Stepping Stones Gather Moss

She dances in the red dust devilling
Fans the embers’ moonward spiral
And on her charmed ankles glimmer
The swords of dead tomorrows
The flags of anarchists
And the hopes of lonely children


She dances at the blue ice gathering
Kicks the deck-chair habit
And at her chained waist gleam
The knives of sleeping winter
The banners of idealists
And the fears of gun


She dances on the velvet light flickering
Dusts the moon with ember spirals
And in her eyes green glisten
The pinwheel stars' lost light
The rags of heathen prophets
And the dreams of aging poets

Dali's Egg ~ 4. Jane

The red dust at the centre of the clearing rose in flurries around the tiny bells that tinkled at their ankles as one by one the village appeared from the forest, greeting John with smiles or nods or just plain indifference. Dr Morose escorted John into the dining area which stood beside the smokey kitchen where he was served a bowl of steaming meat by an Oriental woman. The meat was dark, rich and tender; John felt the edges of his tongue tingle as he chewed the first mouthful.
Dr Morose watched, his eyes curious to the expressions that washed across John’s face as he consumed the medallions of meat, the juices hot on his fingers.
“Good, isn’t it?”
“Hmm” John swallowed, “Very, what is it?”
“Seagull”
“Seagull?”
“Well technically it is Gull, it was once explained to me that there is actually no such species as Seagull. Unfortunately it’s the only edible thing on the island… well the only edible thing available to us anyway.”
John raised his eyebrows and continued to eat, noticing that the village was now busling with activity.
Morose explained that in order to soften the first encounter, they cleared the village whenever a newcomer arrived.
"So where exactly is this then?" asked John as he finished the last piece of meat.
“Where?” Morose rose and leaned over the table to pat John on the shoulder. “C’mon old man, lets get you somewhere to sleep.”

Some time later, John sat on a makeshift bed sheltered from the midday heat by the shack that had been allocated to him by Dr Morose. He watched as the Doctor crouched next to one of the villagers with a basket of large red leaves. The villager’s chest and back was covered in hundreds of tiny scars, most of which were old and stood out pink against his deep brown skin. The doctor was treating fresh bleeding cuts on the man’s body with the sap that he squeezed from the leaves.
These ministrations were interrupted by a tanned woman who entered the clearing with purposeful strides.
John watched as what began as a polite interaction developed into what looked like an argument between Morose and the tanned woman. She was clad in a khaki skirt, a white cotton shirt decorated with pastel flowers, and sandals. She kept her arms crossed over the straw sun-hat that she held to her chest as the doctor gesticulated angrily before her.
After some moments she raised one hand in the doctor’s direction, palm forward. She replaced the straw hat on her head and with a final comment and a cutting gesture of the hand she strode across the clearing in the direction of John’s shack.
Ducking to avoid the low threshold she entered the shack and John was treated to a waft of cool air that fled before her as if in deference to her power. She removed her hat with her left hand and extended her right toward John, pausing until he took it,
“Mr Gabriel, welcome to the Team, and welcome to Eden” she said, her accent American. Her hand was dry, the grip firm, and John noticed that the fingernails were bitten to the quick.
“I’m Jane Grissom, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance” her tone bore the confidence of a woman who had never been contradicted or convinced otherwise.
“How do you do… Ms Grissom?” John raised his eyes to her face, tanned with blue eyes and straight white teeth, handsome in a bland sort of way. The smattering of freckles across her nose made her look younger than the forty-odd that John judged her to be.
“Call me Jane” she said, “It has fallen on me to organise this place, so if you need anything over and above the normal routine, you’ll need to come to me.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder “The doc’ will see to your medical needs, otherwise you are free to do what you please. Besides contributing to the chores – fishing, cooking, cleaning and such - all of which falls under Suki’s charge.” She flashed him a business-like smile.
“Where exactly is ‘here’?” John asked
“Mr Gabriel,” the smile vanished “That is a difficult question, a questions that goes beyond the realms of everyday considerations. Eden needs to be run as efficiently as possible, given these extreme circumstances. The team does not benefit from difficult questions – it’s non-productive.”
“Non-productive?”
“Absolutely. Non-productive. Mr Gabriel, keep it professional and we will get along just fine. Believe me, you wouldn’t want the Judiciary to get involved” She let the threat hang in the air between them for a second before once again replacing the hat and, drawing a chest full of air, said in a brighter tone “So, anything you need - my quarters are about a mile upriver. So long Mr Gabriel” She flashed her teeth once more before departing as briskly as she’d arrived, leaving John to sink back down onto the bed, his eyes followed the clean white shirt on her retreating back.
He noticed that with the exception of Morose, the boy from the beach, and the magpie that perched on the edge of the water tank, the commune’s scattered inhabitants went about their chores and avoided looking in Jane Grissom’s direction as she strode across the clearing and disappeared into the trees where the path led upriver.
“Americans eh Gabriel?” Dr Morose approached the shack “Can’t handle things on an individual level, always gotta root for the team, rally round the star spangled banner, work together for the good of all”
“She in charge here then?” John looked at the spot where the Jane had disappeared into the trees.
“She thinks she is,” said Morose with a smirk as he gazed in the same direction. “Give her her due though; these huts would never have been built if it wasn’t for her leadership abilities. Got everybody’s shoulder to the wheel she did – got us all working as a team.” He turned back to John with a sigh “The irony of it is that she can’t even bring herself to live with the team, prefers to rule from afar – the downfall of all empires.” He gave a short barking laugh and offered John a cigarette.
“Thanks” John accepted and lit the cigarette, drawing the nicotine laced smoke into his lungs like a seasoned smoker. The ensuing coughing fit brought tears to his eyes and his mouth was as dry as old wood – he stubbed the cigarette out on the wooden sill.
“Where do you get them from anyway?” he asked in a strained voice.
Morose tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger “Ask no questions old man”
“How do you get by without asking questions?” there was a hint of indignation in John’s voice, indignation which bordered on anger as he continued, “I mean, where the fuck is this place?”
“Steady on old man, you’ll get used to it. Truth be told, we all suffer from a little-known virus called Infoamnesia, keeps us from worrying about the questions, helps us to get on with our lives – enjoy life a bit. Know what I mean?” he slapped John on the shoulder, “You’ve probably been exposed to it already, you’ll feel better after some sleep – you’ve had an eventful day”

Cathodic Protection

A deer grazes silent at grave’s edge
A gentle symbol where all is bluntly defined

Lucy sits on a headstone
The sun washes her eyes a gold outlaw mask
A sacrificial anode for society’s rust
She sits in solitude
No fortress against the slow passing minutes

Blue eyes that in sockets orbit
Sun-spot pinpoints
Burn in the firmament of her face
Not incendiary not supernova
But fires long tamed to ember

Pale hands tendon tender
Worry the sanctuary of her lap
Know no urge to reach out
Into the vacuum of passing bodies
Unloved

And in the city below people wake
Secure in the knowledge that they care

--- o O o ---

This piece is a reaction to Samantha Morton’s “The Unloved”; a haunting and poetic portrayal of isolation - a young life fallen between society’s cracks.

Subverse

American Collectors ~ David Hockney

The revolution awaits the man in the guerrilla suit
The ink slowly dries on the pamphlets in his car-boot
And the trunks on the troop of room-filling elephants
Trumpet to the tune of philosophical irrelevance

The dealer checks his cell-phone for the international markets
Crosses the killing floor shoe-leather whispering on carpet
Smiles in the knowledge he will get what he’s due
Guns the engine to chrome on his bee-em-double-yew

In the shrubbery disguised as a man in a black suit
Crouching sunglass, earpiece and stylish jackboot
Lurks the agent of change with an eye on the prize
Who parades in a bikini made for a woman half her size

The agent employs tech-tricks to read the invoices
Of the ill-clad sun-bather who’s considering her choices
Between deckchair debauchy and slick sun-lounger
While concrete in half-life decays all around her

Condensation collects behind guerrilla suit eyes
Cell phone erupts between pin-striped thighs

The agent responds to his earpiece whispering imponderous
Licks the tip of his pistol with lizard tongue lugubrious
And with rounds made of darkness by an empire in decline
Blows the chrome-lustre off some of that Teutonic shine

And I watch, a furtive sparrow, from these waiting-waste wings
Wondering if it’s worth bothering to pull down the curtain strings

Dali's Egg ~ 3. Dr. Morose

The sand was golden, and squeaked beneath his feet. Tiny bells tinkled on a strap around his left ankle as he trudged along the beach, his mind blank and empty save for his immediate experience.
The danger-chanting gull had followed him for a while, not bothering to flap its wings, but kiting the wind with nonchalant dexterity before squawking once and turning with the wind to glide back toward the peninsula.
The red mesa passed slowly on his left, giving way to dense tropical forest. The sun beat down on his shoulder and his mouth was dry and gritty, his tongue swollen. Colours flashed behind his eyes, overlaying his view of the curving coastline with kaleidoscopic floaters.
He walked for an immeasurable time, time that seemed to loop and stall erratically like thoughts before sleep, losing its relevance, and marked only by the pounding of the surf and the trudging of his feet.
Ahead, standing alone in the sand, halfway between the green of the forest and blue-green sea, stood a single palm tree, its trunk curved in a backward J.
A slight movement at the tree-line just beyond the lone tree caught John’s eye. He angled up the beach toward what gradually revealed itself to be the figure of a teenage boy who danced from one foot to the other on the hot sand.
The boy blinked occasionally as John approached, his expression was serious and he wore a red tee shirt and grubby khaki shorts which failed to cover the grazes on his knees.
“You just got here.” it was a statement of fact, not a question, “Did it hurt?”
Startled by the question, John managed “…I don’t know…”
“That’s what everybody says.” Said the boy, disappointed in some way,“Don’t tell them you saw me,” He turned and ran off into the undergrowth.
John started off after him, but thought better than to enter the dense unknown of the forest. Initiative lost, he turned from the sound of the boy’s passage, a slight breeze chilling the sweat that coated his back and buttocks = he realised that he was naked.

Borne on the air that welded together the sea and the jungle and criss-crossed John’s numb progress down the coast, came the smell of wood smoke, which in turn carried the smell of cooking meat.
Ahead, where the tree line broke, the mouth of a river spewed a fan into the breakers, and John could now see a curlicue of smoke above the forest.
A hundred metres from the river mouth, to his right; he noticed the beginnings of a path between the dunes and headed toward it.
The path was clear enough to suggest a regular passage by a small group of people, it started as a gap in the trough between two grassy dunes and wound its way inland around the bushes and sea-dried trees leaving no clear view of its destination. After a short meander the path entered the forest proper.
Coming to a fork in the path he chose left.
Some time later he realised that the path had made its way to the riverbank and was now undulating inland parallel to the river; he could hear the river’s liquid song behind the line of bushes as it took aural dominance over the sea’s faded roar.
He came to a clearing that opened around a large scarred tree and giving a view of a shallow lagoon and the smell of rot; the path ended here.
Retracing his steps to the fork, he continued, this path again eventually reaching the riverside and continuing upriver, the forest growing deeper and greener, the smell of roasting meat growing strong now and John found himself salivating, Pavlovian, realising how hungry he was.
The path broadened suddenly onto a clearing where the sun cut through the trees in broad arcs of yellow on red sand and a village built of wood and iron.
The village was organised into vague cultural areas of eating, sleeping and meeting and was dominated by the large tree and behind that a corrugated iron water tank that stood on four solid wooden legs.
A line of rudimentary shelters down one side of the clearing revealed what was obviously the kitchen, since it was from here that the smell of meat and the smoke were flavouring the air.
Nothing moved as John, feeling like some naked shipwrecked sailor, stepped into the clearing feeling the conflict within him – this is all happening too fast.
“You might want to put these on”
Startled, John turned to find an unsurprised middle-aged man standing side-on down another narrow path that hedged deeper into the jungle, away from the village and the river.
The man extended a neatly folded pair of khaki trousers and a white tee shirt toward John.
“Thanks” His nakedness suddenly uncomfortably obvious beside the dressed man, John quickly donned the clothes; the fabric was coarse against the layer of salt that had settled on his skin, tight and uncomfortable.
“Clothes maketh man,” said the man “or was that manners maketh man?” he looked genuinely puzzled for a while, then, as if remembering the train of the conversation, he extended his hand in John’s direction. “Dr Morose”
“How’re you doing?” Bemused, but unable to break from convention, John took his hand and shook “John Gabriel” He looked around at the clearing, “Where am I?”
“Ah, straight to the hard questions," He grinned to soften the rebuke, "Let’s start with an easy one: Are you hungry John Gabriel?”

Fillet Weld

Dragon's Pleasure ~ Jacek Yerka

Kept the world at bay
With a short-leash chain hyena grinning
Set my shutter to time-delay
And wound the tape back to the beginning

Told ordinary tales of arbitrary heart-breaking
Blew eons against the chalk cliffs of selfish solitude
On legs of starfish urchin arachnid aching
Ghosts came in angry waves of varying amplitude

Set full-sailed armadas of sinking ships
To mount anxious attacks on Cartesian windmills
Arabesques of thoughtless Freudian slips
And weld bluntly Occam’s analytical skills

On passengers bedecked like kings and tsars
Whose keels scraped reef beneath powder plot noses
And gazes cast outward to behold the stars
In a splintered and petal-strewn bed of poses

Interstitial Musculature

My Dishonest Heart ~ Audrey Kawasaki

And as I become, delicately unravelling, that monster with butterfly wings
And a dragonfly heart
Whose smile crooked-toothed reveals that cracked truth webbed
Between the bones of my ribs
And the air in my lungs
And from whence a hypocrite swore oath of allegiance
To nothing
Save the idea; the fabricated framework of love

Dali's Egg ~ 2. John

He rose to consciousness from nowhere, face down in the long grass, salt in the back of his throat.
He opened his eyes to sunlight (too bright), a roaring in his head and the sight of a couple of red ants exploring his forearm as if he were some mutant Gulliver.
He rolled over and sat up lethargically, brushing the ants away and resting his forearms on his knees.
John Gabriel, he knew that his name was John Gabriel. But that was all he knew – his mind contained no detail – general information only.
He found himself to be on a grassy dune facing a mesa of sandy red stone. The source of the roaring in his head, he realised, was the sea that pounded the beach on either side of him. He sat at the apex of a spur of land with a sandy beach receding into the salty haze at thirty degrees to his left and right, giving him the feeling of being on the bow of some giant organic ship.
As he stood he was overcome by a wave of vertigo and nausea, a sense that there had been a fundamental shift in the earth’s gravity and that nothing would ever go back to the way it had been – whatever that was.
He turned from the red mesa and faced the prow of the land, the beach now sweeping back past his shoulders in a vee from the rocky peninsula ahead of him.
Embedded into the wet black rocks at this apex was a rusted metal ring measuring two metres in diameter, and attached to the ring was a chain with giant rusty black links. The chain was attached to the ring and ran out in a straight line ahead of him into the sea where it sagged just above the surface to disappear into the haze a squinting distance from the shore. He could hear the corroded metal links creaking from some unseen force being exerted somewhere out there in the salty haze.
He stumbled on tentative legs down to the right, sliding down the grassy dune and over toward the water’s edge. The waves crashed and slid up the beach before running back from the sand leaving it smooth and new before his footprints. A large seagull landed just out of reach of the waves’ foaming fingers. It looked at John with eyes that were hard and black and quite familiar with the appearance of humans.
“don’t go in” it squawked, “dangerous”
John looked at the bird as it tilted its head sideways to study him from a different angle.
“dangerous” the bird flapped into the air and began to circle John's lone figure on the beach.

Secrets

The Wrong Awakening ~ Peter Gric

In a room full of night
Where hostages take soundings
On the drawing of the light

Whatever happened to your perfectly formed beliefs,
Or the gold-leaf arguments encased in lawyers’ briefs?
Were you bitten by the monsters in this distant colony
Did you let them steal your heart for wanting to be free?

Did you watch the age of enlightenment
Give way to discontent
In advertising loyalty and corporate assent?

Whatever happened to all those Technicolor days between
The opening of your eyes from Disney’s monochrome dream
And the arrival of these lodgers with their skeleton keys
Who access your secret attic rooms with knowing eyes that see

Your broken childhood toys
The ones you held most dear
Broken by the fragile hand of all your adult joys

The Rubicon (at Its Source) is a Trickle

Perhaps it is not necessary to pinpoint the exact moment - the sequence of events; the cast or stage settings - that divide what went before from what is now.
The event itself is drenched in static, soaked in fear and over time, decorated with all manner of first-person imperfect significance.
Some call it innocence, some naivety: but with its loss comes the realisation that all is not set in stone; that statues will fall (by human hand or by slow decay); that nothing is ever absolute; that everything you were told, everything you were taught, is an interpretation.
The feeling of dread that ensues is merely the brain adjusting and correcting its neural paths – evolution to ensure survival.
Being cursed with awareness of the process (emotion) is what makes it uncomfortable.
But who wants to learn what they need know?
Far better to know what we need to learn.
Chemical activity knits together our sensory receipts, weighing up urgencies of input against possible survival responses – I am/I exist in the moments between call and response; idle processing time – the ghost in this meat machine.

Dali's Egg ~ 1. Kali

Magpie ~ Liiga Smilshkalne

Kali perched in the hot rim of the corrugated iron water tank and watched the villagers below as they readied themselves for the new arrival.
The bells on the their ankles tinkled faintly as they swept the clearing between the rows of huts and returned from the forest with wood for the kitchen and for the night fire in the centre beside the big tree.
He watched the fishing party return from the beach to deliver their catch to the kitchen.
Kali clacked his tongue and flapped his black wings in disapproval, watching as Dr. Morose bustled about, filling the square with phoney good cheer.
Anyone would think it’s Christmas, he thought – not that these zombies would remember Christmas.
Kali remembered hating everything about Christmas - back when he had legs and arms; back before they’d arrived here; before the power had corrupted their dreams. He remembered all those grim-faced shoppers in a fruitless search for commercial fulfilment – something to replace the emptiness that comes with the death of culture.
Emptiness…huh… unlike the herd down below, Kali still had his memories, both of the island and of before. Before, when they had been a triangle – Jane, Grace and Kali – all in the same racket; taking on the world.
He remembered them together, remembered the moment of sublime pleasure when it had all began to fall apart. Memories: a double-edged sword for a magpie with a human mind.
He flapped hard to dispel the memories, rising sharply into the air, and circling the village once, flew off upward toward the god’s hut on the top of the mountain, his duties to perform. In the distance he could hear the hungry howl of the Judiciary – somebody would be in trouble soon.

Noir

They met at the Null & Void, a nihilist café frequented by bohemian pseudo-intellectuals whose imaginations allowed them to believe that they lived by some higher creed.
They fell into one another’s eyes; irises dilated and focussed fateful forward.
Their hands translated cigarette poses into reasons; pale skin into purpose.
And, at barricades of bougainvillea explosions, fellow assassins sharpened poisoned arrow pencils in preparation for that future.

Still a Searcher, Must Ride the Dark Horse

Die Kleine Glocke ~ Shinji Himeno

I am the colours behind your eyelids
Sunshine daydream chiaroscuro
The optic fibrous gangliac Ovid
Night-time vigil of all you don’t know

I am the silence between the drum-beats
Sucking the air through ossicular chain
The eighth nerve objects to your musical sheets
Demanding an altogether different refrain

I am the word on the tip of your tongue
The thoughts that climb your ladder legs
And salivating savour every rung
Like a fire walker treading broken eggs

I am in the space between these words
Filling the halls so long deserted
By players and dealers of the six of swords
Crossing the water with faces averted

Title from Neil Young's Tell Me Why

Cabin Fevre ~ 8. The Square Root of Zero

It is true that I am now as much tree as I am man.
The charts on which I have thus far recorded my time lie scattered across cabin 13.
It is true that for a time indecipherable to my meat mind I have been unable to scratch further words from the rotten quill, now no more than a hollow stick that lies yet on the warped surface of the captain’s desk.
For am I too no more than a stick?
What use would the green find for my arms, she whose arms reach yet for the sun?
What use for legs, when the chain holds no allure to her?
What use for the gut, source of all pain for the carcass’ erstwhile occupant?
What use for eyes and ears when all can be seen from the interaction of light on chlorophyll.
The Aurora remembers yet its form, albeit distorted by the tree memory of its wooden hull. She is suspended above this dead sea; a trophy for mankind’s’ great and futile deeds
For periods of time my mind has become lost in these labyrinths created by the processes of green life that controls not only my own, long faded form, but also the whole of this useless vessel once rough hewn at the hands of men.
The one process that has not been subjugated by my green mistress is my capacity to think – for what need could the green have for thought other than ornamentation for her own perfection?
‘Tis I then that am as the grit of sand in the oyster’s mouth – for the mind and the properties of chlorophyll conspire yet to allow my thoughts to appear as words on the very walls of cabin 13.

And for you whose perverse courage or profound stupidity allows you to enter the vault of the Aurora; you whose searching brings you here to read these words etched as they are on the already warped bulkheads of Cabin 13; I give you these warnings:
If it be knowledge you seek then be ye forewarned that knowledge can be an empty burden if there be no ear to hear.
For upon ascending the rigorous face of knowledge you will be confronted by the greater demon of understanding – and he will require a much larger portion of your soul.
He will demand that you unpick the very fabric of your clothing, thread by thread, in order that you may then reweave it in a manner clear and enlightened.
He will require that you question the very knowledge upon whose rungs you tread on your ascent.
And finally he will require you to face him squarely and admit that you know nothing other than what you hold in time to be true, second by second your thoughts can only be clutched to your feverish chest in a futile attempt to allay your inevitable demise.
But perhaps, poor traveller, my words on this wood may serve to give you hope; hope that there is some greater existence to which you might aspire.

TERMINUS