For those of you who like David Lynch films, and especially those of you who don't, have a look at his art and this very cool website [takes a tiny moment to load as high-res images etc].
David Lynch: Genius Par Excellence?
For those of you who like David Lynch films, and especially those of you who don't, have a look at his art and this very cool website [takes a tiny moment to load as high-res images etc].
Aspects of Infinity
I
I remember how it all began, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was a fine morning, crisp & cold, but full of sun. I woke up to the sound of angels playing music in my ears. I can’t be sure of their instruments, although they made the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. I couldn’t see, my bedroom was filled with a blinding white light, the only sense I had was one of sound. I lay motionless in my bed, the waves of crystal light & symphony pervading my every pore. I was a blank canvas as the sounds began to shape the very fabric of my being. Through the lucid choir of nothingness came a word & with it followed another:
‘Rise’, it whispered, as if a breeze.
‘Rise up & face the day for your life has ceased. Your new life is just beginning . . .’
I awoke again, yet unsure of if I had ever been asleep.
It is cold tonight. The streets are quiet for once, that ‘feeling’ is not there, for the moment. Everything is so still & pristine. My breath fogs in front of me, a backdrop of black night. Cold O cold, yes warmth – that is what I need. Three coats over rough layers of cloth. I feel like a freakish character in a Brueghel painting.
Another memory stabs my eyes – a feeling comes running at me, then disappears with my steaming breath into the night. Ice has covered everything; shards & sheets of crystal light illuminate the dark.
The cracks are more visible tonight; under stark streetlight, gaping splits filled with phosphorescent light that weep & spew forth into the black shadows.
There is nowhere to hide.
If there is nowhere to go where it is warm, then there is always the cemetery. Earth always offers sanctuary, so softer & more welcoming than the hard bed of concrete. A manhole cover beckons from behind a tomb; we scurry like diseased rats in burrowed warrens beneath the poisoned city, deep within its gut, beneath the rivers & the broken factories. The steaming creeks & rivers above, lap the earth from their banks. Pulling the blistered blanket of glass up, as its wake rocks & stirs our consciousness from mournful sleep & ritualistic instinct. We realise that if we were to be dead --- we would be, yet, we are all drowned . . .
White begins to stain the night as we sleep.
II
We stopped for a while; the others went to forage for maps & food. I rested on a huge marble step that stretched its cold form out for a mile. The building, hovering over me above, would’ve welcomed Alexander’s drunken torch. Persia never looked so grand & diseased at the same time as this mortuary – huge space cobbled with grey stone. The other surrounding buildings scrawled like feverish charcoal monoliths, deep shadows frame the cold snow of their architecture.
I sit alone on these steps.
I watch the cold clouds reiterate above the grey skyline.
There is no blank canvas. Tabula Rasa.
Everything is a colour.
Everything is a word.
I cannot help but interpret & participate in this infinite moment. This morning froze me; snapped me from a dream of thirteen faces — none of which were mine. What is neutral in this God-forsaken world?
I have a new found faith in sleep that serves me well for everything. Shuts my eyes as light as a thief’s, yet still lets me live when I wake. This I find quite amusing. & here we now stand, on the edge of the hill above the dirty little town where I was born. Looking across the black abyss to the thrashing, heaving, mass-molecules of space & time, bursting & splashing the city lights.
O where do we go from here?
What will the skies bring us tonight?
We thirteen seekers of the truth, who were once slaves of sin, now stand with countenance & fortitude amongst the teeming hordes of brutish defilers. We think of nothing but the goal that never lets us know its name & in that coveted mystery, we find assurance & spiritual strength. Like Lazarus, we have risen from pools of blood & death to walk amongst the living dead, to have some purpose totally foreign from that of this world. We sight our ships to sea just to have them crushed by quick waves. Others abort the vessel falling fallen while we fall, we set our sights to land & catapult an anchor plated with the fear of missing the mark. We know however, that where it scalps a patch of earth, we may as well dig a place & in it lay our skeletal frames – watching the moon spin off, far away, to an inconceivable distance as steaming black sod frames then blocks the final vision.
In a damp cavern beneath the border, we seek & find temporary sanctuary. Food is shared & words are said; you step from the shadows into the fold of the family. Warm light dances off the sloping dust caked walls. An orange aura fills the chamber & shadows play out their grotesque pantomimes of murder on the walls, but your silhouette is beautiful yet transparent. The reflection of the flame burns brightly in your eyes tonight & I see a hunger there so deep. I feel your skin so warm your touch like silk lips so you who hypnotise like a home welcome me into your arms once again & again & for a brief instant, I am human again. I pledge my undying love to you & everyone as we twirl like dervish dancers begging for alms of love in worlds of pure white neutrality untainted by freedom as we melt sun with the sky to burn bloom buy our place with what & all we’ve got, which is not much.
My hands do not feel your memory.
My eyes see you in everything . . .
In various sorrows, blizzards begin above the ground. Grinding sand & shingle down the dark corridor toward our empty shelter. To blow the bells & ring the chimes of you, burning pyre-like in my flaming chest, I must climb the highest mountain.
I must record the journey & events of the hours & days to come.
I must record your beauty & your twisted ugliness as detailed & as infinitely as I can, with the last drop of blood as my ink. My heart houses the flint you struck; to live is to die tonight & every lost night from now.
I must record your dying history – your progress, your decay, your thwarted attempts to claim new worlds . . .
everything.
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major - Andante
III
A new day & we brush the ash & dust from our eyes & hair. Our black overcoats increasingly stiffen from the shed skin follicles of her Malthusian moulting, which stick like mortician’s wax with every warm breeze of her dying breath. The sun is purple & fills the tangerine hued sky. Its burning eminence pockets the loose change of oxygen, its twisting smile creases, dazzling. We lower our welding masks & shuffle dust clouds off through the churning ghost dance of the early morning day. From half awake to suddenly wide awake, almost – a lucid kind-of light licks our flesh. It is hard not to forget the ancient promise of real rain --- crystal clear water that is sweet & liquid wet.
O to taste the diamond drops of moisture!
What a bastard of a shadow of a dream!
This is the time when a mind eraser could be put to good use.
We all wish that we could die.
Last night I had a nightmare, my memory recorded my thoughts. It started with a noise & then language became apparent. Words crawl like pulsing worms from my mouth. Naked.
All naked we are nude & nice now in the slow fetid time of a clock no longer tick tock tick tock . . . Rain falling, like dead sparrows on the roof. So loud & thudding, the water-drops as big as bombs. If you had a weak thin neck, it would snap with their pummelling weight. Old trees cracking twigs arthritic limbs frozen air freezing flays flesh off bare cheeks. Wind whipping strop’s slap acid sand grates. Breathless. Diseases abound to burrow faster, yet still we stand & breathe the foul air.
All around – beautiful vampires.
Red lips platinum hair ghost skin yellow tongues lick black teeth.
Everything surrounds & squeezes back – large machines enlarging . . .
Everything is a word, but I can’t shake the fact that words are so meaningless, in the face of such events.
I want to wake up.
We have ploughed our fields with streets, planted them with ugly tombs of concrete instead of fruit trees. The separation is evident; the direction misunderstood. We the unwilling are urged to remain seated ‘til the show is over. Is there any one with just cause why this marriage should be over, speak up now or forever hold your peace in check? Throw twenty different objects together & try to stack them up; a triangular structure is the only form withstanding. Who is at the top? How soon before the objects beneath collapse or eject from the equation? Who ploughs the field does the sowing, yet who is it that reaps & rapes the rewards of our toil?
The separation is evident.
On my way through the smashed suburbs, I saw a clothesline swaying in the cold warm wind, a single tall stick, a rake that strongly held the weight of the world above its rigid head. The pole pushes piles of christened ragged clothes into the wind. It flaps the wet wrinkles of the clothes dry, impregnates their nature to rub against skin. The pole sways privately. Ticking off the time, a pendulous metronome, & supporting it all a blue line & the breeze. The rigid rake has kept its place actively alive by its still & unwavering disposition. By its silence.
It feels like autumn now, but the seasons are all mad & messed up.
Burning bark smells like cinnamon sometimes, right now it smells like burning bark. The tree’s on fire – the last of them, on this dying street clogged with floating embers & curling balloons of smoke. All the ghosts stand in the mist smoke in silent chastity & broken innocence, shivering at the sight of the steel scythe blade of the reaper. Some peel in fright like snakes, others shed leaves like scales & skin – matt-finished minnows fall – sardines litter the ochre smoky floor; quite hot, then cold blue haze blankets everything & we drift off toward our destination.
Towards redemption, or just another aspect of infinity?
IV
A three storied building offers sanctuary from the searing elements for a while, affording us a vantage point from which to spy all other travellers & assassins. Cold hard concrete swells & sweats its broken crumbling walls under the midday sun. We take turns on watch. I meditate in a quiet corner in the dark – waiting for a sign, a map, a pineapple, a hole in the clouds . . . sleep. The others try to sleep; stirring occasionally, humming, reciting lost songs & poetry, drawing crude figures & signs on the scarred walls. After seven hours, I rise refreshed & wary of the indigo night that is now upon us. I climb the outside window fire-escape ladder, hanging out over the litter-strewn footpath below. The simmering night fluctuates in temperature. All is silent save for a warm breeze brushing between my ear & the wall of the building. The yellow moon is huge & seems to be gaining ground with every revolution, its eerie light casting a sickly glow of gold over the jagged geometry of lower downtown Knotterdam.
From out behind a dead store scurries one of the first mutants we see on our odyssey. He scuttles along on his gammy leg. He looks like he is trying to leg-over a short fence, dragging his idle leg then kind of flipping it to limp along on.
From out behind shadows & shapes, emerge the blackened faces of children.
Screaming with insane mirth & laughter like small dancing skeletons, the children surround their prey like rodents around a corpse. He occupies their ebbing worlds as a target for stones & short relief from their surroundings. His hunched body burns with words, rocks, & perverted piercing stares. Looking up bent over, his face twisted in shadow, he shudders & flops faster to outrun gregarious gazes & the pelting assault of creatures more mindless than he. It gets too much sometimes, in fact all the time, the throwing about of his cumbersome cage. The frustration of a life not knowing why, but most of all it gets too much, because of them. They hate him, they always have, & they follow him wherever he goes. Crying now & limping as fast as he cannot go, he falls down, curls up, in the black dismissal of the world.
I can hear his pathetic moans from the rooftop.
He is sobbing & calling “Esmeralda? Esmeralda? I hang my head with the weight of shame just as the weight of your natural & cumbersome form hung you. Come back to me my love. Come back, to me . . .”
A piece of brick flies from the dark, knocking a splash of blood from his swollen forehead. He lies back & stares at the moon glistening in his weeping eyes, his arm raised, fingers moving in silent appeal. In the pain of difference & of hurt, & of being very much alone, he succumbs to the world around him. The ground flattens & swallows his twisted form, the black asphalt pulsing like a heartbeat – each swell inhaling, gulping.
A bony arm remains, elbow high above the ground. In the sick light, it looks like a withered fire hydrant. The fingers still writhe & click, their lumpy knuckles turn & crack, the torn shirtsleeve slides down the twitching forearm.
From the dark realms of a narrow alley, the squeak of pedals, chain, spokes & bell resounds. In slow moving motion, a child on a bike floats across the stage of the street. The child’s head is a balloon – a balloon with huge wide staring black pupils for eyes, button nose upturned, all framed in an ivory countenance as polished as a marble basin. His small arm swinging in timeless motion, it seems to swell & elongate like sharpened bone. I watch his small arm swinging as he pedals, the other hand steering his mechanical vessel. In his toy hand, his hand, he holds a thin shiny curved blade – a scythe glistening like a diamond in the shadows, a razor sharp scythe tinkling off the road, small red sparks dancing behind the black tyres of his bike.
The hand & muscle of the exposed arm is lined up by the boy’s front bike tyre. The arm suddenly stands still & tall like a heron on alert, as if aware of its approaching foe, trapped in a quagmire trying to free its tethered form. The boy peddles pedals pedals faster faster, breath puffing in small red clouds of dust from his sneering wee mouth. The white bony arm wriggling above the asphalt, fingers clenching unclenching as if trying to scream. The boy’s strange arm upraised now, blade in hand sharp, arm – a swinging arc down & . . . SCHLOCKKK . . .
The moon silhouettes the spinning arm clutching at arm & then disappearing past the window of the light of the moon. The boy tilts his huge head back, laughs, swallows & then blows perfect dust-red smoke rings at the night’s weird sky. I look down at the scene, all actors disappear now, as the swirling paper & dust in the gutters of the street stop their discontented stirring. The breeze dissipates, comets stop their blazing trails across the sky, & everything is so quite. I lean back on the wall of the balcony of the roof & slowly let my knees give out under my weight – goodnight sick moon.
Good night.
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat Major, Op. 107 – Moderato.
V
We walk past a flickering transmitter, still crackling with stored power. Static burns the brain cells, buzzing constantly like electric fur brushed up the wrong way. The strange sensation of a foreign body invading every pore & cell. Its life force scratches neon graffiti on never-ending night while all around satellites spin above . . .
A message – another mountain to conquer.
How many days left?
Looking all the time for something that has always seen us, which we will never see, through this burgeoning haze of red dead solidity. O but now I’m letting my emotion override my sensibilities in my search for truth! But what is truth?
Of the heart?
The mind?
The soul?
& what are these names for these things, if such things even exist anyway . . .?
My heart is low, my mind weary, my spirit has wandered on ahead to scout safe passage for our advance, but it is not searching for mystery or treasure. Yet, I pray that it might find some, just something small. A glimmer of shining illusion that we may believe in, to get us through another day & night . . .
A common theme along our journey, that I find quite disturbing, is the pervading impressions of silence that pepper the day & night. It is a dripping tap – even the most subtle of words repeated enough, eventually drives to the point of distraction & attentions the prey. As a tiny twig, broken from a tree, that falls upon water makes ripples that echo its form. However, when such water is not calm, still a bigger branch with more substance is needed to create visible & audible impression. In these moments of absolute peace & lucidity, the shadow of death breathes its name in an epiphany of silence.
This morning, everything moves in slow motion. I awoke to see women beating slow tracks in beauty with leaves swirling at their heels touching sweet white feet. A moist caress glides in their perfumed surrealism. The summer sings optical promises; maybe everything will be all right?
Another vision of Mary – standing on the edge of the Black Forest on the fringe of the camp. An army of ghostly figures behind her, writhing in the mist & the damp leaves, waving slowly, translucently.
Her last good-byes seem forever cast in cold calculus, a flickering hologram.
Fantasien, Op. 116 – No. 7 Capriccio. Allegro agitato
VI
We found an old run-down cabin, just before dusk gave in to night, deep in the foothills of the mountain ranges. Windows doors grey walls torn. A fox skitters ‘round the room, sniffing trash, oblivious to our presence. Eye to eye rats in rafters, on mantle, windowsills, within walls – scratching, scratching, scratching through holes; standing still for slash of time, then off again. Seen sniffed snorted disappeared forgotten, room now empty save for moonlight.
The fireplace flickers, then explodes.
The whole broken brown-grey interior illumined, in all its decayed woody brilliance. The flame licked the cobwebs in the grate, blossoms crushing cellophane, sounds that burn sun-burst bright, engulfing envelopes stuffed with wads of cash & unforgettable memories, crackles to ash.
Then back-to-back black.
The visions are becoming stronger while our quest becomes more inconsequential. Nature is casting its archaic spell over our experience of things. We have all experienced a heightening of the senses; the smells of the deep woods & tumbling streams, the clarity of sight & hearing - a leaf so finely cut, a dry twig cracking under the hoof of one of the green deer sniffing the air ten miles downwind in the heart of the forest.
I remember a story that once captured my imagination – a poet at the end of his tether, frustrated with society & (ultimately) himself, walks into the foothills of a vast mountain range in the Americas with a loaded firearm.
No one ever sees him again, no body is ever found.
All he leaves behind are memories & a huge body of verse for the world to do with what it will. The forest has swallowed him; nature has enveloped his very being, distributed his atoms throughout the flora & fauna like so much mulch, & that’s all we are . . .
VII
The new day vivisects the dawn, another telegram from hell. Pressures of belief make for sacrifice of sleep --- relief, so hard to shake the madness of life from one’s head, without losing dreams . . . grown nurtured there, like lice they hunger, live upon ghosts, teasing & teeming rife with maddening proposals. Wet dam breaks, floods the soul, quenching fires of the fragile heart; blood ferries vessels of shrouded prayer, laps sides of narrow passage, ridges perched precarious --- shelter in the shadows, breeds clinging moss of time --- the dawn buries the dreams in thought, in matter, under the new day.
O thank god for the new day, today!
These small mercies are no mean feat, yet there is still a huge nagging doubt in my nature as to the effectiveness of petitioning the lord with prayer.
Another painful message came today; the great communicator speaks with no words so familiar. I placed the impulse with words so much softer than your cutting spiel of want. I would not hesitate to use you as such, mere words of my own writing, but you would let all of my blood become dust, leaving me dry with tears of loss like water.
A small stream seems to follow us just to remind me – where there was just flat baked dust & soil, a fissure appears & splits, widening as it fills with crystal water, tripping past my shambling leaded feet. It is quite all right to drink; in fact we are on agreement that it is perhaps the best water that we have ever tasted.
The sky parts its grey beard for a minute, yawning in bright disinterest & makes the dull colours glow, as they should, for the same amount of time. Flitting birds play & sing all that’s natural, the stream babbles wetly, tumbling quietly past us, leading us on into the unknown while the sun shines warmly --- paints everything still, so still & quiet for a minute.
I turn back in the grey, toward the valley below, to check the burning fires glowing as far as the horizon. Suddenly, a waddling duck jets its slick form out from the front of the burrowing stream; I grab its wet neck & wring the painful life from it.
We all have to remind ourselves every now & then that we are only human.
That we are still alive.
The river frogs choke the highway, croaking to the night.
& the rain it hammers down across the barren blue hue, in its shimmering sweeping black dress. Smoke-like clouds draped above the great flood of blood. Dawn cloud ingrained in this almighty time with blindness. It rained forever in the sweet south & sweet north & sweet east & bittersweet west. Sweat pearls run down my face. An almighty fine wine of the weeping sky falls down on old slumbering earth, snoring with the promise of the BIG sleep in Messianic night. Till that almighty river’s shining dawn & passage down stream turned big muddy, where the desert had been --- & Noah might’ve rowed on out from the banks of old earth . . .
If it hadn’t been another dream.
Near the camp, ripples on the surface of a nearby dam signalled the coming tide upstream as Salmon swam down-stream, furtively kissing the small insects from the mirrored surface of the sky.
We have to close our minds – we have learnt the laws of the forest – and we have to disintegrate our bodies in order to become part of the force of the storm. Resistance is futile & dangerous. The sun glows pale red through the silhouettes of the trees, as we trace its fall, cold sinks its blade a little deeper in the bone, shadows merge.
We build a small fire on the embers of yesterday’s.
The pine-needles pop & smoke, the twigs ignite & consume themselves, as the flame’s glow casts masks & dancing shadows across our pensive faces. We sip Rosemary tea from warm receptacles; steam curling from our breath, the forest is deathly quiet again save for a stirring breeze swaying the treetops. The chill air defies the approaching storm, the silver clouds above now iridescent in the blue moonlight; they accelerate across the grey plains of the night sky. As their speed becomes lost in the filling of the sky, the trees creak & drop branches & pine-cones from their thrashing limbs. Our fire is scattered, tumbling sparks flicker through the tumultuous bracken & undergrowth, as the wind’s momentous fury systematically attacks our camp.
Allegro con moto
VIII
I know now the third trouble has earnestly begun its unstoppable stoppage. From the wrong mountain that I had wasted three days & nights upon, answering question after question of my silent companions. To be skin-blackened in the blazing light until refuge in a crag brought my skull bloody pecks from all manner of winged creatures. I decided to descend, as I was told that this was not the very tall terrain that I should be on.
Coming down the mountain, I met a virgin who had children; her entourage were all weeping for their lives. I met a blind man who had vision, but no other sense at all. I met a poor man who had given all his wealth away & had nothing else to give anyone – no words, no hate, no nothing at all. The travel down was so much harder than the voyage up the mountain, despite the heavy load upon my weary shoulders. My twelve companions, light as they were; all grasping, clinging, like a thick ball of twitching twine coiled up across my creaking spine.
Coming down the mountain, I met a muse that could not play, sing, or impart gifts of inspiration. I met a clown that never laughed, but who had always been laughed at. I met a married man who had lost his ring deliberately amongst the stony slopes. Now on another mountain, we had ascended, amongst the ranges of the world. Up high on mountain peak, three days & three nights did curse me with its silence, yet the voices they were loud. A cold cave in crags of granite precipice did afford we with sublime providence & writing space in the dark. All about me ravens black & buzzards grey, haunted me with beady hungry stares, while forcing me into friendship with threats of violence & despair. I do not know, nor will I ever, the nature of those creatures that caricaturise the deformity of men.
Coming down the mountain, I was blinded by the brilliance; everything was crystal clear & held a lucid gold resilience. To my dismay, my vision could not offer me sanctuary of allegiance. Thrown from one apparition to spirit deed entrusted --- the golden glow endowed within, soon poisoned all, & ruptured shaking ground. Serenity of peace & mind madness breached the shrunk horizon.
I made retreat in haste & fear of all that I had witnessed.
A martyr's life, of seer & shaman, harnessed by the reins of Sodom.
To lead like the blind scout in disarray. To plot the paths through minefields olden laid, without map or guide to show the way for who has gone before, has gone without, to bleed for wounded souls their pain. To dance scarred by the acid rain's great rocks. To house the children evil shamed. To see the blind-man’s tortured fate, in beggar’s rags dressed with itching pestilence. To walk the paths with famine as my food, with death as my guide . . . I wove my bleeding heaving wretchedness, once again up the incline.
Were we ever going to find the answers for the great one – we were beginning to seriously doubt the validity of his requests?
IX
In my sleep, I had another dream.
Beneath the old sash window, someone had placed a mirror; it reached from the floor to the frame. Standing naked, head-less – it did not look like me, but then I’d only ever seen myself in reflection, so I presumed that it was. Outside, dry ochre fields – flat as sea – stretch away through & beyond defiant nets of fences. A black bull – horns, big polished lump of charcoal stares at me, snorting breath paints the window. He thinks that I have fresh blades of grass for his consumption, he is wrong. Its huge head adheres to my form, the cadence clear:
I rise to fall – the morning sun stains bronze, the birds song sounds of pipe & tambourine, minus my hands that now burn with the sun in this labyrinth of dawn. Seven figures shimmering with energy, atoms spinning in a spinning mass of form, one stood apart – more material & menacing than the others who had a certain kind of innocence in their immateriality.
Given eyes to see a world, we did & so we died. Hunger in the new night’s yawn we ate ferociously, like wolf cubs at mother’s milk, gorged pregnant with concrete fear.
It was all we could do to stay awake.
Now we are the infected.
Slippery tongues of crass old lands injected in our virgin veins, we have not even begun to begin to see the mud we stand in, to smell it as it is, to disregard its funerary qualities. Buried we have not begun to contemplate this place we are in, this rock we stand on. We see the ocean as a moat, as an eternity, between the setting sun & us. We do not feel the touch of waves all we see is all we are. The transcendence of time, irrelevant in its ticking hue, buoyant on its mocking grin -- grasped by none, aspired by some. It chatters – a bone wind-chime, cracking & tolling each short but endless passing of day. Impeccable revenge: in evanescence two pits dwell -- infinite charcoal voyeurs, watching, always waiting for you. For me . . .
Rain falls – ashen snow of sorts, trying hard to clean it only dissolves & steams. Evaporation leaves a hollow where there once was life. Time keeps ticking off itself, so do we too bring intonation to ourselves.
As we have done, so shall be done to no one, but unto ourselves . . .
What is this place on which I stand?
What is this place in which I dwell?
Is this thought naught but a smell, of what has always been that is not seen? Consummation has stamped its seal on everything, long dead & buried – who wields the stamp with such intent?
Who creased the seal on our bent backs?
Who gave us these dead eyes?
Adagio – Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 10
X
Inside the enclosure, they gave us a street to play with. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were there though.
We worked hard while some fell down; they were not picked up.
We became one, so they said.
Our liberty monopolised, streamlined, they said.
Then came the virus. No fence could keep it out. They contained it well, the chosen few were made to survive, you see, they needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure. Suicide – the only sin-filled option.
The wicked city sleeps for a second as the sun comes up sleuths with blind obedience & subtle reward the day blinks & is gone – swallowed by itself we float like zombies bittersweet voodoo magnet – implants its claws in our broken backs toward the neon grin great endless inanity of night pulls to begin in earnest the spade breaks the earth’s skin our quest for delight knows no bounds for fools streetlight sings & slaps the cruising cars like bleeding sunshine shards through weeping tree-lined avenues the cumbersome concrete breaks another face upon goose-steps – goose-steps, across & over while the black mirrored glass of her evening bodice entices the swirling mutants who stumble & ripple with vanity & the tease of undress winding – winding in & out through cavities like a cancer as the darkness covets the flight of our souls & soon, as ghosts, we echo & return with another tattoo from the city’s sin emporium.
Journey we go, into a place where lost buildings of time stack against each other in a delicate city of memories. Walking these barren streets, searching for hidden clues, we get lost in the quest of looking for answers to the future, in the gloomy & poisonous back streets of the past. Black galloping pillows of cloud; hasten like advancing sentries of night against the grey sky, proclaiming: the ferocious almighty thunderheads, glory, blossom, & stab the tender side of the West. The East’s long sabre draws out & twists, spilling gushing blankets of deep, deep maroon over mortal Earth.
Casting great floods to the West.
Decaying plagues shall ravage the North; moreover, famine bleeds dry the South’s cold haven as the East, connotes slow suicide in its prophetic insane seclusion. Green stems from the grey & all the glass age redeems itself back to the crimson beaches, whence it came.
Always hunting, without knowing, for the three properties of motion: the beginning, the middle, & the end.
Life, death, fire, water, earth & ocean.
Bringing in the space of the old: the new.
The idea, the propulsion, the result is seen in all things.
Cause, effect, & result of the action, is a troublesome discourse, when the end is ultimately commotion, destruction . . .
XI
What is acquired at birth falls back to more pure & honest beginnings.
This burgeoning & ever-present death is not really our creation, but more like God’s . . . or something else. Nature does not concern itself with our presence, or the way we practice genocide, murder, rape, cannibalism, & sacrilege. For a while, we lived inside an enclosure in which they gave us a street to play with.
We saw everything, as did the third eye.
There was an uneasy calm about the place. No one spoke. Outside the walls, disease marched across the west desert scratching its long black fingernails along the high tin fence. The fossils that controlled the place stood around nervously; clad in leather jump-suits, their white faces glowing like light-bulbs in blackened sockets, obese ink-pot bodies swelling & twitching at the sounds of the scratching screams, the bloody baseball bats twirling anxiously in their podgy dough claws. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were always there – our imprisoners.
We worked hard as did the other broken bodies. Some fell down, they were not picked up, we saw it all & still the statues rise to meet the falling sky. We became one at that stage so they said; that point between death & beyond or something like that? Our liberty monopolised, ‘streamlined,’ so they said. Then came the virus, no fence could keep it out but the ones that stood tall around the cities contained it well.
Soon the chosen few were made to survive.
They needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. . . & that was then, this is now. It all collapsed beneath the onslaught of the natural night. We tried to forget that place, but for some inexplicable reason it was photographically tattooed on our internal vision.
We could not shake it.
Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure – acceptance, honesty, awareness, and encompassment.
Aspects of infinity.
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor – Rondo-Finale. Allegro
I remember how it all began, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was a fine morning, crisp & cold, but full of sun. I woke up to the sound of angels playing music in my ears. I can’t be sure of their instruments, although they made the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. I couldn’t see, my bedroom was filled with a blinding white light, the only sense I had was one of sound. I lay motionless in my bed, the waves of crystal light & symphony pervading my every pore. I was a blank canvas as the sounds began to shape the very fabric of my being. Through the lucid choir of nothingness came a word & with it followed another:
‘Rise’, it whispered, as if a breeze.
‘Rise up & face the day for your life has ceased. Your new life is just beginning . . .’
I awoke again, yet unsure of if I had ever been asleep.
It is cold tonight. The streets are quiet for once, that ‘feeling’ is not there, for the moment. Everything is so still & pristine. My breath fogs in front of me, a backdrop of black night. Cold O cold, yes warmth – that is what I need. Three coats over rough layers of cloth. I feel like a freakish character in a Brueghel painting.
Another memory stabs my eyes – a feeling comes running at me, then disappears with my steaming breath into the night. Ice has covered everything; shards & sheets of crystal light illuminate the dark.
The cracks are more visible tonight; under stark streetlight, gaping splits filled with phosphorescent light that weep & spew forth into the black shadows.
There is nowhere to hide.
If there is nowhere to go where it is warm, then there is always the cemetery. Earth always offers sanctuary, so softer & more welcoming than the hard bed of concrete. A manhole cover beckons from behind a tomb; we scurry like diseased rats in burrowed warrens beneath the poisoned city, deep within its gut, beneath the rivers & the broken factories. The steaming creeks & rivers above, lap the earth from their banks. Pulling the blistered blanket of glass up, as its wake rocks & stirs our consciousness from mournful sleep & ritualistic instinct. We realise that if we were to be dead --- we would be, yet, we are all drowned . . .
White begins to stain the night as we sleep.
II
We stopped for a while; the others went to forage for maps & food. I rested on a huge marble step that stretched its cold form out for a mile. The building, hovering over me above, would’ve welcomed Alexander’s drunken torch. Persia never looked so grand & diseased at the same time as this mortuary – huge space cobbled with grey stone. The other surrounding buildings scrawled like feverish charcoal monoliths, deep shadows frame the cold snow of their architecture.
I sit alone on these steps.
I watch the cold clouds reiterate above the grey skyline.
There is no blank canvas. Tabula Rasa.
Everything is a colour.
Everything is a word.
I cannot help but interpret & participate in this infinite moment. This morning froze me; snapped me from a dream of thirteen faces — none of which were mine. What is neutral in this God-forsaken world?
I have a new found faith in sleep that serves me well for everything. Shuts my eyes as light as a thief’s, yet still lets me live when I wake. This I find quite amusing. & here we now stand, on the edge of the hill above the dirty little town where I was born. Looking across the black abyss to the thrashing, heaving, mass-molecules of space & time, bursting & splashing the city lights.
O where do we go from here?
What will the skies bring us tonight?
We thirteen seekers of the truth, who were once slaves of sin, now stand with countenance & fortitude amongst the teeming hordes of brutish defilers. We think of nothing but the goal that never lets us know its name & in that coveted mystery, we find assurance & spiritual strength. Like Lazarus, we have risen from pools of blood & death to walk amongst the living dead, to have some purpose totally foreign from that of this world. We sight our ships to sea just to have them crushed by quick waves. Others abort the vessel falling fallen while we fall, we set our sights to land & catapult an anchor plated with the fear of missing the mark. We know however, that where it scalps a patch of earth, we may as well dig a place & in it lay our skeletal frames – watching the moon spin off, far away, to an inconceivable distance as steaming black sod frames then blocks the final vision.
In a damp cavern beneath the border, we seek & find temporary sanctuary. Food is shared & words are said; you step from the shadows into the fold of the family. Warm light dances off the sloping dust caked walls. An orange aura fills the chamber & shadows play out their grotesque pantomimes of murder on the walls, but your silhouette is beautiful yet transparent. The reflection of the flame burns brightly in your eyes tonight & I see a hunger there so deep. I feel your skin so warm your touch like silk lips so you who hypnotise like a home welcome me into your arms once again & again & for a brief instant, I am human again. I pledge my undying love to you & everyone as we twirl like dervish dancers begging for alms of love in worlds of pure white neutrality untainted by freedom as we melt sun with the sky to burn bloom buy our place with what & all we’ve got, which is not much.
My hands do not feel your memory.
My eyes see you in everything . . .
In various sorrows, blizzards begin above the ground. Grinding sand & shingle down the dark corridor toward our empty shelter. To blow the bells & ring the chimes of you, burning pyre-like in my flaming chest, I must climb the highest mountain.
I must record the journey & events of the hours & days to come.
I must record your beauty & your twisted ugliness as detailed & as infinitely as I can, with the last drop of blood as my ink. My heart houses the flint you struck; to live is to die tonight & every lost night from now.
I must record your dying history – your progress, your decay, your thwarted attempts to claim new worlds . . .
everything.
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major - Andante
III
A new day & we brush the ash & dust from our eyes & hair. Our black overcoats increasingly stiffen from the shed skin follicles of her Malthusian moulting, which stick like mortician’s wax with every warm breeze of her dying breath. The sun is purple & fills the tangerine hued sky. Its burning eminence pockets the loose change of oxygen, its twisting smile creases, dazzling. We lower our welding masks & shuffle dust clouds off through the churning ghost dance of the early morning day. From half awake to suddenly wide awake, almost – a lucid kind-of light licks our flesh. It is hard not to forget the ancient promise of real rain --- crystal clear water that is sweet & liquid wet.
O to taste the diamond drops of moisture!
What a bastard of a shadow of a dream!
This is the time when a mind eraser could be put to good use.
We all wish that we could die.
Last night I had a nightmare, my memory recorded my thoughts. It started with a noise & then language became apparent. Words crawl like pulsing worms from my mouth. Naked.
All naked we are nude & nice now in the slow fetid time of a clock no longer tick tock tick tock . . . Rain falling, like dead sparrows on the roof. So loud & thudding, the water-drops as big as bombs. If you had a weak thin neck, it would snap with their pummelling weight. Old trees cracking twigs arthritic limbs frozen air freezing flays flesh off bare cheeks. Wind whipping strop’s slap acid sand grates. Breathless. Diseases abound to burrow faster, yet still we stand & breathe the foul air.
All around – beautiful vampires.
Red lips platinum hair ghost skin yellow tongues lick black teeth.
Everything surrounds & squeezes back – large machines enlarging . . .
Everything is a word, but I can’t shake the fact that words are so meaningless, in the face of such events.
I want to wake up.
We have ploughed our fields with streets, planted them with ugly tombs of concrete instead of fruit trees. The separation is evident; the direction misunderstood. We the unwilling are urged to remain seated ‘til the show is over. Is there any one with just cause why this marriage should be over, speak up now or forever hold your peace in check? Throw twenty different objects together & try to stack them up; a triangular structure is the only form withstanding. Who is at the top? How soon before the objects beneath collapse or eject from the equation? Who ploughs the field does the sowing, yet who is it that reaps & rapes the rewards of our toil?
The separation is evident.
On my way through the smashed suburbs, I saw a clothesline swaying in the cold warm wind, a single tall stick, a rake that strongly held the weight of the world above its rigid head. The pole pushes piles of christened ragged clothes into the wind. It flaps the wet wrinkles of the clothes dry, impregnates their nature to rub against skin. The pole sways privately. Ticking off the time, a pendulous metronome, & supporting it all a blue line & the breeze. The rigid rake has kept its place actively alive by its still & unwavering disposition. By its silence.
It feels like autumn now, but the seasons are all mad & messed up.
Burning bark smells like cinnamon sometimes, right now it smells like burning bark. The tree’s on fire – the last of them, on this dying street clogged with floating embers & curling balloons of smoke. All the ghosts stand in the mist smoke in silent chastity & broken innocence, shivering at the sight of the steel scythe blade of the reaper. Some peel in fright like snakes, others shed leaves like scales & skin – matt-finished minnows fall – sardines litter the ochre smoky floor; quite hot, then cold blue haze blankets everything & we drift off toward our destination.
Towards redemption, or just another aspect of infinity?
IV
A three storied building offers sanctuary from the searing elements for a while, affording us a vantage point from which to spy all other travellers & assassins. Cold hard concrete swells & sweats its broken crumbling walls under the midday sun. We take turns on watch. I meditate in a quiet corner in the dark – waiting for a sign, a map, a pineapple, a hole in the clouds . . . sleep. The others try to sleep; stirring occasionally, humming, reciting lost songs & poetry, drawing crude figures & signs on the scarred walls. After seven hours, I rise refreshed & wary of the indigo night that is now upon us. I climb the outside window fire-escape ladder, hanging out over the litter-strewn footpath below. The simmering night fluctuates in temperature. All is silent save for a warm breeze brushing between my ear & the wall of the building. The yellow moon is huge & seems to be gaining ground with every revolution, its eerie light casting a sickly glow of gold over the jagged geometry of lower downtown Knotterdam.
From out behind a dead store scurries one of the first mutants we see on our odyssey. He scuttles along on his gammy leg. He looks like he is trying to leg-over a short fence, dragging his idle leg then kind of flipping it to limp along on.
From out behind shadows & shapes, emerge the blackened faces of children.
Screaming with insane mirth & laughter like small dancing skeletons, the children surround their prey like rodents around a corpse. He occupies their ebbing worlds as a target for stones & short relief from their surroundings. His hunched body burns with words, rocks, & perverted piercing stares. Looking up bent over, his face twisted in shadow, he shudders & flops faster to outrun gregarious gazes & the pelting assault of creatures more mindless than he. It gets too much sometimes, in fact all the time, the throwing about of his cumbersome cage. The frustration of a life not knowing why, but most of all it gets too much, because of them. They hate him, they always have, & they follow him wherever he goes. Crying now & limping as fast as he cannot go, he falls down, curls up, in the black dismissal of the world.
I can hear his pathetic moans from the rooftop.
He is sobbing & calling “Esmeralda? Esmeralda? I hang my head with the weight of shame just as the weight of your natural & cumbersome form hung you. Come back to me my love. Come back, to me . . .”
A piece of brick flies from the dark, knocking a splash of blood from his swollen forehead. He lies back & stares at the moon glistening in his weeping eyes, his arm raised, fingers moving in silent appeal. In the pain of difference & of hurt, & of being very much alone, he succumbs to the world around him. The ground flattens & swallows his twisted form, the black asphalt pulsing like a heartbeat – each swell inhaling, gulping.
A bony arm remains, elbow high above the ground. In the sick light, it looks like a withered fire hydrant. The fingers still writhe & click, their lumpy knuckles turn & crack, the torn shirtsleeve slides down the twitching forearm.
From the dark realms of a narrow alley, the squeak of pedals, chain, spokes & bell resounds. In slow moving motion, a child on a bike floats across the stage of the street. The child’s head is a balloon – a balloon with huge wide staring black pupils for eyes, button nose upturned, all framed in an ivory countenance as polished as a marble basin. His small arm swinging in timeless motion, it seems to swell & elongate like sharpened bone. I watch his small arm swinging as he pedals, the other hand steering his mechanical vessel. In his toy hand, his hand, he holds a thin shiny curved blade – a scythe glistening like a diamond in the shadows, a razor sharp scythe tinkling off the road, small red sparks dancing behind the black tyres of his bike.
The hand & muscle of the exposed arm is lined up by the boy’s front bike tyre. The arm suddenly stands still & tall like a heron on alert, as if aware of its approaching foe, trapped in a quagmire trying to free its tethered form. The boy peddles pedals pedals faster faster, breath puffing in small red clouds of dust from his sneering wee mouth. The white bony arm wriggling above the asphalt, fingers clenching unclenching as if trying to scream. The boy’s strange arm upraised now, blade in hand sharp, arm – a swinging arc down & . . . SCHLOCKKK . . .
The moon silhouettes the spinning arm clutching at arm & then disappearing past the window of the light of the moon. The boy tilts his huge head back, laughs, swallows & then blows perfect dust-red smoke rings at the night’s weird sky. I look down at the scene, all actors disappear now, as the swirling paper & dust in the gutters of the street stop their discontented stirring. The breeze dissipates, comets stop their blazing trails across the sky, & everything is so quite. I lean back on the wall of the balcony of the roof & slowly let my knees give out under my weight – goodnight sick moon.
Good night.
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat Major, Op. 107 – Moderato.
V
We walk past a flickering transmitter, still crackling with stored power. Static burns the brain cells, buzzing constantly like electric fur brushed up the wrong way. The strange sensation of a foreign body invading every pore & cell. Its life force scratches neon graffiti on never-ending night while all around satellites spin above . . .
A message – another mountain to conquer.
How many days left?
Looking all the time for something that has always seen us, which we will never see, through this burgeoning haze of red dead solidity. O but now I’m letting my emotion override my sensibilities in my search for truth! But what is truth?
Of the heart?
The mind?
The soul?
& what are these names for these things, if such things even exist anyway . . .?
My heart is low, my mind weary, my spirit has wandered on ahead to scout safe passage for our advance, but it is not searching for mystery or treasure. Yet, I pray that it might find some, just something small. A glimmer of shining illusion that we may believe in, to get us through another day & night . . .
A common theme along our journey, that I find quite disturbing, is the pervading impressions of silence that pepper the day & night. It is a dripping tap – even the most subtle of words repeated enough, eventually drives to the point of distraction & attentions the prey. As a tiny twig, broken from a tree, that falls upon water makes ripples that echo its form. However, when such water is not calm, still a bigger branch with more substance is needed to create visible & audible impression. In these moments of absolute peace & lucidity, the shadow of death breathes its name in an epiphany of silence.
This morning, everything moves in slow motion. I awoke to see women beating slow tracks in beauty with leaves swirling at their heels touching sweet white feet. A moist caress glides in their perfumed surrealism. The summer sings optical promises; maybe everything will be all right?
Another vision of Mary – standing on the edge of the Black Forest on the fringe of the camp. An army of ghostly figures behind her, writhing in the mist & the damp leaves, waving slowly, translucently.
Her last good-byes seem forever cast in cold calculus, a flickering hologram.
Fantasien, Op. 116 – No. 7 Capriccio. Allegro agitato
VI
We found an old run-down cabin, just before dusk gave in to night, deep in the foothills of the mountain ranges. Windows doors grey walls torn. A fox skitters ‘round the room, sniffing trash, oblivious to our presence. Eye to eye rats in rafters, on mantle, windowsills, within walls – scratching, scratching, scratching through holes; standing still for slash of time, then off again. Seen sniffed snorted disappeared forgotten, room now empty save for moonlight.
The fireplace flickers, then explodes.
The whole broken brown-grey interior illumined, in all its decayed woody brilliance. The flame licked the cobwebs in the grate, blossoms crushing cellophane, sounds that burn sun-burst bright, engulfing envelopes stuffed with wads of cash & unforgettable memories, crackles to ash.
Then back-to-back black.
The visions are becoming stronger while our quest becomes more inconsequential. Nature is casting its archaic spell over our experience of things. We have all experienced a heightening of the senses; the smells of the deep woods & tumbling streams, the clarity of sight & hearing - a leaf so finely cut, a dry twig cracking under the hoof of one of the green deer sniffing the air ten miles downwind in the heart of the forest.
I remember a story that once captured my imagination – a poet at the end of his tether, frustrated with society & (ultimately) himself, walks into the foothills of a vast mountain range in the Americas with a loaded firearm.
No one ever sees him again, no body is ever found.
All he leaves behind are memories & a huge body of verse for the world to do with what it will. The forest has swallowed him; nature has enveloped his very being, distributed his atoms throughout the flora & fauna like so much mulch, & that’s all we are . . .
VII
The new day vivisects the dawn, another telegram from hell. Pressures of belief make for sacrifice of sleep --- relief, so hard to shake the madness of life from one’s head, without losing dreams . . . grown nurtured there, like lice they hunger, live upon ghosts, teasing & teeming rife with maddening proposals. Wet dam breaks, floods the soul, quenching fires of the fragile heart; blood ferries vessels of shrouded prayer, laps sides of narrow passage, ridges perched precarious --- shelter in the shadows, breeds clinging moss of time --- the dawn buries the dreams in thought, in matter, under the new day.
O thank god for the new day, today!
These small mercies are no mean feat, yet there is still a huge nagging doubt in my nature as to the effectiveness of petitioning the lord with prayer.
Another painful message came today; the great communicator speaks with no words so familiar. I placed the impulse with words so much softer than your cutting spiel of want. I would not hesitate to use you as such, mere words of my own writing, but you would let all of my blood become dust, leaving me dry with tears of loss like water.
A small stream seems to follow us just to remind me – where there was just flat baked dust & soil, a fissure appears & splits, widening as it fills with crystal water, tripping past my shambling leaded feet. It is quite all right to drink; in fact we are on agreement that it is perhaps the best water that we have ever tasted.
The sky parts its grey beard for a minute, yawning in bright disinterest & makes the dull colours glow, as they should, for the same amount of time. Flitting birds play & sing all that’s natural, the stream babbles wetly, tumbling quietly past us, leading us on into the unknown while the sun shines warmly --- paints everything still, so still & quiet for a minute.
I turn back in the grey, toward the valley below, to check the burning fires glowing as far as the horizon. Suddenly, a waddling duck jets its slick form out from the front of the burrowing stream; I grab its wet neck & wring the painful life from it.
We all have to remind ourselves every now & then that we are only human.
That we are still alive.
The river frogs choke the highway, croaking to the night.
& the rain it hammers down across the barren blue hue, in its shimmering sweeping black dress. Smoke-like clouds draped above the great flood of blood. Dawn cloud ingrained in this almighty time with blindness. It rained forever in the sweet south & sweet north & sweet east & bittersweet west. Sweat pearls run down my face. An almighty fine wine of the weeping sky falls down on old slumbering earth, snoring with the promise of the BIG sleep in Messianic night. Till that almighty river’s shining dawn & passage down stream turned big muddy, where the desert had been --- & Noah might’ve rowed on out from the banks of old earth . . .
If it hadn’t been another dream.
Near the camp, ripples on the surface of a nearby dam signalled the coming tide upstream as Salmon swam down-stream, furtively kissing the small insects from the mirrored surface of the sky.
We have to close our minds – we have learnt the laws of the forest – and we have to disintegrate our bodies in order to become part of the force of the storm. Resistance is futile & dangerous. The sun glows pale red through the silhouettes of the trees, as we trace its fall, cold sinks its blade a little deeper in the bone, shadows merge.
We build a small fire on the embers of yesterday’s.
The pine-needles pop & smoke, the twigs ignite & consume themselves, as the flame’s glow casts masks & dancing shadows across our pensive faces. We sip Rosemary tea from warm receptacles; steam curling from our breath, the forest is deathly quiet again save for a stirring breeze swaying the treetops. The chill air defies the approaching storm, the silver clouds above now iridescent in the blue moonlight; they accelerate across the grey plains of the night sky. As their speed becomes lost in the filling of the sky, the trees creak & drop branches & pine-cones from their thrashing limbs. Our fire is scattered, tumbling sparks flicker through the tumultuous bracken & undergrowth, as the wind’s momentous fury systematically attacks our camp.
Allegro con moto
VIII
I know now the third trouble has earnestly begun its unstoppable stoppage. From the wrong mountain that I had wasted three days & nights upon, answering question after question of my silent companions. To be skin-blackened in the blazing light until refuge in a crag brought my skull bloody pecks from all manner of winged creatures. I decided to descend, as I was told that this was not the very tall terrain that I should be on.
Coming down the mountain, I met a virgin who had children; her entourage were all weeping for their lives. I met a blind man who had vision, but no other sense at all. I met a poor man who had given all his wealth away & had nothing else to give anyone – no words, no hate, no nothing at all. The travel down was so much harder than the voyage up the mountain, despite the heavy load upon my weary shoulders. My twelve companions, light as they were; all grasping, clinging, like a thick ball of twitching twine coiled up across my creaking spine.
Coming down the mountain, I met a muse that could not play, sing, or impart gifts of inspiration. I met a clown that never laughed, but who had always been laughed at. I met a married man who had lost his ring deliberately amongst the stony slopes. Now on another mountain, we had ascended, amongst the ranges of the world. Up high on mountain peak, three days & three nights did curse me with its silence, yet the voices they were loud. A cold cave in crags of granite precipice did afford we with sublime providence & writing space in the dark. All about me ravens black & buzzards grey, haunted me with beady hungry stares, while forcing me into friendship with threats of violence & despair. I do not know, nor will I ever, the nature of those creatures that caricaturise the deformity of men.
Coming down the mountain, I was blinded by the brilliance; everything was crystal clear & held a lucid gold resilience. To my dismay, my vision could not offer me sanctuary of allegiance. Thrown from one apparition to spirit deed entrusted --- the golden glow endowed within, soon poisoned all, & ruptured shaking ground. Serenity of peace & mind madness breached the shrunk horizon.
I made retreat in haste & fear of all that I had witnessed.
A martyr's life, of seer & shaman, harnessed by the reins of Sodom.
To lead like the blind scout in disarray. To plot the paths through minefields olden laid, without map or guide to show the way for who has gone before, has gone without, to bleed for wounded souls their pain. To dance scarred by the acid rain's great rocks. To house the children evil shamed. To see the blind-man’s tortured fate, in beggar’s rags dressed with itching pestilence. To walk the paths with famine as my food, with death as my guide . . . I wove my bleeding heaving wretchedness, once again up the incline.
Were we ever going to find the answers for the great one – we were beginning to seriously doubt the validity of his requests?
IX
In my sleep, I had another dream.
Beneath the old sash window, someone had placed a mirror; it reached from the floor to the frame. Standing naked, head-less – it did not look like me, but then I’d only ever seen myself in reflection, so I presumed that it was. Outside, dry ochre fields – flat as sea – stretch away through & beyond defiant nets of fences. A black bull – horns, big polished lump of charcoal stares at me, snorting breath paints the window. He thinks that I have fresh blades of grass for his consumption, he is wrong. Its huge head adheres to my form, the cadence clear:
I rise to fall – the morning sun stains bronze, the birds song sounds of pipe & tambourine, minus my hands that now burn with the sun in this labyrinth of dawn. Seven figures shimmering with energy, atoms spinning in a spinning mass of form, one stood apart – more material & menacing than the others who had a certain kind of innocence in their immateriality.
Given eyes to see a world, we did & so we died. Hunger in the new night’s yawn we ate ferociously, like wolf cubs at mother’s milk, gorged pregnant with concrete fear.
It was all we could do to stay awake.
Now we are the infected.
Slippery tongues of crass old lands injected in our virgin veins, we have not even begun to begin to see the mud we stand in, to smell it as it is, to disregard its funerary qualities. Buried we have not begun to contemplate this place we are in, this rock we stand on. We see the ocean as a moat, as an eternity, between the setting sun & us. We do not feel the touch of waves all we see is all we are. The transcendence of time, irrelevant in its ticking hue, buoyant on its mocking grin -- grasped by none, aspired by some. It chatters – a bone wind-chime, cracking & tolling each short but endless passing of day. Impeccable revenge: in evanescence two pits dwell -- infinite charcoal voyeurs, watching, always waiting for you. For me . . .
Rain falls – ashen snow of sorts, trying hard to clean it only dissolves & steams. Evaporation leaves a hollow where there once was life. Time keeps ticking off itself, so do we too bring intonation to ourselves.
As we have done, so shall be done to no one, but unto ourselves . . .
What is this place on which I stand?
What is this place in which I dwell?
Is this thought naught but a smell, of what has always been that is not seen? Consummation has stamped its seal on everything, long dead & buried – who wields the stamp with such intent?
Who creased the seal on our bent backs?
Who gave us these dead eyes?
Adagio – Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 10
X
Inside the enclosure, they gave us a street to play with. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were there though.
We worked hard while some fell down; they were not picked up.
We became one, so they said.
Our liberty monopolised, streamlined, they said.
Then came the virus. No fence could keep it out. They contained it well, the chosen few were made to survive, you see, they needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure. Suicide – the only sin-filled option.
The wicked city sleeps for a second as the sun comes up sleuths with blind obedience & subtle reward the day blinks & is gone – swallowed by itself we float like zombies bittersweet voodoo magnet – implants its claws in our broken backs toward the neon grin great endless inanity of night pulls to begin in earnest the spade breaks the earth’s skin our quest for delight knows no bounds for fools streetlight sings & slaps the cruising cars like bleeding sunshine shards through weeping tree-lined avenues the cumbersome concrete breaks another face upon goose-steps – goose-steps, across & over while the black mirrored glass of her evening bodice entices the swirling mutants who stumble & ripple with vanity & the tease of undress winding – winding in & out through cavities like a cancer as the darkness covets the flight of our souls & soon, as ghosts, we echo & return with another tattoo from the city’s sin emporium.
Journey we go, into a place where lost buildings of time stack against each other in a delicate city of memories. Walking these barren streets, searching for hidden clues, we get lost in the quest of looking for answers to the future, in the gloomy & poisonous back streets of the past. Black galloping pillows of cloud; hasten like advancing sentries of night against the grey sky, proclaiming: the ferocious almighty thunderheads, glory, blossom, & stab the tender side of the West. The East’s long sabre draws out & twists, spilling gushing blankets of deep, deep maroon over mortal Earth.
Casting great floods to the West.
Decaying plagues shall ravage the North; moreover, famine bleeds dry the South’s cold haven as the East, connotes slow suicide in its prophetic insane seclusion. Green stems from the grey & all the glass age redeems itself back to the crimson beaches, whence it came.
Always hunting, without knowing, for the three properties of motion: the beginning, the middle, & the end.
Life, death, fire, water, earth & ocean.
Bringing in the space of the old: the new.
The idea, the propulsion, the result is seen in all things.
Cause, effect, & result of the action, is a troublesome discourse, when the end is ultimately commotion, destruction . . .
XI
What is acquired at birth falls back to more pure & honest beginnings.
This burgeoning & ever-present death is not really our creation, but more like God’s . . . or something else. Nature does not concern itself with our presence, or the way we practice genocide, murder, rape, cannibalism, & sacrilege. For a while, we lived inside an enclosure in which they gave us a street to play with.
We saw everything, as did the third eye.
There was an uneasy calm about the place. No one spoke. Outside the walls, disease marched across the west desert scratching its long black fingernails along the high tin fence. The fossils that controlled the place stood around nervously; clad in leather jump-suits, their white faces glowing like light-bulbs in blackened sockets, obese ink-pot bodies swelling & twitching at the sounds of the scratching screams, the bloody baseball bats twirling anxiously in their podgy dough claws. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were always there – our imprisoners.
We worked hard as did the other broken bodies. Some fell down, they were not picked up, we saw it all & still the statues rise to meet the falling sky. We became one at that stage so they said; that point between death & beyond or something like that? Our liberty monopolised, ‘streamlined,’ so they said. Then came the virus, no fence could keep it out but the ones that stood tall around the cities contained it well.
Soon the chosen few were made to survive.
They needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. . . & that was then, this is now. It all collapsed beneath the onslaught of the natural night. We tried to forget that place, but for some inexplicable reason it was photographically tattooed on our internal vision.
We could not shake it.
Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure – acceptance, honesty, awareness, and encompassment.
Aspects of infinity.
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor – Rondo-Finale. Allegro
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Hi
I realise that 'Blogging' is as much self-serving as it is for public entertainment. In light of this truth I have to ask the question: "Is anybody reading this blog?" So that is my question, is there anyone reading this blog and if so would you like me to continue posting items of interest?
Obviously, this stuff takes time to produce, edit, post etc. The growing realisation that blogging (in my own opinion) is a probable waste of time has led me to ask this question to find out if it's worth carrying on. Anyway, there you have it - should I stay or should I go? Also, feedback on the blog etc would be appreciated.
Best wishes
Will
I realise that 'Blogging' is as much self-serving as it is for public entertainment. In light of this truth I have to ask the question: "Is anybody reading this blog?" So that is my question, is there anyone reading this blog and if so would you like me to continue posting items of interest?
Obviously, this stuff takes time to produce, edit, post etc. The growing realisation that blogging (in my own opinion) is a probable waste of time has led me to ask this question to find out if it's worth carrying on. Anyway, there you have it - should I stay or should I go? Also, feedback on the blog etc would be appreciated.
Best wishes
Will
God is not an American - (Read & find out why!)
david bowie said:
“god is an american”
nietzsche said
“god is dead”
madame blavatsky said
“there is no religion,
higher than truth”
i say:
“truth & religion
are non-compatible”
by the way,
this is not a political poem
or a religious poem
my views (contd.):
a poem is an expression of interest
potentially, entertaining
possibly, thought provoking
usually, annoying
seldom enjoyable
always didactic
drivel – essentially
but this poem
is not meant to tell you
what a poem is or isn’t
or what you should think
this is just
some words on a page
possibly, not even a poem
vers libre or not libre
that is not the question
finally,
just to set a few things straight:
god is not an american
god is not even alive so how can he/she/it be dead
truth & religion
should never be mentioned
in the same sentence
ever
& poetry . . .
don’t even breathe that word.
Perfume
i love
the smell of the city
the hustle-bustle brilliance
of life effective in every moment
sweet ambrosia of death
sits lurking
in the shadows of rancid alleyways
signposted with ciphers
symbols of strange forests
hieroglyphics of night’s construction
breathe in
the humanity
breathe out
the horror
the horror of concrete & steel
a flailing colossus
the smell of victory
over death
not too unlike
“the smell of napalm
in the morning”
lingering
like perfume in the back of your throat
A Certain Kind of Countenance
Her face, like a flower
In a closed fist
Wrinkled against time, adversity
A patronising counterpart
Settled in for a long lag
& the drugs don’t work, all the time
cigarettes, booze, pills, smoke . . .
you name it, it’s viable
as long as it’s a substitute
for reality, three dimensions
a quiet cup of tea
& dogs are barking
cars growling down the thin streets
sirens screaming,
intermittently
a broken tap drips
drips
drips
across the room, nestled amongst
dirty plates piled high
flies buzzing amongst the scraps
on the kitchen bench
a few ragged photos litter the walls
& the money’s all gone
two cigarettes ‘til hell
no substitutes immediately avail themselves
as each thing becomes a part of her
like broken crockery strewn across the floor
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