,” I inhaled her smoke, a dull ache that soothed for an ex-smoker, “to return some of that wealth to the world”

Gil Scott Heron 1949 - 2011

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news

8.2 Nigel

The signalman, whose name was Nigel, was unable to stop his eyebrows from creasing up his forehead.
Not for the fact that he had opened the door of his hut to a large ginger cat.
Not for the fact that Miles was back so soon after…
Not for that fact that his music was echoing through the woods, (can’t believe nobody’s complained to the management about that); but for the fact that there were not one but two rather sorry looking specimens looking at him as if he was gonna be able to explain anything to them.
“Nigel,” said Cajones, “Meet Atom and Number three.”
The one in the oversized policeman’s’ raincoat (the raincoat was oversized, not the policeman… although…) the one in the raincoat grinned.
The one in the loincloth said “Hey Nigel”
“Jesus” said Nigel, “We gotta get you guys some clothes; you look pathetic. I’ve gotta wonder how you two managed to get out of Nullenvoid. Which one’s which?”
“erm, I’m Atom,” said raincoat, grinning even wider at the mention of clothes.
No.3 gave a smile that smelled of charm.
“Come on in then but don’t touch anything, I don’t need anymore downtime; they take it out of my pay.”

Parade

Atteeeeeeen-shun!
It is common knowledge amongst the lowest rank in the military that intelligence is inversely proportional to rank.
We live in a time of crushing. All around us are the fragmented ideals of the past, successful and not so, some ideals hard fought and never entirely won; ideals that informed us of where the boundaries lay.
For some the demarcation of boundaries, no matter how soft, invokes opposition simply because of the existence of that boundary. These are our canaries; they remind us why we should care.
The system will wear anyone’s clothes and has appropriated the concept of removing boundaries, but only those boundaries which stand in the way of greater financial profit for it’s administrators.
The removal of almost all boundaries within the administrative side of the system has brought about the calamitous position we now find ourselves in: the crushing realisation that we’ve fucked it up; this ship is going down with all hands still stoking the boilers while the officers continue to party on down, all the way down.
Compaaaaany! Dismissed!

Inside the Outsider

Upstream ~ Scott Marr

The train, elevated to pass through the eastern sector of the city, ground steel against steel, inefficient even at the level of physics.
He looked down at the passing parade of residential blocks, new and not so, business units, scrap yards, schools and madrassas; his thoughts touching the fingertips of all those stories, all those self-contained universes.
They could not notice him, he was, after all, encased and mundane; inexistent, and yet were it not for him it would all cease to exist.
He imagined those stories, strung end to end on a ticker-tape that would scroll from here to obscurity, the letters spelling out the minutiae of being; the broken toy, the smell of engine oil in the sullen workshop; the taste of another.
Now descending, the train took its business below ground, as if, ashamed of its clatter, it sought to chastise itself with echoes.
Deprived of a view save the reflection of the carriage interior, he wandered off into the realms of nowhere, sandwiched between sleep and awareness where anyone could enter and interact with the logic.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” she said, applying something to his temples.
He opened his eyes back in the daylight and wondered why the woman three seats ahead felt herself to be that significant as to share her mundane conversation with the rest of the carriage.
Another woman, one seat across and facing, caught his annoyance and nodded her agreement; almost imperceptibly.
Turning, the passing fields smearing green, he took hope home to journey’s end where the train released passengers to scatter like ants, each to their own.

Be Careful What You Ask For

Vanity is not for the faint-hearted: take a wander over to Ask And Ye Shall Receive where P.Chevron has reviewed The Far Queue. The folks over there will, at your request, take your blog apart and put it back together in a way that might sting for a few days longer.

Thank you P.Chevron.

8.1 Semaphore & Gibberish

Wedding Party Sharpened ~ Aron Wiesenfeld

“He’s an unreconstructed man” said Miles from the front of the queue
“Who?” said Atom.
“What’s your problem anyway?” said No.3 to Cajones, a large thorn protruding from his left temple.
“You might want to modify your tone little thing” said Cajones from the back of the queue.
“The Signalman” said Miles.
“How did he break?” said Atom.
“Oh, the usual,” said Miles, “women, money, success.”
“Owch” No.3 removed the thorn from his temple, “fuck”
“Tone” said Cajones.
The music grew steadily louder as their approach slowly revealed the signalman’s hut through the undergrowth. Possibly embarrassed by its own state of disrepair, the building had attempted, unsuccessfully, to drape itself in ivy. The overall effect only enhanced its naked un-ambition.
The building’s primary task appeared to be to support an oversized and rusty satellite dish that pointed up at the sky.
“That must collect some amount of rainwater” said No.3, still holding the thorn distractedly.
“The dish,” said Miles, “like your statement, has holes in it which allow the water to drain away.”
“Shut up” said No.3.
“Yeah, shut up” said Cajones.
Atom walked up to the paint peeling door and knuckled a tentative rat-a-tat-tat.

24 Frames per Second

la peur du noir ~ Gewll
[used with permission]

like a runner in black and white
french new wave cool
your feet treadmill cobbled street
your heart seeks to beat
in dreams we run like heroes
the ground beneath our feet
nothing in our heads
hollywood
I hear you whisper freedom

Chicken Licken

Charade ~ Alyssa Monks

The sad truth is that days have passed since he's seen the sky; actually noticed it.
The heavy carriers from Golgotha Sestri drag their contrails across the gap between the wriggly-branched tree and the abandoned church; their petrolic roar reduced to white noise by distance.
Green like the sky; he remembers someone telling him that the Zulus have no word for blue. He marvels at how language runs like a river around obstacles; always seeking something more beyond the limits of mere words. He realises that those huge hunks of steel, honed from the cold face of mankind’s need to know; when set against the pale patch of sky that fall within his vision; fail to translate into coherence. It is possible that the medication is fucking with his head... it is equally possible that he inhabits a sci-fi fable whose moral may not include evolution as a one-way street.

Tales for the attention-span deficit reader

∞.7b Mad Scientist's Notebook

I, Robot

To bow at your epi-centre
Where aftershocks and premonitions abound
To kiss the day we met
With ever increasing detail defined
To run my hands
Across the years that span the taste of you
To be enclosed
To be encased
As if all that waits in tomorrow’s hallway
Can wait a little longer

My Life is an Open Book [Untranslated]

[Extracted from the files of Mark Time P.I.]

Tretchikoff

One shouldn’t confine oneself to any one doctrine of morality since to do so is to exclude the margin of error.
“I know you don’t believe in my right to a voice Mr. Time,” Her skin bloomed dark in the gloom of my office, “But I am sure that the weight of my family’s wealth will convince you to speak for me nonetheless.”
It is impossible to find fault in such impeccable logic.
But I may be wrong.

∞.7a The Signalman's Blues

It’s not like I enjoy this sort of thing, I could be doing something a bit more exciting…
They pay good money though; not enough to stop having to work, but enough to get all things you need to be a happy camper.
I’ve been sitting here for days keeping an eye on all these algorithms; these adjustables with broken buttons; these reality satellites… and I can tell you it gets pretty fucking tedious sometimes.
I’ve just had Miles around talking bullshit about the inside of his head… if ever there was a man who you could say “he’s out of his head”, Miles is that man. Took me ages to find a gap in his monologue (I swear he breaths through his ears), a gap big enough to slide a word in and in the end I upset him again by yelling “SHUT UP MILES”
I do feel bad now but, fucking hell, the guy’s a time-eater and monitoring algorithms is infinitely more stimulating than listening to Miles eat away the minutes.

Forest ~ Dan Hillier

...By Any Other Name

Love is a temple
In glare of the sun
Your gaze is a razor
a phaser set to stun
Sacrificial beauty
In the passing of days
Beauty no less
In zigzag heat haze
Transient intransigent
Dewdrop on rose
Misled by the need
Meaning to suppose
Love is a temple
In the glare of the sun
Your gaze is a caress
A ghost on the run

Wounds Self-Inflicted: a Double-Edged Sword

Moebius

It is the misanthrope’s curse to realise that the clarity that comes with an open mind cannot be confined to the theoretical and will wash the streets with the violence of its revolutionary zeal, often opening onto vistas of bestial ugliness that darken the heart’s high ideal.

He felt encased in an alien bubble; a foreign object in a sea of phlegm. He carried his books in the brown paper bag provided by the old lady in the second-hand shop; whether to protect them from physical damage or to avoid offending that sea of so-called humanity, he couldn’t be entirely sure.

It wasn’t until he looked back that he could see clearly the moments that’d hung so heavy on his day: the people in the street cursing their shallow language in accents disinclined to anything else; hawking to spit as if it were a human right; making their ugliness evident by wearing garments that advertise the cultural poverty of rampant capitalism.

And so the books; the only source of wonder that never lose their power; their aching pages; their slow decay; their organic bouquet; the books that remain to stand alone at the picket line in the cold climate of technology’s factory where all is honed down to the width of the byte. (A byte being the first level of complexity in the philosophy of computing power; a combination of more than one of the smallest mechanical parts, a bit.)

And furthermore are these books not the earliest of mechanised technologies, these books that, in part, brought about both the dark inquisitions and the tyranny of religion and the enlightenment itself?

Is there is no blade colder nor one more honed than that which constitutes a double-edged sword?