Scarecrow

Scarecrow in the front row

Rags make riches

From the stitches

But he's not alive, it shows

Trembling in the ill wind

Buttons for eyes

Hands done in ties

Patchy hessian-skinned

As the crow flies

Away from him

Grease painted clown face

Smiling in vain

All without a name

Withdraw the human race

It's rather a shame

Even the birds can't stand his face

Scarecrow in the background

Plays the bitter anti-hero

Is that weeping that we hear? No!

Give it time, stick around

Watch him spring out of the ground

He'll dance for us, put on a show

Our lonely friend, the sad scarecrow

Our lonely little scarecrow

The Spiders.

Dewy wet caught in needles

Inward bound

Pitter-patter

What's the matter?

Not a sound

Four by four delicate limbs

Onward bound

Spin your web

In the flow and ebb

Silken spun around

Eight glistening portals

Outward mapping

A feast of kings

The spider sings

Ready for the trapping

Well, I'm just a puddle of sunshine this evening, aren't I?

This is actually quite a nice follow up to the last one in terms of narrative.

There aren't enough!

This simply won't do!

How am I to maintain,

To keep a healthy mainframe

When there's naught but

Animals to occupy the space

Between the obligations

And the joyful sensations?

They mime a dance

I take a chance

A foolish chance

And join the dance

They're not quite there

Or they wish they weren't

Wishing to be

Beyond the learner

Not willing to see

That all the sterner

I'm only trying to help

Not ruin your dance

Stupid as it was

To take that chance

Bitter husks

I just can't seem to write shit all

And shit is written in bits and bits

But a pieced approach does not at all

Allow for words, the muses call

But the phone's offline

I'd hope this funk would lift in time

But forcing words, just not my kind

Of thing, you know?

On my side I've time and means

But not the drive to do, it seems

For to do is to be and couldn't I see?

Being is all that's left for me

And still I can't see?

If people are dust, we must, we must

Occupy ourselves lest we become

Bitter husks

Crobat AGAIN.

I'm excited. Or ecstatic. I can't decide which. BOTH. At the same time. Patrick made me a Crobat, though out of what I'm not sure. I share two of my four names with him. Fun facts. Yeah.

It's beautiful. And as everyone should be aware I do love Crobat. Very much so. Let's see if we can get a picture.

There you go. Look at that bad-ass. He's coming, coming to cut you up something fierce.

-

But I'm terribly conflicted at the moment. Alarmingly so. I have to come up with a monologue. Well, less of a monologue, let's just call it a solo performance. Granted I have a couple of months yet to devise the whole thing, but it really is a frightening prospect. I've narrowed my options down to one of the given stimuli, problem is there are two choices within it. They're linked, of course, or it wouldn't be a single stimulus. I have a choice between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the actors renowned for being the original Frankenstein's monster and Dracula respectively. They're both amazing options, and I need to decide in the next few days. Broad, general research can only go so far. The idea is that they're competing for the title of 'The King Of Horror' at the wrap up party for Son Of Frankenstein by monopolising the attention of an up-and-coming director. They deride the other's portrayals of monsters.
So, let's go through each and why it would be wonderful and awful.
Bela Lugosi. Cool. Dat accent. He has a beautiful Hungarian accent which is just fun and pretty easy to replicate. In terms of characterisation I'd prefer Lugosi. When playing Dracula he has these terrible and beautiful imposing eyes, the typical hypnosis eyes. Dracula is fun to be. However, Lugosi is a bit of a dick. Granted, that might work in my favour if I need to be a dick for narrative purposes but I just don't like him as a person. Various facts and trivia have driven me away from him.
Now Boris. I genuinely find Frankenstein's monster more frightening than Dracula. By nature he is imposing, he's large and he doesn't say much. He's the uber-zombie. I would find it easier to pick flaws in Bela as Boris.

I had so much more to say but the more I think the harder it'll get.

I'll just do more research.

The catch.

HEY OLLIE WHY DON'T YOU GO TO BE-

HOW ABOUT NO?

When an itch to scratch

It meets its match

But there's the catch!

It tries to snatch

To find a latch

But here's the catch!

Oh, they try to patch

Open the hatch

But there's the catch!

The itch to scratch

Forfeits the match

By default, by design

In short, it resigns

But lo', a sign!

"What fault of mine?
Do you so malign?"
And here's a sign!
Grasp the vine

Pray it'll be fine

There was a sign!

"What manner or design?"
And forced to resign

And here's the catch

Illness catalysed ranting.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU REFUSE TO GO OUT, OLLIE. YOU STUPID BASTARD.

loljk. Sickness strikes at only the most inopportune times.
But words can come to you if you just push them a little bit.

I don't know what it is, but something is drawing me to listen to Australian hip-hop. No, not Hilltop Hoods, fuck off, they're rubbish. At the moment it's just Urthboy and Hermitude. Under normal circumstances this would make me feel dirty, obviously I am not under normal circumstances, whatever that entails. Maybe it's something about the culture, the pseudo-bohemian idea of 'the streets'. Hip-hop culture is probably the culture that I identify the most with. Not at all 'gangsta' or anything of that ilk, but the idea of no pretension to the aim of an idea conveyed through rhythmically placed words. Some of the words aren't too bad either, completely contrary to any bastardised drivel about 'bitches and money' or whatever the kids are listening to these days. Urban settings best suit me as well, a chaotic sprawl of concrete and irrelevant paraphernalia. Think of a Tim Burton movie if it was placed in the inner city, imagine the arbitrary items heaped into piles in dingy alleyways and the derelict apartments where the rooms have no purpose and can be/are used for anything.

It's entrancing. Two completely disparate rhythms, one regular and the other decidedly random, overlaying and overlapping. And it's poetry, no less! Those are three things I strive for: word, rhythm, and harmony thereof. Hip-hop/rap achieves those two perfectly.

Right. More things. Write all the things. Write all the things? YES. Write all the things.

Plans for tomorrow. Put pen to paper. Which is a nice way of putting it since neither of those elements come into play here. Put words to pixels. That's better. PLANS FOR TOMORROW. YES I'M IN A STATE OF SEMI-DELIRIUM. WHY DO YOU ASK?

Until now I never had anything with which to play records, which is a shame since I really do love to browse records. Now I do. We trawled through a family record collection and found some amazing shit: Ten Years After, Madness, Dave Brubeck, it was beautiful. The Brubeck stuff had versions of familiar songs I'd never heard before with harmonicas and violins and psychedelic guitar, and reflecting on that they're versions I probably never would have heard. There is far too much music than can be contained within a computer, or even the internet, it's ephemeral and constant. Even existing music is constantly changing.
Which is why I bought two random 50c records. The cheap stuff is always the best; if it's crap then that's okay, no harm done; if it just happens to be amazing then that's even better. Tried that once before and it turned out that the artist was just about to hit it big in Australia, so I was inadvertently ahead of the curve. Right, I bought a record with Beethoven's 5th concerto from Op. 73 and Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, and another of the London Symphony Orchestra playing classic rock. There's some really good stuff on there too: Pictures Of Lily, Gloria, Layla, Another Brick In The Wall, You Really Got me, it's looking to be pretty good. Now I just need to invade Robin's bungalow again and watch video cassettes and listen to records and play ridiculously old video games.

Possibilities open up wherever you choose to find them.

Edit: I'm not delirious on this, the following evening. Yet here I am again, listening to Hermitude. I just genuinely enjoy hip-hop it seems.

Sleep deprivation.

And here's my last 24 hours in verse.

A purpose brought

And shelter sought

A secret spilled

For tankards filled

The second of them

Lately called in

The minutes that last

Are the last minute casts

Dust everywhere

What the fuck do I care?

No sleep, no sight

No face, no light

An end less preferred

Not enough to deter!

An array of delights

A long forgot height

Sunlight streaks

For the opened week

Second-hand

An old favourite band

Of hoodlums, of loudness

Of a rekindled shrewdness

Of sickness in health

The ecstasy's melt

But the purpose sought

Is a purpose forgot

A purpose for later

We'll pick it up later

And I guess that's all

Songs for the apocalypse.

Fun-time idea: construct a playlist of the songs you want to be listening to during and after the inevitable zombie/nuclear/etc. apocalypse. Think deeply on it. What would you want to be listening to while lodging hammers into the skulls of animated rotting corpses? What can you picture yourself trudging through the wasteland through?

Mine's mostly industrial, (early) electro, garage rock, and some good old fashioned gothic rock thrown in for good measure: Nick Cave, Sister of Mercy, that sort of thing. Anything particularly gritty or evoking of baddassery. To that end, there's also a fair bit of Black Sabbath in there.

Right, so let's go through mine in more depth. I'm enjoying this a little too much, aren't I?

The White Stripes
A lot of the more bare bones stuff, songs where Meg slams the bass without any complexity whatsoever. Icky Thump, I Think I Smell A Rat, Black Math. It's all just raw, it makes me want to get as drunk as possible and smash metal things together, which is probably what I'd be doing post-apocalypse.

Abney Park
This is pretty easy. A lot of their stuff is actually about a post-apocalypse steampunk reality. Under The Radar from Aether Shanties in particular. Earlier stuff is just so heavy though. The Death Of Tragedy and Cemetery Number 1 are entirely composed of songs from some Matrix-esque rave scene. An industrial rave, that's what I think of when I envision Abney Park.

Tom Waits
Tom Waits' voice is terrifying. Particular albums just sound like they've been stripped down to the bones, right down to the rattlin' bones. His voice, like an ash cloud soaked in whiskey, it conjures images of a much less violent world, but one where some futuristic cowboy walks into the bar and everyone immediately goes back to their drinks because he'll murder them with a guitar string. He writes poetry better than any I've heard, he writes songs to be alone by.

Dr. Steel
Assuming of course it wasn't Dr. Steel that actually caused this Armageddon, though that probably wouldn't deter me, hammers and nails and sampling would walk me through a ghost city. In all probability though, he probably launched the nukes.

Tool
I just like the idea of blowing off zombies heads to irregular times and unnecessarily distorted guitars.

The Creatures

Those drums! Practically all Creatures songs are just Siouxsie Sioux howling and Budgie on ecstasy beating the drums like he wants to give them all heavy concussions.

It's pretty easy to imagine any of this ringing out through deserted streets and up collapsing concrete skyscrapers or across junkyard wastelands or through deserts or even in vast underground caverns (Abney Park <3).