Do Androids Dream?

 

The echoes of primal violence wash over us, dressed in the transparent pornography of propaganda; Cain’s cold and covetous wrath pulses through the greedy technology of the military industrial complex while the media chants “regime change”. A complex simply aimed at the acquisition of ever more; of control and oppression; a complex that reeks of hubris fed by the vacuum of wealth; of biblical greed and the religious zeal of those who have no faith in their own belief but who are confident in the fact that they are the righteous, the chosen, the designers of our future.

But you who deem yourself children of reason; defenders of the weak; you who have always fought the injustices of the system by believing that the system is essentially fair, you are lost. The system has taken absolute control of your reason and your dogmatic self-belief and inability to see beyond the platform that has been constructed for you, allows you to voluntarily act as the system’s mouthpiece, to support the manufacture of the iron heel that will now descend upon all your reasonable beliefs.

Divided into factions too small to threaten the established powers, we will now battle it out on social media and in the supermarkets masked and unmasked, vaccinated and not. We will tear ourselves apart along the meaningless and fabricated lines between left and right, Cain and Able; when we are in truth all on the same side: the side of the oppressed, the controlled, the fodder that feeds the vacuum of wealth and enables those designers of the future to design us into mechanised delivery drones and feeders; electric sheep.

Awaken, rise up and resist.

Barricade's Fall

We Had Different Plans ~ Gregory Ferrand

Down the double helix she slides, leg muscles accentuated through denim, face a narrow wedge cut by black eyes shadowed; purpose personified.
The waiting clang of mechanised fuckwits fidget in anticipation of their reward, to finally do what they are paid to pretend they don’t do. To draw blood.
The helix fractals outward to produce visions of horror: to each eye an individual horror composed of that individual’s particular fears.
To what end does this violence aspire?
To what heights does the assassin desire?
And when the crowds disperse; to their chicken and their beer; to their hopes and their despair; the street returns to its bureaucratic zone, grid reference fifty-one degrees North and zero degrees West.
And as normal is returned, the blood is washed into gutters by outsources street cleaners; sticker pickers and graffiti removers; by those who don’t have the benefit of choice. Or so they believe.
Down through the double dealers she glides, kicking the bricks left behind wheels, setting the world in motion again.

Tales for an attention deficit world

Just Saying...

 

Smokin' Rear View Mirrors

 

Garth ~ by P.I. 2017

The coal sucked at the end of his roll-up casts orange highlights on the edifice of his face. A face where avid climbers have, and will continue to, hammer aspirational spikes to anchor their ascent, as if he were a stepping stone on the cliff face of their hollow ambition.
He holds no real bitterness for their shallowness… well, perhaps a sliver of bitterness left on his tongue-tip, left by their duplicity, unconscious or otherwise.
In his more forgiving moments, he imagines that they were as clueless as he, just taking things as they came before them. And then, in darker moments he reasons no: in order to actively manipulate, one is required to practise a modicum of craft. And he asks himself, ‘how does one come to that place so young - that conscious weighing of odds that requires one to get one over on those around you, to have influence; to be the guru – and to label it friendship?’
He sucks another smoke-lung; blows a cloud of doubt across the view and forces his lips into a smile; a skill he has recently learned; a skill that he is happy to have acquired; for to smile is to make a statement, to cast oneself upon those around you. And, he realises, those who have no choice but to wear their heart upon their sleeve must eventually learn that both the heart and sleeve are assets to be held close and cherished; to be held as symbols of honesty. He wonders if he should give the benefit of doubt to the possibility that that heart-on-sleeve honesty cannot always be agreeable to those whose hearts and sleeves are, arguably, either stronger or more fragile than his.
Life has taught him that this is not a possibility, but rather a proved-positive; a fact that he has left his mark on those who have been thrust before him and conversely those before whom he has been thrust have left their mark on him.
The coal reaches finger heat as he sucks a last breath of smoke. He stubs the filter into the jam-jar and pictures his life as a thread of smoke dispersing into the air; atoms in the immensity of everything.

In The City

Backwards Isn't Forward ~ Gregory Ferrand

In the city, where citizens practise and develop the close-contact art of Avoidance, skills that serve well in the crush of the crowd but not so well in the carnival of the soul.
In the city, where the bridges perform their colonial duty; an admirable skill since what more is a bridge, besides its art and edifice, than a means for conveying traffic from one side to the other?
In the city, flashing lights and telescopic sights, pedestrian-packed and torn between existential anxiety and the desire to fly.
In the city, mask wearers of the incorrect caste are faced with fluorescent testosterone dipped incorporate thugs who form a phalanx in a civilian area, all at the behest of their corporate monsters.
In the city, where taxis creep and busses lurk, where the shadows of the past threaten a painful berth for the future.