Simply By Being

New short myth-story after the link. 

A Memory of Murder

Previously:  She yawns, for theatre

Sometimes she spent afternoons staring at the sun with her eyes closed and a cup of maté nearby, watching the colors shift up from misty reds to cooled-out greens, and eventually to a serene neutral sort of color, or maybe it wasn't a color precisely, but something like a color, something a little to the left of color.

Occasionally background conversatoins would trickle in behind her eyes, fragments that seemed to make sense (no; felt truer) when they were stripped of context. Freed of the search for associative meaning until it was one thing, the wind breathing, the cars moving, the sand growing, the voices voicing. Meaning was an imagined hallway connecting a series of rooms with one door.

When she opened her eyes again, the color of the world had dimmed, until it seemed mostly black and white, and shdows of blue hues between. She'd try to hang on to that perception, to prevent the colors from leeching their way back in like the tide. It was a counterintuitive process, like fighting to relax, or using your other hand to get off.

Stepping sideways in time was tricky business. It required patience.

(I won't do this to you often, but here.  X-posted from fulldamage.)

Once in a while, arvakr pops up to remind me that for a short space in time, during my last exile to the Inland Empire in the year of 2001, that I thought of myself more often than not as a poet.

It had been preceded by a year of wandering, chasing dreams and concepts across the fields of America, up and down the west coast all the way up to Snoqualmie in Washington, east through Wyoming and terrifying Salt Lake, through the curious futuristic 2nd floor corridors of the downtown Twin Cities area, all the way over to roost in New York for a high-pitched summer. The whole way I was threadbare, running out of money, and bare steps away from that real beat madness that shines up so well in the books, but leaves out the weariness of never having your own bed, catching showers as you can, hustling part time jobs just to get by, and largely drinking away any profits those jobs might grant you, just to keep your head cemented on tight, just to keep the voices manageable, keep them from BEING voices if possible. I got my wig split in New Orleans, and that deservedly, but I got my BRAIN split open all over the country, and that was beautiful and perilous. I learned a lot of my strengths and weaknesses... in short, I grew up a lot.

But the travel-weariness caught up with me eventually, and I took a little time out in my hometown, storing up energy and licking my wounds. It didn't take long for the gypsy in me to cry havoc, though. I took a warehouse job for a while, splicing endless heavy stacks of 11 x 14 computer paper together, taping sheet to sheet and shoving them on their way down endless conveyor belts. Half a sandwich, a couple of ephedrine tablets and a fantasy novel in my back pocket brought me into a semi-meditative state for those late-night shifts, and it wasn't so bad. It drowned out the endless thinking that I'm by now accustomed to, the cancer of words.

The next job paid better, working for a Title/Real Estate company downtown, but it was crazy-making, tie-wearing, 8 to 5ing monkey work and I might have exploded in a bloody shower of frustration and powerlessness, an AK47 in one hand and a bunch of bananas in the other, monkey food and a bullet for each cubicle worker I mowed down, but for my two saviors. The first was a stellar group of online people who helped me build a story setting that grew charm and depth beyond any expectations I'd had for killing time in chat-based RP. The story from my last post is drawn from that work, and to this day we're still toying with it, fleshing it out, and it sustains me at odd moments when I'm low.

The second was the proud Monday nights spoken word crew at Riverside's Back to the Grind. As always, the scene now is long gone, but at the time it was what I was looking for. Accessible, real, relentlessly creative, a tribe of suburban warriors on their way to make something happen in that dead land of strip malls and barren freeways leading only to the endless drying brown of Southern California's low hills in the summer. They let me get in front of a crowd numbering over 100, and scream my bloody lungs out about everything I thought was wrong and everything I thought was right, and no one else had ever given me that before. It was by and large free of pretension, free of star wanna-bes and up and coming leeches on hip-hop's carcass. Open mike had dancers, singers, bards and scholars, people who'd never grabbed a mike before, and people on tour, whole bands and lonely students, doing it for the sake of it. I can't say how much I miss that, there's so little else in that town to miss.

Typically, I have writer's disease, and can't stand to look at most of my older work. I'd throw it on a bonfire, if I weren't such a packrat. But once in a while, I pull out an old piece and to my astonished amazement, I can look at it and go, "Hey, actually... that was all right." This is one of those pieces. If you're going to read it, I ask that you do me a favor and vocalize. Read it to yourself out loud, even if it's just quietly, for that is how it was meant to be heard, and there's a chance that just maybe you might find a bit of yourself hidden in there, in all the pieces of you, hidden and shouting out the past, amidst all the broken pieces of me.



Turtle 06.25.01

There is an old legend which states that the world
is held upon the back of a giant turtle,
a galactic animal, scaly skin crusted with meteor dust
that falls away in an endless particle shower
of hours and days
in its slow and unrelenting determined march through deep space,
bearing us all up against an infinite fall
with its slow and single minded reptilian grace divine

It's not that I blame the dreamers
and schemers
for making calculations
putting eyes in the sky to erase the face of the legend,
to end it.
I understand it. I demand it, shit. Put me in front of a tree of knowledge,
a college, a hot stove, an alcove
containing the first fire, a live wire, a road less traveled to an unknown land,
a book of the damned,
and I will always reach out my hand to them.
I accept the cost, I must, no regrets, its just
that when the dust settles, I remain painfully aware of the moment
when everything was Potential.
Before some things got lost.

I wish we had more time, you said, and the moment poised and stung
moistened with the gentle lilt of the Dutch-Afrikaans accent under your tongue,
and my veins remain stained with your spiky blond tresses
and our mixed scent of pot and leather and Guinness,
and the rest of that bar in Holloway, London, can mind its own fuckin' business
as we study each other for so long
so quietly
thin undernourished travelers' bones forming a silent guitar riff
a secret glyph,
a symbol that stands for a lifetime of potential,
an apple forbidden
and a round world of perfect moments that never happened.

Girl, I have carried that livewire smile
across years and miles
but it was Amsterdam that reminded me most of you,
with the Vondelpark just beginning to bloom
but forever mixed with the scent of the red light district
where the gods of sex and money convect
a perceptible beat in the cobbled street
to the beat of each dealer whispering X, X, X
next to the awe inspiring menagerie of succubi
who will suck you dry
for what you got in your pockets,
lock you into their dance.
Behind glass, they attain an immaculate purity
after every cock on the planet from here to eternity
they remain, still dancing, these women.
Bring on the abominable, for they are indomitable,
legend
like a galactic turtle, or the last touch of your hand.

Out West
there lives a cat whom in my head I've dubbed the Patron Saint of Fools,
under who's divine name and companionship and rule I've seen
no end of property damage, liver ravage, and wild hyena laughter.
This bastard
the best of friends, we've traded punches in the face
as marks of love and respect and shit,
just for the heck of it,
turned respectable complexes into piles of wreckage.

And I miss the old times, and places,
and I'm tired of how every conversation is the same old conversation,
about how we should go to a show, or when the last time was
you scored some blow.
Damn, we were the kings of slack, and nobody wasted time cooler than us jack,
always down for whatever, got each other's back,
like that
but did I lie?
When the dilated pupils of your eyes reflect the fact
that I encouraged you to say fuck the world and not look back?
When I never visit, because the booze and meth and stench of death
remind me that I helped you start that shit?
Straightedge to basehead so fast it made my head spin?
This is it, all over again, like that time on the roof
when we all got jumped by three Armenians,
and I was still drunk and soaked and wearing swim trunks
and I hung back like a bitch while you sucked up two hits
and you have no fucking idea how much I tear myself up for that moment
every day in every way
how it haunts me and taunts me like the smell of booze and meth
and death on your breath
stops me from just reaching out
just enough.
Your tombstone will read, His Friend Fucked Up.

But I brought you with me on that dark road for a reason
And I'd do it again.
I will always turn my back on Eden,
to hang from the tree of knowledge, with a friend.

It's taken distance and years and a road full of gurus
to teach me to see the lesson
that many of life's best moments and blessings
come wearing the fragrance of tears
and the grey, tidal voice of the Turtle
drenched in wisdoms unheard of, and voodoo,
who knows when his children have bled
whispers into my head
that my life is better, and despite the cost
the earth is more beautiful for the things that I've lost.

© Ken Barnes, 2001.



Something about a bottle of cheap wine always gets me maudlin. Here's to you, Black Swan Shiraz & Cabernet blend. And here's to YOU. Cheers.

"Mac" courtesy of a.net

Rohin MacKurn: The Collector. One eyed, red-haired child of a timeline that never was. But she's got a toe in the door, now, and by hook or by crook she means to tear this world down and build a new one on top of it. Following a desert skirmish with a squad of goblinoid raiders, after cutting a few deals and cutting a few peoples, we find her here in the desert, rising from the underworld to greet the morning. But not alone.

The Poet: An old and deadly thoughtform shaped as a weapon, the Poet has amassed many labels, including "Godkiller," and "the Liar," and has claimed to have been born of the rock that Cain used to slay Abel. To him, all poetry is born of the passage between life and not-life, and his favorite genre is murder. It is speculated that he bears some connection to Odin, and while this is unlikely, those who bear his mark can oft be recognized by their brimmed hats, and having an obscured or missing eye. He has gone without a proper wielder from some years... until now.

Let us watch them dance.

Adding It Up
06.04.02
a duet with Hanani

The sun wakes slowly, crawling fingers of pale yellow over the flat horizon. Not even the sky is fully hued, it blushes with the first touches of dawn as though it has been caught sleeping. Below, the red earth remains desert night cool, the sparse blooms barely beginning to reopen with the advent of light. Soon it will be hot.

Morning wind bestirs herself like a laugh, kicking up the first eddies of dust, filling in the cracks of the parched ground. It is the waking time for the world below as well, though these are moments less observed. Less witnessed. And yet they happen. This is the story of one such waking, deep underground.

Desert sand hisses, sounding for all the world like rain, falling as the ground below it begins to give way. Where there had been solid ground is quickly caving in, ever growing, a mouth opening. From it comes a voice, speaking in coughs and curses, and with the clatter of metal. The first thing to rise from this maw is one inked hand, followed by a dusty length of arm. The desert's mouth breathes fire; a dragon having lay sleeping since time began, awakes. Or so it appears. The color of flame rises from the earth, but it comes attatched to the inked shoulders and arms of that first hand. A single eye squints, and the wakened dragon breathes deep. Dust wafts upwards like smoke about her. Her grin challenges the braving dawn to greater ferocity.

Dawn, demure this morning, reaches across the shadowed landscape with a blade of red light, caressing the youngling curiously, as if to better take the measure of this creature in a girl's skin. For she bears herself like a dragon, and her grin is a dragon's grin, borne fierce and defiant against a world that has ceased to believe in such wonders. And in a moment, she lends her flame, her warmth and her approval to this youngling. Perhaps, in time, she will awaken and her grin will be as Real as it is True.

To bask is a verb falling shy of the girl and the sun. It is a moment of Now. Her skin ripples in the light, a blue reflected by the sky, as the rest of her draws up out of the earth and into the day. Beneath her boots, the ground is already hot. Her fingers curl and uncurl, they itch and the itch travels up her arms and down her spine like a living shiver along ink that would be scales.

With breath, light and life came awareness, and tagging along behind was its' new bedfellow, urgency. Everything was moving, now, and if it wasn't moving with her, than it was moving over her, leaving her in the dust.

That itch, that constant itch. It continued to creep back into her thoughts moment by moment, each day more insidious and more irritating than the last. While she was occupied it was bearable, ignorable, but at moments of inaction it would claw at the back of her brain, trying to drive her mad. Sometimes it would descend upon her in the middle of the night in a violent paroxysm, a demon of inner fire that would awaken her with rawness and bleeding. As if to oust her. To take over, so that nothing was left but the Itch and it's rotten future, in her torn skin.

Her curled fingers tighten, nails dig into palms and her blood begins to add moisture to a sapped ground. It is only the barely audible drip, plop whispers that filter in under the itch and soak into her awareness, and at last she looks down. Already the dark spots are drying, absorbed by thirsting soul. The desert has a ravenous appetite.

Jack and Jill went up a hill...

Always, since she was young, less hungered by knowledge, less haunted by its' cost, there has been Rhyme. Melodies, snippets, little heartfelt snatches of poem and story, sneaking in behind her thoughts, cobbling life together to the beat of time and meter. Sometimes they're pretty, and they'd pass the time while she walked or worked, and ease a measure of the care from a young but already lining brow. But so often, like the Itch that plagues her now, something would go wrong. If she stopped listening for the words, divided her attention for too long, then they would go places, those rhymes. Go places and come back, darker than they were before. Broken.

To Fetch a pale of water.

"Jack fell down and broke his crown..." The drips are falling faster.

"... I drowned his little sister."

Her laugh rasps dry, gravel raked across concrete. The heart in her chest beats slow, hollow, like an echo down a well. "Serves her right, I bet she pushed him."

The voice is dual natured, binary and insidious. If it were audible, it would be a guttural horror, gunmetal and broken machinery, burning oil's scent over parched blacktop. But it's so familiar. So much a part of her, so much like those twisted rhymes that are irreparable, and irreplacible. So to her mind's ear it is smooth, and soothing, and its' touch seems to cool the itch for a moment, putting it away, back underground, so she can think. "It would be... justice. Wouldn't it?"

"Poetic justice."

She lifts her hand, unclenching fingers red with her blood's war paint. Vitae. Vital. Signs that she is alive. The scar down her face twists the smile, slow, like the wind of a snake.

"You know little of poetry, my little dragon, and less of words." Presumptious, and curt, but the tone is somehow twisted into one of endearment. "You are a collector. A doer, not a thinker. That is your strength."

"Poetry, like you, need not have anything to do with words."

The blood on her hand begins to dry, caking and baking in the ever growing heat. Her heart's steady rhythm cuts time. "Am I hearing you or myself?"

"Thisssss..." Her arm lifts, slowly, a marionette's salute, as though she'd belatedly thought to ask permission for her question yet unanswered. One sleeve slides down as though pulled, though gravity is the only present culprit. "The runes you bear. Signs and sigils. There is a measure to these, a rhyme and a rhythm. They keep you whole, and they make you real. That is one form of Art."

"I know what they are, and what I am. But what are you?" The ink along the lifted arm undulates from the muscles that would move back to her side. Perhaps it is the sand that hisses, as the wind kisses it across her skin.

The wind breathes a gentle sigh. "An Artist, my little dragon, does not ask questions that cannot be answered. An Artist answers questions that cannot be asked. I am the one who hears you, when your cries are drowned silent by those of your bratling twin. I am the one who knows your worth, when time itself thought to cast you aside. I am the one who answers Need. What matter, then, if I am You, or I am I?"

"What use relying on anyone, if you can't rely on yourself?"

When she speaks it is the voice of the skeptic, "I see." The wind begins to flake the dried blood off her hand, returning it to the dust from whence she had come.

You can hear his grin. It is the sound of flies hunting. "I'm no angel, of course. But don't ask me to count the people in your head for you. I am a weapon. That's my job."

"Then you know it's hunting season." Her smile makes the sun feel mild. She curls her fingers the rest of the blood drifts away. Even the spots on the ground have been carried by the sands to be distributed like gossip across the land.

"Verrrrry much so." Her muscles, rendered sometimes weak recently, stretched and strained upon the merciless rack of shifting probabilities, now move sinuously and smoothly. A well-oiled machine. "The hourglass is running dry. Luckily now, with me at your back, we may be able to cut the Time you need in half."

Her shadow lies long upon the ground, dark and tall, reaching up to meet the soles of her feet, and it is almost as though a cold strength runs up from the ground, through that contact, into her. Perhaps it smiles at her, with a certain mirthless madness. The sand makes it hard to tell. Perhaps it is the glare of the light, but the place on her palm where her nails had pierced carries no trace of their bite. She raises her arms above her head, hands clasped and stretches. The wind across her shadow, for just a moment, leaves the impression of claws in the mind's eye. Her skin moves and the ink seems to writhe and settle like amoured scales. "Cut Time is my favourite tempo."

"I have the answers you need, little dragon. I have things to show you. But they come, as does all knowledge, at a price."

The wind dies flat, in an instant, without requiem.

"Will you see them?"

She sighs, the wind's only eulogy, and reaches in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. With one dangling from her lip, "sure, why the hell not." Her lighter flares before clicking shut and sliding into a pocket. She cocks a hip and exhales into the still air. "This is the best conversation I've had all day."

"Careful. People notice you talking to yourself, they're going to think you're... crazy." His laughter is faint. Perhaps it's hers? "Give me your hand."

Beneath her boots, a tall shadow waits expectantly.

"And that'd be new?" Her smirk carves along a crooked mouth. She crouches, one elbow propped on a knee, the other arm snaking towards the sand to touch. It should be hot. But it's not. It's cold. Just like gunmetal.

Soundlessly, something darts with lizardlike speed. Her hand is drawn down, down into the sand, and though nothing is visible beneath the surface where sand meets skin, she can feel the grip, the firm clasp of her wrist in a blood-bond shake. Her inner forearm has been opened along half it's length. And the blood comes down, runs down in a ready gush... jack fell down, and broke his crown... and begins pooling in a shallow basin of sand.

"This is your first lesson, foxgloves. This is how we scry."

"And the blood comes running after." She bleeds more than blood into the sand, it is genetic information. The matter and energy that bonds and holds her together slowly breaking apart and flowing into the ground. The desert is, after all, always thirsty. Blue whorls and whirls along her arm writhe as though they would crawl up her arm to avoid being spilt. She seems to pale. As though thinner, opaque somehow and the sun at her back just might shine through.

"You, Rohin, understand the world in a way that most people cannot see. All through their brief and stymied lives, everyone chooses every day, to be the person they are, and bury the person they might have been. They choose the safest outcome. They choose the laziest option. They fudge the numbers, instead of taking what they want."

"All along the way, each day, each choice adds up in a secret column that no one wants to see. The little guilts and wrongnesses, the tiny betrayals. The little murders. The slights we force others to endure, for our own gain. The vibrant people we might have been, swallowed by the shallow people we become. It all adds up."

The blood is pooling, steadily pooling. Forming a surface. "You know the things they hide. You come, to balance accounts."

Mirror mirror on the wall... She's starting to see her reflection, dark in the lugubrious liquid. The voice is louder in her head, or was it outside now, looking up at her, staring up from her blood and using her mouth? Her voice? In her other hand is the smoldering cigarette, whose smoke wavers like a mirage. The debt collector drops it in the edge of the pool, and smiles.

Fire blooms across the surface of the now-full scry, tearing away her reflection (if truly it belongs to her), replacing it with something else. A Priestess outside an Abbey. Over her shoulder, a cherry blossom grove whispers and hushes itself in quiet awe. Steel describes an arc, in the early morning light. She dances.

"This is your enemy. The path she treads will lead her over you, leaving nothing in its' wake."

A scarred brow lifts, heavy with doubt. "That little sheila?" She crouches closer, as though the pool was a portal she could lean right through. Her single eye squints, auditing the dance and keeping account.

"She Watches, and she is Watched, and armored in Grace. You must attack her through her weakness, the Serpent. You will find the Serpent in the fields, lying with the Gone Man's daughter."

The Priestess on the other side stops. The sword, which moves as an extension of her arm, pauses mid-air. Held, like a breath. Even in the desert the stillness is felt from the cooler forest floor. A cherry blossom falls, brushing across one of the woman's shoulders. She looks up towards the branches, through them. For a moment, it is as though she listens. And hears.

"Move the scry." Curt, no dissembling.

The collector gathers a handful of sand with her free hand and tosses it across the surface of the scry in a cascade of tiny ripples. Like a thousand little stones across a pond. "Can she hear me?" You? Us?
When she speaks her throat is dry, as though she's been talking twice as much, or swallowed some sand. Or, perhaps, from the sand swallowing her.

"No," he replies, perhaps too abruptly. "This is a matter of practice. You have speed, and ferocity. You lack Grace. You must learn not only to be unperceived, but to be imperceptible, to be always where they are weak and blind, until it is too late."

The scry ripples, small darknesses building up to greater ones, until the light is swallowed by the tenuous phosphorescence and shadowplay of the underground.

"Yeah. Invisible." Words half obscured by the intrusion of a cigarette into her mouth. The flicker of a flame flares and relfects off the pool like a guttering torch.

Click. "Now what'm I lookin' at?" Blowing smoke towards the darker depths of the image, thinking invisible thoughts.

"It is... a matter of economics," he murmurs finally, as the darkness reveals a set of bars, growing directly out of a cavernous surface of volcanic rock. A pale set of hands grasp those bars, and behind them haunted eyes, now grey, now glinting red with the light fails to find them.

"Ones and zeros..." Her retort cut short. "Hey, I know him." She taps ash away from the pool and spits, some distance beyond it.

"This is your ally. He is the player behind your acquaintance Kade, and shares your goals. He would draw the New World into the light, and settle it upon the bones of this flawed and pale plane."

"Where's he at?" Sizing up the what she can make of the rock.

"He is a madman. Half the time he believes himself to be a prisoner in the humanoid city that lies nigh your Gate, and during these times he is treated as such. Other times, he maintains and controls the slave trade upon which the city above has always fed and fattened. He sleeps almost never. If you think, you will discover that you understand what this means."

"I never sleep." Her single eye narrows as she takes a long drag off the cigarette, when she exhales, it is as the dragon. There is a silence. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So, Nikolai Belikos has to share a body." Her smile curls with the smoke.

"He may not look upon it as a burden. Never underestimate that one, and never turn your back to him. But with his resources, you can make everything you hold dear come true."

The man's face is a sheet of resigned misery. He is brooding, calculating, thinking desperately, but the flame of hope has all but guttered out.

And then it changes--

-- and the face that's left sheds natural, human emotion like a duck sheds water, leaving in its' wake a cold, self-satisfied smile second only to that of the moon.

"Fuckin' creepy bastard, ain't he," comments the gravelled voice to the smooth one coming from the same mouth. She grins, and it is a gruesome sight in the glare of the sun and blood.

The scry is shrinking now, the being behind it is taking its' nourishment drop by drop. One more time, flame peels back the pool's surface like a curtain, revealing a traveling Thieflet, swiftly departing a scene that, more than likely at some point involved fire and mayhem.

The collector spits, her smile souring into a scowl that simmers in her single eye. If blood can be said to boil, perhaps the ripple or two that rolls across the surface of the pool is evidence of the truth in that. Her teeth creak with clenching, enamel gritting against the sand that gets into everything, even mouths.

"We know her." The remaining ichor in the scry has begun to steam.

Her skin reddens. But it is not from the sun without. Her anger rolls off her like a heat mirage. Only it is not a mirage. In her other hand she has closed her fingers over the cigarette, burning it out in her palm. Likely, it is cold compared to her.

"But you cannot kill her, alone."

"Yeah. I know. Still got the scar." On her back, just below the left shoulder blade is the remnant of a stab wound, one she'd delivered. But it had been to a different back altogether. "Tell me how."

"You have me now," the Poet whispers, for she realizes suddenly, that is this voice's name. "You have me, and I have many kinds of strength to lend you."

The scry is nearly gone now, barely the size of two hands side by side, but flame peels away one last, one final sheet.

"Lend." This last word repeated, weighed, tested. It is an expensive word to one who deals in debts.

The image makes very little sense at first. It's like a jumble, a mishmash of other image's they've seen. Bars, strange lighting. Fire, a plain of fire, volcanic rock lit red with earth's molten memories. An abbey? A fortress? No. A mountain of sorts, stairs carved into the gutrock.

It is along these stairs, near the peak of the staircase, where the bars appear. They are frigid, and built of ice, crystalline cold enough to freeze a star. And they need to be. The hate and anguish that pulses out of this cell is enough to set the final pieces of the scry to a true boil, and it lights her soul with a kindred flame.

A bowler derby, so similar, is visible, and a strand of hair blocking out where one eye should be. But there is no gaze within either of those twin hollows, none at all. Her knuckles are forever white. She screams in eyeless fury, from her icy prison in Hell.

The collector stares. Even the desert is cold for a moment. Her lips move to ask a question she already, he already, they already know. It is the last Korgan. The last bearer of the Poet. The executioner of the Lost Boy.

"And now, the Lady of Sorrows." He catches her unenunciated thoughts with the care one would use to lift a dying bird. "She may come to aid you, if I call. If you are strong enough to withstand that aid."

"She's... Legend," is all her cracked lips manage. With her free hand she dips a finger tip into the scry, releasing the ash from the held cigarette and ripples the image.

"You can be her champion, Rohin. You can be mine. You need but reach a little further, and what you want will come winging to your grasp."

The scry is but a handsbreadth wide.

"Words. What do I need to do?"

"Reach. And be certain. There is no going back from this."

She sinks the hand into what remains of the pool. "Lemme think. To win or not to win."

It could be her own future, there in that endless prison, in that burning freeze. The path was a mortal one. But for the blessing of a Dream who fought her way across time to live, She who struck down her Creator that the rest of his Creation might have justice...

A smile, and a scream, echo across the desert's changing face.

--fin

In every gargoyle sleeping There is a dream like this And takes a breath And everything is photonegative. The whole sky is burnt into place, in underexposed, magnetic film tones. The earth drinks of light, leaving noisome silhouettes and absences across the lower field of vision. The rose is pearlescent, a haunt, invisible to ordinary eyes, reflecting only colder hues. Inscribing only indigoes into our naked sight, leaving all other values implicate. Something inside mewls pitifully, hungry for proof, hungry for life. Something that we never thought about, yet always was. We reach forward, to grasp, to know. To be tasted by the questing tangent thorns, as reassurance. As a promise. Her hand is small, sacrosanct in ints diminutive scope, as if to tear away the veil that suggests anything might be worth holding were she not able to hold it, and at the same time suggest that such hands hold everything together. It closes over ours, over the rose, over all sounds, to marry us to a new moment. It seems right to gasp, nerves keening with the flesh as it parts, integrity broken in myriad, crucified to the rose. It seems right, but the mewling thing is silent now, and her hand it holds the sound, and her eyes unshrinking violet beneath icicle hair gather everything, so that there is no air to gasp. There is nothing left but to tremble lightly, no whisper to be made but those of nerve and muscle fiber, frantic whispers in the language of electricity and elasticity, speaking chaos and tongues. Sensation held upon the cusp of bearability, held and melted into something so much sweeter. When she pulls our hand away from the thorns finally, the blood comes in a gush, anxious to return to Mother Ocean, to tell ribonucleic stories, to call toothed longing from the depths. To be come whole again, infinite and dissolute, less and greater than everything. She draws our screaming palm to her mouth, thereby effecting transmutation. My hand covers the lower half of her face, a flesh bandanna, a feeding insect, a mask that in the wearing reveals more than it conceals. Purple hunger exerts a force that no science can detect or measure, drawing brain's heat into heart, heart into stomach, stomach into guts, guts into groin. Each pass of that tongue, now a snake sliding, now a birdwing beating, wipes away another thought, leaving a changeling in each cradle. Unbidden, our hips rock forward, caught in the gravity of that texture, heavy with unsaid communication. Urgent, needing meaning. When her stained lips come away, the air scalpels in with a silent hiss, and we know that we would ruin Time for this, break it's back and leave it in pieces, and lay our jacket across them at her feet, that she might walk across unsullied by the mire of moment to moment. Abdomen to abdomen, I feel our ribs expand with yearning, yawning wide to surround her, to consume that second beat, swallowing it whole. In every gargoyle now asleep There is one piece of soul they keep If it should die, and they should wake...

All stairways, when traversed downwards, lead to here. The trick is to avoid the bottom landing, a trick in itself, a trick of matter and perception. Hotwire your each footfall, a quantum mechanic's trick, and descend, and continue. Along a certain axis of reality, all stairways lead down into the dark. The way is at a right angle to that which you observe, no further away than a glance, behind a barrier thinner than the sheerest sheet of paper. Thus, by some (who sleep too little and dream too much), it is referred to as the Kingdom of Paper Moths. Your journey there is attended by the liminal sound of tiny wings, beating away all the holy remnants of your life. Tick. Tick. Tick. Once you have descended here, you will learn too quickly that darkness is not the immutable thing you thought; that absence of light is also a trick of matter and perception. The darkness here lives in sheets, endless sheets suspended from some unreckoned place above, silken curtains of an opacity that is complete, yet so gossamer as to fall away like mist from your flawed sense of touch, leaving nothing more than a suggestion of slickness upon the skin. There is no way to see where each curtain might part, and yet each one parts precisely where you touch it, each tactile shadow admitting you to the next. The blackout curtains behind the stage of Is. You will not think to regard the lie beneath your feet (and this is for the best), as you part the final curtain to the Helix Cynosure. Down and up fail to remember their original sentiments here, meaning giving way to Mobius, as above or below all of the stairways descend to the final landing. Upon a dais, the outer rim of which is ringed with forgotten letters from the true Alphabet, sits the throne of Chueh Yin, the Moth Prince. His form, draped in silks of sable and crimson, is angular, perfect in a Euclidean sense, each line of limb or feature meeting another at aesthetically perfect angles, a polyhedral sonnet inscribed into the form of man. No curves or softness here, save for his raiment. He is all planes and junctions, and the slant of his red eyes tends upwards towards the world of Forms. Only the merest flickering, no longer than an eyeblink, betrays this perfection from time to time. From moment to moment, here and there across his visage, a triangular gap will open, apertures of darkness opening and moving across his face like pieces of a mechanical mosaic. Ebon hints -- -- that what you look upon is not skin of the sort you know, but wings. The thousands upon thousands of wings of the Calyptra moth, Chueh Yin's progeny, or perhaps his sires. Calyptra, whose banquet is the font of your life's dearest fluids, your sweat, your tears. Your blood. The liminal sound of tiny wings, beating away all the holy remnants of your life, and under each wing, when it beats, underneath each wing perched and crawling upon the Prince's body, underneath each tiny trick of light and matter, underneath is... tick underneath us tick You must not think on it. On what holds these fragile vampires so bound, so that the only death that will rouse them from their living bed is the irrefusible Fire of the World's Ending. You must not think it. To look upon Chueh Yin the Moth Prince, is to know that all stairways lead ever down. --The Kingdom of Paper Moths 4/13/05 KB end

(in progress) They called him the Quetzalcoatl Kid, and some other things besides. And he ate pussy like a Hero. Now, the Kid was a raptor pilot, from a time before climate change and the shifting magnetic poles had made all the greater lizards slower and meaner than a jailhouse tattoo. They were a different breed, those raptor jockeys, wirey and tearless, generally brown with the sun or from the favor of the Earth. Working in tandem or in small bands of four, they kept order while the Daystar smiled, and kept the Mammoth Bison moving steadily in their dreaming marches from one waypoint to the next, steering them away from cliffs and keeping the desert's many vulturine nuisances at bay. His steed Utah was similarly a prodigy, though not in the same arena. He was smarter and larger (though not necessarily faster) than most of his saurian brethren, and possessed of a limited morphic resonant projective ability. Though disdainful of the human attachment to language and symbol, he was able to communicate basic concepts, such as [water], [trouble], and [need smoke], directly to the mind of his jockey. Mostly a steadfast Atkins subscriber and health nut, Utah did enjoy a cigar on occasion, though reducing his oxygen intake by even the smallest amount generally sent the large saurial into a blissfully stuporous languor, most often proceeding from there to a face-first recuperatory dustnap of indeterminate length. While astride his steed, the Kid had little to fear. Unfortunately, at this precise instant, he was not astride his steed. At this precise instant, his weight was supported in a potential manner, by a securely tied rope marrying his neck to an overhead tree branch, and in a current but highly tenuous manner, by the giant quantum hummingbird keeping its place between the Kid and an unfriendly-looking vertical drop into a gully comprised almost entirely of free floating atmospheric molecules and very sharp rocks. At this moment, the Q-bird held a more-or-less steady hover. It might remain in place indefinitely, or at least until it ran out of energy to support it. Being by no means sure of how long that might take, the Kid was doing nothing to hasten the moment. This was not a type of situation which he found entirely unfamiliar; however to his faint amazement, it seemed for once as though no amount of cunnilingual talent would help the situation in even the most tangent way. To be continued...

-begin 12:27 AM 10/5/04 There should be a word. There should be a word for missing things you never had, as such. I'd like to spend a day, going through my music. MP3s, CDs, tapes and vinyl. I imagine a bunch of us sprawled in the living room, just playing stuff on the stereo, flipping through and casting aside the audio echoes I've collected over time. Picking things to sell, sampling and trading tunes people haven't listened to or haven't listened to for a while, just putting things on the main stereo to listen to. Quietly working together, or even noisily, building a little empire of sound that belongs to all of us, a city of noise and memory, uniform sonic building blocks that come together to make a moment, a little place, a little piece of home. It's not that I don't have the music. But I don't seem to have the friends. Mind you, I have friends all over the place, high places and low. But they're all spread out, across the country, across the world, across time and space, and they're not going to intersect any time soon. School was a little bit like that, at least, a place in time where I had a lot of friends that lived near me, and we'd congregate like that, unplanned, just wander into each other's dorm rooms or apartments and hang out, for no particular reason other than to trade ideas, to pass the time. I didn't know what I wanted to be, or where I wanted to go, but I had all the time in the world to waste, and only had a few steps to go in any direction to occupy space with other people who had all that time, too. It's not that school was anything special in and of itself. I've met more people, crazier people, found even crazier adventures before, and since. But here in the adult world, somehow that shared time doesn't exist any more. Everyone's all spread out, and spending time with each other is an event, not a matter of habit. We all have things to do that take up all our time, work, school, drugs, art, the Game of You. I never just go somewhere to "hang out" anymore, I don't have any place to go waste time in company, it's all solo. The time spent with other people, it's not in concert the same way, it's not the same, and there's no way back, really. Every place I go, every social circle falls apart eventually, falls victim to that same entropy, falls into the distance and away, and the only constant is me, and I was never as constant as I wanted to be. Have you ever missed home, without knowing if you'd ever been there? "Almost done with that test case?" The voice jolts me out of the reality of the word processor, and back to the ephemeral now. The past falls away, and through mist and morning rain I know what it is to be a ronin, a wandering sword with no family and no lands to call his own. With a pang of loss, and love, and duty all the same, I remember that my sword is no longer made of steel, not in this here and now. I am a Breaker, and the only building I do is through tearing down. Precipitation blatters against the building's wide window panes, and though dry I feel rained upon, and nod assent as I slide the black beanie a little further down over my eyes, drawing Focus. "Hai. Soo," I murmur, a response which is little different than "Have it done in a minute, boss, just wanna check a couple of last minute things," which is how the Lead interprets it anyway. All the same. I key a sequence into Muninn, who with a whirr of contentment spits forth the first few solemn chords of a Bad Religion MP3. Controller forming a comfortable weight in my palm, I aim it pistol-like at the screen and breathe a mantra. The Black Box hums, and form from chaos, a small army of pixels resolve themselves into a warrior. We are kindred spirits, he and I, fighting phantoms in a world that everyone around us imagines to be real. When the tinny, acerbic notes catch a bass line and begin to fly, in that short time I clear my mind of all but the pathing structure in front of me, the prescribed Player's course, hunting for even the slightest weakness that I might use to take it down. Always a long day in the Test Pit. When the clouds clear, sometimes I wonder Why. And I wonder what you're up to...? -end 1:02 AM 10/06/04