Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Canary Warp
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
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
Saturday, November 26, 2011
In the Belly of the Whale
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.
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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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Head
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
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
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Children In Deed
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
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
Friday, November 18, 2011
John Smith & Anna-Marie
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 launch, John Smith thinks perhaps he too would have volunteered as a Candidate for the New; would give himself to oblivion or failing that bear the risk of leaving his empty husk to dance the decaying streets with all the other Deadman;
But he’s no Deadman and the empty hours, perverse in their arcane clockwork, demand filling. So he spends his days in the books, venturing out only to scavenge 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.
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 his wake as he threads his needle-nosed way toward the decidedly past-prime botanical gardens at the centre of Colonel Lombard Park.
Loosely animated and stop-frame jagged, he passes the long empty animal house; a cross-hatched sketch of shadows and bars; and in passing, all stick-man thin and acute angles, he encounters 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, unrecognisable in his disguise, and his usual response is to ignore her advances, but this evening, something in her silhouetted against the ruins of the animal house’s spouting vines and over-ambitious weeds proclaims something different; a beginning in a time wrought with endings - he relents to engage with her.
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.”
The air is thick with suspended solids, galaxies and stars that clog the rag that John Smith wears across the lower half of his face both as disguise and as filter; experience has taught him that to be recognised is to incur the weight of blame for the state MantraRay and indeed, for the quality-less lives of the planet’s residents, besides which there is the added threat of the mad priest rumoured to scour the streets for converts.
John nods his consent and Anne-Marie follows as he slinks past the skeletal conservatory, whose glass is long lost, frame held together by molecular habit since all scientific proof of its solidity has long been banished by the rages of time and global catastrophe.
John’s glasses mask his eyes with a reflection of the fires set there to allay the onslaught of the night by vagrant Deadmen unlucky enough to yet possess some semblance of thought.
Anna-Marie follows John Smith across the tracks while, from a window in The Great Station Hall, DeSandro Bien is vaguely distracted from his duties by their passing.
But he’s no Deadman and the empty hours, perverse in their arcane clockwork, demand filling. So he spends his days in the books, venturing out only to scavenge 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.
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 his wake as he threads his needle-nosed way toward the decidedly past-prime botanical gardens at the centre of Colonel Lombard Park.
Loosely animated and stop-frame jagged, he passes the long empty animal house; a cross-hatched sketch of shadows and bars; and in passing, all stick-man thin and acute angles, he encounters 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, unrecognisable in his disguise, and his usual response is to ignore her advances, but this evening, something in her silhouetted against the ruins of the animal house’s spouting vines and over-ambitious weeds proclaims something different; a beginning in a time wrought with endings - he relents to engage with her.
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.”
The air is thick with suspended solids, galaxies and stars that clog the rag that John Smith wears across the lower half of his face both as disguise and as filter; experience has taught him that to be recognised is to incur the weight of blame for the state MantraRay and indeed, for the quality-less lives of the planet’s residents, besides which there is the added threat of the mad priest rumoured to scour the streets for converts.
John nods his consent and Anne-Marie follows as he slinks past the skeletal conservatory, whose glass is long lost, frame held together by molecular habit since all scientific proof of its solidity has long been banished by the rages of time and global catastrophe.
John’s glasses mask his eyes with a reflection of the fires set there to allay the onslaught of the night by vagrant Deadmen unlucky enough to yet possess some semblance of thought.
Anna-Marie follows John Smith across the tracks while, from a window in The Great Station Hall, DeSandro Bien is vaguely distracted from his duties by their passing.
| Back | Chapter Index | Forward |
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Stardust Memory
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
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
Friday, November 11, 2011
11.11.11
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
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
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Zealot
penumbra . 3
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.
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.
| Back | Chapter Index | Forward |
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Nightwork
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
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
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