unfinished, unfocussed

Let me take a biopsy of
Your cardiac musculature
Let me extract your genome
And compare our STRs
Let me find what caused this analogy
Because we do not share a clade
I'd be loathe to call this parasitism
When science has a better word
Mutualism is our evolutionary joie de vivre

Dialogues.

It was like the Platonic myth
Smelted to a filigree
Forced into an ear hole
And poked into the thalamus
The story had layers
And fine print
And a rigidity like the immutable castes
Where walls are the end of the world
Where walls are the end of the world's webbed way
When trapped in indefinite motion
Moving surreptitiously
In an external dimension of light
I am halbermensch
The cave-dweller
Comfortably taught the myth of creation

Ishtar.

You make me feel like a kid
Again
In nice
And not nice ways

I am luxuriously giddy
At the prospect of potential
(I touch you and my brain
Turns into molten plastic)
Of all the synapses we might extend
Toward one another

Here, for every stumble forward
There is recoil in my muscles
(This is a fear I have not felt
Since I was very young)
There are avenues within me that
Beg new exploration
Stoppers I now have to throw away
It's impossible to tell what I looked like
Before those things

I will not be a glacier
I will tear open my skull
And produce an offering of my barest self
I'll find the anxiousness inside me
And harness its pure energy
To erode away the cold sheer face of the glacier
The enemy

And on Easter, how appropriate
That I might realise a rebirth
Peck peck pecking at the eggshell
To smile into the dawn

You are warmth upon my fresh face
You voice is the cadence
Of the very first breath

Evolution.

By the end of today

I'll attach a gravity to several things

Banal, flighty, uncontained

And let them sink me down

Where the fish bones keep

Where the sea is deep

Rich with a thousand million tiny monsters

Too prismatic for chance

By the stroke of the hour

I will make new bones

And drink all the saltwater I can find

Effluent will pour from my mouth and the plants

Will make me green

I am full up

My muscles and the built up waste

Let nothing pass my cavity

Except oxygen, ions, bare essentials

Whirling around the knots of my musculature

Screeching into electrical balance

By the end of the year

Two things may occur:

I will be porous and brittle

Supported by the network of spongy skeleton

And pierced all sides by water

Or perhaps, more likely

I will exoskeletally reinforce my skin

And spit wax on the ground and burrow

The final split is never far

It is ever ongoing

.

Every separate moment that I

Am reminded that you exist

Is another smile that I get to keep

A sudden breath

A skip in my step

A writhing in my sleep

Unfortunate.

You are
(And would that that
Were enough to describe you)

Green and floral
And extending out beneath the ground
To eat the water of the earth
Hungrily living and flowering and dying
A four-coloured circle
An endless loop

Sinking ships and ocean earthquake
Striped waves and the
Foam-wrecked shoreline
An infant turtle
And the tern and the gull
Your wings are grey
You are

An endless list
And a single word
A phrase
A truth
You are

The khopesh
Claymore
Bastard sword
The battering ram made of a bull's head
You are

Another eternity of adjectives and nouns
That I am not able to say for the time
That they would take
From being by your side

New scars.

1a.
Buy the lockpicks
Open the door
Put a hand out into the sun
Burn a little bit
Dart back to the dark
1b.
Numb the burns
In ice cold water

2a.
Throw out your whole arm
This time
Fuck the pain
Some things are hard
Don't you want to stand in the sun?
2b.
Repeat 1b.
Let the tears come
If they have to

3a.
Are you ready?
Hell no
You'll never be
(not completely)
So jump
You heard me right
Be the Icarus you always wanted
To be
3b.
Keep climbing towards the sun
Because you
Will
Get there one day

4.
Don't be afraid to fall

This fucking bus.

Don't you get uncomfortable just sitting on the bus?
Don't the buzzes and clicks and vibrations
Grind your teeth till your skull starts humming?

A speed bump
Thunk
And the sound comes very
Close to shaving
Away at my jaw

Sitting at the back of the bus
Dodging sounds like falling swords

I remove myself and
Am delighted to feel just
How still I really am

I will go far.

A song! Haven't done one of those in a while.

I will go far
There are miles yet
There are footsteps left to take
There are journeys left to make
I will go far

I will stop at the inns
And sing for my fare
But no one here will listen
I will sleep outside tonight
I will go far

I will walk far
Through desert
Through the mud
Through the rain
Through the eye of the storm
I will come back again

I will run out of water
On the plains
On the grasslands
I will come close to death
And I will pray

I will come to know
The trees
Of places I have not yet been
Sleep in the shadow
Of a mountain
Whose name I'll never know
I will go far

I will learn the language
Of a people
From a thousand miles away
And return home and be a stranger
And not know how to say
I have gone far

I have gone far
I have walked
I have fallen
I have killed
For my food
I have walked
I have traveled until
There were no further places left to go

Scratch one, two, three

Fallen heavy
Ground thump
Like the footstep
Of some minor god
Shaved like a lamb
A wax solider
Blue lines and black spots
The invisible ink details a story
Of little use but grave danger

And I am sick
So sick of
Looking into a mirror pool
Seeing myself smirking in the
Droplets and reflections
Muscle spasms
And contracted pupils
And a deep-veined shudder from my heart

When no amount of romance
No musical tryst
Will lace up my sores
No coloured magic
Or passionate night alone
With only my instruments
What might one day be enough

Serenity.

Childe of Melisande

Childe of Maria

Childe of Helena

Childe of Minos

Childe of Arikel

They're gathering in the antechamber, milling like so many gnats inside my head. It is still calm for now. A cornucopia, I've always called them, a cornucopia of raw energy and inimitable vice and stupidity. Yes, I abandoned my envy a long time ago.

Humans, kine, the masses, are simply a step backward. A cloudy mess of hot breath and a thousand dimly lit dreams on which none of them would ever dare to act. Truly, they feel too much and too constantly to ever attain the purity of that single, elegant state of being. That neurochemical nonsense I hear Fiends harping on about must surely hold water, and for that, pity is the only acceptable way of dealing with mortals. A human is confused. A human cannot know what it is. It is impossible for them to still that gushing typhoon they contain within those fragile skulls. A creature completely at the mercy of its own being, totally unable to focus and feel to the very heart of anything.

But I digress, am I all that different? If I were to succumb at this very moment, would I be any better than one of... one of them? I lament my own nature, as do we all, and yet I cannot help but think that in the clarity of death this separation of the rational and the animal is nothing less than the next phase in a progression pointed squarely at the divine, however quaint the concept may be. It is that I am aware of my own bestial proclivity that designates me the better of this precisely intimate relationship.

By now they are well and truly on their way. I do hope they make a better show of it than the last week's coop of fledgling fighters. I have been so very careful making my selections, more careful than I've tended to be in recent nights. It's possible to collect the right combination of idealists and socialites such that outbursts are unavoidable. Again, these living things are so predictable in their odd microcosmic chaos that it borders on the humourless at times.

The trick there, is to find just the right relationships to sour, to eviscerate just as they will soon be eviscerating each other. I've certainly put to good use the trick that effete madman taught me, just as he proclaimed I would. Anger is the purest emotion that the rabble are capable of feeling in these times. The world was once that they were so loving, so beguiling in their silly little devotions, now they seem all too ready to knock about the prow of the good ship Mars, with a little push provided, of course. I have not needed to stoop to using direct commands in a very, very long time.

I? I help them. I free them from their own clouded minds. Rage is the emotion du jour and I am their shepherd, guiding them, goading them to the pinnacle of ecstatic outrageous fury. Without me they would never feel anything so pure and total, doomed to wander the halfway roads of the living. The viscount of vitriol, the archdeacon of the acrimonious, the herald of hate. In their last moments they will be perfect and complete.

I sometimes wonder if they are thankful. But, of course, they cannot be: they are too enraptured by the conflict. There is no time for gratitude in the fray.

It is admittedly beautiful, the culmination of all my efforts. The final breath before the plunge. It has never occurred that they become aware of my temporary absence before I find it is time to tip the atmosphere into a deep red and the first blow is struck. There is little I truly enjoy more than watching the bright-eyed one in the little black dress dig her nails into her sister's cheek, or the escort turn on the well-to-do gentleman or woman. To see a look of love turned to fiery damnation is the greatest expression of human emotion I've come to know. But only if the fury is all-consuming.

Eventually they are little more than mangled cadavers. Should one survive here and there, come out on top as it were, well, suffice it to say that my entourage is forever growing. The war-cries die down, the bile ceases to flow, and in its wake is a silence of excellent purity. The shadow of complete mammalian rage is all that remains.

Finally, everything is calm again.

Up on the first floor.

I feel you
Roil
Writhe
Coil
Slither
Under the sheet
And how I wish
Every twitch and
Fabricked swathe
Was towards me

.

Fouler trees than yours
Have been shown to bear sweet fruit
And yet I fear your bitterness
Taints your fate, seed to root

The last of the daylight.

I am using the last of the daylight
To chase a lizard onto the sand
To sweep the floor
To stretch my hands
To examine the flies before they take flight

I am stretched in the last of the daylight
I am licked by a soft south sea wind
Bitten by bugs
Itched by the grass
Hearing the ocean breathe out and in

In the last of the daylight I tremble
Knowing tomorrow that I will be gone
But with the last of the light
On the sand I will walk
Feelings the places the sun once had shone

Leak.

Whenever I go to the ocean
It feels as if
I am returning

We will walk on unfamiliar roads
And kick up the sand and disturb the ants
Until I remove my shoes
And wince at the stones underfoot
When I no longer know the way home

Then fall to silence as we compose in our heads
And let our minds drift to each other
That is where my feet will rest
As I face you
And kiss your salty lips

The House of Sand.

One by one
I unstitched myself
I unhooked the strings that kept us together
And tore myself apart
For you I will
Reshape the past

And now here by
The ocean
Where the sand
And sea
And sky
Wear me away to a stone
I salt my wound
To burn it out

To kill myself

That we might make something
Covalent
Without my sutures
And needles
Here by the cradle of all life
We will make it again
No stitches
Nothing unreal
Constricted
No artificiality
It only ever was
Just you and me