The Sun Beaming On The Sea

Open Letter

2008-01-03T03:01:29Z

This is an open letter to the girl I love. When are you coming home? I fried up some beans and vegetables for us, there's a movie freshly downloaded that I know we both love. I washed the sheets on the bed and fluffed the pillows. I thought up five nice things to say to you today to make you feel better about yourself, and I thought up five other things to say that weren't as good. I'll probably end up reworking them for later. I reminded myself that you do love me, why the hell else would you live with me? I thought about those things you said the other night and felt sorry about the way I reacted. I still don't know what to say to you about it, though. I want to help you and to nurture you, but I'm no genius, no matter what I sometimes tell myself. Maybe I can't help you all the way. Maybe after a point it will just be the two of us, struggling forwards with what we've learned, helping each other equally. I had a dream about that the other night. There's a bottle of whiskey that I bought too. It's the kind I always used to buy when I was alone, but this time I was thinking of you when I bought it. I wouldn't much mind if you drank it all. You aren't all alone with this, but it's just me with you. I thought about holding your hand. I want to show you the things I know, but some of them are locked so deeply inside that it's hard to get a good look. I want to peel my mind and soul like an onion for you so that you can trace the contours with your hand like they were the rings inside tree trunks. You'd probably be able to get a better look than me. I've seen some pretty crazy stuff, and been a part of some things that'd teach me a lot if I hadn't forgotten them. I wanted you to help me remember. Then they could help both of us. I think sometimes that I won't remember soon enough and that you'll not come home some day, thinking to find them elsewhere. But they're right here. Waiting for you. This is the scar that I got when I was seven when the wagon overturned. This one's from earlier. But right here, beyond my eyes, lightyears inside my skull, is the one I thought you might be interested in. I can't get a good look at it. Sometimes it kind of looks like you. Anyway, the plants all died, so they don't need to be watered any more. Never got a pet, unless you count the roaches. Never really had anything that was ours to share. Except each other, and our time together.

So I put the beans in the refrigerator for later. I fluffed up the pillows when I went in to look at the bed. The usual stuff happened to the whiskey bottle. I always thought about drawing a picture of you when you were asleep. Haven't thought of that in a while. What you look like to me now is probably not the way you'll look the next time I see you. But it's okay. That's the kind of thing that's easy for me to imagine.

This Is The Story Of Where The Water Went While All The World Waited (Part Two)

2007-07-12T12:39:36Z

You may not realise this, but all of you came from embers. There used to be a terrible fire in here, you see. A fire larger and hotter than you’ve ever seen. There used to be a fire in here because, before even the fire, there used to be a lot of things, large and small, that would burn very easily if they were ever in the same place, at the same time, as even the smallest spark. All of these things had done a very thorough job at hiding all of the flames and all of the sparks away in very safe places, and all of these things, the large things and the smaller things, prayed very hard that the sparks and the flames would never emerge. At the same time they secretly feared the emergence of the sparks and flames. They had done such a good job at hiding them that they could no longer even find them themselves. And so they might be anywhere, the large things and the small things thought. Some of the things, among themselves, even got to thinking that another one of their number might have kept some of the sparks. Even one of the sparks. Just one. They kept close together, these burnable things, you see. They even loved one another very much. So some of them thought, and never spoke any of this aloud, that others of their number might have hidden one of the sparks inside one of their own pockets, thinking that this was a very clever hiding place, right under their own noses as it were. And it wasn’t that some of these more fearful or suspicious ones even considered for a moment that an equally burnable thing, larger or smaller, might have held a spark in reserve in order to settle an old quarrel (yes there were even these, friends – quarrels, sometimes, though quiet ones), it was more that they understood, in their terror, that terrible things happen. They understood deep inside, perhaps sometimes without even realising it, that sometimes all it takes is one thing placed beside another thing in order for disaster to strike. And so it was that one of the smaller in size out of all of the things, one that most of the others, in fact, could barely even see, for, indeed, it was nigh on the smallest of their number, grew very large in its fright. It shook in fact. It trembled in a blur of its anticipation. Something was going to happen. Sometime. Something very bright and very hot, and something with a great hunger driving it. Sometime. And once, for a moment, some thing larger might have felt it, like the buzzing wing of a fly brushing the flank of some great beast, and inside the one touched, there might have passed a brief moment of puzzlement. As if the thing touched, who, due to the sheer scale involved, could not even register the very impact of the touch, still was jostled by the act of memory recording the incident, somewhere deep in the mind where all things are known forever, and was made to consider through the contagious force of fear exactly what might happen if the very nightmare of the fly that had brushed its gargantuan flank ever came to pass. For nightmares vary very little across the spectrum. It is always a thing feared, even a little, that can set the very firmest feet to shaking. And there was not one among the burnable things that did not have something to fear. O yea of the driest timbers, yor sap long dry, who, in my eyes, might as well be dead, passed away from my world, our perceptions now misaligned as though the very heart had been removed twain your artery and my vein, does your shadow remaining upon this earth (the stillflowing artery long dead, now flowing nothing) tremble to its roots when thinkest ye yor dustgone leaves might drift through dancing flames? So it was that ears until then deaf were made to focus through the Great Equaliser of fear. And all in a row the drums lined up, taking their cues from the drumbeats that strengthened in volume and in force as more and more and tauter and tauter responsive drumsurfaces aligned beneath the thumping force of concern, every beat by every beat emphasising greater and greater vigilance and warning. All mouths closed. All eyes wide. All steps halted in midstride. Every particle of every bouncing and thrumming hide anticipatory of every falling pounding thought turned quicker than the one just before that, falling faster and with greater worry, stoked by every thought with just less worry falling before it, that called it forth, but with more quickly growing panic than the thought falling even before that. All those things. All those things turning their lenses of concentration toward the amassing concern over the terror of nightmare, the nightmare itself the fear of a fear, a distilled effluvia of horror rising from the thought of the horrifying thing. Staring at it. Marvelling at it. A casual curiosity diverting for a moment minds mostly filled with the cogs and gears of preparation for all of the tasks ever flowing in, morphing with a flicker of an eyelid, mutating with a tremor in a cheek, becoming what it observes, becoming even more observable mass for even more observing eyes. All of the things together now, working in the spastic unison of hysteria, all the work put into all the plans (the reasonable plans, the plans that worked, that snuffed out all sparks, that slew all dragons, that made every thing safe for all eternity if only they could make themselves realise it) forgotten now, as a roof is forgotten so long as it keeps the rain hidden. All of the things together now, thinking one thing, stretched towards one thing, reaching for one thing, unknowing, unable to help themselves because they can only see the thing they reach for (the thing they reach for now in desperate fear of the very thing they reach for) and not all the rest of it, the rest of themselves, what used to be all of themselves, all of it still bent in the old directions, the directions away from it, the directions that built the walls and dug and filled the holes between the very sewn fabric of the concealing pocket, the glowing sack that must contain the cure. The fingers, openly shaking now, grasp at the drawstrings of the sack, fumbling desperately with the knots that these fingers themselves tied not so long ago, knots tied in a time of quiet when reasonable plans were put into effect in a calm and responsible manner, knots now torn at, the looped and tightened strings scratched frantically, shouting voices all around, urging the hands on but only increasing their quaking, wailing voices crying out of control with wild heaving muscles behind them, blind eyes rolling back into sockets as the noise and the flurry keens up and up into drumsplitting decibels, the beat forgotten, the terror now every thing, every crush and press in a sweltering and violent place, every body frantic for something close at hand, every hand reaching for it, every knot loosening, every string untying, straightening, all bags opening, all hidden things laid bare, every dry and burnable thing pressed close in and thrashing against every hidden place and every delicate secret thing. You may not realise this, but there once was a terrible fire in here. All of you used to be embers.

The Grass Is Never Greener

2007-02-08T03:58:30Z

Still all a-tremble because the cold is never far.

Lovely is the throatmeat when the pale fangs take a slice.

Lovely is the sunshine and lovely is the ice.

‘Cause

“We got ourselves a bleeder!!” the raspvoice was heard to say.

It’s yellowgold to umber, bathed in the light of day,

because I made myself defenceless in the deep dark fields of hay.

The seed may stray and the beasts may roam

to yonder hearth and home;

the fox might lay in the bones all day of chickens, goats and sheep;

but since the boards came down and the posts left ground,

my fears can finally sleep.

Because I made myself defenceless as a sort of final straw,

my flesh and field can only yield beneath all teeth and claws.

Boundless colours shift and dance since I tore down manmade laws,

and the blades of grass do drift and prance as the wind blows clear the fog.

We had it from the wisemen that the greens of our neighbour’s lawns

were emeralder than the eyes that peered and squinted ‘gainst the dawn.

As the grass strays through the fields so green – so yellow, red and gold,

as the flowers bloom and the bells toll doom,

as the warmth gives way to cold,

you’ll hear me say as the ravens play,

“There’s no way for me to sense this.

With a palms-up stance and a world wide glance,

I have made myself defenceless.”

Merry Christmas

2006-12-26T04:36:41Z

I know I couldn’t have made it this far without you. Any time I’ve been on the verge of disaster you’ve gestured or spoken a word not to make my problems disappear, but to show me how to solve them. I came here full of my high hopes that buoyed me up into the clouds, and sunblind I exalted in my accomplishments. But as the easing hand of gravity began to press me down it was you who taught a floating man to fly. Then the darkness. So many times I shut my eyes in terror against the darkness, unknowing which came first: the shadows all around me, or my keeping out of the light. But again under your instruction I learned that my heart burning like a sun will light all the paths and heights before me. The most terrifying thing in the world is to think that we are not loved, that love is a lie, that there is a place or a thing somewhere, somehow that is made of terror and that banishes love. I see now so clearly that there of course could be no terror without love, no love without terror first to be loved. And even warm with that fire in my breast, even for moments, tears slid down my cheeks and sizzled in the blaze as I felt the weight of life on my shoulders. Atlas’ burden seemed a paltry marble next to this sacred duty of breathing, banding us all together in our fear and pride to make a paradise out of slow and crumbling wasteland energies. But how great an accomplishment it is to know that children can be born, and that they can laugh easy in a place carved out for them already, their own trials already made easier by those who have gone before. No dark without light, no warmth without chill, no life without death. Even the most magnificent of cities founder, as stars burn out in the sky. The weight is again passed around, the pressure on, the sinews flexed. I love the EARTH to death, from womb to grave, sun cresting all horizons as leaves and hands lift to its shining face. But in the flux, I need only one thing more, beyond blade and bandage.

I need you to watch over me.

as stable as a seesaw (both ends wide)

2006-09-26T08:02:50Z

That’s why it was hard to know for sure. Because she kept dropping her pencil and then bending over to pick it up, and I wondered whether she had butterfingers or if she was trying to entice me. She didn’t seem like the sort. A really honest smile when she’d look at me. No duplicitousness there. Not like me thinking that maybe she was, darkly wondering in my head while my eyes must be merry. They must be merry because she keeps sort of giggling when she sees them. She wouldn’t giggle at them if they looked serious, would she? Or would she? I guess serious might seem cute. Like what I was thinking really wasn’t as important as I thought it was. And I guess it wasn’t. Isn’t. I guess the only thing worse (I thought) than the way things actually were was the thought that maybe the perceived horribleness of things was actually an excess of emotion swirled about a gaping empty center. Like maybe she wasn’t thinking about me at all. Maybe she was just a clumsy girl that had no idea how easily I can fall in love, how much I love having my heart broken because I’ve gotten so used to it. Maybe I see the rocks on the shore and fantasize about the incredible journeys they must have taken in order to end up there. The journey made incredible by the vast distances covered by inanimate things, the world’s tiny hands helping them along, helping rocks along to their final resting place on shores to be lapped at like horsetongues at salt. But really a man (not even a man, a WORLDNYMPH) strolled along the shores while we slumbered in wombs and deposited the rocks there, arranging them just right, knowing how they’d fire our dreamfilled heads to wondering and weaving fantastic explanations to sate our fear and fill the empty ruse of life on earth. Except one thing. The feelings are real. My care for her is real. She must know something of that as sure as I know it. That she’s there in the empty place when I peel back the layers, smiling, and that’s good enough. That’s more than beautiful enough. My heart not wide enough or bloodfilled enough to feel it all. And after words (or the lack of them) when I’d walk along through the trees thinking and the chirpchirpchirp of the birds and the reasurring leafrustles around me reminding me that I am not alone at all. It’s not even her and I. It’s hands and legs and faces, branches and leaves and flowers, towers of stone reaching out from deep in the earth or from the shadowbound floor of the sea, all connected together, all reaching and smiling and smiting and caressing from the same place, the same curious wondering place that is trying and trying and advancing along almost inadvertently towards another place (another place too big to see and too glorious to feel even) where we’ll rest and be complete. That’s what it might have been. Might be still. We could help it all to be. And in so doing help ourselves to see. That’s what makes me so unsure and afraid: I know that I’m the form made to express something that I’m too dense to even understand. I grasp and grasp and grasp. It’s close enough to be the next thing promised but grand enough that I’ll only know it when I fall into the space out there in my future that’s been prepared for me already, a grave maybe or maybe just an inferno that I fall into, incinerated inside, all of me crisped and blown apart to drift and so glad to have helped in ashes. But don’t let me make a mistake that’s even impossible to make and really is just stagefright. Lifefright on the earthstage. Don’t let my burnt flakes tremble. Touch them soft with your winds. And smile at me with your eyes. Then the empty place will be so filled with wonderful things that only have names on earth that only on earth and only in the center of a human life could ever be important enough to grow flesh for only to have it sliced and bled and wept over gratefully. Her and I together then. Not even any words said. Just knowing these things without even this clumsy mass of my thoughts vainly trying to express them. Just the moment of it. Bright. Her. Smiling. A pencil. Falling. And me. With my heart. Dropping down. Dark.

Love Sinks!, or Aweh On A Mountaintop, or Tuwuns Twicetied's Titillating Teatime Toddler Tale

2006-09-05T08:32:22Z

All ears were hanging low when the people of the earth heard the news of her death and of his rage. Where the branches of trees dipped from fogshrouded peaks and the tips of their waxy leaves just brushed the pools among the rocks where the water trickled down to the lowlands, she had passed rippleless with her hopes in her hand. Yes, there was many a heart rend asunder in the time when word ran rampant on the air, borne aloft by voices quavering and griefshrieking, sobchoking whispered admittances of things too true to be lies or delusions. Upon the shoulders of the behemoth of stone, whose eyesunblinking bore the sea and the sky and the land, the girl who was apple to those eyes, who brushed each petal and who loved every pebble, who wore seafoam off her shoulder and who wrapped seaweed round each leg, the nymph glimpsed on occasion in tales wildly popularised with the usual embellishments of circumstance but with nothing unsaid untrue about the nature of the gaze glimpsing back, the lady of the lakes where the lakes call their home, her Dawn to his Be, stepped lightly and eversure, caught scent of the sea, and eyes agate and agape goggled breathlessly at the mist that was the Breath of the Mountain parting upon the paleness of the sun and a bird winging there beside it. Her feet that had flowed her over the rocks found anchorage between two of them and she was twisted in the air, held in his grip of stone. And not one eye closed in prayer didn’t balloon outwards with tears when, hand in hand, they all listened in while the tale told true of the one moment that was left to the two of them. The touch that they shared, with all their hearts bared, filled a moment to bursting with the thirsting for life in the strife of the moment when all that touched teared. For she was resplendent with wreaths of the sea and the sky, tugging her gently to make a wingless bird fly. And the place of her birth, where the sea met the earth, held arms open in greeting and waving her home. And the moan in the stones that ground as they groaned flung skywards the flocks from their nests in the rocks. Her soul met his bones in the snapping of stones when the handsclasp handsnapped and not a wing flapped and windswept she tumbled windblown. Meek, humbled, and desolate, the people of the earth wiped their tears through the soot on their cheeks as he blackened the sky and made smoldering ruins of the land. The sea beat her waves against him but only his molten tears fell hissing into her beseeching face. Amid his roars and explosions, she had fallen from his reach, her eyes lost in the distance as she was swallowed by his smoke and his glare.

In Love with The Girl by The Sea

2006-08-31T04:32:39Z

So good eve, dear sir, dear eve and good morn, for as sure as that lock has been shorn, there's a quickness of air felt at midnight, dear sir, that by daybreak will be keening forlorn.

And good moonshine, dear sir, fine corpselight on you, in the celebrant air of days past, but the moonlight, dear sir, and that pale sleeping glow, never o never will last.

“I just wrote it,” she whispered into the dim fireglow of the lightdancing faces. The midnoon face with the high airy brow that was painted in lines all blue beamed two eyes that were shimmering across the breadth of his countenance. He and she and the other one, the one that looked patient and wise but a little cruel, seemed to disapprove, and the girl close to the fire trembling unsure was finally given her answer. She was to be cast outside of the cave system that moved along the shoreline in serpentine fashion and made to eke out existence along the slobbering lips of the sea.

And that’s when she said no, she said no she’d never write again because the roar of the sea in her ears as she picked up the mussels and starfish and chewed them raw was the sound of the voices that she had wronged. They were screaming about ten thousand things that she’d never considered but were now urgent and alarmblaringwaving. So sorry, she’d say to the sound of the sea, So sorry, I’ll never again

be the one that blares scorn and despair

on your tide

Oh, never, Oh never again. But the trick about corpselight that she didn’t realize but was forced to enunciate was that it surrounded things that were still alive. The thrashing, glooping wound of the sea was bleeding into the air, and in the air the blood died and floated and drifted like the spores of mushrooms. This was a mantle of death that the sea, a tooliving thing, could never throw off, like the dog between the old apartment buildings that pauses to give a cursory shake for the tiny worldquake of fleas now and then while working the chicken bone from the plastic of the garbage bag, or the wave that tossed the man from the deck of his boat and smashed his face into the boom of his sail, crippling him. And, like most of the mantles that adorn drifting balls of pale rock perching over planets athrob alive, it imbrued corpselight allaround and allthroughout and allinside too of girls by the sea.

And the celebrant air of days past was present in the touch that drew such emotion, because all’s known that was everknown as we knew the smartshot was keening when we brought round the fist. When we knew the knifetip entrypoint was verified by the retraction of the blade and so the painsharp remembrance of the steel that hugged as it tore is evidence of something we’re missing. A smooth wrap of skin like an orangepeel is so great a thing indeed that it need not even have corpselight, so great it shone while alive. But torn and screaming,

roiling and teeming

like the boiling mass of the ants

it outdodges chance

in the starshuttered dance

to be remembered

a glance.

She never knew the sky to hang quite so fierce as when she knew that it was the sigh of the sea, the laugh of the land, or a soft cupping hand. The weight of it was the promise of tomorrow. The promise of another starfish that squirmed while she bit it.

And this is the way that yester day felt all tomorrow today.

It’s the balm that blistered,

the raindrops beglistered,

and the eyes that let come what may.

It’s the hands that drew words from the throat like a cord,

all chokegagging while sagging

and hauling it out

amid the buckthrashing fear of the hoard.

It’s the thunder and drift

and the tremblinglipped kiss.

It’s the thunder,

the thunder

and drift.

And it’s the night that he missed her,

sprawled out by the fire.

It’s the blunder,

the hunger,

the bliss.

Yes, it’s the night that jewel kissed her

when all the sea whispered,

“The hunger,

the hunger:

the bliss.”

An Earthstory

2006-08-24T19:03:03Z

This is the story of how they all ended up where they started but with longer hair,

more weathered faces

and eyes that looked hard and deep.

They were bumbling like tumbleweeds at first,

along the unbroken line of the sandless shore.

They capered and jingled

and sloughed off some words,

like:

Stumblefuck, and

Sweetcrotch, and

Throatslice, and

Bloodmeat.

There is the incident where one of them wouldn’t let any of the others touch their rock.

Following this the rock became a weapon that was used to cleave skulls

and to bash in stonyglaring faces.

It passed from hand to hand.

The tender flowerpollen sprinkling spores like raindrops over all of dirtbound flowerdom

and regrowing seeds spit

into trod under

brothers and sisters not even blackbloated now or expelling the gases of decay,

but disintegrated and homogenised with the flesh of the earth,

the newshoots reaching higher and higher up than every one before,

spreading petals in prayer to the sun that burns for

the petal the plant the root and the ground

the sphere catching light and throwing it around.

The whole glinting mobile spunspinning adrift over the face them laying on grass in the night’s deep shadows gazing into that ocean of silent twinkling roaring glare.

Then sleep for a while.

Zzzzzzz.

Then:

She said to him, “Why are you looking out that window?”

And he answered, “Why does it matter?”

So she said, to herself, “This is the handsclasped spindance where each of us is burdened by the other’s weight, trapped in a whirlwind with the,”

“Please never leave me,”

“We’re only just resting before the next round,”

“it’s over,”

“I knew it,”

“that hand you just played,”

“was bitten,”

“I saw,”

“unsmitten,”

“just stay.”

“I can’t,” she sang lightly, “I haven’t the time,

there’s these things that need doing before the sound of the chime,

and I haven’t the patience to ask more than twice

why the price

for your anger

is lost paradise.”

“The sound of your bitching is O SO BEWITCHING.”

“We’ll never get out of the pickle we’re in

‘till we heal the hole made from the sin.”

Cockadoodledoo.

Now more than fourty worldwidths wide, the hole continues to expand at an astounding rate. We have it on the best authority that, while the sun left us shadowspelled, the twin suns Thelightyouplaywith and Thelightyoudont slipped over the lip of the hole and into the mindbending chaos within like lemon seeds washed down the drain. Chief Fancypants of Lustrepants College and Penitentiaryvault provided an expert eyewitness account of the loss of the Piece That Used To Make You Smile to P Smutty, the tumpsty of spytmut ------ p e s e t e t e u e m e y e, whereupon he vomited a human jawbone and a small squeakytoy.

And it’s here right now in here in us and we’re wondering just what it is that we should do while we think with the pieces of our stomach and the gases of the eighteen nebulas of concealment and the only lightly masticated hotdog but it was something about having the courage and the conviction not to doubt and it was something about a pipe that cut off sharply and the space in between where there was a ratmaze with all sorts of cheese before the other end of the pipe picked up again and there was a trick somebody showed me once or maybe it was me that showed me you know before me was notme-and-me where the walls of the ratmaze started expanding and collapsing like a lung breathing and when the air came in and was held in the pieces of the maze made channels and the water ran through the pipe and into the channels and then the lungmaze breathed the water out into the

STARING CONTEST BETWEEN THE INTRASTELLAR CHAMPS

THE SUN

THE FLOWER

When the flower withers and dies it has its last laugh when its seedchildren come to make their homes in its bones.

Rest assured it’s the old story of the newborn baby already wearing the mask of its grandparent’s skull.

The individual laughs of the flower are each a flower of their own and they laugh with that old mortal wisdom until the day when the sun coughs, then looks about sadly and lays down to die.

Though they both died (and lost – all bets are off, folks) they had the quiet old knowledge that the Next Big Thing was already setting up shop in the old ribcage, stuffing the gaps full of moss and leaves, building a firepit venting smoke through the sternum, laying up foodstores in the curve of the hips, then laying down on the bottom of the skull and looking up with youthful blinking eyes out of the eyes that were already there, old dead eyes looking hard and deep at the stars above.

Cactuar, or A Ferocious Lesson Learned In The Desert, or Alone In A Dark Room Sweating And Swearing

2006-08-23T08:50:53Z

I'm going to totally switch gears with this journal for a moment just to ensure that a flow of words is released that I've felt muddily building up in my mind for the past while. So here goes.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination/love for the Final Fantasy series of video games that has without a doubt shaped and informed various periods of my life. There are periods where my love wanes and periods where it explodes strong like the curve of the sun cresting the night’s horizon. I don’t know what it is that causes these ups and downs. Perhaps the tail of Haley’s Comet needs to be in Leo (more likely the sum of my nights and days needs to be in LOSER, a configuration NOT AT ALL UNCOMMON). One of those crestings occurred two or three days ago when I began playing the tenth game in that series on a whim. That game had previously infuriated my for a variety of reasons and so I had never ended up passing it. SO GREAT WAS MY LOVE this time around that I ended up spending pushing twenty hours in one sitting playing it. This is the sort of thing that I decide to fill my hours with. My faculty of judgment is the equivalent of ten rowdy frat boys heady from their perceived freedom and beer bongs. But I did get a kick out of the whole thing, and I found the hokeyness really endearing this time around.

ANYWAYS, I went back to continue where I left off today (tonight, actually) and I began playing for an hour or so. The characters are currently stuck in a DESERT and so I was wondering around fighting giant sandworms and vultures, getting back in the groove, when I ended up in a fight with a CACTUAR (which, for readers not familiar with the hilarious mythos of those games, is an anthropomorphic cactus associated with elusiveness). The skinny is that if you can kill it before it runs away, you get ‘a prize’, BUT, if, like me, you have been playing for an hour, too giddy on your own success to save, and all three of your party members get nailed by its ’ten thousand needles’ attack, and KILLED, you wind up with a neat little bubble of rage quivering and quickening. Suddenly I remembered, perhaps, why I had never completed that game. Spite. Oh, yes, I am most certainly subject to its wiles.

So the moral of the story is: cactuar will pay, and will pay dearly.

No wait, the moral of the story is: I could have been summoning a minor love deity to shower the world with kindness and joy but I spent it playing videogames.

Or, here’s a good one: once genetic engineering reaches the levels promised by that lying bastard science, I will transfer my being into a cactus body and launch ten thousand needles into my own crotch as punishment for my foolishness.

The truth is, there isn’t really a moral for this one, just another hair’s breadth of the grand image revealed, or CONcealed as it’s rather probable that I’m fucking it all up.

And I didn’t really release the flow of words, I just sort of stirred up the mud sediment.

In Terrestrial News . . .

2006-08-17T06:06:51Z

The influx of raw data found itself encountering the usual obstacles today: fear, anxiety, misinformation, blindness, lassitude, apathy, masochism, avarice, the longview, the shortview, navelgazing, kidneyshanks, eyeing-the-petticoat, bicepflexing, the bleary eye, the trembling hand, the golden calf and the glasswraught authority, the weary sigh, the package of discount razorblades purchased sweatily at the allnight convenience store, the withered genitals, the blistered genitals, the slammed door, the pridestrangled apology, the redfaced spitsputtered curse, the black eye, the phantom pain, the effigy, the overgreased weathercock, the last straw, the first straw, the road that gets lost on the horizon, the dreamblind eye, the dreamdry well, the last tree felled, and the drain to hell and the hammershattered bell. The hammer.

And in other news, the world 'terrestrial' is actually 'terres trial'. Terres' trial?

this is the story of how the lips trembled when forelips trembled around

2006-08-06T20:13:01Z

This is the ranround tentrammeled story of tuwuns twicetied, allties crossbound roundwhiles one at least tasselling tieless. Two eyes too, flashing sights unseen earthbound round words bridged airtrussed. Two eyes drawn droopwise from the lids downstumbling over sights slipped and tentpeaked, rosyred skied and webwork glowstrewn, and touched grazewith eversosoft tensionbinding linklocks till eyesworn and soresighted entrenched beyond bridgelengths blinked. (And then nothing really happened for a period of time sightsworn purblind – till splitlids glistered bare lightdevouring throattighteners.) Then tensionmount structurestressed groaning loud and wordswebs strewn rippled net taut spastic crushhidden wingflaps remaining unfree, museumfettered, held for lack of the sighslipped beautyflown skyswallowed. Everfound, the one heartlocked, twoties free, twicewise, found itself the wingswide recipient of the flightwind feathersplaying castemupwards force finding fourwings backlocked buffetflapping the sky high wide, citysmall and antswarming. The best view for allwhiles now. Seeingstretched the limits wide and all the everywherecenterness rrrannngggvibrated still the points onepoint wide. What were fourwings backlocked with all the flightwind laughingstolen, touching each other in the sky against the inevitability of the skeletonshatter crushdeath continent shelves below? Twowings trembletouching fourlipswise in the flightwindsweptaway landsrush of allearth plummetrushing? Singing allhomes hearthwarm in the dreambundled cloudrush spastickonjuring sleepbubbles all the way down? Alls watersettled that ever smashed a shin or skinned a skull just as alls bonesplintered that ever softfloated in the easydrift. A fin torn, a wing shorn. Finflapped wingsnap just as all the air wingtossed bubblebuoys gillpressed surfaceward. So silverdarted oceandeep the tieyesbound, wavehidden, wavetied, all the net deep, crestsbreaking patternwise all across the dappled sunbeaming surface, a tale told of allties tinyhidden in all the last places looked and foreverbinding all the best parts fishparted, tieyes hardly even open in the deeps of the lightsmothered blacknessblossomingbloom. Mostlike the sort of story running trammelled two ones twice tied over and on in and through the needleyes and threadtrenches unknowingly stitchtightening two eyes ten feet deep in each other (twofish maybe, paddleblinking the lightways, crosspathing the alldeep) trying newties over slipperywhispered corners, all the seas wet, sevenfins backpedalling fourteenwise (all the tieropes trialtightened) and heading landsramped skywards.

bryanscott @ 2006-07-31T19:50:00

2006-07-31T23:53:09Z

fuckinghorsepiglickingcocksuckingassragpigruttingshitslopsnapdickskullfuckassrippingcuntbag

Oh my God.

2006-07-28T07:57:57Z

I didn't write that last entry of mine . . . that I have since deleted. I meant to post it to that endings community, and thought that I had until today. On a semi-unrelated note, I am so nauseous that it's frightening.

" . . . the piece that fit . . . that would make ME fit."

2006-06-13T10:22:48Z

I’ll be

wandering blind and out of time

when I’m

trying to find pieces that aren’t mine.

I’ll have my scope searching for rope out of hope

that there’s some solace in a place without shame.

Just tamed beasts without a leash ‘cause they won’t run

for fear of the gun.

“There’s no bullets!” I’ll wail inside the hail-

storm blinding eyes that didn’t see to begin with.

It’s a myth and it’s a lie

and it’s unkind,

but we’ll furnish it with kind words and some plush couches.

Just a slacking bunch of slouches.

I weep without a peep,

just silent tears in full view of my peers.

There’s something in my eye, so don’t worry.

It’s just a glint of hope.

A fleck of dust.

An old machine clogged with rust

that used to

feed the place in me that needed answers,

that needed to make these fool fears heard.

A bird without a nest in sight

and eggs in plain view.

So plainly it’s screwed

I’ll use every single piece that I’m given

but it won’t seem like enough.

Yeah, it’s tough, but that’s what makes it worth it.

Haven’t seen the warmth of the hearth yet,

freezing my hands before the cold logs

and rubbing them together like two cogs

that don’t fit.

Just a small bit

missing.

Phoot Hardler

2006-06-13T05:22:03Z

Winter doolinger wranfile. Eye wassenloops foophile out soom werdlewrangle foor yoo all. Wrast winglewinter massenflooz tingledrolloped sandcheeks in doot handerhal. Tay sandcheeks gazzleflooting tandzlops and whoozerwandles ootside. Eye fropped doon an sat neerwhiles wrast tay sandcheeks gazzleflooted. Yeevilwazzle werting carniverous tamshazzlenhoopenwingle. Eye tingledrolloped gloopens handerwinden soozenphile out eyezen tinglehooblers. Bindlewindle frappendashery asshandle, vreezendeezen fabulous vrazmaz foodling. So eye hoozed and boozed and found eyezen soorcheeked oover ranzmanz.

Yoo noo wrast winterhaglin frat hooglingdinglin ootwitz? Nay, oorwitz eye foond a braydray handerhaloo fowyips. May der hay der da hool handerwinglin ooberwhile, da hool handerwinglin ooberwhile framberjimber wandwaglin mazmeer.

Oon dazzer foon eye a harthole tarendorps eye high handerhal all.

Oon razewhips a harthole en dee.

"Some crash." -crash survivor

2006-05-23T23:39:51Z

Airborne since the crash,

and gliding since the fall,

I wonder where I’ll hit

and if I’ll even hit at all.

There’s a little bit of wonder

and a little bit of doubt.

As arms outspread and graceless

call forth dumb lips to shout,

I’ll fumble with a wisdom faceless

watching since the fall.

I’ll stick, you see,

like an arrow marked

for the place between the ranks -

or I’ll burrow soft into an eye

and find a weary brain:

I’ll kill as bare escapes a sigh

free at last from pain.

I’ll miss, you see,

without a mark

and tumble ever always

into a dark and unseen place

shielded by the tall trees.

I’ll learn, you see,

and rounded flesh

will sprout a crown of wings:

I’ll turn, you see,

upon a gust that spring’s soft sunlight brings.

For any way it happens,

and arrests my sudden flight,

it will come just like a sunbeam

upon the face of night.

Aloft upon the windswept tide,

clawing through the lash,

inside the arms of flame I’ll bide,

airborne since the crash.

Another Random Grasp At The Credo

2006-05-15T05:09:20Z

i want to put out these words where nothing is achieved through the action of trying to express the incredible

so it’ll go like this

there’ll be these parts hanging all over the place that are striving and reaching and trying like every single one of my words and actions have tried to throughout life and in the middle of the singularity of it all and in the middle of these random shards jabbed in amongst nothingness something might have been communicated that explains in some small transient way what was felt by physical beings in a place that would eventually be wiped away by the power of creation

in the mouth of creation, washed away by its words forcing forwards and blowing apart tiny beautiful things just to create larger and more beautiful things with the destructive rearrangement of parts

there will be the little sensation of wistful regret when this is looked back on because we all remember being an atom, we all remember being a star

stars explode

i’ll have this desire to place down in history the knowledge that i was once any part of this grand reality even though i hated and loved every moment

you’ll smile and i’ll frown and then there will be born a disparity between two parts that orbit one other part that neither quite conceived and out of this is born wonderful things that cannot be expressed in any other way

and is that what it’s all about: these thoughts and feelings that fall like uncaring brushstrokes and in the end there is just the bloodsplatter of life against a place that denied life?

so

let’s wave our arms and let’s keep them still and let’s keep on going like we’re a train that had a destination vaguely remembered kept in mind throughout the mad journey across old rails that didn’t even remember their own purpose and rode across by newer and newer cars that wanted to go places they couldn’t quite conceive and we’ll have this understanding unspoken ununderstood and unknown that drives us forwards and we’ll keep going until we reach that place where we finally know that we have grown legs and that this was the price for learning how to walk

A Scorpion Can Move On Bare Flesh Stealthily (Or, "A Credo and Five Parts")

2006-05-15T04:41:39Z

My credo:

I can type pretty fast when I am not drunk. There is a certain rhythym to be achieved, and, once affected, you are pretty much able to plough forth at about the same speed with which you are able to think. There is a delay, of course, but only one as long as the amount of time that it takes to find the beautiful things ahead on the path (with eyes, maybe) and call them back to the body labouring behind, driving all that flesh.

My five thoughts:

The bits kept drifting down like snowflakes, like ash. There wasn’t much left of me. A big heart-shaped part of me had inflated and inflated in my chest until I was doubled over by its expansion. And I popped before you arrived. As they drift, I see the part where the tugged strings used to attach. There’s the part that grew when you smiled at me. There’s the part that grew to accept the volume promised by your eyes. And look, there’s the very first part of all, grown before I even knew you, built on the knowledge that one day there would be a reason for all of this tissue. Look.

When it finally came down to it, there was a battlefield that stretched on and on. The fighting just kept raging, corpses born as fast as stars in the dusk sky. You could hardly look at it all for the time that it took to defend yourself. And when the fighting slowed at some point, and we found ourselves still alive, I think we were a little surprised and disappointed. We knew where the river would take us, though there wasn’t any other, but now we were somewhere else entirely. Past the deserts and past the bonefields, past the mortuary and the sepulchral wall, through heaven and hell and back on earth somewhere amongst the hooting of owls in the night. The soft sounds of the forest and the cool green smell of the sleeping trees. Us covered in blood.

I once heard someone say, “How are you?” like it was a promise that things were going to get better. I smiled at them, glad in the secret knowledge that they had shared with me. It might have been rough, and we might have suffered through all of our years, but, in the end, I guess there was a little sunny island with trees bearing ripe fruit. I guess you could hear a wafting melody played on pipes. I guess there was someone with ancient opal eyes who would touch your head and melt away all of the pain. Yesterday I had begun to believe that they lied, in the deeps of the present moment I doubted even my own scepticism, while in the infinitude of repeating tomorrows there is only an image of me stepping forwards with my face hidden.

There were jagged pieces of rock rising from the broken field. A desolate landscape, to be sure, but there was something hopeful in it. I imagined, to myself, stumbling there, that I was like unto a man coming across a skeleton long lost. There was once flesh around these bones, skin to bind it, and blood flowing through it. That only the bones remained was not something sad, but something proud. After all, they were not the malleable bones of an infant, but the proud strong bones that told of a life full lived. And what could be grander than that?

Where the luminescent portion of my being poured forth from my head and lit up strange pictures into the dim light of the landscape I shared with friends, family and others that gathered about, there was a sense of melancholy in my heart, and this played out in rape and murder and tragedy on the stages of my mind. The light was blue and white and purple. Faces and expressions were clearly accented in this luminary puppetry. Pieces apart from myself but that spoke through me. “Why should you all care?” I spoke suddenly, and the images ceased, my head growing dim and cold. “Why should any of this matter?” My heart was heavy and glum. The funny piece of business was that despite the fact that all of the projections had ceased, there was still one person before me that stood enraptured. They said, “Have care to notice that the shadows that play about your face are equal to those that are dispelled by the light of your mind.” And someone else said, “Isn’t that always so?” And I smiled and there was an image lit up before us of a field that stretched on to a horizon, and the field was filled with trees and people and laughter, and the light danced about all of them like the soft wingtips of an unseen angel.

This is a man forcing himself to do five pushups in preperation for the weight-lifting competition.

2006-05-07T21:23:19Z

I had this idea to write a short paragraph where first I would write every other sentance out and have them consist of the main character's actions, starting with the pronoun, then go back and fill in the gaps between the sentences with description minus pronouns.

So this was the first try:

He stood up. There were snowflakes made out of paper that hung and dangled from the ceiling of the room. He threw on a jacket. The lining was nearly torn out and the cotton showed on the inside, slightly dirtied by some part of last night's debauchery. He bounded down the steps to the road. The grass seemed very green and the easy sunwarmed breaths brought pleasant summer odours arm in arm with them. He crossed the street. Every depression and hump in the road shivered with its contact, resonating long after the road had been left behind. He ducked inside of the store. The dim light in here made the glaring sun through the windows and door seem like the mouth of a dark cave opening onto the wild and horrible world. His cheeks reddened at the sight of the girl behind the counter. The girl’s skin appeared to be the colour of porcelain. He purchased a pack of cigarettes. The smooth plastic on the outside of the package, the bright colours of it, even the weight of it, made it dazzle like a treasure. He left without telling her the secret in his heart. The bright light of day engulfed the whole of the universe. He stepped back into the road. The air and the trees, the sound of cars and humanvoices, the ringing telephone coming from some open window, were all old friends whose pleasant whispers were a beloved chorus. He was killed by a truck careening over the asphalt.

And then I tried it again here:

She leapt the short distance between shores. Birds twittered and swooped in the trees overhead and shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy to illuminate the sandy ground. She glanced back into the rushing river and smiled. A sound of snapping branches followed by a sudden intake of breath placed a dissonant chord into the symphony of the forest. She flipped a rock up with her foot and caught it. There was a brief scrambling sound that was like unto a boar attempting to tear out of the underbrush. She tossed the rock sidearm into the bushes. A man’s corpse, dressed in wargarb, tumbled into sight with one arm flopping to the ground next to a pistol it had dropped. She glanced at the corpse. The forest symphony picked up new rippling tones of melancholy and crashing waves of tragedy. She moved on through the underbrush. A current of leaves and branches flowed. She broke onto the open plain. The sun was dazzling in the red of the sky, over the rolling expanse of the grasslands. She moved on, disappearing against the horizon.

You folks should try it at home!! It's rather rewarding.