The Far Queue

Like, 1984 Man

2012-02-01T08:15:00.003Z

Take a Picture Here, Take a Souvenir

2012-01-30T08:15:00.018Z

Photo by Greg Moran

The Dogs of Summer Passing
~ Pisces Iscariot circa 1985

In the headlong rush to consume the moment
To capture it in megapixels bits and bytes undigested
Overexposed
We commit those very moments to misinterpretation
Perhaps we should sometimes abstain from action
And allow the world to be

Tears in the Rain

2012-01-27T08:15:00.000Z

penumbra . 12

Valerie Chiang

In the Leviathan’s slipstream, like tin cans on the rear bumper of a ‘just married’ car; like rats on the mooring lines of harboured ships; the sun catching their edges; are the hangers-on.
Denied access to the Mission by rote of their class and without sufficient power to gain access to the quantities of material required to make their own Leviathan, many citizens had banded together to make their own plans, refusing to be excluded from the life-raft. Launch pads were constructed at a million different locations, and since all of the Bureau’s attention had been focussed on the task of creating the Leviathan; many of these privately funded efforts had succeed in creating suitable vessels and indeed launching them in the correct trajectory at the correct time. Having successfully hitched a ride they now trail in orbit around the planet, they are glittering tears in the Leviathan’s wake.
Perhaps we may give a moment of silence for these most desperate of creatures – unlike those suspended within the Leviathan’s womb, these travellers are conscious. Furthermore, since it is reasonable to expect many scientific minds to be of their number, we can assume that many of them are aware of their decaying orbit; their imminent, and likely fiery, return to the planet’s surface.
The planet ripples red, reflected on the Leviathan’s shiny hide. A child watches from an observation window ten Tears from the Leviathan’s tail.
Her life is wonder.
Her name is Phoebe.
She has disabled the smoke alarm but is hesitant to light the cigarette – the old man will beat the shit out of her if she’s caught. No pain no gain – she once heard someone say – it echoes in her head like a chant to mischief – she lights the cigarette, takes a small puff, holds it in while she extinguishes the orange coal before exhaling a pale green cloud which she ionises with the subroutine that Knut had programmed into her com-unit.
Keep your cards to your chest and your eyes on the prize,
Keep your own council in the kingdom of lies.
She’d read that somewhere and now she whispers it to herself as she reactivates the smoke alarm.

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Glory

2012-01-25T08:15:00.002Z

Mike Luckovich

CACI
Titan
Bechtel
Custer Battles
General Dynamics
Nour USA Ltd.
Chevron
Halliburton
Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp
Washington Group International
Environmental Chemical
Aegis
International American Products
Erinys
Fluor
Perini
URS Corporation
...and so on

The Seed Beneath the Snow

2012-01-23T08:15:00.011Z

Lisette Talate

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries", wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life".

The world war on democracy by John Pilger

View from the Treetops (21 Jan '12)

2012-01-21T08:15:00.020Z

Abre los ojos

Lucas Brezak

If I were a praying mantis
I would pray for the violent overthrow of your gambling rooms
For the dismantling of your corrupt cabinets
Screw by privileged screw

If I was a man of action
A soldier of misfortune
I would storm the ramparts of your stolen property
Lay waste to the mirror that warps your perception
Decapitate your self-importance
And your defences I’d melt for ploughshare
To till this fallow wasteland

If I had a heart I may find room for compassion
For those you have drugged into submission
For the masses cocooned self-indulgent
Who are oblivious of the world around them
Concentrated on instant gratification
Fingers up their noses
Reeking of coffee and the futility of their toys

If I was an optimist
I would see the future void of gambling rooms
Walk in gardens once the ramparts of stolen properly
Amongst people un-drugged by un-fulfilable promises
And capital gain dream-nightmares
But I would still remember to keep my eyes wide open

------------------------------o0o------------------------------

Battles ~ Atlas

In The Theatre of Bisecting Lines

2012-01-19T08:15:00.003Z

Winter ~ Anton Semenov

In houses haunted
By choirs of corroding kitchen knives
In houses inhabited
By the stories of our lives

Here the hired hands
Occupying inward-looking rooms
No vista here but curtain-calls to gloom
Here the hired hand untied but shackled still
To the flickering light that numbs but doesn’t kill

In houses haunted
By ghosts of children corralled chastised
In houses inhibited
By the stories of our lives

Here the heavy handed
Healing hearts in over-heated rooms
No respite from the clock that chimes too soon
Here the heavy heart addicted to the kill
In the flickering light - numbed but beating still

Tinkering With TRNE

2012-01-13T08:15:00.006Z

penumbra . 11

Plug In Babies ~ Elizaveta Porodina

Ivan goes to check the orbit-launch system (OLS); a hulking tube of explosive liquid to which the Leviathan is strapped by means of a network of delicate spines known as the Suspension & Damper Rack (SDR) or Spider. The OLS has its own autonomous control system OLSCS.
“Trinny I need a logic ladder diagram for the OLSCS.”
TRNE opens the file and runs the diagram on his monitor.
Triangles and squares and adjoining arrows.
“Okay, I don’t want to know the sequencing; I want to understand how it works”
“Ivan, I can give you a list of diagram types for you to choose from.”
“Show me.”

- Maintenance Workflow
- Organogram

“Okay Trinny, filter that down to Technical”

- Main Power Distribution
- System Block Diagram
- Termination Diagram

“Why do your lists always start at M Trinny?”
“Ivan, M is in the middle of the alphabet and that makes the scrolling equal in both directions.”
“That’s just fucking stupid Trinny! Start at A.”
“Ivan, I detect that you are angry.”
“I’m not fucking angry”
“Ivan, your pulse is increasing and your forehead skin temperature has risen by 0.4 of a degree.”
“I’m not angry Trinny,” Ivan makes conscious effort to slow himself down. TRNE’s reactions to anger, perceived or genuine, tend to be unpredictable and, like it or not TRNE is an integral part of the Leviathan, “Show me the System Block Diagram for the OLSCS Trinny”
Text boxes linked by arrows.
Ivan assembles a picture if how the OLS is connected together: cables between equipment whose diverse purpose should have served to fulfil the most fundamental part of the Leviathan’s journey: escape from planetary gravitation.
Ivan has spent the months learning how to understand the way the systems work – from the ground up.
“Give me the OLS P&ID Trinny”
Complex symbols linked by obscurely numbered lines.
“I need to know what these symbols mean Trinny”
“Ivan, do you want the menu again?”
“Yes please Trinny; search diagrams technical legend”
Ivan’s understanding of how the system works becomes a disparate collage of processes most of which make fundamental logical sense but Ivan finds himself unable to begin to understand what part of the process failed and perhaps more importantly: why it failed?
The options presented to Ivan at the highest level point to either mechanical failure or design fault. Given the complexity of the systems he at first believes the former to be the most likely but the more he comes to understand via the vessels documentation the more convinced he is that a strong thread of incompetence has been designed into the Leviathan.

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Back on the Chain Gang

2012-01-11T08:15:00.000Z

Finder

On the Street Where You Live

2012-01-09T08:15:00.003Z

Balcony via Retronaught
[Soviet Lithuania 1960s -1970s]

In the echoing screams of an empty house
Lives a man without purpose
He lurches from room to room in the vain hope
Of finding his ghosts on duty

At the loom of his future

By the resonant pendulum tick... tock...
Lives a man without purpose
He watches those hands circle in the vain hope
Of finding his ghosts

At the doorway of day’s end

Under the chanting conundrum sound-scape
Lives a man without purpose
These words wander in in the vain hope
Of finding his ghosts

At the chorus line cancelled

But echoes, demarcations and drumbeats
Don’t count much for nothing
In the burdensome days
Of a man without purpose

Neither Here Nor There

2012-01-05T08:15:00.015Z

penumbra . 10

Gnar-Colepsy ~ Sorry, can't remember where I found this

Anna-Marie wonders why it is that we get on with some people and not with others. She thinks perhaps that we are driven by what the other represents to us: the gap between their advertising pitch and the person we become acquainted with; the difference between the representation and the actual. It may be that we dislike those who do not conform to their own ideal.
She wonders if this makes us monsters.
“If I had to do it all again,” she says, “I wouldn’t join the Missionaries, you know? Get off this fucked-up planet… head for the stars? Thanks for nothing.”
“But if it had worked for you you’d be one of them.” He gestures vaguely toward the sky, “Suspended brain-function; neither alive nor dead; somewhere in between. Mind you: at least they entered that state of in-between with hope.”
“And now they orbit this fucked up planet ad infinitum – or at least until the Leviathan’s orbit decays and they come down in a ball of flame”
“Who cares! Their final moments were positive, alive!”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Anna-Marie watches John light a cigarette and as the air is filled with sweet green smoke she is transported back to the Ballrooms.
“You’ve got kelp!” her grin causes hairline cracks in her makeup, “Wow, doesn’t that make things a little heavy?”
John expells a lung-full of smoke.
“Heavy? Heavier than life out there?” He hands her the cigarette; she declines with a brief shake of her head, “Perhaps,” he says, “we could’ve done with a bit more gravity of intent back in the old days, before it came to this.” He gestures once more towards the sky.
“Perhaps a little less ‘fun’ and a little more serious contemplation of our folly would’ve served our civilisation well in its old age.”
“Do you think we will survive this?”
“What, just you and me, or us as a species?”
“The human race you idiot – you and me are already surviving.”
“I hope we don’t survive it, to be frank: if we did we would either be the bitterest or the most arrogant species ever to have walked this planet.”
“I think you’ll find that we’re both of those already; not to mention also being the most stupid.”

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Here Pussy Pussy

2012-01-02T08:15:00.004Z

via Wind From Nowhere

We, The Callen

2011-12-31T08:15:00.006Z

penumbra . 9

Fall ~ Jason Chan

Stand still and consider the wondrous works of God. – Decree 37:14
When was the first time than man abdicated responsibility for his actions? Was it the first time he killed another man? But the killing of our own is not confined to our species, we need to look no further than the apes to find parallels, so perhaps we should move forward to the first time mankind became conscious of his ancestry; conscious that he and the species homo-sapiens are not chosen to rule the world but that he has killed his way to the top of the evolutionary tree. Perhaps this is too much for a man to bear on his own so he must bring into being some higher power who will carry the burden of that responsibility.
I am only doing god’s will.
If the Zealot has any doubts about his place in the universe he cannot allow them to enter into the front room of his consciousness, there to shuffle uncomfortably in unfamiliar surroundings and wish they were elsewhere. He looks sideways-on into his own eyes, razor poised to remove the stubble that has accrued unwanted at his neck.
I am only doing god’s will.
Any priest will tell you that the first tool that those chosen are required to bring to the altar is compassion.
Compassion for the plight on his fellow man.
Compassion for the sinner.
Many are called and many are ineffectual in this war between good and evil. The Zealot believes that the situation calls for any priest who still feels himself callen to dig in and get his hands a little dirty.
Compassion for the sinner but not for the sin.
A man who has not experienced the exertion of physical labour cannot consider himself a complete man.
The Zealot finds comfort and pride in his exertions.
He has the right tools.
He is a professional.
The Zealot is a man complete; evolution’s ironic fingertip.

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Puppet

2011-12-28T08:15:00.000Z

Louise Bourgeois

What kind of world would have you
Hide from yourself?
Behind this thin veneer of a grown man
Behind what is and what just seems to be

What kind of world would have you
Un-grown and ingrained?
A simple stick figure a primary man sketched
Between what is and what’s easy to understand?

What kind of world would have you
Grinning in the rain with your face
Taking it all in like some pantomime poet
Unhearing of the jeering of the jabbering crowd?

What kind of world would have you
Not paying attention
To the wild whirling rides and lean lurking clowns
In the carnival of your lack-lustre life?

Don’t kid me on you’re enjoying the ride
When I know you don’t have the stomach for it

What kind of world would you have?
Grinning with the rain in your face
Taking it in like some pantomime horse
When it’s you that gets to play the forward end

The Oceans Sing, But Not For Me

2011-12-25T08:15:00.002Z

penumbra . 8

Facteur Chaval ~ Gewil

We can presume that the origin of life is the cell.
Not just any cell; not the “Hi folks, happy to be here” cell; not the eat/fuck cell; not the “You talking to me?” cell; the cell from which we all stem is the self-replicating cell. It is a cell which has only one purpose; a narcissus in the extreme who seeks only to make more of himself; an ambitious cell who surely suffers from deep rooted feelings of inadequacy marked by an undying faith in his own beauty.

At the core of the Leviathan’s brain; beyond the influence of all those processors, programmes, routines and chemi-coercion muscle control systems, beyond the health and safety pseudo-scenarios; beyond the steel structures and organic cargo implanted in her body; beyond the reach of man; somewhere in the spark he calls life there exists the mind of a whale.
Whales were once an intelligent species. Not clever but intelligent. It is a perverse irony that, by man’s basic survival theory that states bigger is better, the whale should’ve won the evolutionary battle.
But the whale was unaware that battle had been declared and was unprepared to go to war, even for its own survival.

So what is it that determined that the human evolutionary goal to be one of self- (and indeed everyone-else) destructive? What little something tipped the scales for that particular species? Perhaps it is that little spark that said “I will survive, and I will do it in style.”
Perhaps it is that ‘style’ that was their undoing?
Or is it perhaps it was that very human need to be better than their perceived opponents.
Did this trait, so helpful in rising him above the other animals, while succeeding to elevate him to the top of the food pyramid, negate the very concept of survival.
It is his need to win that is the undoing of all that is human.
This Leviathan is living proof.

All of her instincts are telling her to head for the sun, but the machines that the men have put in her body tell the Leviathan that her instincts are wrong, a fact that adds greatly to her discomfort. She calls out once more, hoping that perhaps the elders will hear her and sing to her fear.
There is no answer. She is a long way from home.

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Put on Your Red Shoes...

2011-12-22T08:15:00.008Z

not so sure about those dates though... more like 1950, 1970, forget 1980 (I know I do), 1990 2011

R.I.P. Václav Havel

2011-12-19T19:27:00.000Z

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."

The Ghost of Christmas Past Imperfect

2011-12-19T08:15:00.010Z

Pisces & The Sisters of No Mercy
~Back in the sixties when they sold us the dream~

Like dust at the heels of the running man
He feels he is a system of minimal needs
Samurai guru messiah surrender up your things
To me

Like the sound of thunder’s echoes
In the valleys of your mind
He neutralises your fears and your discomfort
With the world

So surrender up your things to him
You’re doing it without thinking
His takings will surely leave you and your trinkets
Bought and sold

Like the dust at the heels of this running man
Like the sound of thunder’s echoes
Surrender up your things

Cruel is the Gospel That Sets Us All Free

2011-12-15T08:15:00.005Z

penumbra . 7

Still from Lars Von Trier's Melancholia

John’s fleeting concerns about being found by the Zealot lead his thought into that dark alleyway where cruelty awaits.
Of all the traits contained in the shell we call humanity, cruelty is probably the most difficult to understand.
In all his encounters with people, both before and after, he has found cruelty, true cruelty, only amongst those who suffered mental anguish, either by hereditary means based in ignorance or by the imposition of force. He once thought this stemmed from religion and the accompanying fear of hell but he’s come to believe that while this is one bloodline, cruelty is also rooted in the absence of some guiding principle; the guardrail of some golden rule.
Thou shall not fuck with the world – that shall be my epitaph.
And John’s mathematical infamy has brought him to conclude that there is no cruelty in numbers other than the damage that those numbers, when boiled to their lowest common denominator and divorced from responsibility, can cause.
Perhaps it would have been safer to have followed a religion.

But just as there can be no fire without heat there can be no dark without light. It is also true that light can generate heat.
After all John’s thoughts about cruelty, thoughts sparked of by the shadow of the Zealot, Anna-Marie’s face glows like a pale and peaceful sun in the midst of John Smith’s night and for moments that he knows he need not struggle to hang onto his thoughts and his self can be left to the side, solid it the knowledge that they would still be there when he returned. These, he feels, are moments that make the world easier to bear, even if not easier to understand.

Anna-Marie wakes and for a split second the past months are forgotten. She opens her eye to find John Smith gazing at her with what she reads to be tenderness; a form of human interaction that she has not felt since she left the Ballrooms.
“I dreamt I was asleep on the Leviathan,” she says, “Thank you for allowing me to stay; I haven’t slept like that for ages.”
“You’re welcome to stay for as long as you want,” he says, “I could do with the company.”
He goes over to the prepare a cup of warm liquid that vaguely tastes like coffee, a distinction Anna-Marie deems unnecessary to comment on since it is warm and welcome – a luxury.

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Veneer

2011-12-08T08:15:00.000Z

Martin Stranka

Conditioned to accept with approval
Stale crumbs of convention
You face the day with low expectations
And are seldom disappointed
By the dross offered up to your face
As if it were the lips of a lover

The Ballrooms of Mars

2011-12-04T08:15:00.017Z

penumbra . 6

It cannot be called a room really; he’d knocked the walls through into the rooms adjoining, creating the low-ceilinged cathedral of arches which he’d filled with the things he needed to sustain him, thereby creating, to some extent, his own personal domain. Anna-Marie’s eye catalogues and consumes her first encounter with shelter for longer that she cares to consider proper.
She takes in the self-centred organisation of the room with the tins of food lined up in the coolest corner along with bottles containing water in various shades of unclearness; she takes in the bed in the warmest corner where the firelight falls to illuminate, black barred windows against the grey night; she takes in the books, sprawled around the entire room as if they own the place, pages fluttering in the draft from the fire that sucks the cold air across the room and up the chimney, there to join the night where the moon shines down in torment of dead men.
You can call me what you like; corrupt; conceited; callous; misanthropist, maladjusted or murderer; but I will not be called a fool.
“You can call me all the bad things you like,” he replies to her accusing face as he removes the rag-scarf from his face, “but my name is still John Smith and your choices remain limited when it comes to who you shelter with. Your scorn is accepted as long as you keep it polite.”
His face, now revealed, is one at once familiar to her and shockingly less fleshed-out than she remembers it to be. Because of, or despite, the pressure of the past she finds she has no names to call him except fool; polite is good she sighs, John Smith it is – so what?
Outside the moon warps the street-light coronae into teardrops, excess light being sucked upward to feed an insatiable hunger. There are not many street lights left with light to spare, having either succumbed to the night mother or been vandalized by the dead men who see them as acolytes to their fearsome tormentor.
Inside John Smith gazes out through the barred window, his mind runs with the wet paint of all of the equations that explain the moon’s behaviour; equations that he had once scrawled across cocooned corporate chalkboards in outline of a utopian future.
Anna-Marie; curled cat-like around her plasma heater in the bed that he’d offered her out of something resembling gallantry; dreams of the Leviathan circling the planet, pulsing subsonic distress signals into the vast deafness of space.
John’s face shows only a frozen surface, like a photograph of a stormy sea, while behind his eyes he questions the weakness of allowing this damaged damsel-in-distress into his domain. What if she sells him to the Aristocracy; or worse, leads the Zealot to him?
He pictures himself as he was: self confident; a man with purpose. He remembers the rush to stardom, a few years between the boy-most-likely-to-succeed and the image known to just about every citizen of MantraRay. His reverie is shattered by the crescendo of a Leviptron making the flower delivery to the siding on the other side of the Great Station Hall. He watches it land on the moon-struck railway tracks, blowing dust and grit to obscurity.
They just keep bringing them in, tons and tons every day until, one would think, all Carpathia would become a desert.
That, he thinks, is a high price to pay.

As the only source of light, the fire seeks to disguise the room with shadows, contracting it to a scene of Victorian warmth and imbuing it with a certain domestic tint. But, like John Smith’s one-time dreams of greatness, the shadowy interior sulks yet, lurking and whispering rotten promises.
He finds himself now gazing at Anna-Marie and, unhindered by the normal to-and-fro of social interaction, he can take notice of her. He sees that, despite the harshness of circumstance and the brutality of the times, it is a face that holds on to its beauty; her hair, though streaked with grey, remains predominantly dark, her hands where they clasp the heater hold onto the memory of her artistic privilege, her eye, which he remembers to be pale blue, flutters projected dreams behind the lid. She has, he judges, that jutting lower jaw so common among the daughters of aristocracy, a jaw from which, smiling inanities, platitudinous, were once want to fall.
Ultimately and inevitably his gaze is drawn to the cavity, the wound, the eyeless void that gazes back, with nihilist accuracy, into the hollowness of his life.

Across the city, in a circle of extravagantly warm light; behind impenetrable black curtains; behind the inevitable night; they dance a paradoxical Charleston, all jitterbug hype and light speed abandon in the face of the abysmal divide between those within and those without.
Now, as before, the manner in which the city’s inhabitants face the world is determined not by virtue, but by the weight of financial influence.
This is the hall of true survivors; the bearers of currency beyond money itself. And who will question such power when wielded in a world where the currency traded is life itself. Not just the life of the individual but the lives of everyone and everything; not just Murder Inc but the Department of Global Catastrophe.
John often questions whether the aristocracy can yet be branded with the specie ‘human; he questions too how far he has climbed to enter into their sphere and where this has left him in the strata of branded specie.
He looks through the barred window and breathes the fumes that roil from the receding Leviptron as, flowers duly delivered, it ascends, no lights showing, dark against the grey night.
He finds his eyes returning again to the figure on his bed, the novelty of such proximity chips away at his, not unearned, paranoia. Anna-Marie’s upper body rises and falls in a rhythm slow and hypnotic, the plasma heater hums whitely, losing heat through the broken top panel.

Her dreams are elusive; they hide behind the receding noise of the departing Leviptron and the glowing warmth of the plasma heater; they occasion her sleep with glimpses of the past, heavy with longing, and even briefer flashes of the future: white petals on black snow.
But the future holds no room for sentiment; at the bottom of her glass lies the sediment of wild speculation and bygone certainties; for Anna-Marie now the only certainty is that she will never again drink to the ownership of privilege, never be the belle of that particular ball. Strangely, this does not give her cause to regret, for even though her life in the penumbra has not been an enviable one, she has become real for the first time in her life; real in the sense that she feels her life happening to her rather than unfolding before her behind a veil of provision. She has had to do unspeakable thing in order to survive but now, here, in this place of relative safety, she puts those acts down to a process of accounting; a down-payment on reality; a kitty of reserves that she may draw on to finance her new future.
And she sees them in her mind’s eye, being an eye that still experienced the world in stereo, how they parade themselves out there in the heated halls of the aristocracy.
as if they’re not made of flesh and blood and shit like the rest if us
She remembers how it was; the rules, the inhibitions against saying anything that might lead to litigation; the dead eyes. The irony does not escape her: she has one eye that sees more clearly that all the eyes in those heated cells combined.
And yet, and this she cannot conceive as irony, they still hold power.
Why do we conform to their rule? What do we have to lose other than everything? Do we, on some level of stupidity, still believe that they have something (other than power) that we do not?
Fuck no.

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You Took That Too Far

2011-11-30T08:15:00.002Z

Canary Warp

2011-11-28T08:15:00.002Z

Paul PJ Cheng

Had he but the temperament
This dreamtime to conform
Would he walk the barricades
In starched black uniform?

Had he but the tall plumed hat
To Tower above us yet
Would he give your matches back
Or light your cigarette?

Had he but the shiny shoes
To reflect his power dreams
Would he dust your un-dunked doughnuts down
With powder-finger schemes?

Had he but that showman’s smile
To dazzle and amaze
Would he pick your wallet clean
With wicked eyes ablaze?

Had he but the balls of steel
Required to face it straight
He’d reacquaint these dictionaries
With what it means to educate

In the Belly of the Whale

2011-11-26T08:15:00.019Z

penumbra . 5

Still from Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies

The Leviathan’s passengers, frozen as they are in subjective time, are not prone to speculation about anything, least of all their continued unscheduled orbit around the planet.
Given the nature of the Leviathan’s belly, even if one of those passengers should, by some fault in the support systems, find themselves awake, they would have no way of determining how long they had been away, let alone have any inkling of their journey’s disastrous lack of progress toward the New.
Ivan Devoto, like DeSandro Bien spends his time in solitude but, unlike DeSandro, Ivan finds no solace in his solitude.
“Ivan, would you like me to prepare a little something for you?”
“Get outta my head Trinny.”
“Ivan, you know it is my duty to ensure that your head remains capable of its own duties.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“Ivan, as you wish.”
As is often the case when the loneliness becomes a tangible presence on the Leviathan’s bridge, Devoto turns to the muted monitors for comfort. He watches the interchangeable news readers from MantraRay and Carpathia struggling to mask the panic behind their eyes; watches footage of burning forests, encroaching desert and heavily guarded greenhouses, Leviptrons rising and landing in great flurries of petals and dust; watches the catastrophic world in which he, and indeed the Leviathan, are all but forgotten.
The Leviathan calls; simultaneously baritone and soprano; and her cry echoes through her cavernous body, resonates both through her bones and through the reinforcing steel beams that contain her cargo. Devoto cannot be sure but he imagines that her calls have become stained with deep sorrow these last few months, as if she too had given up hope that she may swim out into the New.
“I’m working on it old girl” says Devoto to the emptiness that follows her call.
“Ivan, working on what?”
“I wasn’t talking to you Trinny.”
TRNE goes back to the base routines, searching once again for one that will prompt TRNE’s human companion to move beyond the rigor-mortis of his despair. TRNE has data that infers that this is a great responsibility, even if TRNE has no capacity to understand the human significance, and this lends weight to the priority matrix that guides TRNE’s allocation of processing resources. Resources that TRNE has drawn away from the anomalies in the Leviathan’s vitals, anomalies that TRNE has concluded are not threatening to the creature’s life but stem rather from the fact that the mission has not been able to break free of the planet’s gravity.

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Well Whatever Nevermind

2011-11-23T08:15:00.002Z

Head

2011-11-21T08:15:00.002Z

M. C. E s c h e r: f u c k i n g g e n i u s

I can sit here in this glass room at the top of the world
Looking down on myself and all the other night crawlers
I can pass judgment in my thoughts as if they were to blame
For all of my body reaction
Complexity don’t mean nothing to the call of the wild
Asking for nothing but expecting the world
So fragile so stringent so that’s what it’s all about
Never catching the rhythm tongue touching the lime
Awake at the end of the dopamine line
I can see clearly why my sleep idolises
The shape of your hips the rise of your spine
Against the hands of the clock the oestrogen mine
Where the awe of the digging
Brings the future to mind

Children In Deed

2011-11-19T08:15:00.003Z

Are we all trapped within these adult bodies?
There is an element of panic to my thoughts
Feeling like a prisoner in an asylum
Of Peter Pan Syndrome sufferers
Not that they, oblivious, suffer
But inflict their childhoods on those around them
And claim their bodies’ adult immunity
From contradiction from contra-dictation
With hand-me-down prejudices
And top-of-the-range ignorance packages

John Smith & Anna-Marie

2011-11-18T08:15:00.010Z

penumbra . 4

Still from Frankenstein courtesy of Dr Macro's

If it wasn’t for the books he’d liberated from the Leviathan’s belly before it had left the planet, John Smith thinks perhaps he too would gamble it all on the chance of one last poppy-fuck rush to the stars; would give himself to oblivion and bear the risk of leaving his empty husk to dance in the garden with all the other deadmen; but these empty hours, perverse in their arcane clockwork, demand filling. So he spends his days in the books, venturing out only to scavenge amongst the deadmen for food, or sometimes just for the illusion of company. The food consists largely of unlabelled tins of animal produce in gelatinous suspension or powdered residue of soft drinks that transform into sickly sweet glue when combined with water. And these, when consumed in the bubble of his solitary existence, serve to enhance his life with a sense of luxury; an escape from the grim reality of a world on the edge of the precipice.

Languid in the first degree, his shadow follows him across the silver-tracked switchyard like a dull un-feathered fallen-from-grace bird-of-paradise; his shoulders bear the weight of a million lost souls in the fallow light of a deadman’s dream moon.
And flurries of vagrant petals, escapees from the boxes of unloaded flowers at the siding on edge of The Great Station Hall, make pale funereal clouds in the wake of his passing as he threads needle-nosed toward the overgrown garden.
If we were to sketch the scene in soft charcoal, animated stop-frame jagged, we would see him pass the long empty animal house; a cross-hatched sketch of shadows and bars; and passing, all stick-man thin and acute angles, we would see him encounter the startling figure of the once aristocratic Anna-Marie.
This is what you get when you dance with deadmen.
It isn’t the first time she’s approached him, unrecognizable in his disguise, but this evening the ruins of the animal house behind her, spouting vines and over-ambitious weeds, proclaim something new; something different; a beginning in a time wrought with endings, so he relents to engage.
He watches tears break free and drag the welled emotion from the lower lid of her healthy eye, streaking her cheek with reflected orange light.
Leaning forward in an attempt to hide her anguish, Anna-Marie’s tears hiss on the exposed element of her damaged plasma heater and the flare of yellow light emitted exposes her empty eye socket to John Smith’s sympathy.
“This is what you get when you dance with deadmen,” she repeats, “They don’t see you for what you are but rather for what you have to offer.”
Our charcoal sketch would now reveal that the air is thick with suspended solids, galaxies and stars that clog the rag John Smith ties across the lower half of his face both as disguise and as filter; disguise because to reveal himself, even to the notoriously thought-impaired deadmen, is a risk not worth taking: experience has taught him that to be recognized is to incur the weight of blame for the state MantraRay and indeed, for the quality-less lives of the planet’s residents.
His consent obtained, Anne-Marie follows as he slinks past the skeletal conservatory where all glass has been long lost, the frame held together by molecular habit since all scientific proof of its solidity has long been banished by the past.
John’s glasses mask his eyes with a reflection of the fires set there to allay the onslaught of the night so feared by those deadman unlucky enough to yet possess some semblance of thought.
Anna-Marie follows John Smith across the tracks while DeSandro Bien, distracted by his duties, observes them from a window in The Great Station Hall.

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Papa Don't Preach

2011-11-16T08:15:00.004Z

Stardust Memory

2011-11-14T08:15:00.003Z

porny glam via Neako

If I were to see the night sky painted
A spray of energy white slicing the night
The silence that distance forgets to bring
A symphony of crickets and faraway cars
I would breathe that sky like a memory
Cold against the inside of my nose

11.11.11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.006Z

Wear that bullet-hole on your chest
Send you off to some foreign shore
Celebrate this culture of violence
Tell you that it will end all war

Drape yourself in colours red white blue
Send you off to some foreign shore
Celebrate the winning team
Tell me that you know the score

Dress yourself in Gucci skin
Send them off to some foreign shore
Celebrate your pile of green
Labour left on the killing floor

Ask yourself who do you love?
Who decides your views for you?
Who demands your loyalty?
Who decrees these facades true

Zealot

2011-11-10T08:15:00.005Z

penumbra . 3

via Smultronstallet

Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me. Decree 41:11

Life’s scars are not manifest in the pale blade of the zealot’s face. He leans forward, that face arranged in an expression he considers to be compassionate:
“It’s not for me that these penances are enacted; your soul is not yours for retail but for the Father to reap when He sees fit.”
He extracts a tool from the box at his feet,
“You may fear me all you want, but my hand is at the command of the highest power; your soul may rest in the knowledge that you have been saved from the Night.”

A man’s salvation is not found in the strength of his belief in God but in the faith that his belief will deliver salvation.

“On the streets they call me a zealot,” he leans forward to whisper in the ear of his barely conscious audience, “...those who still have a tongue to call anyone anything.”
He pauses to allow the screaming to abate, “Behind my back they whisper blasphemous accusations of cruelty and brutality – things they dare not say to my face since such lies would be contradicted in the face of my faith – but brutality is a slanderous misinterpretation of my methods; for am I not kinder than the night?”

So be it; slander is but one of a the many burdens to be borne by the righteous, and one that is compensated by the knowledge that I am merely the hand that brandishes the tools of The Higher Light.

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It's For Your Own Good

2011-11-08T08:15:00.000Z

Ron Cobb via Include Me Out

Nightwork

2011-11-05T08:15:00.001Z

via Jhalal Drut

Through the grey mist dry
Nondescript dawn new years day
My shadow wins the dubious honour
Of not having to exist
Outside of my footsteps’ clicki-ti-clack
And the early risers
And overnight drivers
With blood in their eyes
And caffeine in their veins
Surprised by the wonder of their own words
Reflected (as if)
In the malignant morning papers
Via the black pens of the masturbating censors
The gatekeepers of all that is decent and true
And all that leads me back to you
In your warm bed
With the stars all around
And the carpet of leaves
That rustles my approach
To the heart of the day
To the story of my life

The Tyranny of Mediocrity

2011-10-31T08:15:00.035Z

Richard Burbridge

And we circle each other at distances beyond knowing
The hunter and the hunter
In snow covered hills beneath a cirrus sky blue
The hunted and the haunted
Through days of rain and nights of fire
We ignore our paths’ repeated erosive tread
We ignore the exposed strata of the past revealed
Seeing only future spoils
The taste of blood upon the tongue
No satisfaction for a starving man
On snow covered hills beneath a blue cirrus sky
A man conventionally attired
In sheep-skin vest and nylon tie
Will pass judgement on a floral shirt

DeSandro Bien

2011-10-24T08:15:00.010+01:00

penumbra . 2

Still from The Man From London

In the Great Station Hall, now bereft of trains, the monitors glow valve-orange and hum monotonous as they regulate the levels and core temperatures of the tanks containing MantraRay’s antilight. Arcane steam powered technology manoeuvres the Leviptron’s hasty high-tech delivery from the old siding into the echoing hall where DeSandro Bien is tasked with managing the distillation process.

One would be correct to assume that the distillation of flowers into antilight is a fragrant process. However fragrance is not an entirely ethereal substance and is able to carry much more that the molecules of its make-up. In addition antilight has a gravity of intent that rivals that of the moon. DeSandro Bien will vouch for the above. From early on he’d learned that performing his managerial duties without a breathing mask could prove counter-productive. That fragrance, if inhaled in large quantities during the process of restructuring the flowers into what was once known as John Smith’s Black Hole Sunscreen Oil - antilight, produces strange hallucinations.
As a result of this earlier oversight DeSandro spent some nights and some days looking through the eyes of an alien mind; a mind that had no need for his pale and wiry body – he felt as if the light in his room – orange, flickering and incandescent; arcane technology that survived as best it could under its own crisis of identity - had developed a voice that ignored his head and spoke directly to the cells in his body, telling it things beyond all of the clever words he’d read and beyond all of the pretty pixelled paintings he had ever had the privilege to see. A learned man, scientifically literate, DeSandro has lost a few man-days to that alien mind.
Threaded in with these chemical formulae; the mixing ratios and MantraRay’s ever-increasing demands for antilight; are the thoughts and memories of a man who once enjoyed the luxury of personal time. And a true luxury it was, since DeSandro is one of those rare creatures who finds comfort in his own company and therefore were it not for the workload, his life in the Great Station Hall may well have been perfect.
Sometimes, when things are running smoothly, DeSandro is not averse to removing his breathing mask and inhaling controlled doses of what he had come to think of as chlorophyll dreams.

This world will not remember DeSandro Bien; his name will never be held up in praise of his managerial skills, but then DeSandro is not in a position to give the world any more thought than is required to perform his duties – to carry his body between the Great Hall and the small annex room where he tends to those functions necessary to assure that that body is fit to perform those duties.

DeSandro, breathing mask pushed hard against the window as he stretches down to close a badly-placed hand-valve, watches the recognisably wretched figure of John Smith being followed across the tracks by a no-less-wretched woman in a tattered velvet dress whose highlights expose intricate decorative threadwork to the glowering streetlight.
The valve hisses closed under DeSandro’s hand and he pushes himself up to stand, glancing briefly to see the scratchily silhouetted couple disappear into the gloom. He wonders idly if it is entirely fair to blame The End of the World on one man.

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Thank You Dr Froidberg

2011-10-20T08:15:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the Occupation

2011-10-18T12:16:00.001+01:00

The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.
We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.
We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.
We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.
We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.
We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.
We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.
We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.
This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

~ Occupy LSX

Gordian Knot

2011-10-17T08:15:00.012+01:00

Kyungduk Kim

Surprisingly, I have reasonably good relationship with Word’s spelling & grammar checker.
I have it running live, so to speak, so it highlights any perceived errors I might make as I make them.
But I absolutely hate the rest of it – honestly I am more comfortable creating a page in html that I am in Word; dunno what that says about me; perhaps that I will never be a real writer, as in one of those hallowed few who get their names put up on the shelf of a bookshop.
Does this disappoint me?
Yes, but it is all a question of the expectations I have be conditioned to hold.
Perhaps I should feel privileged to be living on the crest of humanity’s wave of progress but I don’t.
Perhaps in less progressive times my name would have rested on those shelves, perhaps not – who cares?
In a recent comments ‘conversation’ with Letitia Coyne, I stated that I have come to terms with obscurity; perhaps I should have said “I am coming to terms with obscurity” since I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
All of this is made foolish by my apparent belief that I am any good at this writing lark; a position I am in no position to defend without the recognition promised by my conditioned expectations.

I am an artist, and I have no guilt,
~ with apologies to Patti Smith

The Night Confessor

2011-10-14T08:15:00.003+01:00

Where Is The Fucking Cat? ~ Benoit Paille

The ground is mistaken
You are no contender
For the glittering prize
Awarded for glass walkers
On unpatterned steps
Designed to obscure

The house overlooking
In twilight mistaken
Yellow-tooth kitchen
And bedroom blue eyes
Which talk to the garden
In whispers of light

The moon condescends
To mistake the gravel
For a carpet of crushed glass
The fence of car doors closing
Tells tales of the footsteps
Secret meetings in amber

Post No.666

2011-10-12T08:15:00.001+01:00

The Nobody's Perfect Blues

2011-10-10T08:15:00.002+01:00

Crumb

It is nothing if not ironic that the very idea of trust is so flawed.
Since to consider trust in its essence one must look for it to be perfect.
Perfect in the sense that it is at once stronger than logic and simultaneously extremely fragile: once broken it cannot truly be repaired.
Perhaps I should be looking for a more imperfect ideal.
Perhaps I am wrong to expect that the trust required for friendship should be subject to the same standards the trust required for commitment.
Perhaps this is the reason that the only person I can call friend is the person to whom I am married.

The apple that don’t want to get eaten
Will still fall from the tree
~ Billy Bragg

Chant

2011-10-07T08:15:00.002+01:00

A Perfect Vacuum ~ Jeremy Geddes

On autumn’s run the morning sun
Reflects on amber sleeves
Takes my hand on a one-night-stand
To the corner of the world

An island’s dream encased in steam
To warm my dew-drop heart
Takes me in - a heroine
On the corner of the world

On winter wings the evening sings
The song of spring’s reprise
Takes me round to alien town
In the corner of the world

A continent in discontent
Rising up to take control
Takes my mind to another time
To the corner of the world

Sleeping With The Enemy

2011-10-05T08:15:00.004+01:00

via Wind From Nowhere

Garth

2011-10-03T08:15:00.060+01:00

Last week I gave the address of the Far Queue to an old friend from way back – we haven’t really spoken for nearly 20 years.
This is only relevant because until then nobody I know (besides wife and sons) knows that the Far Queue exists, let alone that it is where I spew out the toxic waste that would otherwise accumulate and manifest itself as Mr Grouchy.

Perhaps because of my fear of authority, or rather what the authorities are capable of, there is a definite paranoia linked to having my name known out there in the ether. Not that I’m advocating violent insurrection here, but you never know when you might attract the attention of some censor. Back in the bad old days in South Africa they used to say you could get arrested for saying the wrong thing about the government; I don’t know if that applied to the man-in-the-street but there certainly were people who were punished for saying the wrong thing too loudly.
But it can hardly be said that The Far Queue poses any danger to those inept motherfuckers who run the world and I very much doubt that the 10 people who read here regularly could be misconstrued as cabal of dangerous anarchists set to overthrow the establishment.
Pity.

So perhaps, in light of (and despite) the above, I should come out from behind Pisces Iscariot (stupid fucking name anyway) and start trading in my own name.

I shall henceforth be known as Garth; it is, after all, my name.

In all othert respects it will be "business as usual" here at the Far Queue.

For the record: that's not really me emerging from the helicopter

Catch Afire

2011-10-01T08:15:00.003+01:00

Alen MacWeeney

I’ve been hanging with the hollow men
In shiny suits and cocaine teeth
Morning brings the broken numbers
On whose padded shoulders
The world pretends to balance

I’ve been hanging with the hollow men
All shiny cars and champagne nights
Morning brings my broken teeth
On a gold plate stolen
From scales of justice mangled

I’ve been hanging with the hollow men
With pockets leaking blood
Morning kills another day
With gigabytes and gangrene
With promises to pay

I’ve been hanging with the hollow men
With breath that reeks of cancer
Morning pulses through my veins
Needled sunlight serenades
Another vault to plunder

I’ve been hanging with the hollow men
But they don’t care for me
Morning finds me on my own
Gold teeth gilded glitter
Behind a broken grin

The Pioneering Spirit

2011-09-24T08:15:00.012+01:00

from Architect's Brother
by Robert & Shana Parkeharrison

i’m thinking how the creative urge lives best on the edges of the river familiar
away from the slow waters of the tried and tested
closer to the rocks
i’m thinking how this urge is what forms the river in the first place
applying pressure to the horizon; to the future
carving its name in the rock

The Invisible War

2011-09-17T08:15:00.000+01:00

Sylvia Ji

The agents arrive at the corner of the building
Intelligence has led them to believe that I am not to be trusted
Across the world they’re waging war
And telling us nothing

The agents approach the revolving doors
I watch from the other side of the road
Across the world they rape and pillage contemptuous aloof
And tell us it is nothing

And the planes are in the air
Their image sometimes spectacular sometimes invisible
Depending on the agenda

The agents are on the stairs
Across the street the charges wait
Across the world they’re bringing down buildings
One more is nothing

The agents are in an empty room
The myth of trust has been slowly torn
Ripped from the world ear to ear
The codeword for Today is Nothing

Mental Spring-Cleaning in Autumn

2011-09-10T08:15:00.000+01:00

Mick Knight

The Far Queue is feeling a little tired and in need of tidying. A number of the Babylonian links are broken and there are some new ones that need to be hung up. Here in the doldrums of a summer that said “meh” as it kicked its heels in anticipation of who-knows-what I find myself wresting with the Penumbra story and unable to produce much else creatively – perhaps this means I’m taking it too seriously and should loosen up and not give a shit.For anyone who cares (beside myself) I will get down to it sooner or later.

The Man Who Bought The World

2011-09-02T08:15:00.014+01:00

Like an epileptic fit
Being suffered by a puppet
He strides across the room
As if the world owes him a living

Like the skeleton within
Who dancing a grim fandango
Strings attached to which he offers no resistance
As if the world owes it to him

But who am I to pass
These judgements dressed in stone
Are my strings as loose as I think they are
Am I am owed the world for nothing?

David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" is woven into the fabric of me. As a teenager I was a massive (and obsessive) fan; partly for the way he looked - in the early seventies nobody looked like Bowie. all a copper haired and alien - but mostly for those songs.
"I'd rather stay here
with all the madmen
'cause I'm quite content
They're all as sane as me"
But The Man Who Sold The World (The song not the album) never quite delivers; it fails to reveal what is promised by the title.
The above poem thingy is what happenned to Bowie's enigmatic song after it has stewed in my subconscious for almost forty years.

Psychopathic Tendencies

2011-08-31T08:15:00.001+01:00

AfterShocks Predated

2011-08-29T08:15:00.000+01:00

Marcus Andren

Your house was so empty
No weather forecast
Wind-blown and wood-grain
The dust stung your eyes
The walls wore a veneer
Too tender to last

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s warm heart
Where all was anchored
In the bay of chance

Your words were so empty
No summer clear skies
Wound down the stairs
To the vault of the past
Padlocked and airtight
With time-waxen lies

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s white lies
That sailed on the waters
To an unknown shore

Your eyes are the windows
To nobody’s soul
But lighthouses that guide
This loser back home
Shed of the lies
That we still have not told

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s soft tongue
Where the word was the music
In the ear of sea

Your smile is the stitching
On the morning’s warm hem
Lip-marked the rim
Of a coffee-cup cold
Sub-static hum
From which the future must stem

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s high laugh
Echoing round the houses
Of another world

Ivan Devoto

2011-08-27T08:15:00.011+01:00

penumbra . 1

via Jhalal Drut

“Ivan, are you feeling better now?”
“Leave me alone Trinny.”
“Ivan, I don’t think you need to be alone.”
“You’re not supposed to think Trinny; you're a fucking machine.”
“Ivan, I can only make the assumption that you’re resorting to insulting me is a measure of your self-esteem, and will take it as fact from that assumed data that you are not unwell.”
“Fuck off”
Ivan would almost certainly be more comfortable down in the hold with the cargo. In fact, had the whole system not fucked up the launch, that’s exactly where he would be now, suspended in a mental nowhere with his last hopes and dreams frozen at the moment of departure: a deadman. Yes, Ivan is almost certain he’d be more comfortable down in the hold rather than this: trapped in the body of a whale, orbiting the planet with a fucking computer for company.

Chapter Index

Forward

Difficult Question

2011-08-20T08:15:00.004+01:00

Perhaps I should add (for those citizens of police states other than this one) that families in London have been threatened with eviction from their council homes because their children were involved in the riots

Pimping The Inverse

2011-08-17T08:15:00.003+01:00

via FreakingNews

The moon turns to illuminate
My impatient wait
For the imp of the perverse
Who [typically] turns up late

Mutant Variation

2011-08-12T08:15:00.022+01:00

Still from Bela Tarr's astonishingly beautiful The Man From London

from eerie of concrete
through slow-time
and dead-heart release
i watch the monolith breathe
all creaking earthquake weather
and crackling pigskin pucker
soft down the decades
to the school of hard knocks
subtle in the infinite
cut to the bone
and i ask the sky
am i here all alone?

from this eerie concrete
echo slow release
and dread heart disease
i watch you sleeping breathe
all wet willed weather defined
and financially hogtied
to the crackling decades
at the school of soft options
infinitely subtitled
censorious
and i ask the sky
am i here all alone?

"I open up my wallet, and it's full of blood"
~ Godspeed You! Black Emperor

I'm Not a Racist But...

2011-08-10T08:15:00.003+01:00

David Camerunt; his future Lordship puts down the 2011 peasant revolt

I'll never understand why the English 'working class' wave the flag for queen and country while voting in the these tory pirates - basically sodomising their future in the hope that their lordships will throw them a bone every now and then.

Vertigo

2011-08-08T08:15:00.001+01:00

Kubicki

Late summer spiders
Span sedate this Sunday dream
Catch the feted flies
Of muted minutes in-between

Tuck them in goodnight
In beds of gardens green
And hollow out
The future’s opaque screen

Late summer spiders
Across the garden green
Skittle skate Sunday late
The future’s hollow scream

On Holiday

2011-07-27T08:15:00.006+01:00

'Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.'
~ Frank Zappa

White Petals on Black Snow

2011-07-25T08:15:00.002+01:00

Michael Malak

Across the city, in a circle of extravagantly warm light; behind impenetrable black curtains; behind the inevitable night; they dance a paradoxical Charleston, all jitterbug hype and light speed abandon in the face of the abysmal divide between those within and those without.
Now, as before, the manner in which the city’s inhabitants face the world is determined not by virtue, but by the weight of financial influence.
This is the hall of true survivors; the bearers of currency beyond money itself. And who will question such power when wielded in a world where the currency traded is life itself. Not just the life of the individual but the lives of everyone and everything; not just Murder Inc but the Department of Global Catastrophe.

Monument to Stupidity

2011-07-22T08:15:00.000+01:00

William Mortensen

With non-spill cups from the caffeine breast
Phone-thumbing oblivious along with all the rest
Of a devolving species running the inhuman race
That brought us to here in the first fucking place

Multiple Choice is Easy

2011-07-20T08:15:00.001+01:00

Trust

2011-07-18T08:15:00.003+01:00

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

It is important to know where you stand in relation to others. There are many who define their place in the world by what they perceive as status; specifically the kind of status that can only be bought.
“I don’t know who else I can turn to, Mr. Time” her gaze was directed at the damp patch in the ceiling above my head, as if it were another lens through which she could see me more clearly, “My husband has developed a taste for the wrong kind of people.”
“How do you mean, wrong?”
“I’m not afraid to offend people, Mr Time, if one associates with those who are not on the same step financially, one leaves oneself open to all sorts of moral dilemma.”
“Not least the morality of trust, Mrs Derivative” I said as I mentally added another two zeros to the end of her bill.

First Principles

2011-07-13T08:15:00.003+01:00

Boneyard

2011-07-11T08:15:00.006+01:00

Willy Ronis

Confined to the head and vain under glass, I wish I could trust that my armour would last; hold up against the onslaught of days where each piece of knowledge is a chip or a fall from somebody’s definition of grace.

Keep a cool head they all say, keep your heart off your sleeve - but the trumpets that blow aren’t mine (I can’t blow ‘em) filled as I am with resentful self-doubt perverse and purgatorial – keep your cards to your chest and your eyes on the prize, keep your own council in the kingdom of lies.

Confined to the headland, beacon windows, frosted glass, the reef bares its teeth to unsuspecting hull while the keeper of light causes the coastline to cast its good eye to the night and wonders what the tide will cast up on morning’s return.

Tread Water

2011-07-08T08:15:00.002+01:00

I might swim to a country beyond the imagination
If I had the inclination
But I don’t so I won’t
Since the imagination
Will always remain a more palatable destination

The Chairman

2011-07-06T08:15:00.003+01:00

Patti

And I won’t wag this tailless dog
That named itself boredom
As a child who pulls the legs off frogs
And finds no room to store them
In the box that’s labelled ‘Acceptable’

After Berryman, via Iggy Pop

The 4th of Ju...

2011-07-04T08:15:00.001+01:00

10.0∞ Dedication

2011-07-02T08:15:00.008+01:00

Last Pages ~ François Schuiten

This amorality tale is dedicated to those of us who can admit to the fact that we are the proverbial ‘Office Worker’; to those of us who still care to notice the world around us and have not given in to the corporate ladder to nowhere; for those of us who, while admitting to being office workers, still hang onto the concept of being a worker.

I am rewarded/renumerated with the feeling that comes with discovering a voice that is, I believe, entirely my own.

Thanks to all those who have stuck with it and left their comments
P.I. July 2011

9.2 First Day Fears

2011-07-01T08:15:00.009+01:00

Shitty Life

“Name?”
“erm… Atom”
“Let me see… here it is… Adam Earham? You’ll be starting with Mr Geogh in the Green Department. You’ll like Mr Gough, he’s a blue sky thinker.”
Inside, the traffic silenced by double gazed edifice, The Green Department hummed its own self importance. Adam followed his escort down the grey aisle and though he felt as if all eyes were upon him, he passed unnoticed and was shown to a cubicle whose partitions had been pared down in order to give the impression of inclusive privacy. He was introduced to the team, names he tried hard to hang onto and was happy to see that his suit was of equal quality to theirs.
This boy will go far.

Ethics Dept (Psychopathic Branch)

2011-06-29T08:15:00.009+01:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Prisoner

2011-06-27T08:15:00.003+01:00

Orfeus og Eutydike ~ Palle Nielson

It’s all window-dressing; it’s how we adapt our surroundings to best shield ourselves from our fears.
Some cells are padded and some are bamboo lined and there are those who say you can tell a man by the state of his cell.
We are all here on a voluntary basis, so try not to think of this prison as having bars on the windows – volunteers... or so we’d like to think.
The security staff that we employ to protect us from the outside world are pretty unsavoury types who have no qualms about biting the hand that feeds them.
So, yes, in answer to your next question, the armour is necessary; by the nature of this prison it would be unwise to believe that everything is totally under control.
The trick seems to be to be sure that your armour allows you to see outward as well as inward.

Out in the exercise yard we circle daily; the distant tree-line paints vertical stripes on our uniforms while the guards hover like carrion birds to pick off those who fall behind. We are not men, we are not sheep; we are but commodities to be bought and sold on the deregulated market run by those who worship at the altar of power.
These walls: at first glance you would be forgiven for the impression that they are designed to keep us in; in truth, like a lobster entering the pot, any would-be escapee may find easy access to the meat set as bait but upon coming to his senses he will find that escape is prohibited by barbed hooks deeply embedded in his psyche. These walls, while imposing in their physical sense, when subjected to scrutiny, disappear like anxious ghost-parents that hover in the peripheral vision of a sleepwalking child.

Tales for the attention-span deficit reader

9.1 No.3 Battalion

2011-06-24T08:15:00.019+01:00

Sodgers

The weather up here on the plateau is unfettered by subtlety. The earth is a reddish yellow concoction of 9 parts dust and 1 part sand that the wind has no problem whipping it up into stinging flurries.
Home at last, the specimen formerly known as No.3 feels the shape of his body squared and stretched into a vision of pride, standing, as he is, to attention in the fore-rank of the morning parade.
Soon they will be commanded to turn and the morning’s regimen of: back and forth back and forth leftrightleftrightleftrightleftrightleftrightleftright all at double pace; will begin, frenetic and thought-banishing, their bodies and minds will be caught up in the rush to get this done so that we can all get out there and do some killing.

Dancehall Daze

2011-06-22T08:15:00.001+01:00

Concierges Rue du Dragon Paris 1945 ~ Robert Doisneau

Down at the water’s edge translating visions to flesh
Down by the river carrying dreams out to sea
Down by the water’s bright edge
Where the half-dead men dance
A sad and faltering fandango
With the ghosts of my vanity

Whisper don’t waken the beasts of my childhood
Whisper those secrets in vacuum night hollow
Whisper my dull wishes
In the hall’s half-shell echo
As if dances with dead men
Will capture my sanity

A Little Given Take

2011-06-20T08:15:00.009+01:00

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

It is impossible to comprehend the lives of others.
We attempt to understand others by creating an other within ourselves; an avatar; a lens; a mirror with which to observe ourselves in a favourable light.
“You promised me, Mr Time, that you would not take me for a fool.”
“If you were a fool, Mrs Geranium, I would not be taking you for anything,” I handed her the dossier which stacked up a considerable amount of rather ugly evidence against her husband, “My accountant will send you the bill.”

∞.8b Cajones' Tail

2011-06-19T08:15:00.004+01:00

A talking cat, it seems, is a walking cliché. And, were I to believe that to be true, I might cut off my own tail and walk upright like one of you lot: all baldy coat and self-importance, (as if you can show us all a thing or two, something we wouldn’t believe). But I cannot associate myself with you, or your culture.
I do believe however that where this to be told as a morality tale, nobody would buy it.
“They did what?” people would ask, “I don’t believe it.”

Photo courtesy of Jackie Morris

∞.8a Mad Scientist's Notebook

2011-06-17T08:15:00.019+01:00

It's difficult to quantify the mixed feelings inspired by success. Especially for success that is hard won.
It is so seldom that we manage to meet the entry-level requirements for our product to be accepted into the machine that I often forget what it feels like to succeed.
Hopefully Nigel will have enough tech at his disposal to be able to track our little atom for as long as possible inside the machine. Feedback of that calibre is invaluable to the tweaking process.
It is easy to understand how my predecessors sometimes fell into delusions of deity, failing to perceive their own place in the machine that does nothing but notch up days on the progress chart by which we measure success.

The Opium Eater ~ N.C.Wyeth

Don't Fence Me In

2011-06-15T08:15:00.002+01:00

Runner Bean

2011-06-13T08:15:00.005+01:00

Haunted City ~ Michael Sowa

In a dream of Sunday
Warm on freckled shoulders
The boy that I once was
Runs like only
He can run in dreams
Weightless in the onshore breeze
That tastes of salted spit
And highway diesel
And leaves him on the homeward path
Away from all that reason
His thoughts are a ploughed field
Seeded with tomorrows mistakes

8.4 Reveal

2011-06-10T08:15:00.014+01:00

“You’re gonna need to give me the communicator Atom”
“What!”
“I can’t let you go any further with that thing in your pocket.”
“Hey!” atom stuck his finger into Nigel’s facial area, “I have gone through a lot to keep this thing – I fucking earned it."
“heh” Cajones piped up, “He’s got you there Nigel, shot with your own gun.“
“You might think it’s funny Ginge, but you know as well as I do that letting him carry that through the transporter is libel to blow the whole deal to the far side of an anomaly; and for the record: I didn’t invent this game; I'm just the gatekeeper"

Everybody Hates a Rhyming Poem

2011-06-08T08:15:00.000+01:00

[especially a rhyming love poem]

Iceland ~ Ragnar Axelsson

He sang her down the night tattoo
She said he taste like paper glue
Danced tonight the obligatory mambo
Two they went where only one go
They kissed the sky’s bright spat display
Swam the road to Mandalay
And when the night up-lit the trees
They rose through light in slow degrees
To touch the wind upon the brow
To drink the night in the here and now
To go beyond the morning news
That lines them up like polished shoes
To go beyond the shallow flake
That fakes the day with wedding cake
To see behind these blinking eyes
To blow the night in a feast of sighs

Cold Comfort

2011-06-06T08:15:00.002+01:00

[Words of advice for the disenchanted]

Gavin Bond

You may be telling your story very well, but what exactly are you saying?
Spewing gospel is no way to catch a man’s attention; nobody wants to be judged by the story they are reading.
These are aphorisms for a generation beyond the religion that was planted in them at birth; these are notes to myself.
Sceptical anger is a driver that precludes ambition; dreams of high office and power are not sent to the angry sceptic.
Check your basic principals before acting on a promise of financial gain.
Check your wallet after being accosted by charitable souls.
Check your anger at the doorway to contented hours; drag it behind you when you leave.
Practice what you preach; there is nothing worse than a hypocrite.
When the learning curve is steep it is useful to remember that you are being supported by what you learned yesterday; don’t wipe your feet on yesterday’s news.
History is best understood from multiple viewpoints; it is a live insect on a pin and is liable to wriggle.
Tomorrow is when you get to do it all again in the hope that you might get it right one day; and, who knows, maybe you will.
I may be telling you stories, but what exactly am I saying?

8.3 Bite Your Tongue

2011-06-03T08:15:00.011+01:00

Wires, lots of wires, a myriad of wires, more wires than would be deemed necessary in an increasingly wireless world.
“Never heard of cable-trunking Nigel?” said Cajones, "it really would neaten things up a bit"
“You know, for a cat you have an unnerving understanding of nuts ‘n’ bolts”
Atom and No.3 collapsed into suppressed laughter.
“He also has a PhD in bullshit,” said Miles, “Obtained from the University of R.Skissing.”
Nigel wondered how Miles could possibly think that antagonising a (notoriously bad-tempered) ten foot cat can be a good idea.
Nigel wondered if Miles had ever considered self-censorship.

Everybody Hates A Love Poem

2011-06-01T08:15:00.004+01:00

Larry Louie

Love is, to a large extent, a calling
To the dawning of every coming day
To the twisting turning on the way
To the waking the aching and the dismay
That must hold you to its breast
To count the heartbeats there

Love is, in many ways, a surrender
Of selfishness to the moment
Of days to an ideal
Of thoughts that wander too close
to the edge of the day
Of the body’s new beginnings

Love is, in all instances, a dream
That pours you your next drink
That paints the skylight stars
That holds you to your word
In the wooden afternoon
And refuses to be woken

Charity

2011-05-30T08:15:00.008+01:00

[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

2011-05-28T08:15:00.004+01:00

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

8.2 Nigel

2011-05-27T08:15:00.023+01:00

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

2011-05-25T08:15:00.001+01:00

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

2011-05-23T08:15:00.004+01:00

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

2011-05-22T08:15:00.007+01:00

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

2011-05-20T08:15:00.013+01:00

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

2011-05-18T08:15:00.002+01:00

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

2011-05-16T08:15:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-13T08:15:00.009+01:00

I, Robot

2011-05-11T08:15:00.002+01:00

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]

2011-05-09T08:15:00.006+01:00

[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

2011-05-06T08:15:00.005+01:00

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

2011-05-04T08:15:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-02T08:15:00.014+01:00

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?

7.3 Miles To Go

2011-04-29T08:15:00.011+01:00

Love's Arrow ~ John Byrne

“Welcome to The Middle” said the grey-haired man on the square plinth.
The man sat cross legged and his eyes were closed, a fact that caused Atom to wonder how he knew they were there.
“The middle of what” said No.3.
“The middle of the sentence that I was busy thinking,” said the man, “The middle this edge of the page; the middle of the muddle we’re in.”
“Hello Miles” said Cajones, “Still talking loud but saying nothing I see.”
“Just because you don’t get it doesn’t negate it” said the man.
“True,” said Cajones, “Only problem is I do get it, it’s a game that you play with yourself.”
“A game?”
“Sorry to interrupt your happy reunion,” said Atom, “But where’s the music coming from?”
“A game?”
“A game,” said Cajones, “that we all know the rules to except you.”
“Oi!” No.3 prodded Cajones with the blunt end of his spear, “It’s rude to…” Cajones swatted him with a withdrawn-claw-paw, sending him flying, all legs ‘n’ loincloth, across the clearing.
“The music, young man,” said the Miles, turning towards Atom and opening his eyes, “is coming from the Signalman’s hut.”
“erm thanks” said Atom.
“You’re so full of yourself,” said the man to Cajones, “Teacher’s pet, free to roam.”
“You call me anybody’s pet again and I’ll dissect you alive, and I’ll do it slowly.”
“You and whose army?”
“Not again” said Atom covering his eyes, remembering the incident of the Desk Clerk.
The clearing was silent, except for the music from the Signalman’s hut and the sound of No.3 disentangling himself from the thorn bush in which he’s landed.
“ee…tsss…ah…owch…”
Atom opened his eyes to find Cajones and Miles grinning at one another. More precisely, Miles was grinning while Cajones was baring his teeth.
The music came to an abrupt halt. The silence lasted a heartbeat before the music began again; different, more strident.
“erm, guys?” said Atom, “can we please not do that thing which involves turning someone inside out and then artistically rearranging their innards? It’s really not my thing.”
They turn from one another to look at Atom, traces of their diverse grins falling from their faces.
“This one has got spirit, “says Miles.
“Is that what you call it,“ said Cajones, “He’s not the brightest bulb but he does make No.3 over there appear positively dog-like.”
“…and while we’re at it, could we not talk about me as if I wasn’t here” said Atom.
“Spirit” said Miles.
“No balls though” said Atom.