Christ.

The music and the words don't match up yet.

Yet.

In my

Head

Everything is green

The whole world

And the statues

The people

Houses

Everything

And though I

Can't force my eyes

In my head

Everything is growing

Like trees

I twisted my own roots

Up to meet the sun

And they were so scared

I still don't know

Where to put my roots

But they grow

Under me

In a

Triangle shape

I just want them to be

Green

Inside of light

(or so I've read)

The colours are infinite

And small

One day I'll find

The right

Green for you

And me

I won't

Force my eyes to sprout

But everything is green

Inside my head

Diptera.

The gnats, the flies
The flicker of tiny lives
Pluck, hairthin
Little mandolin strings
And even thoraic
Crystal veined wings
A full-body whirlwind

Engulf me, like the lamplight
And the fast-paced swarm flight
My minutiae friends
You make me feel like I
Might be dead without even realising
Diptera, you flatter me
But my sockets are closed
For business this evening

Imagine the giants
Slow-foot monsters
With no more than a pair
Of clumsy flightless wings extending
These inelegant
Artless things

The bugs, the bugs!
The success is stifling
The pitter patter of those
Tiny many feet
I feel so insecure
Amongst the evolutionary elite

"So, your pressure is dropping..."

I have a storm
Of infinite recursion
Hidden in my eye

The clockwise south-bound
And its tropical counter
For the purge at the center
And we are both so reciprocally
Low pressure by volition

Where control slips
Out of the spiral
The whip-wind hurricane
Just look into my eye

If you are the storm in my eye
I will be the eye of your storm

I give you a hamburger.

Transcription from a Tumblr post.
Good gods don't let me forget this.

Let's make the cule a unit of measurement
One cule would be
One level of abstraction away from the reality
Of a situation

For example:
You ask me for a hamburger

At one cule:
If you asked me for a hamburger
And I gave you a raccoon

At two cules:
If you asked me for a hamburger
But it turns out I don't really exist
Where I was originally standing
A picture of a hamburger rests on the ground

At three cules:
You awake as a hamburger
You start screaming only to have special sauce
Fly from your lips
The world is in sepia

At four cules:
Why are we speaking German?
A mime cries softly
As he cradles a young cow
Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart
Into patties
You look down only to see me with
Pickles for eyes
I am singing the song that gives birth
To the universe

At fives cules:
You ask for a hamburger
I give you a hamburger
You raise it to your lips and take a bite
Your eye twitches involuntarily
Across the street
A father of three falls down the stairs
You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands
I give you a hamburger
You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands
You cannot swallow
There are children at the top of the stairs
A pickle shifts uneasily
Under the bun
I give you a hamburger
You look at my face and I am pleading with you
The children are crying now
You raise the hamburger to your lips
Tears stream down your face
As you take a bite
I give you a hamburger
You are on your knees
You plead with me
To go across the street
I hear only children's laughter
I give you a hamburger
You are screaming as you fall down the stairs
I am your child
You cannot see anything
You take a bite of the hamburger
The concrete rushes up to meet you
You awake with a start in your own bed
Your eye twitches involuntarily
I give you a hamburger
As you kill me
I do not make a sound
I give you a hamburger

At six cules:
I give you a hamburger
My attempt to reciprocate
Is cut
Brutally short
As my body experiences a sudden
Lack of electrons
Across a variety of dimensions
You are dis-made
John Lennon hands me an apple
But it slips through my fingers
I am reborn as an ocelot
You disapprove
A crack echoes
Through the universe
In defiance of conventional physics
As cosmological background noise
Shifts from randomness
To a perfect A-flat
Children everywhere
Stop what they are doing
And hum along in perfect pitch with
The background radiation
Birds fall from the sky as the
Sun engulfs the Earth
You hesitate momentarily before
Allowing yourself to assume
The locus of all knowledge
Entropy crumbles
As you peruse the information contained
Within the universe
A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist
You stumble under the weight of
Everything-ness
Your mouth opens up to cry out
And collapses around your body before blinking you
Out of the spatial plane
You exist only within the fourth-dimension
The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along
The ground and collides with a small dog
My head tastes sideways as
Space-time is re-established
You blink back into the corporeal world
Disoriented
Only for me to
Hand you a hamburger
As my body collapses under the strain
Of reconstitution
The universe
Has re-asserted itself
A particular small dog is fed steak for the
Rest of its natural life
You die in a freak accident moments later
And your soul
Works at the returns desk for the Pheonix library
You disapprove
Your disapproval sends ripples
Through the inter-dimensional void between
Life and death
A small child begins to cry as he
Walks toward the stairway where his father stands

Perchance to dream.

I've started taking these drowsy antihistamines before bed most nights because of reasons. I say most nights because I'm not supposed to mix them with alcohol and I've done a fair bit of drinking in the last couple of weeks, so I don't always get the chance to. I wake up much sleepier than I usually am in the mornings, and I feel myself getting physically tired before bed whenever I take them. Properly tired, my eyelids struggle and everything feels like I've been up for forty-eight hours. Proper drowsy meds, so that's kind of nice.

And so every time I take them I get nightmares.

I've taken them sporadically, so I'm almost certain it's them. Owing to the infrequency of me even recognizing dreams at all and the fact that the nights I take them coincide with the nights I have really vivid nightmares, it's pretty easy to conclude that there's at least the slightest of correlations.

Until the first evening I hadn't had a nightmare in years, they just didn't come. I realise that I dream and that I rarely remember them as easily as others seem to be able to, but I maintain that nightmares stay with me, because, you know, they kind of suck. So, that was a little jarring, when the thing that woke me up was a pair of hands around my neck. That was the first one, an extremely vivid nightmare of a physical assault. I know it was physical assault, it had the same urgency attached to it, the same desperation that comes with an almost completely random outburst of violence on your person. I am familiar with the feelings that comes with being assaulted, just to clarify. It is something I've experienced.

The second one reinforced the correlation, because there was a nightmare and it was a recurring one from my childhood. Wait, let me clarify. The fact that I recognized it as a nightmare reinforced the correlation because I never remember normal dreams, and the fact that I recognized it as coming from childhood reinforced that I am able to recognize my nightmares much more frequently than my normal dreams. Does that make sense? It does to me. Malkyf, or whatever.

I don't know how to describe the second one, but it's definitely a nightmare. The third time, the most recent, escapes me but it was still noticeably unpleasant.

So I guess I'm just trying to justify why I believe the two things, the medication and the nightmares, are related. They are. So there.

Alright, Ollie, back to the point.

At first I wanted to stop them immediately. Who wouldn't? I don't want to wake up in a cold sweat one night of my own volition. No one does. I think no one does. No judgement and all that. The slight convenience they give me just wasn't worth the psychological trouble. That feeling lasted all of five seconds before I suddenly wanted to have more nightmares. I wanted to see where they'd end up. I want to reconnect with my unconscious. Maybe I've lost something that kept me anchored and I want to find a way back in. I think it completely normal to say that I am intensely interested in the workings of my own brain. I want to see what I am, and maybe nightmares are the way to do that. Awful things happen, yeah, sometimes completely arbitrarily, and sometimes maybe some relevant shit is going down in the parts of my brain I leave by my pillow.

I'm not afraid of feeling afraid.

Goodnight.

-

(In progress)

3/4

Dm | - | - | -
Gm | - | - | -
Dm | - | A | -

Night one
The test has begun
And the moon's come up from below

The hour is late
And your nerves are a state
So close the door
And shut the window

So sleep
Sleep
Perchance to dream

Nine.

The interval punches me
Into the air, aloft of
A punctuated wave
Aloud in wide formation
This spike stretches out as
An albatross wingspan
Bearing me aloft on a bright red harmony

I cannot let them
Become static
I cannot have them
Anywhere else
I'm in no position to contradict
My own auditory tenants

The distance between the
Two tones
Is large enough to fit
My heart in
But the chord snaps shut
And by the minor or the majority
Or the glorious number seven
And the sweet discord
I am a bleeding heart for this

The arm that hammers in the bass
Pushes my synapse
Is the same with blood running down to the fingertips

From the blood.

My father is a mortal
He is the very thing that killed
My innocence, my wonder
And I know he still tries to see it sometimes
For what it gave back to him

(The young me
With little bright blue eyes
Is still sitting in that city hospital
I don't think he gets it)

This grinning buffoon
Pushing little buttons and marveling
Exactly as I used to do

Curled into a weary smile
I will let him have his smaller
And smaller moments like this

I know he will stay happy
As long as he believes
That he still has much to teach me

Hypertonic.

From corner to corner
Cover to cover to
Collecting the moisture in its hidden
Secret places
My roof is a catchment
My fan is the shower to my
Spring harvest
The ripe
The juice
The shriveled turgid
Too taught skin
If I am lucky
My flesh will make the finest vintage

Water me
Shower me
Be careful not to drown me out
My cells are rough
And dry
They cannot contain themselves

It is true
I concede
I lack the cellulose for this to be so
My membranous will is very
Delicate
The in-flow is beyond control
Immersion in the fluid is the
Only thing that I have left

Were I to breathe
There'd be but sand
I have no more moisture left in me
Inside out
Peel to core
I am the low-hanging desert fruit
I am the cactus shell

Except that there is no hidden store
I am simply empty

An inventory of my corkboard.

I'm in a nice mood and I have the late Jeff Buckley wailing and reverberating about my room as I smash out the chords on the electric. I thought it might be interesting to make a note of the things on my corkboard as of now as a reflection on my life.

And so:

• one enveloped ticket to Einstüzende Neubauten in February
• a gift voucher for MTC's 2013 season, and a receipt for half its value in expenditure
• my December work roster
• a ticket to Sydney for 2/1/2013
• the sheet music for the Aphonia interlude pieces
• an RSA certificate
• course outline documents for arts/science
• a letter from Tamuz written at the conclusion of Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, and the card with the lovely messages from cast and crew
• the truly excellent card from the end of Aphonia with the leather silhouette of Sherlock Holmes

As far as microcosms go, I think that's quite nice.

.

The pot is nearly empty
And the dregs are all so bitter
But they're all that I have left
My wallet's nearly bare
And these coins are all so dull
But they should get me through what's left
Of the day
I think I'll be okay

Vineyard.

We cultivate here
All that's human
Earthly goods and profane splendour
Button noses on vines
We have beauty on tap

This field looks empty
But beneath the mineral soil
A crop of child-bearing hips
Slowly comes to plump fruition

This is the glasshouse that grows
Painters' hands and pianists' fingers and
A clockmaker's eyes and a fisherman's wrists
And the legs that carry you on romantic trysts
The lungs of the operatic
This is a dancer's torso and legs from a very good vintage
I remember the air that year
So well

If you'll follow me we have a special
Something just for you
In here behind the locked door

This vat, this tank
Is really something
Of course it takes very long to mature
But we are perfectionists
Fifty years of cultivation and one hundred
Thousand kind words

One hundred percent, pure
First grade
Human empathy

Metamorphosis

Walking silently about the house
Having minor moments of dissociation
I am surrounded by these vital
Elegants
While showers come down
And die right down again

In presence
I cannot control the shedding
Just as I can't control the spread
Of tainted lamb's blood
On the bedding
The sickly scent
It gives me euphoria
A perfect disrupted trinity
My painted hips
My sainted lips
My black honey
My fingertips
All are replaced and remade each night

Le Lendemain.

le lendemain
and then and then

if you do decide
to walk the plank
to blossom out
to lose your mind
shaving your eye-white tusks
crisscrossed for red
convivial lymph
(but I could never love
a pile of ash)
unhook my sutures
burst out of my scars
laid over each other
again and again
over to le lendemain
the scars paint a little love heart

make your presence known
to my drunk and surly phages
my neurons are nearly
burnt all out
the only muscle remaining
that I can feel
(because my skin is charred
coal
barren)
is the smooth striated
fibers
around my heart and out my
aorta
my pulmonary sweetheart
I will take a row of
hypodermic knives
and needles
remove the key from your
jeans pocket
I will make for you
a pair of
angry wings

to fly above the current
and watch the back-formed ghost
that echoes in your eye
and know his flaw

Shape.

Is there no vocabulary
For what I'm hearing

There is no word to define a cadence
Or to crystallize
Reverberation
The music of the world is
Trapped

The free sensory interchange
Interpretive totality
That's my one and only dream

.

Chatter chatter
What's the matter
Cling to cliffs and earthly matter
A slick of oil
A black smattering
Layer ourselves in steel
And prepare now for the shattering

-

Dreams are for yourself
And you can share
If you really wish
No one's dreams can be forced on another
There's no such thing as ownership
Possession counts for nothing

.

Carrying cups of tea to my room
I mitigate the spilling of the
Life blood
It burns my hand
I let it

My mathematics teacher lied to me
She claimed that it would help
To think and proceed through the motions

I have my own solution
To the life blood equation
My solution is
Don't think

Don't think for a second that
Hope is gone
Don't think
Don't think
Don't think

Yes I am talking to myself
Should anyone be listening
I thank you for your time

Fear is the mind-killer.

I don't have the words to express how I feel, so I'm going to steal the words of a few things and lay them out here as a reference for myself.

• I must not fear
  Fear is the mind-killer
  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration
  I will face my fear
  I will permit it to pass over me and through me
  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path
  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing
  Only I will remain

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear; Dune, Frank Herbet

• Well I've been bound and gagged
  I've been terrorized
  I've been castrated
  And I've been lobotomized
  But never has my tormentor come
  In such a cunning disguise
  I let love in
  I let love in

I Let Love In; Let Love In, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

And this is just something from French studies that stayed with me:

• One of the things that defined surrealism, in fact the driving philosophy of surrealism, was the departure from rational thought. Most of the techniques the surrealists employed in their art were designed to bypass rational thought: the juxtaposition of unrelated objects to confound rational interpretation, automatism, shock and violence. This rejection of rationalism was a rejection of the ordering of French society itself. A defining feature of the establishment of the Third Republic was the solid foundation of rationality, which came to manifest itself as a society founded on reason, logic, and science: an efficient society free from the shackles of superstition. In the aftermath of the Great War, the progenitors of the surrealist movement figured that the advancement of rationality and a logical society had led to a profoundly illogical end. An efficient society had been geared into a war machine.
  The only course of action was simple (to the French, naturally): an irrational revolution. A complete overhaul of the then predisposed manner of perception. It was necessary to free the French people from rational thought. Logic is a cage that only allows itself.

There is no space here for rational, ordered, logical thinking. That would lead to something horrific.

Vacuous rhymes because reasons.

As a blind man
Running from a black
God
Dead trod
Smoke sod
Rising from a
Hell train
Grease stain
Dull pain
Opens up the
Old wound
Ungroomed
Harpooned stuck against the
Back wall
Grace fall
Hoarse call
Right down to the
Blind man

Par les soirs bleus.

I keep a pen in my pocket

And to keep such words

Against me

They are crushed and spill

Out on my skin

And stain me white to blue

To keep two things so close together

Will stain them both

Or kill them equally

Three is risen.

I think I'd like to lose my sight

If only for the things I'd write

Imagine all the letters free

Divorced from the ugly alphabet

I'd write something nice

I'll bet

I think I'd like to lose my eyes

And let my two ears rise and rise

If I wasn't shafted by my sight

I'd hear the truth

And I'd be set

I could never lose my ears

I've relied on those for years and years
In the shower I oft close my eyes
To escape the visual cacophony
To shield me from the lies

I've seen so many things
And I am
Tired

I'm Spent.

Hopelessness feels like
Lead fingers
A cage about my knuckles
As all my carpals turn to ash
And fragile bitter ivory

I am weakened for the crescendo
And I diminish in fifths and thirds
And the whole of me shatters
In the resolution

Midnight butterfly.

It was necessary

To write this in the evening

At the end of a day

At the end of a

Day's worth of work

Before I am able to 

Sleep off the hurt

Before my chrysalis bed

Makes me another late night butterfly

With completely new patterns

Beautiful, yes, no doubt

But

I often regret not writing it down

And I know

I just know

I just fucking know

That the words might come to me in bed

Or in dreams

Or some other ageless and disconnected location

So I will right(write) this at night

Before the day ends

Because this is about the day

Or the sun rather

And the passion it brings

The symphony it sings

Such things must only happen in day

(Must or should?)

In every book I've read

And every song I sing

Hear

Make with my mouth

Every lily-white perfect parchment I find

I've even seen it written in the sky

The clouds that shape my dreams

Can mock me too

And rain into a pond and my chaos eyes

Can only see the same thing there

A ripple a shake a pattern embedded

In life

Though it's no objective truth

It is written in the minds of every hopeless

Dreamer and romantic I meet

And they beam it to me with their eyes

Their perfect burning starstruck eyes

How do they know?

They've seen it too and actually listened

A common red thread wired into

Every single thing I see

Art is only extant for this single truth

Or so it seems to me

Because my focus only goes so far

You love someone-

You know the love of which I speak

Yes? You know it too

The total love resplendent and complete

That artists try to crystallise

(And fail, as I am now)

They couldn't and they never could

Never will find the formula

To keep this love in a jar

In a box

Under locks and keys

The love is wild

Yes, that love

You hear it said

(In books in songs)

That this love begets a need

A full need

Like the knockout from a deep red wine

Full and total and palate staining

I feel this need

I feel this needing to complete

Something

I'm not sure at all

A love can only come full circle

With utter knowing

Or so says the red thread

In everything

And like the totality of the thing

I need to know more

I hunger for more

I die every time I realise

That strangers might know more of you

Think me not so petulant as

To be unable to share

(My feelings on the matter are no secret

I love to let love happen)

But the heartbreak is that I don't share

I simply can't

When it isn't even mine to share

I wrote this at night
And through it I greeted the new day

strawback

jawbone jackknifes jumper cables
through my eyes to my pineal
gland to make me dream

strawback sleeping in a sit down shed
its eyes strain to recall the book that it read
strawback breaks the crest of his cortex
it's not the snap but the whiplash
that makes you well and truly dead

.

Too many too much
To delineate
Pathetic
Pathetic
Short gasps short bursts
Worthless in the scheme
But still I cannot dream

.

Perhaps I'm wrong and it's
Romantic:
If I peel back a layer
I can see my heart beating
Shuddering under the new weight of the air
But the only response is fear
Disgust
A loathing that I crush underfinger
But the breakneck is too near
And if I scrub some more then it's
Possible to find new life
Even if old death is what I crave
In a hollowed out and fleshy cave
Covered in a fine white fuzz
New ions could even take the stage
Belligerent and red with rage rebelling from my fingernails

.

I make no sound but for the cracking of my heels
For the beating of my heart
For the gurgling from the pit
From my stomach from my stomach
For the hunger
I cherish it

.

let go of your black whiskeycroak smokestain

let the flowers blossom in your windpipe

and come out of the rain

the beauty of the jungle

the horror of the garden

weeds are only weeds because you

call them that repeatedly

the weed have flowers too

freedom begins on the inside

Family Matters.

With music.

Look
Look around
Hear the trumpets
Hear that God almighty sound
See the wings in the crowd
See the angels
Listen to them sing aloud

The crowd
Parts for one
One manic grin
One smoking brandished gun
One final note from the mass
Two wings disappear
And the angels breathes his last

Gabriel sings
Gabriel cries
Yuriel fights
Yuriel dies
Raphael writes a song for his brother
Michael laments for his father and mother
The angels stop bickering and and sit down for tea
They discuss their extended family
Break their bread and their father's heart
And the angels go their separate ways again

All at once
The wings turn to black
And the hundreds of halos
Take a step back
Love thy neighbour
Ceases to mean anything
A war chant emerges
And the whole crowd sings

Human faces turn to snarls
The wheels in wheels collapse on themselves
A hundred people sing

The manic grin he sings with them too
His eyes have turned an icy blue
And on his back
His wings unfold

The whole world stops and stares
As the culprit emerges in holy glory
Angels murder too

Look
Look around
Hear the trumpets
Hear that God almighty sound
See the wings in the crowd
See the angels
Listen to them sing aloud

.

I pressed my mind to mirror to see

A grown man staring back at me

I shivered and he only laughed

I smiled and laughed with him

The month of evil.

Drains into little pools backwatered
And nourished to grow out thorns
Remembering fondly the most evil of months
An eight-head horsemen given a name

Washing over the apostate strong
In the black and heady tide of time
I claim the evil month as mine

With deep earth roots and tears
Forbidding the undergrowth and canopy
The ivory and oak bomb shelter made for me
To live out the selfsame fears of the opiate-bereft crowds
The maudlin reluctant enemy

A flashing jingle of silver
A crumpled page of a holy book embedded inside my chest
A microscope perspective on the nature of the truth
A word from the management that counts for praise
This and more enriched my days

Perhaps I alone possess the wolf's eyes to
Pierce the month of evil's haze
Yet powerless to halt the tide
The lifeguard pries the floundering seal
Out of the bloodblack tide
To feel it slip back in again and cry for help

I claim the evil month as mine
Perhaps I am immune to time

Quick prints.

Barefoot I match my pace
To the earth's pulse
The heartbeat of this place
Underfoot under concrete
Under ore veins convulse
Frenetically
A bed of dust comes
Tucking in its sheet
Whirling in the hot air
Twists pathetically
A frantic orange warmth
Conspiring with the earth
Wreaking havoc on my bare feet

I am I am I am I am I am I am.

A persistent echoing a foldback of time
All the moments here before flood into my mind
I am not mad I am not mad
A black silhouette in colours unnamed
And it shifts in its shape it's never the same
I am not mad I am not mad
I have heard all of these words before
Long ago in a parallel time back in yore
I am not mad I am not mad
Time blankets this place I can see I can see
And everything explodes I see all reality
I am not mad I am not mad


Have you ever been afraid because something made too much sense?

Make the bones sing

Strangled readjust the light and shine
Me out of the conical head and onto a page
Sifting through the notes and shifting through
The permutations I have these bones to fill
With meat and sinew

From a sheet of paper erects a force-field
From the punishing rain from the slow dull pain
I have these bones given to me to fill
With meat and flesh and

The flesh to fill with blood
It's all very good to make a body
You have to make it live somehow and maybe
You'll relinquish just a little of your soul
To make the paper sing these tones reverberate
Off the inside of the force-field

This wondrous skeleton is a gift to me
And I am responsible
To make it move

Noster.

I had a mark
I had a girl
I had some cash to make
I fucked it up
She hanged for it
Now I have nightmares while awake

I'm finished with my pirating
Now I just trade booze
Illegally? Well, I suppose
If that's the word you want to use

My Terrorist Heart.

Music in progress.

Don't get caught in the blast of my terrorist heart
My orange clad pacemaker right from the start
My mustard coloured wings choking you to death
Seeping and intoxicating out of my terrorist heart
Dangerous right from the start

Colourshape.

I recognize those lacerated
Fingertips and that smoky
Laugh
That I always inhaled and
Coughed up
Your unforgettable black smear stain
On my young and drunk
Impressionable brain

Take your god damned hands off of me
And sink your teeth into my neck
Sink your colours into the sunrise and I'll
Make a dawn chorus to which we sleep

My love grows slow.

The mountains have always been there

And the oak is old as time

So low and so mighty so slow and so

Slow that you can never really watch them grow

How does a mountain grow?

It's always been there

You wouldn't know

True power, the energy to move a nation

Doesn't just spark up

There is no amount of patience

No anticipation

You let it grow

And while I may not be an inferno

My love will move mountains

Because my love grows slow

Honest.

A little boy puffs up his chest

And pipes an honest tune

He tries his best to do his best

But the song is over soon

He trips and stumbles for a bar

And briefly cries aloud

The cry slips through the door ajar

And the song is briefly cowed

A rumbling and then the crack

Is filled with furtive eyes

It's started now, no turning back

The boy decides to try

He crescendos through the verse

And explodes into refrain

And though the song in words is terse

They can feel it just the same

The little boy breathes out into

A final bar of pause

But without him sound begins anew

He is showered with applause

#malklyf

And then I had to delete malklyf.tumblr.com because it was turning into a joke, an easy justification for doing things for no reason when what it originally was for me was a genuine way of expressing that I felt like an intellectual outcast who didn't feel like his thoughts were normal.

This is easy.

It's raining
Its pouring
The old man's asleep
If I should die before he wakes
I pray my soul to keep
On running
Keep on running
Keep on running
Keep

It's pouring
It's raining
The old man is dead
Take your hands and cut them off
And put them on your head

It's raining
It's sleeting
We all fall down
We scream and hoot and holler
Because the circus is in town

It's pouring
It's raining
With a pocketful of rye
It's taking all my willpower
Not to end this:
"Then we die"

Oh, just a nightmare.

BROTHER where are you where where where I can see where I can hear you from across the wall and all your little childer did you think I wouldn't be able to hear them screaming when you tried to wrench them back through the pinhole.

There.

That one.

Right there.

Now you'll never manage, you could've tried.

Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Open it. Tear it right down and make everything one. What's an illusion to a god, false brother? Even if you didn't know that you'd find all the dead ones there it was noble anyway. Ragnarok. Connect. Everything.

.

I need something to soak it up
Something to bounce my sadness off
Something like a piano
Or a male alto voice
Just
Something

Something to take the jitters that I let out
Of my head sometimes
(How they shiver in the cold air)
And envelop it in harmony
And make it part of itself
Take it back in

An acceptor to my nervousness

Quiet Firestorm.

The Quiet One
Ran fingers along the ruts of
His teacup, grasped the handle

(Where would he put one down
In a place like this?
On a pale deathly chest?)

He always had a teacup
Though she never thought to ask
His poison

"They say that you drink from the Devil's cup"

It is derisive, ironic
And the words curl in the air
Like her mouth

(She pants the words
Almost, and observes the wreckage
Of the fight)

A quiet head tilts back
Completely, moving with the rim
Downing something, she never knew what

Eyes closed
Neck long
And returned, placid

A fluid motion
He never looks away
From that point on the floor

(He doesn't look at the bodies
He just looks down
As if through the very earth)

"Don't be silly, Lightning, it's my cup, no need to be snide"

The smoldering one
Pulls himself out of a pile (corpses)
Lights a cigarillo

"You never let us have fun, do you? Always finishing up with your boring shit"

An eyebrow
Not in haughtiness
Not in vanity

He lays the teacup down
A pair of hands wring themselves dry
And picks it back up

The lit end of
The cigarillo folds into
Itself, extinguished

Lightning laughs
Now (battle) it's done
She finds time for joy, giggles

"We were having such a nice time, you know how we do"

The eyebrow lowers
And the point on the floor
Of Quiet One's focus shifts

He looks up and eyes
The walls, and them
You could swear you saw the briefest of smirks

Even tones
But forceful
Not straining himself

"We still have work to do."

Luc Bat.

Another nice fixed form.

Break up the wet concrete
Feel quakes beneath your feet and toes
And everybody knows
As rain comes down in flows and shawls
Clear ichor bullets fall
From mighty mountains tall and clear
That feed into the mere
And mix with sand and fear and make
Industrial mud-cake
Grey stone impostors, fake concrete

Greasygrind.

I can taste metal
For the briefest of times
The brain fluid case is light as air
For the briefest of moments
I don't even care
Just like a solid knock to the head
Being winded is just like that

But no one's taken to my skull this time
A flick to the left
And a neckline angle that doesn't quite rhyme
The air gets in through synaptic cleft

Being winded is just like this
I breathe in too heavy
I turn the wrong way
Knocking my right mind
Straight of left field

And citric metals seep into my tongue

Red of Tooth and Claw.

A ritual that turns anger
Into power
Resolve and righteous action
A chant in thrumming lows
And piercing strings ascension

When we meet
You will see
I will destroy everything of beauty
When I cast a crown and rattle dice
At the king of the lonely's throne
You'll hear me trampling back
You'll hear me coming home

The sand comes up to our chests
Like the tide
And reduces our skins to the bones
Which it polishes to a sheen
Our hip bones knock
Ribs interlock
In the rising sand
Our bones are clean

Syn.

A drop sends
Shockwaves
Down my spine
And I wrap myself
In strings
Funny that their noise
Is the same as their shape
Cleaved in wires
Biting my skin
An ecstatic cage of violins
She sings the air to madness
Madness slips into my ear
I shiver in awe of what I hear

Honeytrap.

I wonder if the towers of air
(The skyscrapers and high-rises)
Imagined by a hopeful youth
Dimly lit
Mysterious
Held the promises they claimed

Or was that steel construction
I gravitated to
Some kind of pitcher plant

It took me so long to realise
That the sweetness that I fell into
Was burning me the same

A forest of pitcher plants
You know what that means

Mortocracy.

A lifeless guardsman
A construct security
An empty suit of arms
Dragging the disgusting mass of flesh
And blood, breathing, inhaling
Disturbing the stillness of the tomb that is
The throne room

And on the plain chair
The makeshift throne
His majesty, the lich
Ruling long into death

Dead muscles held aloft by some
Thaumaturgic act
And skin shrunk to see the outlines of the bones
A shoulder stiffens
Reaches out
And leather skin unfolds and rattles
Indicating the catacombs

Without words
The sentence is carried
And the live prisoner is taken
To join the royalty

Green.

My hand is splayed on polished wood
And it looks not like my own
The light from my eyes to my brain
Takes a newer route this time
Through a pre-nascent herpetology
Darwin nudges me
Into another clade completely
I could be anything
If I'm not careful
My hand will spread out further and further
And further until my skin is scales
And my eyes are many
And legs can kick a whole in the wall
This same blood I feel
Can be found anywhere
In so many things
More wondrous than I

But they are not I
And I am not some kind of
Lizard

The Chordate Monstrous.

The most nascent edge
That juts into sound-space
And mind-space and whole
Elongates
Lengthens
Stretches
Until the rope of the world
The chordate monstrous
Ties itself in knots
Its spine a pretty conglomerate of
Blank bones
And unwritten bombs
And vertebrae breaching and reverberating
Backwards
Backwards and then
And the people of last century with their
Token shields, fair-weather faces
Scream in delight and horror and lust
A spiny impudent wretch in the air
Leeching the colour from the world
Only those already gone will know what we did

Drink The Water.

I am

Rusty rocks and twang
Corrugate
And red dust in sheets on the
Small lonesome
Town
Pale of the water
From the well
From the ground
Leatherback churchgoers
Leatherhand
Glass eyes
Lonesome crow
Cawing crow
Everyone fights
Everyone dies

I undertake a great task

He Who Gives and He Who Took.

The sounds giggle from your stomach, don't they? They sing in the gurglings of your last meal, fresh, warm, three-fold and heady. Every welling up of bile and fluid and scarlet humour forming a filmy bubble in your fleshy brain, and bursting, releasing that terrible cadence of a name, that you love and hate and fear and don't know why: Malkav Malkav Malkav. He who gives and he who took, he who was eaten twice by his childer and he who knew. Knew something too great.
Don't ask me my name, please.

Twice. Two. Dos. Shhhhh. Numbers have power. You know that. Numbers mean things, names haven't meant a lot for a long time but numbers still are important even now even when you can't keep them in. Personally, I believe he had eight. Eight. 8. Sideways to infinity. He had eight, two died early, stupid, they were they were. Lots of cousins have died in stupidity, better to be gnawed than stupid with undying sight. Two, anyway, back to two. He was eaten twice, so why can I say it Malkav Malkav shouldn't it be gone? Is he still digesting the name I know? He eats them, you know. He eats the names we should be able to remember, the names of the places that grow in the back-alleys of the web and why can I say it if he ate it? One of us ate the names, one of us ate his name, and now we call him by the backformation of the family name we cling to when it should be the other way around. We came from him. He doesn't come from us. What was his name? That's a cobweb trail you'll go down and never come out of.

The first time we ate him it was more proper. Propriety. What a laugh.

It, he, it's the process of unifying. Literally. Look past the word you already know. Unify. Un-I-fy. Malkav is the process of the un-I-ing, of un-you-ing, of coalescing and viewing himself subjectively through his childer, himself, you, and removing the idea of separate minds. We're different to the outside, but you know we're all the same, I'm you. So shut up when you're talking and listen.

He gave to his brother and took and gave from and to his childer and took from his grandsire but it was too much wasn't it? And now we look like we're looking at more which we are. The hushed up corners of the world, the corners of the cornerless shape we un-live on.

Don't ask me my name, please.

.

I genuinely question my sanity and no one is allowed to belittle that just like no one can belittle any part of my mind even inadvertently. Don't belittle my emotions with petty wants.

The Reality Bust.

Down!
Down!
Down the ravine!
Out of the speaker and out of the screen!
Out of the blast radius
Fight, fight, we must
And crack up the ice for
The reality bust!

Ranting and riveting and raving
Get a clue!
No one can tell us our path isn't true
We fight for entropy
Because entropy is just
We don't have an appointment
It's the reality bust!

We tear down the mazes
Their false-found chaos lies
Dismembering matter
With our third and fourth eyes
From the cloud banks and mudflats and the bottom of the sea
A great whole is rent
In all reality!

The spit of high heaven
The spit of the gods
(Oh, I think that's us
Ha!
What are the odds?)
At order and logic
We tear in our lust
For the great truth
The mystery
The reality bust

Grotesque.

When people are happy and I can't seem to able to manage that I feel like my feelings are devalued, like it's not okay to feel like shit. Negative reinforcement doesn't help either.

On the piano stool
Foetal and twitching
Cutting up yellow hair
Singing the praises of children of the book
And extending what I call my fingers
Inelegant things
I could read all day
I could scream and bother
The others
I could hope that satisfaction will spring
Forth from achievement
Some days I even look forward to just that
It's not my duty to spread misery and scorn
But the latter I deal in handfuls
The former I'm expected to deal with myself
Melancholy
Is not acceptable or sightly

When my person isn't what's wanted
And my escape is unattainable
And they all refuse to be tainted
By simple humanity

Edit: And in lighter moments I look back and my own temporary happiness makes anything else seem irrelevant and invalid. But that's not the case, and it's so god damned stupid that just because people aren't feeling something they are unable to recognise its existence or importance.

Y.

There is a certain dignity
A subtle solace
In sadness
A quiet quaintness
In the tomb
That poisons even this shut up shut u
My face is rocks
My face is rocks
A stony silence
To shunt out the day
To shrug off the possibility
That I might be incorrect
That I might have drawn a conclusion
More erroneous than I can believe

It is the separation from possibility
That is what kills

If the greatest feeling
(and it is)
Is knowing and embracing
The myriad possibilities
And chances
And lives in tiny universes folded up into
And exploding out of
A single choice or moment
Then the worst
Is seeing it unreachable
And never knowing if you'll unfold

I rise from the air
My love
Mein herr
And push delight in all directions but my own

Ferrous.

Ferrous
Ferrous is what I feel when

When flesh is made
Caustic and rough
By the windchill and the carbon
Toxic smoke
Ferrous is what I feel

When I look down
Cycling through
A life left on the pavement and
A moisture-lost leaf reaches
Up and through my pupils
Takes my brain
In its metallic undying and deathly hand
Ferrous is what I see

When flesh is made
Permeable
Prickly, spiky
By the windchill and the tobacco
Ferrous is what I feel
Ferrous is what I taste
The ions on us tingle
Depriving you of water
And we're sour in each others' arms
Like running your tongue along a lamp-post
Or your keys

Ferrous
And toxic and tingly
Exchanging ions all the while

.

At some point in the future, Ollie, you're going to feel like shit.

It'll happen, that's an immutable fact. You'll feel worthless, like any effort you make to go in any direction is doomed to failure and all your endeavours inevitably spiral towards some sticky end yada yada yada life is tough deal with it etc.

I'm not here to tell you not to do that. Do just that. It's important. Lord knows your psyche can't run on arrogance alone. Just remember this:

You made people cry.

You, through force of will and artistic interpretation, shunted people into a state of raw emotion.

You didn't do it alone, sure, but that doesn't cheapen the fact that you managed to connect to people. Somehow.

So, just remember that.

You're never worthless.

Get Up.

It's probably
Unhealthy
Wrong
Self-destructive
But I have things
I plan to take
To the
Grave

Edit: And some lucky people might get to be those things.

Make It Mine.

It was perfect
It burned and it burns still
By way of some elemental precision
(Or maybe it was the drugs)
Temporal obligation has yielded to this moment
An anchor in time that won't sweep away

The downhill slide
We'd all resigned to the night by then
You tried to push on
Because you're just like that

Your feet were bare
Because, damn it
You were grounded
I sometimes wonder if you feel the earth like I do

Your eyes were wild
Or just more open than they should have been
And your pupils were so trained on something
Not bewilderment, not panic
A need to know something
I don't know, it doesn't matter

Your eyes were wild and your chest was bare
That green hoodie that suited your bleach blonde hair
And the zipper lined your white flat chest
And your stomach
And the curve of the collar around your neck

Against your chest
It beat and beat
Banging on your heart
That polygon dice
That twenty-fold cast infused in fate
At perfect angles to the hoodie
And your chin
And your waist

Your chest was bare and your eyes were wild
And lining your cheekbones
And staining your stubble
Distorting the light off your two-week growth
Left, blue
Right, pink

Back, green
Hair, white

And I told you the next day
How beautiful it was
And far away it was

What have you done?
Why won't it leave me?
Maybe it will now that I've
Made it mine

Malk Life.

I never wrote about us, did I?

No matter

Small wonder though

You latched right onto the obvious

I am your father

And I know you're content to rest

In your father's eyes

Because nothing is real

Least of all you

You learned that a hundred times

One day I will too

You were to me

What you sought in him

And the layers of your brain are still trapped in mine

Will you ever unravel?

You are the demon

Drenched in irony

That guides too much of my thought

BANG

-

And just below that another explosion another big boom big bang black brain bent behind boring banal bitch father mother lover weren't you and together duality isn't a lie I've seen it for myself and together we might just make something beautiful because you are beautiful you have a machete a rocket in three dimensions that pierces the veil of two I am knife and you are cake black forest shedding losing a layer did you run stupid boy did you run little coward wunderkind and fall into a rabbit-hole and into that cake made of strychnine it's okay we have antidotes here it's called inheritance you inherit an antidote purer than a thousand brains and I know you've killed before because you're a good boy beautiful boy and that's what good boys do I bet you killed your father aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand right into the neck BANG.

Parable.

Walking through the woods

One night

I saw a man who'd made a noose

Out of his tattered tartan scarf

He'd expertly tied the knot

Just right

Perfectly tight, perfectly loose

I said hello

He only laughed

He only laughed at me

He only laughed at me

And said

"Your words mean nothing on the whole

I can't take them to the grave!"

I said back "If you're to

Be dead

Why bother speaking if your soul

Will never now be saved?"

Upon the tree from which

He hung

He scratched a simple 'x' to mark

His place of suicide

Inhaling he then jumped

And swung

Smashing straight into the bark

Breaking his neck

The man had died

The inhalation flew right out

Upon the man's untimely death

Yet the scratching in the bark remained

Thursday the Fifteenth.

Sickly undulating valves and pipes encircle
And cull the morale of the landscape
The shatterings of the trees displayed in impossible pattern
In unlikely concordance with the ephemeral air
Am I mad to listen to the branches?

I pull wonder out of the thin air
And arrange the world so that I may see
And interpret on my terms
While the wind gently suggests a direction
And time taps his wrist
In late-afternoon and it's time to dive
Into a purple resolver, fragrant and full
In readiness to pour down a deluge of suffering
And hope, burying the mass
And thickening the air
Black spirits remake this radial plane

And somewhere
Someone
Sheds their meek tears

Liam Irvine.

Down go the masts

And the rigging and the deck

As if the ship went down in mutiny

There'll be no more complaining

I don't think it will stop raining

Rain us right down to the bottom of the sea

The wood did not catch fire

It was our upward facing ire

That set us against our good Captain Dee

It wasn't meant to go

So badly, how could he have known

This idea would sink to the bottom of the sea

He turned to the rafts

Though they thought he was daft

He said "No storm is stopping me!"

There'll be ideas for later days

He can mutiny so many different ways

While they sink to the bottom of the sea

Hay Foot, Straw Foot.

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Feel the tremors that shudder and moan

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

Marching off it makes no sound

No timbre in the air, no tone

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Red hot breath like some Hell hound

We go in the cave one by one, alone

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

When bugs and rattlesnakes abound

Through grinding noise, the sole road home

Left foot clamp down on the ground

We don't even stop by the lake we found

No respite for the weary bones

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

The horizon is punctured by crucifixed mounds

We left so eager, but no longer condone

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

Aurality.

I grew my first ear in my
Childhood
It carved itself of flesh
And shot out a path that
Went straight to my brain
It still goes there sometimes but
The signals get confused
The signals get diffused
When I was young all that I knew
Was simple melody
The music was little more than a pleasing piece
Of produced sound
A song that rises from the ground
My aural faculties
My brain
And my intellectualities
Grew from those sweet
Sweet harmonies
From the soil of sweet harmony

My second ear came into being
When I was adolescent
I had begun to grow a heart
It fluttered in my chest
And it demanded sustenance
My second ear grew out of my own necessity
And it carved a lonesome highway
Down into my new-born heart
I gave to it those harmonies
I starved my brain of melody
The sound had to be shared
Between objective thought
And new found feelings
Feedback grew and grew
And grew and when the sound
Came back I knew
That my heart had changed it just a bit
I found there something new
From the foundations of my brain
And heart working as one
The music changed and changed

The third is still not quite complete
It pushes its way out of pre-natal space
In the middle of my head
Somewhere below my brain
And yet it manifests
And skips a block of space
It folds back into reality
And it is all around me
It doesn't hear as such
It feels the sound another way
The music becomes tangible
My synaesthetic plight
It unpacks a note
A whole harmony
And the vibration then unfolds
Into something hard and skeletal
A block of space that permeates
Every space I see
But I don't hear or see it
I feel the space unfold around me
Expand into a prism
That somehow encompasses
Everything
I think my third ear might not be in my head at all
But another place completely
My third ear is another sense
To occupy another plane

Council.

A possum scratches on my windows
Likely eyeing himself
Some new phantom sizing up
Pulling up the concrete carpet and
Scattering the dirt like tea leaves and splinters
And bark-bound clouds
And homeless Irishmen
Shrouds and coffins and mockingbirds
A colder
Bluer winter
Than I might have known

An hour might do
An hour might do
How long will it take to reach the bottom?
Will this golem let me down?
And the hand around my neck
That spits fire from its mouth
And thinks in tongues
And falls in tons of bricks
While the flesh aggregates
And crawls into the jungle
And crawls into my windpipe
And speaks for me
Hovering in horror
Speaking platitudes in sign
And slowly tightening a dexterous finger
Around my Adam's apple
If the golem would let me down
Just to sink back into dust
If the flesh might fall apart
Just to rot
As old flesh must
We might find ourselves in iron
Or a giant tortoise shell
While tree frogs talk to
Spitting bugs
And conspire against the whims of man

Folding away.

A lot of the time you're the warrior-king
But you're also the black and the white of the moon
Punching into the rafters
And making a new mind
From the shattered planks of many

I'd like to write a thousand words
A thousand metaphors
For your lovely white body
For the collapsible veins that make you up
The hackneyed mess that you are
That takes in the world and does something different
To me

But sometimes you're the mouse I made
The wandering gypsy-Jew
Harridan harpy singed-hairs all around your tarpaulin chest
And you scream your crystal death rattle
To the end of us both

And sometimes I can't reach you
Just like I'm trying to do
I'll tread the corners of my mind
The back alleys of my brain
And one day I hope to find you

Capital Something.

But he was always in the room
Clawing at the final curls of my shirt
And darting down back to the corner

A furtive eye uncoils
Through a crack in the door
And peaks at the doomed and wandering
Laughing from the corner of the room

Avatar.

I tried to do it with my eyes
But it just would not do
I tried to do it with my fingers
I tried to say 'I do'
I tried and tried with eyes of mine
I tried to crack the world in two
And found inside my own damn ears
The answer I'd fought to
I could hear one thousand things
More than you ever could do
And away into another way
Away it flew and flew
And you
Fly farther than the farthest of two
I'm not allowed to say
That one rhyme I want to
My Jew
My Jew
It's you
My Jew
I'm happy to grant that metaphor to you

And I, the lonely prophet Jew
Sitting on the top held by a red screw
Proselytising to you and you
How to go about it anew
Through and through
Come shattering through
The lonely wandering
Scorned and wisened
Burnt to bitter blackness through
The tiny wandering Jew

Tripping and slipping
And falling in through
Flipping and skipping
And calling to you
All I have is words
For you

What proud diction
What predilection
What manifestation is going to lead me through
The calmest
Reddest
Bloodiest waters
Pushing right on through to you

Webway.

Flat against the floor
Walls
Roof
I'm not sure
Flat against the wall
And spiking in the wrong direction
Spiking into my cranium
Skull
I'm not sure of anything anymore

Flat against the floor
Walls, roof
Right out the door

Defunct.

I keep catching myself thinking
The wrong way around
Not because I want to

And saying things
Not naturally
But because I know that
It's what you're supposed to say

Like every tiny action
And suspect affectation
Is part of some larger
Stifling
Social obligation

Although now that I have anchors
On the surface of the world
I have a stake in the world
I feel it much less often

Theological Roots.

I will measure time in tiny blocks
I have seen the fall
Of the elders and the temple
I have seen it all collapse into pages
Made of faith
And a mistaken twice-born wraith
Nestled in between the ages that fly through me
In tiny blocks enough for
The porous glaze of a church window
And the faux smile of the patriarch

Long live the withered
Long live the dead
Long live the man with thorns on his head

Dirt is not forgotten
And the market demands a little more
The price for faith is mutilation
The price for faith is
A quick blow to the ego
But the market demands something more
The Gentile smile and pray
With closed palms
And the entropy-boys shout vitriol
And stockpile needless arms
One day they will all come back and the capital
Will wither

Long live the beaten
Long may he sing
Long live he who heaven-on-high proclaimed king

The trigger finger itches
With sand in ever crevice in between
And in the eyes of the blind
And the visionary children
Who poke out the eyes of their parents
Especially the eyes in their mind
That burn with the image
Perpendicular lines
Bearing the meek
For a long and harsh
And bruising week
That burns in the brains of
The faithful
And all
That burns in the brains of
The faithful

Long live the martyr
Long live the son
One day in God's eyes we will all be one

Golden Pinpoint.

And at the end of this
Blasted tunnel
I don't see light
I see honey
(Whiskey?)
A bit of red

Sellout

Sat and stood
     Like a sack of stones, lime
Just a drop
     Down like rain
     Down, amazingly fine
A warren
     Of the possessed
Dimly aware of
Faintly reminiscent of
In want of
     So very many things
          Thoughts of home
          Whole-made thrones
Running out of time

Synaesthesia? Maybe.

I wish I could describe the dimensions
I can see in this music

It spikes through around the corner
And sidesteps into my cortex
Angled in space
An interval is like a peak or punch
Keys are colours
And notes exist in many ways
More than sound
It's like a chord
Describes a polygon
And the corners
Manifest themselves in my neurons
And spatial perception invades my ears
Somehow

Stepping through dimensions
And directions
I didn't know existed

A Sestina.

Hell yeah, motherfuckers.

Down by the banks and reddish reed I lie
In stupor in the mud I make my bed
An instant in the river's swell received
And yet it feels as though I have come home
To water's edge the soothing stream has come
To wear away the harsh and crumpled slate

What madness comes now, here, the hour is late!
The stillness of the mirror pool belies
Up and down the muddy stretch, he comes
Arousing me, untimely, still abed
And it would dare invade this sacred home?
A beast that evil nature has conceived

If you'd not seen it there, you'd not believe
Inhaling wretched air the chest inflates
A monster that the bugs and filth call home
Spewing pus to where I had once lied
No longer would I make the bank my bed
The vodyanoi, the water beast is come

My pupils bulge as I watch it become
The most horrid thing I ever had perceived
(Roused as I was from my now soiled daybed)
The mud and scum seemed to accumulate
Some aqua golem, sooth, I do not lie
That comes here to invade my current home

I piped up to shoo it back to its own home
That it might squelch right back whence it had come
But having no defense and no allies
A sharp whack to the skull did I receive
And then I crumpled broken on the slate
Defiled now, my once inviting bed

Now damaged as I lay there and I bled
I wondered what would become of my home
To see my home untarnished would elate
But now I feared a much harsher outcome
The beast turned from me, hoping to deceive
And turned back and struck; a rather poignant lie

To my bed the vodyanoi has come
At home, the water beast received
Upon the slate I, dead, must lie

No More.

I will sing a song 
So blue
I will sing a song for you
I will sing a song or two
And one day the songs will
All be through

One day
My throat will cauterize
Itself
And collapse from all the cautious lies
Caution is the watchword
Except for when we sing
Do we cling
To caution
Until the end
Or should we scream into the night
To the end of light
When the god-sun yawns itself to death
Smiles itself into the grave
Will we sing for the old dead sun?

That depends
Will the sun sing a tune or two
A rondo bursting at the seams
A song detailing all our dreams?
The sun does not grant wishes
We will not sing for it

No
The last song of all
Will not be the sun's
It will burn itself away long before the final note
The cadence we see in our dreams
You know
The one we wrote
Escapes the cage of hope
Of potentiality
And heralds like the trumpet
The end of all that we can see

We foresaw this final song
We even wrote it
And the sun blinks for one last time
And the songs end
And the songs end

We did this
All ourselves

Collecting Dust.

A brief reprise.


The dead men sing women you mean the dead men never were quite dead dead red bled from the eyes and inside out the dead men sing for me like birds a-flying but you never really were dead were you my hybrid my father my herr doctor in the theatre in the tunnels in the bomb shelter hers and his and shouting like a joyous song like birds pierces a ribbon of red red red and maybe you're in here and maybe I ate you maybe I'm you am I you I am quite dead I believe splits in two one red one blue ich bin ein what in two and dead men bred for bright red heads me the bengel das childe no longer homme garcon mais the cliff is falling falling down down a pit of claws are they needles and mistaken monster men but my bird you sing like half of death and I crack the tablet on which I lay and you are one half of the dead men man I think man but was he real.

Superman.

Taps to a beat
That was can't hear
No more fear
Let's it all go to Hell
Taps louder and
Louder (again and again)
Fouler and fouler
(Down with the rain)

Beats on a drum
that we can't see
Says 'I'm free'
Let's it all go to Hell

Guten Morgan.

I'll finish my coffee first
(distractions)
People moving in stop motion
And beating at the sky
I'll finish this mug
(another)
And read a chapter or two
Bliss

Colourful Death.

Death comes in colors

Death comes

In a kaleidoscope coat

He comes in red and mops

The blood

From your punctured gut

He comes in white and gives

You one final breath of life

Before the tumour takes control

He comes in grey and puffs

A cigarillo

In the corner

He comes in green

To watch you

Eaten, by God knows what

He comes in blue

And pumps your lungs

Of ocean spray

He comes in pink

For the newborn

Purple for the bourgeoisie

He comes in yellow, prods

A finger at your bloated belly

Starved

And at the end

He'll come in black

He'll come in black

He comes in black

Quitter.

I cut off all my fingers
Hoping I might will them on
To grow back at least as strong
(My bony digits, long
And artless now)
In therapy I flex my lexicon
But the words vanish
A clumsy tongue
Dry air from my bruised lungs
Watered down by the rain
I used to bring down in sheets
With my bony digits, long

MachV

And with a gentle prod, a puncture in the bright veneer, something has escaped.

I can watch the tide
Beat bloody the bare brick face of the world
And I can watch the world
Smile in return

I have watched the boughs
Bend to bear the blank-brained kings
And I can watch the king
Be beaten by the boughs in turn
Be beaten and be forced to sing
Be beaten and obliged to ring
Clear across the field and mountain
Pit and rivers black

I will watch the trees
Of another country's wood
Yield death drink
From its belly
From a giant spider's mouth
The boughs bend down to be broken
I can watch the trees

We're all mad, dear.

The last three posts herein have been about Malkavians.

Just so we're all aware.

Mein Gott.

My father was a monster
But our father was a God

My mother sometimes speaks to me
And our mother roams in Nod

My kin are mad and all deformed
Our friends shine like the sun

My people curse me through my skin
But our people all are one

Our father was a blasphemy
And we are a tragedy
And we have but to emulate

My father lives on blasphemy
I see beyond the tragedy
And I have but to emulate

Mein Gott
I can see everything

Cobwebs.

One thousand tiny tiny points shine the opposite pole so loud inside but fresh air might shut them up good Gott do I want them to shut up and not one of them speaks German how is that even possible it's not difficult after all it was the language of Gott apparently NO let's not get there the yelling oh Gott the yelling Jesus asked me my name I think and I told him and he turned to stone and melted in a shower of shrapnel everything disappears in shrapnel and I ich bin I'm still floating down the Rhine on a wayward scrap of a bombshell or a bullet hole we're full of bullet holes the shape and size and irregular bent of the father's eye they say only one had three but two can have three our father had three I refuse to believe it not that I believe  much of it anyway I don't know do you hear that you bastard maybe one day you'll return and I hope by then you've learned that faces are for more than yelling but you don't have a mouth anymore YOU DON'T HAVE A MOUTH ANYMORE she was always telling you how pretty you were like stars inside a flower made of blood gouged by a metal and lace contraption that hides underneath a pool of honey and milk all dressed in black but Gott and children are eclipsed by du ich bin stop that you left your mother strapped to the operating table and one day he'll return and all your fathers with it because syringes aren't medical they're a little more subtle than that for Gott's sake can't you all just be subtle please the syringes go in the eyes the syringes go in the eyes the syringes go the eyes eyes the eyes like a hole in the world staring into the pit and the pit stares into me because I am the pit runs away one day into the big city sleeping like neubauten and I can never go to the doctor because she told me it has three eyes and the devil has three eyes and he joined the chorus little by little adversaries little liars smell like the warmth of life who doesn't enjoy a bit of luxury and it comes so shiny like you made it stupid boy do it again in the city where monsters are friends instead of being made of bombs and blonde hair how did you not explode you tried so hard and ran away and now monsters are my friends hidden from my mind's eye Malkav's eye the eyes go in the syringe mein Herr poison poison poison poison poison poison oil BANG oil gas-jets clawing his way out of my mind like into black's in life a pillar can be nice when made of BANG and claws made of salt daughters of FILTH SCUM GET OUT OF MY CITY we thought you must be dead but she's screaming so it must be lies like the future dressed in black and all the children sing like men sing like men kommt ein Vogel geflogen setzt si nieder auf mein Fuß a good boy doesn't eat his friends nor shun his the monsters under his feet you always were a good boy oi lads better not get too excited I wonder when you'll speak mein Herr good Gott it smells down here.

Albert.

I watched you die
Twice
In my mind's eye
Thrice you've mocked me for leaning on you
And four times you've disappeared

And every time you returned
Albert
Like a gunshot in my ear
Like a bomb underneath my feet
In those tunnels that run beneath the street

You taught me to trust
And I mistrusted you in haste
Oh, Gott
(It appears that Traugott now is me)
You were so grateful that I couldn't see
But I see you shining there
Albert

Weavers.

My friends
My lovers
We are spiders
We take in the world
And let our emotions become caustic
And poison
In our guts
Our bellies
And we lay them out on the world-web
And let each other sting
And be stung
Bite
And be bitten
By our emotional poison
Made of love
And truth

We trace light patterns
Between cups of coffee
We make a web of mind
And soul
We trace dark patterns
Between glasses of wine
We make a web of us
That's whole

My lovers
My friends
We are spiders
Bugs of prey
And all the world is prey
You know
For our musings light as aether's glow

I poison myself for you
I poison myself for all of you

We reshape the world

To The Forest.

To You who reside in the forest,

Don't assume anything.

A lot of the things you deduced and reasoned out for yourself were right. And you'll continue to alarm yourself with your own insight and perception. You'll begin to curse your ability to guess horrible things correctly. They will weigh on your mind.

But, please, don't assume anything about anyone.

Sincerely,
The Woodsman.

O, Janus.

I douse myself
And let myself be plucked
Like dulcet strings
And as smoke drifts into my drawn out face
It is the updraft in my flightless wings

They are broken children's things
I am a broken child's thing

I am blind
And search the depths
And the heights of the tallest trees
Contentment swells within my breast
A great many things can my eyes see

Extinguished.

Nothing is ever extinguished

Come in out of the
Rain
Makes a heavy noise
The stench of wine
And sweat
And boys

A tempest of pride and sin
Begets this
But nothing is begat by this

But none of it is ever extinguished
Like light is never extinguished
It refracts into a haze of mild warmth
And volume
If we concentrate we can bring it into fruitful being
Once again

I hear them argue of duality
And the philosophy of
God
Walks into the room
No, God is not extinguished
Nor extinguisher

Stare straight into the
Sun
Day brings another spark
Aroused of ashes and attrition
It was never extinguished

Nothing is ever extinguished
Least of all
In any form
Love

Neglect.

We live among the giants
We walk among the Gods
And we tremble as they set foot outside our tiny kitchen window
We offer up our prayers and sacrifice
And they give us their advice
And sometimes, God help us
We listen

The Lark Ascending.

The lark ascending on petticoat wings
In sun-soaked silence of the morn
To join the dawn chorus, to sing

From banished cold and nightly sting
The finch and sparrow, all manner adorned
The lark ascending on petticoat wings

Lifting up with the dew, in joyous swing
The hearts of the forest, the rabbit and faun
To join the dawn chorus, to sing

The russet quilt of the great sun king
And his subjects to the waking horn
The lark ascending on petticoat wings

Replete of joy that morning brings
Bereft of moonlight, cold, forlorn
To join the dawn chorus, to sing

Gathered here the splendorous spring
In dewy wonder of the morn
The lark ascending on petticoat wings
To join the dawn chorus, to sing.

The Rider.

Pre-ambling out of a rich red haze
Stony-throat silence abounds in the air.
Paler than the deadest and redder than the East.

Corpse-white? Why?

With all the resonant timbre of a pit.

Sunset damages fade and falter under moon;

Merciful moon, mother moon.

His whispers fade away in soot and smoke.

Does it hurt him?

But the sun can only scream.

A recluse that impresses upon

the twisted-up alleys of refuse and scorn.

The able stance of the recanted morn

How does he bear it?

Resets in regal manse, white corpse adorned.

Treble curs't, and treble bound in woe.

Covered in earth and violet spring.

Zie sleeps in frigid earth and under stone.

Ach, ich... du... but who?

He treads lightly, but attends.

Aroused of the singular sun, he attends.

Stick in the mud.

Stop it Stephen Fry, you know very well that any time you write something clever in a traditional form I'm going to give that form a go.


Whaddya mean I can just stop reading the Goddamn book?


I balance on the quivering edge
Of a violin's taught string
Solemn, I peer over the ledge
                         A curious thing


I have a finger in every basket
But few eggs to give
Come with me to the casket
                         But I yet live


You sound just like that other one
Frustrating, talking, complaining
Oh, but they're all so fun
                         It starts raining


I fear I've forced this whole collection
The words herein are worthless, less
'Twas worth the dissection?
                         I suppose, God bless

Terza Rima.

Like sullen tide we march on break of day
With lungs of black blood stone and ice on wind
Forget the half-shamed words of those who stay

A vapor, steam, that rises from the skinned
And tortured through a night of red hot steel
A vapor, steam, that lifts us up, the sinned

Or sinner from another day, we reel
To hear our names come chanting down the hill
Their weight and shame and hatred that we feel

But risen by what might, what strength of will?
What pride do we have left in bitter nights?
When time and tide have halted and are still?

In bitter cold and darkness we have light
That burns for us, in darkness we have light

Nocturne.

Every stroke of genius
Belies a gentle simplicity
And every tender tracing
Draws from a basic melody
And even in such clockwork discord
I find peace between the lines


Silk spiders on ivory
Bound in shifting silver
Make it rain

Poison the waterhole.

Exquisitely destructive
In the wake of my perfection
That is not your bent

Do you live in the forest?
Are you trapped in the past?
Do the boughs of the forest bend for you?

They do not bend for you
The forest is mine
Witch

And I'd have you know I cauterise
The forest's paralytic spread