Below are the 13 most recent journal entries recorded in elsewise5is3is1's LiveJournal:

Monday, May 22nd, 2006
12:17 am	Second Day. Skylit.. The desert wind hotly whipped across the grassless, shrub-dotted plain, rusty, brown spots of ferrous age between nascent emerald and dusty olive. The yellow light of the sun struck the nickpocked rivets on Kiercl’s boots. The perfect blue ensnared the sphere of the whole heavens, Kiercl’s stark silhouette sharply thrust into the sky’s marbled opal depths as he strode upwardwinding about a hill whose top had fostered into being, a tavern. Said tavern, perched so acutely at the pinnacle, was the Tophill, named by locals for its locale and by frequent pirate shippers for its use as inn and eatery. The Tophill beer was of a single species though of two distinct humors, both stout and pale, but was best known for a home-brewed emerald bitter that found common acclaim among those mature tastes layered enough to apprehend its effervescent splendor and textured body. Wholly fiftythree feet above the brief respite Kiercl took to swig once from the sweating glass jug, the pub’s centrality drew transients who took leave of their wares elsewhere along the desert highway, enjoying unburdened camaraderie amongst those hellbound enough to risk trafficking in such contraband. Kiercl’s eyes caught a hawk swooping heavenbound on thermals ejected by the downward tumbling cold air of a distant, oncoming thunderhead. Broad wings brushed against the opal-ocean palette as unspoken ease carried the bird aloft, Elswise with unblinking eyes in salient tow. The grounded Kiercl’s gaze shimmered for a moment, blinking two tears out onto the rustred soil, their pursuit bleary, a watery eclipse of form and light, then an open sky, empty space. The path Kiercl followed wound thinly through a loosely defined plain of wandering vines dotted with budding grapes hanging above loaves of mushrooms rising like bread under the ovenly sky, splitting from the rain-soaked soil into bloom. Kiercl absently kicked a wayward handcut cobblestone that the running water had flushed from the meandering border of the trodden dirt. As Elswise reached the crown of the hill his horizon widened, distant outcroppings opposite the city upon the plateaus which amidst hunters would sometimes catch a glimpse of the prophets, fading into the rocky backdrop in their haggard linens, always watching, always listening. The city’s architects had struggled against gravity but had pushed outwards at last, as had the furious rocks below the desert plain, thrustup so many ages ago. The tavern itself stood on a stony foundation of saltpeter and coal deposits, having served as a mining office in the distant past. Exhausted by the efficient eyes and greedy hands of urban speculators, the ruined foundation stood for many years before the gathering dissidents communing in the desert’s wide space found cause to resuscitate it’s timber walls and hewn tables. Founded above tunnels, their miners and rotted machines entombed within and long since stilled by burst gas veins and lapsed bulkheads, the Tophill had been rebuilt, and rose to resemble a number of other establishments that fed and sheltered other miniscule communities that dotted the known extent of the landscape. Together they had swept away the dusty webs of skeletal spiders hanging in mimicry of their predatory status, swinging at the whims of passing worms and beetles. They had cut, planed, and polished wood, wrought hotly purged iron into hinges and brackets, and lay into frame milky glass panes drawn from the desert’s fine southern shore that traversed a small sea of subterranean welling, all beneath the Tophill’s view. By hands and will the desert’s peoples had swept away the remnants of decay and posited an artistry that had needed not but pineoil and dusting in its seventyfour years of standing. Through that glassy veil saw Tavernist, who shared his title with his surname. Indeed, they saw each other at once and waved in simultaneity, one wordlessly greeting the other and comically, each tipping respective glass jugs held aloft. Larips Tavernist was drinking from a deep jug, icy well water held within. A bold heath stretched across the back wall behind the bar upon which Tavernist leaned his scarred elbows, holding a long row of thick blown-glass jars, each wrapped in heavy lead and copper vines, tops stoppered by fat, handcut corks. Beside other windows wooden sills full of plants hung in the intense morning sunlight, glowing with a graceful, grateful reception. A slow current of water trickled through waxed ducts, overhead, dripping into the sills from carved gargoyles of amber resin. His heavy leather boots thunked against the hard, freshly swept oaken floor, dusting his path in a reddish wake, settling in the sunlight cutting through the windows to fall upon a welcome mat, reading ‘Velbekommer.’ As Elswise strode in Larips brought up the heavy glass jug, Kiercl coming to lean against the bar, the heavy glass weight in his hand clunking down onto its grained surface. “Working?” Kiercl asked the leaning Tavernist, shaking his head. “It’s a hot, dry day,” Larips began, muttering not so much in a grumpy harrumph as in a tired drawl, “Though I see the milk’s come in a few days early, has it?” “Not so much,” Kiercl replied, sipping from a glass Larips had put forth between swills, amber waves calming beneath a foamy cap, “More’s the General’s just got some extra stock in the cold room, it seems… Always expects trouble, it seems,” Kiercl mused over the newly served glass. Larips furrowed his brow, setting his drink down soundly on the mahogany bar and surveying the still, empty room. Rocking his tipped barstool forward onto its three stout, sturdy legs, and inquired, “Trouble?” “Meaning you haven’t been listening for the past two days?” Elswise asked, surprised, knowing Tavernist’s poor vision lent him to a peculiar affinity for the calming, disembodied affection of a voice, absent presence. “Speaking only of the past two I haven’t been here at all, though you’d know that if you’d’ve been in so recently,” the joke biting. “As if the old barfly’s free times were ever wasted outside of these walls,” Kiercl coughed, nodding towards a bench on which lay a hunkered, sleeping body just below the swath of late morning light, “You’ve got all the company you can handle.” A few muffled snores escaped the slow rise and fall beneath a heavy coat and were the only signs of this third presence. Larips smugly offered, “As if he’s done anything for this place in the past ten years,” “Cooks,” Kiercl languidly interjecting, inspecting his brew, “Yeh, and,” Larips trying to – “Gardens,” then thinking, “Bu—,” and again, “Sweeps,” “Hey –,” Larips held out a hand. “Stop before, y’know, you start in with the real specifics.” Kiercl shrugged and drank, Larips muttering, “Goddamn morosophist…” Again washing glasses in the basin, Larips’ words floated aimlessly about, “Most generous leech... world’s known,” Tavernist said, thoughts winding in and out of vocalization, “…damn good he’s wise in ways, an’ gardening and culinary artistry… washing.. dishes…” Kiercl and Larips cast a glance to the sleeping form, listening to the calm cycle of breathing escaping the old man’s weary lungs. His breath stuttered with the passing of a breeze through an open window that chimed suspended glass panes against one another, snorted, coughed, slowly shaking himself awake from the inside out. A craggy, wizened face turned towards them and an echoed accompaniment of thick morning regathering of the night’s mucous, allowing, “Which one of you boys and my breakfast ready?” This drew no response from Kiercl, who looked to Larips who carried the glance back to the old-timer, left in the silence following his hypothetical. “You know where the garden is, gardener!” Larips said gruffly, before “Harvest you own bounty, you old fool!” and drinking deeply from the glass jug. The old man’s eyes fell peacefully to the ground, without attention to Tavernist’s retreat into a room behind the bar through the door opposite the stairwell. Kiercl murmered, “How’s the day find you, mes-sier?” An old neck rolled, popped, “Just as well as always, you know,” the old man breathed back. Clearing his throat again the old man rose to a stand and looked at the plateaus over the horizon. His eyes faded from the moment, lost to Kiercl’s understanding. Then, the old man spoke: “So long as the incomprehensible has desires we shall suffer refinement of our one and only view our failure to see a revolution of an innovated selfhood rather merely dividing, conquering a sought future preceding in a direction foregone, outward, obsessively escaping the gleaming temptation of massacres far and wide laying low brothers too long separated from a truer original likeness in the reflexive eye of the dying man whose heart works against the deepening blade of a rusty knife.” A moment sat peacefully before Larips, who had reentered the room scoffed, toasting with a tall, thin greened glass that held a choppy aqueous mixture, “If only I were as mad as you, old dreamer,” sipping, Kiercl laughing, “Hah!” and drinking, emptying the heavy-handled glass before him. The bits of substance in Tavernist’s drink danced about as he sipped, an immaterial gauze clouding the light where there was no sediment shed from the chopped masses resting at the bottom of the glass. Kiercl’s gaze came to rest on a small, green carved fruited cactus sitting at the end of the bar, and his eyes grew narrow. “Tavernist?” An open expression drew more, “Is that speaking stone drying out without the benefit of the earth’s resuscitation?” Tavernist’s eyes followed Kiercl’s nod and a quiet glare came to Larips’ face as he swept the cactus-spine into his palm, “What of it?” Kiercl shrugged and tapped the bar, saying, “As long as it roots where it lies now,” and then, “Is my book still here?” Tavernist brought up a heavy leather volume from beneath the bar, dropping it before Kiercl who had leaned forward to place his glass beneath the tap and drawn out a new glass for himself, the wavering foamy head fizzing, filling the air. The old man looked towards the bar as Tavernist exited, his own thick-soled boots tramping heavily in contention. “A holy man came by this place, the other day, earlier,” the old man said at last, “He said that in a dream the night before he came the sky had opened its light to him and showed to him this spot, whereupon a new faith was to be founded.” Kiercl, looking sceptical said, “Not one of the prophets…” The old man blinked an impotent glare, nodding, “One of them,” Kiercl breathed deeply and said, “I’ve not met one yet,” Craggy smiling, “Oh, you will.” “Funny, that,” Kiercl mumbled, sipping the bubbly amber. “Did you say much back?” asked Larips. “I said an infinitely unblinking eye would welcome his words when he was given a sign to be expressed in a place commonfound to all.” Blank stares met the old man’s laughter before the joker said, “And what passes when a sentry meets the cause of the complaint he is answering?” “A quiet violence?” Kiercl offered. Larips then said, “My offense is always disbelief as one must act to believe, to engage, to consume it whole and contribute its digestion to your most basic wants but to me the words he spoke were stoppered by an ignorance of a truth most basic, such that he saw it to be self-evident and like sold air into a hot canyon his words slipped from my mind, he could not impact me.” The old man shrugged his eyebrows. “Well, I guess I’ve no need to finish!” Kiercl asked, “Was it the old native?” The old man shook his head, “No, it was the jew... he’s that beard, black, wiry, oilslick and wild.” “Christian, right??” The old man snorted, “Heh! Well, but one of four,” Looking up for a moment confusedly, the old man said, “What’s my name?” “Shuttup, Bier,” Tavernist said coldy, his back turned to his two friends. “I know that part of it…but what other?” the old man mused, his chin caressed by fingers in search of but a thread, “It was…” “Mess-ier?” Kiercl said slurringly, “Herrer!” The old man shouted, “ and Monsieur… Bier.” “What a name,” Larips said, Kiercl following with an ahumph. “And holy,” the old man said, drawing confused looks from his fellows, “ That’s a word only useful when followed by shit.” His day-before-sweat-stained clothes rumpled as he moved, bringing himself to a stand. “I don’t think any of those crazies know what the hell it is they’re talking about heaven when it’s all they should ever see about them.” Elswise handed the waking bastard a fag from a clicking case and followed with a hand holding the hinge-halved metal flash that snapped and brought to flame the end of the twisted paper before slipping back into Elswise’s pocket. Coughing, the old man drew in a hit before throwing an arc of spittle onto the swept floor. “Food to stir my soul, light to stir my mind, and I’ve got motion!” the old man said, more energetically than before, stretching in the heat falling upon to him through millions of distracting miles. The old man strode over to a stove and opened the heavy iron lid, throwing in a match he lit upon a metal zipper running along a pocket on his coat. Catching flame upon tinder and wood the stove purred slowly to life, its heat exploring the ironcast space as the old man’s muscles explored the soothing sunlight, relaxing in the heat. “You can mop today, too!” Larips shouted from below a drawer from which he was pulling knives for the breakfast preparation. “As if I was going to let that filth sit there all day, boy,” he coughed again and shook his head, “ What’s the sundial read out there? First third of the first third?” Bier asked. “As if I would know,” Tavernist’s shout came back alongside Kiercl’s shrug. The old man threw a heavy skillet over the flames rising from the metal coffin before him, ontowhich he threw thick slabs of bacon, sizzling upon their contact beside a pats of butter melting for the eggs Herrer Bier was pulling from a cold drawer beneath the bar beside upon, opposite Kiercl. The old man sat, the meal cooking, not poking it lest it be spoiled. Outside the sun’s meager hovering over the mountains cast a single line onto a sundial outside of the Tophill. It was the only timekeeping implement in the whole wide desert, unread, ignored, and only referred to in jest of foolishness. “What sort of holy man came the other day?” The question hung anonymously in the pork filled air, a gentle sizzle laying base for a pleasant conversation, “It must have been Christian,” Bier replied. “The jew?” the inquiry came. “Oily locks and all,” Larips said lowly, “But one and the same whose name betrays the schizophrenia of three thousand years of maddening suicide,” Bier answered. “This man, his skin, dark with the sun’s age, speaking with vivid vision, stirred many a helpless heart with those who witnessed his coming here. The hapless few did not leave so happily but instead starved by an imagined fury bearing down upon their every mistake.” “Though they rarely betray the sort of bite you’ve about you today, Tavernist.” Met with gruff resistance and crossed arms Kiercl continued, “So he failed to convert you, I imagine?” “You imagine well, boy,” Larips spat. “Were you the one questioned, fool,” Kiercl said, turning to the old man. Kiercl coughed and drew out from the clicking chrome case another thin wrapped roach, offering an additional one to Larips, who accepted. The old man laid a platonic red pepper beside a wooden cutting board upon which he prepared rough browngrain breads, thick-rinded cheeses, and soft plumbs. “I think he’d rather see an unknowable light than the honest dimness of the world,” Larips said, “It certainly inspires him more than the common or he’d not have wasted such time in his vocation, worship being such a waste, eyes cast to the sky and all, no?” “I prefer eyes to the sky,” Bier said, seating himself at one of the tall three-legged stools, “And open legs to a temple,” Smiling mischieviously, “Unless the body is a temple into which one invites the charming lips, yes?” “Only religion I know of to be worthy of attention,” Kiercl mumbled, again drinking, denying a small smile. Agreeing Larips asked, “What of worship do you know, old miser?” The old man glanced over from his sizzling meal and shot Larips a concerned glance for a moment, then attending his food and moving it all to an awaiting ceramic plate of earthen hues from sky to night to morning to underfoot and shadow, “I worry about your stupidity still, Tavernist,” Elswise looked to Larips who was about to raise his voice. “… and I say,” interrputed the old man, “that no one with eyes to see or flesh to feel the warmth of another can escape a sort of godly sight that pervades the earth with the sunshine, nor have something great escape unsearching eyes.” “And you see?” Tavernist asked, “When I saw the first formula my fears of damnation and of the unknown ceased,” Herrer Bier said mysteriously, “No evil, devil, no fiends amid fears fleeting from a confident sight, any ill unto ill that just decays for the health of naught?” “Oh,” he waved, continuing, “there is no devil, my friends, no fiend, nothing but a mad god raging in ecstasy that exceeds a gesture of love uninterpretable,” Smiling, digging down with clayware into hot eggs, yolk spilling onto steaming strips of pinked reds and rouged-white fat, pepper sliced open and filled with such hot innards of absolute hiding, scarfed with ease and enthusiasm, “Hmph,” Bier mumbled from his seat, now as patron. Beneath the old man’s hairline the sunlight caught an outline of bold lines, ordered, tagging his flesh into records long lost. He said, “You’re losing me, Elswise, you must return. You must come back this week and you must carry to arms the light of the ceremony’s life. You are starred for the heartbeat that will drive us through rhymed hours of rhythm and you must accept, lest that grace fall to a lesser musician, a letter naught spirit… would you prefer such a thing?” Growling into another sip, Kiercl said, “Don’t spend any further worry on my presence… just lend me a place and you’ll see its return come that midnight,” Tavernist began pulling green glass bottles, shining royally with their vines of wire, down from the mantle. “Three days of sunlight, no less,” he said to the whitewashed wall before him, “The heat will keep the liquid moving, and that’s what’s still needed... “The man who came the other day, Bier,” Tavernist stated, “Knows no good but his own, no peace in his heart, just a gap between himself and his passion, adored beyond a chasm, enshrining his joys in golden expectations, uninspired, sought but unconceived, lending instability to the weak toes on which he strains heavenward.” Larips again drank the green-tinged water, drawing in bits he chewed on, listening as Kiercl muttered for a moment about the news, relating a bit about the fires. “No fighting yet though,” Tavernist said. “No,” Elswise replied. “Not yet,” the old man whispered. Tavernist had laid a small bunch of the coppered-vine jars upon the dark wooden bartop, the sunlight casting a shimmering light through the soft sediment drowsily hanging about the bottom. He threw beside them a canvas bag into which Kiercl began placing the jars, clinking against one another, confident in their sealing. “Remember, three days!” shouted Tavernist after Elswise, who, taking the heavy volume from the bartop with the canvas bag about his shoulders strode through the heavy double doors that had earlier admitted him, Bier chewing now and again on his stuffed red pepper, Tavernist again washing something, his back to the entrance. (Comment on this)
12:16 am	Second Day. Heat. The intensity of the riots grew with that of the heat, which Elswise dealt with by drinking water. Chilly dew stirred his thoughts, and by the heat’s deadening abstraction the water came to acquire a sharp flavor all of its own. Kiercl leaned heavily on the giving wall of the blockbound home, and then alighted with a forward swing propelled by the spring of layered slats holding up the buglike metal shell. Beneath Kiercl’s bare feet, the soil was smooth and supple with a fresh eminence of the fading night’s fallen showers. He sat to slowly rocking on a chaise of iron vines wrapped about smooth handhewn wood. His feet he perched upon a sawed-and-sanded treestump, a jeshua tree radiating carved fractal bands circumnavigating the stump’s cylindrical face. Elswise relaxed, rocking to the frenetic scene drifting outward from the old teleradio that sat snatching common broadcast frequencies on a mantle crowning a humble fireplace. The very same brick hearth that had cradled Atsoma’s flickering inner spark twentyeight years before as she lay dying, so petrified. Now it breathed warmth into Kiercl’s hands on cold mornings and bitter nights in a space that was a kitchen that was a reading room that was a den additionally. Adjoined was a cellish room in which he slept on a bed of plain linens and a thin pillow, windows on either side of the home and looking to the two points where the sun kissed the earth. As the morning roused Kiercl on long, quiet days spent after peculiar meditation on the world’s lesser mysteries. The falling sun illuminated his reading long into long summer evenings, this luxury broken only by several months in bitter winter. Kiercl sat and rocked out subverbal tensions to the gentle rhythm of the morning’s rising breeze, making out in the distance the leaden silhouette of the city. Clouds gathered about the city’s height, as always. It stretched these days so expansively and to such altitude that it broke the currents tumbling through its magnetized skeleton, drawing opaque ripples in the jetstream’s rumbling eminence. Thethrummmummmummmof electric veins so high above the earth…. To the east lay the foothills rising over several horizons into plateaus likewise stirring from the sky a cloudy veil laden with electric moisture that roused the surface to blooming forthwith. Loaves of manna sprang up betwixt fallen growth purged by the lightening storms that on those days came prior. Above the solar eye brightened to a glorified refraction in the clouds. Of bdellium, of rouge and saffron flowering over the underlying citron depth, lemonsharp… and wonderful. Kiercl’s thoughts of the past and of the scene about him paused for a moment as his rhythm of rocking in accompaniment to the spherical teleradio was interrupted. Realizing that the riots might distract the better part of the city’s administrators, the fresh milk stolen for the countryside might find its distribution ceased. True enough, the pirate traders whose trucking routes took them through the wide reaches of the desert sold a black product anyway, lifted from unattended crates in inner city loading yards every week or so, but it would be the thieves’ ethic that should falter in the wake of the ruptured present…. Half of Autopia’s milk came from the inner city these days. From the sprawl of warehouse farms just interior to the fiery warehouses, indoor pastures produced much milk, all still drawn from a menagerie of cows, goats, and soyfields. The outer city had long since become accustomed to a new milk, cultivated and electrically caressed from designer bacteria of so contrived a germline that nature herself would not have recognized – even under microscopy -- their dialogous negotiations of antecedental wisdom. As such one of the last natural foodstuffs in the city came from the poorest portion the workers who were their own best customers. Wisely, they ensured an unflinching attention to quality to favor their inner urban peers. As many as one step truly forthward little is produced whilstwhile, and a small tension wavered in Kiercl’s lax shoulders while beginning to understand that water might just have to serve for some time to come. Elswise rocked, unquenched. Kiercl drew himself to a stand leaving the rocking chair swaying to a diminishing rhythm. He stretched hands heavenbound, gripping the rich blue depth. The breeze carried away a thin sweaty sheen his skin had produced as he twisted his wiry frame about, reseating muscles and redistributing the knot worrying in his gut. All of these had been set into a minor chaos by his previous night’s unrest, so robbed of satisfaction by those subconscious musings on the riots. The desert heat kept Kiercl lean and wakeful with his wild brushbrown hair, his convenience untouched by quickly cooked foodstuffs or long days spent seated and breathing recycled air. Therefore Elswise moved with sparse deliberation, like water, as he slowly drew on an airy charcoaled linen shirt permitting his body the cool reprieve of the sky. Kiercl tousled his sleepy hair before drawing on woolen socks and sooty leather gumsoles, lather bowl before him beside a bakedearth plate already empty, wisps of yolk and yoghurt between stray crumblings of flatbread. A landlocked sea, nearby but a manageable distance on foot by the time light broke, generously provided fish to supplement his rarer meals of meat, vegetables always plentiful. The short supply of shame in the desert lent any passersby no distraction to Kiercl’s nude figure minding a closet of fish smoking or swaying to a silent beat, curvy ageworn upright bass beside the rocking chair, its ebony neck humming a throaty buzz under his knowing fingertips. Beneath the desert moon Kiercl’s nude presence was so assumingly secondary to the smell of lemonspiced fish or the phlegmatic growlll, sizzling pop! and bassy bwhaah of rough strings uttering deep melodies. This morning Kiercl listened once again to the news floating quietly out from the dusty teleradio and so far he had gathered this: riots beginning yesterday knew not the seething disorganization of riots in days past, when a few unjustly injured had lashed out with aimless abandon, harming no one but the innocent and nothing but what was public. On this morning though, an eerie understood and malicious ego carried waves of hands about to raze the surefounded tendrils of the outer city’s upper division and its monstrous edifice. Librarians had abandoned their stacks, vandals their bombing, teachers their classrooms and classes their texts, all ushered by a newfound commonsense into the streets to burn out the metropolitan offices providing the outer city’s authority. “Riotous eyes of waning fury surveyed rubble violently derived from stores of alcohol that had frustrated their lust for audience, this very passion now trailing forth in flaming arcs through the smoke-choked air to bursting upon impact, engulfing the offices whose officials ruled the priorities of the inner city from the upper division. The staff of these offices had fled as soon as they had perceived the danger of the first days’ riot but their superiors’ faith in their outer city peers’ long arms provided hesitation enough to find that very faith laid low by the raging fires.” Judgment from afar, yet the world unjudged…. “Tasting the gluttonous fat of their bulbous bodies the fires hissed, popped and spat in the face of the quickly relieved cries escaping their sputtering lips, dark suits of polyamorous esthers brought together in a synthetics laboratory finding freedom in the splitting heat. “Their shirtsleeves wicked fatty rind and blistering rivulets into the fiery licks blooming into bootblack plumes billowing upwards and infusing the intermittently blue- and cloud-filled sky with corporeal snowflakes and browned memorandae alike, winds sweeping sheets of acrid rain through the city blocks. The fermented perspiration of an angry god cooled the sweaty faces of the rioters as surely as it dissolved the marble edifice which had until then housed these well-dressed dictators of assumption, politics, and life.“ These details Kiercl knew because the syndicated news desired it so to be, and the news spared no detail when it came to relating the malignant atrocities of the rioters and the voluminous cries of the city’s hesitant officiates. “Paralyzed shells of ashen corpses dissolved in the morning rain as the marble about them too dissolves, so slowly, oh, and the bodies of the officials will not be recovered…” And then with a whining electronic pitch the teleradio switched off, indicative of the sun’s place in the sky. Time, then, to waterspeckles and silver. Elswise stood dressed in morninglight, informed and unmoved by the suffering just related to him. What preoccupied his mind was an empty refrigerator that stood without the milk that would refresh his thirst as the water had not. Simple as his preoccupation was, Kiercl’s heart was nevertheless stirred by the notion of change, if only to last through this second day. As Elswise stood, feet booted on the sunblanched porch that still bore the cracked burden of a prior generation, he put his troubled thoughts quietly to unheard wisdom and stepped forth to follow a thin, informal trail that wound down the dry riverbank towards the General’s store. Kiercl’s thoughts followed him quietly down the path. Amidst blooming sunbled reds and buttermilk creams, surreal light fell over patches of bare rustbrown yet to rise from seeds that surely slept beneath the presented surface. Lavender petals fluttered in the calm breeze among nascent buttons of emerald cacti and hardy olived vines occasionally wandering onto the townbound path on which Kiercl lackadaisically strolled. His feet found their own way as his gaze took in the common sights and smells and sounds which rose in subtle volume with the sun’s arc, aging hourly upon its ascent to eventual return. Widely speaking, the General was a man of wisdom and age whose youth had seen the holy aim of war and want until a stray metal fragment sent into trajectory by a spark exploding outwards from an oil tank the General had been repairing on some damaged machine of war took both the General’s ability to fight and his care to restore its guns to flaying the flesh and muscle of opponents The injury additionally had cost him the ability to recall his own name and as a result he simply called himself the General on account the uniform he wore daily. A much-repaired olive woolen getup dictated this rank to him, though just why a man of such esteem would have been fixing a tank he did not anymore know. At present, the General’s memory of his peers was at worst unaffected so long as he shared with them a genuine tear of sorrow or a hearty laugh. His newfound absentmindedness had, for an as of yet untold purpose, he still believed, long ago posited him here in the desert alongside others who found no place in the expanding arms of the city. These self-expelled others the General had had the pleasure of clothing and feeding for so many years, being content now to provide for others instead of so violently antagonizing them. It was this same General, the one and only as far as Elswise was concerned, who caught glimpse of the other through the lucid windows of the storefront. As that younger latter strolled in he pushed wide the dirty double swinging doors with a determined entrance. Smoking a handrolled soursweet fag held between loose fingers, Elswise walked in and the General greeting him with a nod, “So is seems the rising spring sun’s brought forth for you a new bouquet, has it, Elswise?” At this the General sniffed the air and smiled at his old friend. Elswise harrumphed and hit the fag, too smiling as he held the smoking end out to the General, who took it and inhaled from the crackling paper a delightful drag, then handing it back to Elswise. The General paused, coughed and schuckled as he coughed, saying, “That’s a fine crop... tops if I ever tasted it,” he hummed with a smile. “Still though,” the General said, then muttering, with a darkling bottle glittering geometry in the morning glow, “I believe it’s the bitter drink that will get me through my days.” At this the General dumped out black stillness from a heavy porcelain cup which moments later received a pneumatic filling from a nearby agebattered brew kettle of burnished steel. To this the General added a vigorous amber splash from the thicksided bottle and joining the aroma of coffee was the drywet burn of whisky spirit. The General tipped his cup to Elswise as the younger man tipped a fresh fag pulled from a clicking flatcase. Quickly stowed he then snapped a hingehalved metal lighter into flame to set to crackling whiterice paper and a swill and a drag later both laxed and went about their business. “So what’s it you’ll walk away with today, Elswise? Early for last week’s receipt, yeh?” Smiling teeth paring a thickskinned thumb, “Whats’ in the break of habit?” “I thought I’d come on down and suppose you’d some milk lying around in the back cooler. Or are those legitimate deliveries growing as rare as your stories, old boy?” “Well,” the General huffed, “All the same I think the milk’s as plausible as most of the tales I know and rarity, well, I suppose it’s about time to break that habit, hm?” The General thought for a moment, still on his stool, perched like a contemplative sculpture. So the General began, “It was a snowy, bitter day, which was funny in its own way because we were all sweating, inside and sweating over wounded steel sent to us for attention,” Half-pausing with a look to his medals the General continued, “I guess… maybe I was showing some recruits the ropes, the fighting being more awful on that day, more killed, resources strained, but regardless,” he sighed, “ I myself had to pull the thorn from the lions paw….” Here the General lapsed, but Kiercl silently attended the verbal space that fell between them. And a minute later, “But the lion awoke that day, as it would have under anyone’s fingers, I suppose, for for me to have gotten these honors,” waving casually at his medals, “I must have been damn good at something. That day, though, either luck or fate, or maybe skill escaped me and a careless cigarette went into the oil, or gas, or whatnot, and …whoof!” The General swung his arms about dramatically. “I saw smoke and fire and flaming plumes jabbed like pokers into my brain, and I awoke after the blackness to a medical technician telling me just the same story on a day he claimed to be weeks later, though he was unable to tell me my own name and I found myself somehow impervious to the recollection of what others called me,” He laughed, “’ts just as good, really, whoever I was then saw the purpose in maiming and death and creating casualty is something I just can’t entertain now.” The General again paused, breathing, remembering, looking then back up at Elswise, sinking back into the present. “All as well, I guess. I’d have either died or killed so many others, which being worse, I simply can’t know.” Kiercl considered, like a child hearing a fairy tale for the very first time, the simple story and sat quietly for a moment. Quietude sat between the General and Elswise for a minute or two before the absentminded General remembered the purposeful look on Kiercl’s face as he had entered the store. “So then what‘ll you have today, Elswise?” “Well, the news of the riots has me worried that there’ll be no more milk coming in on the pirate trucking lines in the next while, as academics and vagrants alike seem to have abandoned their stations to fight the obsessive grasp of our politicians and thus,” Kiercl shrugged his shoulders offering empty, upturned hands to the General as the latter spoke for the former, “And thus you’ve got no milk, nor any hope of anything coming in anytime soon?” Kiercl smiled and nodded firmly, his lips set stiff with whimsy. The general mused for a moment on the change in the city Autopia as well, the same musing that had stirred Kiercl’s thoughts earlier into an oscillating internal revolution that gave impetus to his muscles and unspoken creative thrusts. Humphing he said, “Should get some goats, a calf even… y’already got something good in those bees of yours, Elswise, it’s time to capitalize!” With that the General hefted himself from the barstool upon which he had been sitting walked into the back, out of sight. Sound, of a whooshing door’s suction, passing, seconds later the same sound readmitting the General to the storefront. He placed jug upon the counter, its aqueous glass curves sweating dew and frost untaken yet by the heat. “Well, that’ll be fifty or a few chords… it has been a while since I heard that one song you know moves me so,” the General’s brows rising to reflect his sincere request. Kiercl sat before the counter and took the old guitarcase the General produced from beneath the counter. Kiercl plucked a few strings, turning the pegs at the headstock of the hollowbody until it sang in a sweet six-stringed symphony with an open, breathy melody. Kiercl strummed a simple beat and tune, thumping the hollow body of the guitar to kick out a pock of air, bopping like a quiet drum, slapping the upstrum in a pop to a sway the General youthfully reproduced, his eyes closed and beating with the music ~ strum strumma strum ring pop! /fingers sliding down the neck…/ pause. bopthumpa strumma, strum, strumma strum ring ring, strumma strum ~ pop! bopasthrumpa strum strumma strum \dragging up the scale…\ strum, strumma pop! ~ pause bopasthrummpa strumma bopthumpa strumma strum \dragging fingers up a fretty neck…\ ~ pause, ah, strum, strumma ring ~ pop! /dragging fingers down / “O sphere ~ “From an imperfect being would I “Inexplicably rise to thus be confronted “With you ~ “Then by sight and imagination see the “Sense over angles passed “Hence condemning the “Sightly roughened natural edge “That later comparison birthed! “It took only time ~ “It took only some time.” A pause hung between the breaths that led to the General’s murmuring, “Oh, the memories that stirs…” The General’s wheatbrown eyes opened, gazing absently at the ceiling before falling to meet Kiercl’s inquisitive expression. “But I’ll bore you with my stories about loves forever lost another day?” His stubborn throat hassled out, ahghemed loudly. Kiercl smiled, drawing a fiftynote out of his pocket, the bill so old the ink had faded into a soft impression that flowed about its creaseless cottonlike plane, once having been foldable as sharply as the decisive lines of some dead principal’s likeness. That stark, presiding visage had once too been pitched black against the soft green background web of infinitesimal lines. Elswise placed the bill on the counter and took the jug after laying the guitar back down, and said, “Well we’ll say you owe me one as I’ve forgotten the rest of the verses,” The General smiled, snuffling, and Elswise strolled out the door, glass jug in one hand, unlit fag in the other, leaving the swinging dusty double glass door to close with a jingle of charismmas bells long forgotten by their original purpose. The General’s rising chuckling filled the empty store as he took up the bill and folded it into a thin box resting on the countertop. The note joined a thin palmful of others, their digits constituting a reasonable total, uninteresting to thieves yet as comfortable as could be. (Comment on this)
12:16 am	First Day. Memory So then to exercising mine I beneath the godseye… and pause, breathe, ‘In facing waterspeckling confidence slurs, the flatsphere’s slipping angle in plain simplicity is irreflective of a straightrazor’s heavy handle,’ …body’s moisture drawn out in nightbreath and eyelids sleepdusted withtowhich and steam and heat and morning’s vigor and with a deep breath! chapped lips ministered intowhich by rising effusion… … fleeting tendrils of visions unseen by eyes yet seen by mine prior I… …and to waken from the lesser dream, the greater mystery yet to come…. A sliver of morningsun edged a blade resting upon his waterslickened throat. A smooth clockwork stroke of the right wrist scraped bare his cheeks and underjaw over an earthendark basin which caught a splash of water and lather dissolving in the steamy stream fed by the cistern. Wiping the last soapfoam from below his sharp beardline he stretched skyward, popping vertebrae proper. In the morning light his bare body rippled waves of gooseflesh beneath linen shirtsleeves into which he reached himself, drawn to close about him by means of dense darkwood buttons of a thumbnail’s breadth. As atmospheric tendrils whorled about his face and stole away the lingering wet, the sun finally broke open the impatiently glowing horizon. And the red erupts…. Kiercl Elswise stood upon a weather-twisted bleechtwood porch, ‘midstream a dry breeze stirring his hair against the harsh sunlight stewing at the edge of the shade’s westcast mercy. Slouching beams nailed in perpendicular cut the rawred light into latticed parallel lines and Kiercl’s clothed reflection caught a bloody tone on the polished steelskin hull of the home behind him. Above, only sky met the impatient fury of the red orb already hot on the shimmering horizon. Thinking bloodysky, myself cloudy o’er crumblearth trousers of honest color. Earlier he had seen news of riots in the city Autopia – that distant citadelic presence towering above the empty plains, above even the mountains themselves. That overhanging dark, that tension of constant audit and accountance to those obtuse outer city others, to dwell within this dark founds a guidance of electric buzz of neonred wrought as wantonly as will would have… industry’s ubermolecule, of progress, of reaching heights, into the sky like a crystalline hand of man’s will made... and all the while beneath that original virtuous aspiration. A spontaneous shiver flickered through Elswise’s shoulders. On the glassy black sphere of the teleosphere little had truly been visible through the rising flames and columnal smoke, but he knew the cameras’ attention for the news syndicates to often be untrustworthy anyway. Through audible static something was unfolding. Thinking, hot... simply that, but more and wanting wind to coolly blow away balmy nightsweat still hanging in morning’s dark air. “As morning broke this first day of the working week, fires exploded throughout the abandoned warehouse districts dividing the inner and outer city. Rioters reduced the buildings to immense woodfires just beyond the boundary of the cradle,” that knitting of entrenched magnetized veins holding adroit the skybound outer Autopian edifice. Kiercl attended the mirage in the black sphere of the teleosphere before backing into an empty, inward gaze. He meditated on that vague, transcendent plane of the mindseye as he looked west towards Autopia. A sunrise-reddened knife piercing heavensea blue and yet, holding forth thumb and squinting skeptically, so… meager. “Only the innermost city blocks remain untouched. The, eh, labor-taxed poor declare this riot on an ambiguous account... while this smoky distraction bars the policstat from pouring in from their outer city barracks,” an airchoking halt, riotbreakers mounting against the people, one people, that theyatlarge of society but there’s no why to be found this time. And, breathe…. “These flats have, in the past, sheltered rioters whose recourse to injury had been frustrated by the efficient pruning of the policstat. Recent demonstrations on the steps of the ministry to the inner city turned to bloody violence before light broke this morning... as many know the representatives of the outer city reside in this building as well. In the citywide pool of cultivated laborers, a new revolution seems to be stirring the city’s segregated halves,” a lurid sort of disparity breaking the day, the pang of gazing upon the fattened while starving, that carnal gleam in the eyes…. In the inner city some hungry fathers of impertinent brothers of exhausted sisters of indefatigable mothers of raucous children still regarded one another with a shaky trust and were uncommitted as of yet to this communal violence. Some students remained unired by the incomplete, gainfully misconceived and mildewing texts that so wholly populated the crumbling libraries and universities. Like smoky truths once conjured to allay curious citizens, public apathy had reduced those wispy spectres to a haze oft’ ignored. Some mentors stayed their anger at the frequent losses of power to their inner city classrooms even though the power grid was fed by the very weight of heaven. The downward force of the outer city’s magnetized edifice generated a cornucopia of energy, ensnared and reigned in to serve industry and progress, “‘…the very footprint of Gravity Herself,’ they sometimes said, ‘refined, electrified, worthy….’” Meanwhile, a mere and ever uncertain surplus fed the aging inner city. Some contractors did not yet wince at the decaying heights of the expectations maintained by the code of excellence to which the inner city had once aspired. Ignoble, weatherworn brick of once-ivied schools now seemed categorically substandard in the dim depth beneath the outer city’s gargantuan supurban rise, so bleak and infertile, that grave shadow…. Deliverymen shipping parts for worn mechanical beasts champing the inner city’s grains were unconcerned by daily collapse of inner city byways. Each week brought new sinkholes for reasons left unaddressed because the only remaining doctorals in the inner city were simple scientists, themselves mere hydroponic cultivators of golden barleys. Dealing with these pitted routes rarely bothered the interrupted drivers, who preferred sitting with a cold glass bottle in one hand and the certainty of a daylong wait for city insurance agents in the other. Whether stolen, damaged or otherwise misplaced, these machinated bones found their essence undermined, and thus the slow degradation of the threshers and mills was further inflamed. Though martial law had been instituted in an attempt to nip the budding of organized violence on the streets, all profound effect fled from the grasp these revolutionary menaces, whose spirited sway was stifled by the absence of leadership or alcoholic obsession. Thus condemned, they simply burned abandoned commercial spaces or dumpsters holding only refuse or orphaned whelps too poor to dwell under leakless roofs. Even families fractured, opposed, and infighting prior to this commoner revolt, now came into synchrony, setting ablaze tar, concrete, and steel while the very life-defining industrious ethic that had provided these three tinders found its willful subscribers diminishing in number. Whether citizen or deliveryman, student or doctor, the weight of the outer city had become too much for anyone any longer to bear. Elswise remembered the city only dimly. From the porch in the dry, rolling desert it was hard to recall through the glare of the sun the flickering neon signs of sunken-corner kiosks. Tumbling urban debris had swept through overshadowed streets and newspapers had danced fluttering tangos before dissipating ecstatically in foetid vents and gutter drains. One year even the streets themselves had steeped in roiling steam. The city council, housed in the ministries of the outer city’s upper division, had that year granted approval to nuclear reactories to recycle their reservoirs of rusteffused cooling water. By flowing down uponto the inner city’s hilly streets, the water would finally return to the earth by draining through the soil beneath the city’s earthly foundation. The heated stream offended few experts: “‘…on account of the eminent radiation levels being provably minor, ma’am… you see, it’s all absorbed …no, they’ve assured us that the minerals of the watertable below….’” Kiercl, playing streetside, had watched as decaying carcasses of vermin and effervescing streams lapped pungently against his bare feet before disappearing into the gutters. That very same year luck had seen fit to move the Elswise family from the city to the sprawling desert countryside, several hours distant from the edge of the outer supurbs which rose even higher than the old inner city skyscrapers, having already severed those below from openness above. The space and light of the countryside will be good for them, father had said again and again, thinking of that small bunch of prized exotics always blooming into lunar waxyellow in lavender’s royal embrace. The nascent green buttons had always grown so cautiously in the dim citylight. Straining skyward upon a sill, the cacti sat sequestered from household fluster and the day’s passing habits. The spiny moon’i’night cacti had taken well to the crackedearth lot the Elswises later came to occupy. Petals wax from deep roots to better draw new plumes of color forth from rich layers held in earthdun breast, and father so often saying that the point of the country was its distance from the city…. The countryside’s sunlit space could not save mr. Elswise from the anxious tension he still sought daily, commuting an obscene distance into neon-trimmed concrete arterials, illumed through aloft glasspanes held by taut, muscular cables in sampsonian braid…. Perhaps the distant tension of working distracted mr. Elswise from suffering the memory of ill fate, so, so common, too common….. Having lost four newborns in childbirth and still others soon afterward, a tragic mystery shrouded the Elswise lineage. Each and every infant had been inexplicably rendered breathless as wetskin blued and a silvery, luciferous cataract of striated mucous lay as a veil over eyes forever held from life’s first hospitable light. As a result, at least two doctors had abandoned their professions, and if not their professions, had fled then their posts and thus any hospital the Elswises were likely to visit nine and some months later, all simply for fear of ending up as one doctor had after delivering three such infants from mrs. Elswise. “‘…Why, that doctor remained a resident in his own hospital! …hadn’t you heard?’ “ As a detail within the details, he now slept as a patient in the mental ward. Still wordless, witless, and without any attention to the calls of others for years, he occasionally muttered quietly, always to himself, scratching his rough-haired face in perplexion, “‘…just doesn’t. hmm, no. no… no... sense. Eh, but…ah, but…no, really. …and hawh....’” Such tragedy was unknown to the relatives of the Elswises, who were all content with burying fish and tulip bulbs instead of children. These relatives though were few in number and with but two somber legal relations living elsewhere in the city, the Elswises had to nurse their sorrows alone in the city’s innards with neither the ability to counsel their spirits nor their dreadful, repetitious fate. As such the birth of Kiercl or of his younger sister Atsoma, who arrived one year after, had never entered the hopes of either Elswise and therefore brought their parents great joy. It must have been the happy providence of childrearing that caused mr. Elswise to continue his lengthy journeys into the distant city. Upon his evening return he’d force a smile to greet Kiercl, always playing outside in the falling light, enjoying equally his father’s return and the setting sun. The elder Elswise’s smile seemed to be remembering those times when the family would visit the countryside, not having yet moved there and thus always ecstatic under the brightness of the unveiled sky, oh and that aftersigh, that breaking open of gunmetal clouds that so habitually dwelt over cityskies. In days past, the awaiting countryside received the Elswise family in a cradle of whipping, woven winds which tasted sweet and crisp as the congestion of the cold, crowded city was itself expelled from their lungs and muscles. Kiercl’s vision blurred with those passing memories, remembering with a knotty throat that day of his father’s exit. Tragedy visited the family yet again just as the desert had begun to brighten their heretofore dim, smileless lives, this time as an arrest of the very heartbeat that drove the worrycreased mr. Elswise into the outer city’s supurban heights each day. Though the countryside was now the bright space that gave them room to breathe more easily, it was still the city that pulled the wind-tanned elder Elswise every bright morning to its dim recesses. If it was a memory of liberation that gave depth to mr. Elswise’s smile as he come home each evening, memory alone could not save his stressed heart from collapsing under pressures of long journeys far too frequent into the center of that dim city. Like a sleeping cancer an unnamed anxiety had grown over his lifetime into a fiendishly paranoid leviathan lurking in blood pressure, hypertension and subtle self-derision until one day collapsing under its own doubtful weight. Its grand stilling coaxed mr. Elswise’s heart to silence, his blood like heavy sediment sinking in his veins. As mr. Elswise fell, his hands reached out to his horrified daughter. Standing before him, Atsoma gasped as her father’s dead eyes gazed emptily into her own before he struck the floor. Seeing in those last moments her father’s hands reaching with death’s possession towards her fair throat, a dread inhaled suddenly lodged a bit of bread she had been eating. Her fading mind captured the scene, handsfatherlove’sdeath in that last witnessed moment. Medical examiners from the city had taken hours to even respond and by the time they arrived dusk was falling. The grim-faced doctors operated mechanically, absent of compassion in their precise technique. Kiercl, dry-eyed and standing as an observer before that which could be seen but not grasped, looked but did not cry and was of little comfort to his mother, who looked for both reason and solace but found neither in the briefly detailed exit interview the examiners conducted. The reward bestowed to her trembling hands was a notice entitling the two survivors to a meager subsistence, ‘with sympathy.’ Kiercl’s mother stared wretchedly into his dry eyes for days afterwards, not seeing his curiosity, which lay in a silence damned unwittingly by his mother’s hand as she had slapped away his wandering reach. Thinking, seeking to view that spectacle beneath heavy black plastic layers, a balmy eternity enclosed, heat trapped around unmoving weight father daughter infinite miraculous decaying, condemned to scatter. It was that appetite for palpability, to touch, and feel… and know…. Kiercl noticed then that the weathered porch which had withstood all manner of abuses under the fierce sun, torrential winter rains, and drunken midnight stumbles had finally cracked under the burden of one carrying the dead weight of another, splintering dryly, and echoed, and remembered…. Mrs. Elswise found herself within a grimacing silence. Words seemed too much to bear and had broken into a despair that had darkened her eyes evermore. Her gaze was each morning reflected by the glassy surface of milky whirls thickly effused rich tea brimming with darkgolden honey sunshine. At such blank moments her tea sat cooling before her without any memory of its preparation. Such promises, Kiercl could hear her sometimes whisper, hope is a dream of such great promises…. (Comment on this)
12:15 am	First Day. Consideration. The struggle of both philosophy and theology within and between the ministries and universities became yet another problem; one might think that attitudes in places like those would evolve to situations where proof of adroitness might be tangibly attained, yet those who could only speculate devolved into argument and theory, forever cascading through industry before inevitably coming to rest as novelty.... Dark letters of great authority…so thickly printed by the mass stampings of presses in days ignorant of electron waves and photocommunication… presence and power to reform the form, to grasp the reachable and hold fast until fatefully parted… and of history beyond? …Dates began to mean little in the latter half of whatever century we were in, and time was instead began to be based upon the cycle of growth in the hydroponic space stations in turn dictated by a plan of harvest and distribution for the surface below. With irony, the very progress of technology led to the reintegration and reliance on the most basic natural cycles. Rouged velvet long since faded from its risenribbed spine, soft, flaking, brittle sheaves, an autumnal text in passing, still more: … capital gain remained a driving force of exploration. This produced an equal number of side effects such as astronauts mining on viable moons of distant planets, or the harvest of crystallized methane on the ocean floor. It was often commented that from high above, in the ever watchful guardian stations orbiting Earth, the planet had begun to take the appearance of a metropolis frozen in a lingering midnight over much of Asia and North America, the smaller amalgamations of Paris-Seine and others considered independent entities in the Euro-Slavic lands. The darkness of the planet’s many abscesses struck the megalithic landscape scraping the stratosphere with an inescapable humility. Once we were proud to have achieved the architecture of fifty- or hundred-story towers. Now there were gigantic satellites, suspended by continuously flowing streams of magnetized plasma powered by the very core of the Earth itself. It was reasoned that if plate tectonics could work on for a natural model of subterranean plasticity, could not the concept be extended to an artifice maintaining habitable platforms at altitudes as high as ten miles? Following, absurdity, one before and after so many others? Turning to crackling reenvisionings so much later: … structures of the brain reengineered in the new Voidis genus, which was a term given to those dealing with the emptiness of space, and the Oceanis counterparts, another new sort of human that had evolved within the profession. It makes little sense to those of us observingin retrospect, centuries later, deeply rooted in our own, more perfect understanding of the human machine. But at this time of technological and commercial expansion, for which the era was named, few gave credence to the minority opposition to this great expansion. The reluctant, complaining minority grew silent after a while, either put off by the deaf ears of those they petitioned, or perhaps becaming commercial explorers themselves, and thus began to see what was truly changing, that towards which we were truly advancing. … time itself seemed altered with the advent of sophisticated cryogenics and gametic cloning, consciousness preserved and the essence of the mind transferred between custom-cloned host bodies. This allowed a greater fluidity in exploring new environments, before certain physical changes were deduced to be necessary. The most publicly known change was to the Oceanis genus, which primarily consisted of a revised respiratory structure as well as a full revision of cardiological functions, strengthened to endure not only the intense pressure of deep sea work, but also to raise the average body temperature by nearly forty degrees, resulting in a new average body temperature of 135 degrees Fahrenheit. This was only possible with newly created intravenous food sources, typically totaling fifteen thousand calories during a twelve-hour working period. Much less is even now known about the Voidis clans, lost to the great distances between the farthest corporate outpost and the nearest mining colony. Each group was rationed, so to speak, into clans because of their specified tasks. For example, one clan would specialize in mechanics, while another might be engineered with intelligence and temperance, thereby creating a group well suited to lead, organize, and network. And no one saw the trouble brewing within this plan, no one would believe any power greater than our own could be afforded, even accidentally, to those we ourselves imagined into being… Ideas, passed into names and stratified by the abstracted notions of a mind in tune with its human dimension sees such sense in the naming of things, the division of the matters-at-hand. And these old societies had seemed so strange once… One passage caught Anthea’s interest more than anything else, its treatment of the quarternary humors of the world he himself knew so well. So our understanding precedes us… Placing it back into the drawer from which he had taken it, Anthea closed his eyes and took upon his the weight of the rising day’s tumultuous events. A glaring orb shouted nuclear fire from the sky and the manyfaced crystalline city’s skeleton spat the glare back up into the upper division in fully illumed thousandfoot cloudshafts. Anthea Soual stood within his office overlooking the central spire, its enormous point a gyroscopic compass guiding the outer city’s floating blanket through eons of a wavering magnetic field like a plate of ice on arctic seas. The city, forever, onward, Autopia… A static buzz on a small, smartly-shaped speakerbox broke the silence and Anthea’s musings on the rising steel and concrete garden before his window. A rough click followed, then speaking a voice perhaps soft in person, “Minister Soual, sir, there are a few others here to see you… it is the group here for the nine o’clock?” “Yes, then,” Anthea replied with pressure upon a simple black button, “send them then in, if you please,” releasing the button and focusing the force of his will on a quiet rage waiting within. Those who kept Soual waiting rarely had to force their thoughts upon him, as his attentive patience was his greatest intelligence. Those who made a habit of underestimating his memory never saw their misstep take root and bloom into years of miserable pawnship. This characteristic cost those with whom Anthea dealt much if they failed to maintain a parallel faculty of secure mind. Though his simple, plain posturing lent him an air of simplicity those truly foolish attributed to simpleness, many but not most read him as such. And rare were those wiser beings whose clever caution in dealings of business inferred a calm to which Soual and the ministerial tribunal so evidently attended. Alone, Anthea was less threatening but far more dangerous and seeing through all deceits, reinforcing his position as the minister of conduction. At the beck and call of casual suggestion…. Removing himself from these final introspections as the belated group entered the room after having noisily fumbled with the knob of a darkly marblewood door, its lock clacking and predicting their disruptive presence before they had even uttered a single word to one another. In low tones before quieting they whispered before stilling beneath a dark gaze he cast over them. Standing in the window’s generous luminescence, silent, silk-suited, waiting, now looking at them rather than over the rainstained concrete apartment blocks so far below which spread for miles through the sweeping sheets of rain. “Gentlemen,” he greeted them, “and ladies,” smiling gently at the minority of three in a group of eleven plus one and himself and saying, “we’ve concerns to discuss which truly tender to us all an interest in the city and its greater direction, no matter our smaller, more personal, local interests.” At this, the murmur beneath the ministers’ breath halted like a stillborn heartbeat fading in the receptive abscess of a wintericed alley. Those in the room found their faces ticking in a culled fever brought to roil by Soual’s intense stare that began to focus slowly on empty space or something that could simply not be seen. With capitalistic objectivity set in his taut face Anthea said, “We have before us the issue of the inner city’s dissatisfaction, which we feed with our poverty-ensuring wealth, ensuring their dependence, their subservience. The riots have blocked our authority for the last time, for we must direct the city wholly. We cannot stand not in meager partition. So too must we draw to a point the flailing industry therein that couples us with the past. “The earthly mothers’ milk on which that asynchronous center of our city depends is an anchor from which we must draw back! from the slumbering ignorance of the past has ignored the reasoning behind our best innovations! for these poor denizens of our inner city center have never tasted the affluence that would free them from their earthly dependency. Woman’s breast has borne unto mankind much, though to think that it should provide something as platonic as an unconditional benevolence… I should think that in the eve of her descent to society something was cast as strewn, marred, and for that we must labor. And they… they cannot call their will to the triumph which we here in the outer city have beheld in our rising from the soil.” At this some in the group laughed, never having known the taste of cows’ or mothers’ milk, much less any preconceived belief that such interdependency was to be the epitome of what a being as divine as a human could create, his society, his politics, his pillars of virtue... Born into an assumed position of governmental grace that fed so on the science of progress and cultivated convenience, each one from birth had drunk deeply of programmable bacterial milk that fed the outer city so readily, bottles waiting to be electronically caressed with the push of a button hanging in closets circulating a cold countertemporal current, more protein, less fat, balancing each day of the week for variety... Soual waited for their laughter to die without killing it himself, instead pausing for their attention which was drawn into focus by his cool inertia. “Indeed, these riots have troubled us only because we have lost several of our peers to the fires set into frenzy by these reckless hounds, these moping dissatisfied. It is these antagonizers we can no loner tolerate nor placate.” The severity of his words spoke to the trembling ears of the group and an uneasy disquiet came over them, fully unanticipated and obviously upsetting. One of the women, a motherly, elder woman welldressed in leisure shivered at dark imaginings that she had not quite recognized within herself. She fostered a question forth, “There must be something that we can do… something effective, as we have never truly been?” Anthea’s puerile smile masked the darkness in his heart, directed singularly at the naïveté the elder blonde had unknowingly shown in her unconsidered words. “There is a great deal we must do,” Anthea said, “but what stands before us is something of potentially immeasurable force and importance, and to master the force of our will for the future’s making we must be more human, more compassionate, and act with greater wisdom than any who have preceded us. Upon the trailing edge of Anthea’s speech were arrogant words fostered by a shimmering red-tied man who uttered, “Evolved? Minister Soual, I care to beg your pardon,” he almost laughed, scowling humorously, “we have mastered life itself! …realigned our most basic genes, cultivated supply for our every want and wish. Though diseases still multiply in their affronting aim to undermine our species, our cures are but a halfstep behind in their counterpoint. Since the breaking of the nations and the old regime of local rule was necessitated by the ferocity of the unaligned, we have grown so much and evolved much! “As our air clouds we rinse it clean more quickly than ever, and our economy, our politics, and our schooling have in the past fiftyseven years become unfettered by the purposelessness of art. Instead we have applied our measured confidence toward the continued refinement of our least desirable psychic elements. And will you please tell me why I am here? A mere political representative such as myself should not be privy to the ministry’s dealings…” Pause. Breath. “ Regardless, what more should we see as a necessary aspiration?” Simple in its asking the question hung in listless prerebuttal for but a moment. Anthea’s almost-smile stopped short as he spoke, “Have we poor? The unable, and those unwilling…?” More scoffing but admitting, “Indeed,” almost embarrassment, but no a quick reconsideration of browborne dew glowing under heatless scrutiny, “but we must connect that to the inevitable bellcurve that we undeniably assert in our understanding of the science behind our adjected, adverbial world. The cream peaks, minister Soual… and we are the apex of that everlasting, parabolic oscillation. Chosen by our context, I generously believe… you would agree, yes?” A dishonest tension flashed across taut musculature, washed out in the office lights against the shimmering red column beneath. Like a bloody sun setting over an unilluminable dark. The formal frame of his dark suit did little to draw attention away from his face, now a focus amid the background, uncertain. And yet the politician continued, “We here in the outer city are part of a long tradition of excellence that stems from our humble understanding of what we are as earthly servants and what we must strain to become. We must build towards a height of perfection, a flawless society, not utopia, certainly, but certainly some society to continually strives to be a utopia. We have been given this opportunity by the providence we cannot claim as well as the providence we must claim: the wealth of our forbears, their legacies, our education, our hallowed cultures, even our ability to become cultivated, refined, for which we are indebted to our creator.” At this, Anthea could not help but smile. “As one of the last remaining christians governing, sir, do you see your calling as morally indicative of this ideal which before yourself you have laid? Certainly the riotous mass before us we must agree to quell, but truly, do you see something about our present existence that cannot be found rooted in history? Something has ignited these stragglers of economy as I would claim and of morality as you would claim, and something must,” Here, gravity and breath, “change among our most basic psychic elements. We must evolve.” Anthea’s eyes caught a rim of brilliance in the misty edge of the light gleaming off of his iris. The man in the red tie responded with steady caution and gathering caution, giving and taking, saying, “The poor are as animals, blessed in their merciful resolution unto death’s arms by the inevitabilities of the common world.” Defensive, taut diction. “Surviving,” tie-choked, “Their dreams are not to be realized.” Anthea’s smile gave way to a callous blankness that absorbed any tension between the two and said, “What should serve to differ us and them? Is it merely that you shall be anointed in heaven and they shall enjoy a lesser state, forever beneath you? Or is it simpler to look even further down upon the truly damned?” Taken fully aback the redbound man resolved his distress after a mere bit of shaken faith. “In my rest after this world,” he, stirred, said, “I don’t believe I shall look upon you either, minister Soual,” and hesi~ Sighing. Soual’s eyes clasped shut for a second, letting sink to an engrained depth the need to humble this man and his flushing political pallor, his profession of passionless mediation. Stumbling the politician hefted forward, “We shall see on the day of judgment, minister Soual,” adjusting his tie from its spontaneous constriction. A brief murmur slipped in hushed breath beneath the table. Anthea regained reign of the room speaking sharply up, “We must arrive at a place where we may choose to continue along our perpetual refinement of the ever imperfect, condemned to failure, or choose reduce what you, my red faced friend, would call the smallsouled pagan spirit within us, and thus, within our whole society,” almost worth a smile…. “To a view of life that exerts the force of our imagination as well as our hands as the steerage of the world in opposing that pathetic view submitting to age, death, tragedy, illness, cancers, famine, and the plethora of imperfections that gods or nature or absurdity have so generously cast upon us, but we who are capable of so soundly a reasonably defeating all such unnecessary ailments of the human species now can act upon the whole, undivided...” At this Anthea paused to taste the sweet vacuity in the air, replenishing his calm. His skyblue eyes drifted back upon the vast palette of space above and outward, inattentive to the straying will of the group at hand. Notes were made, intentions logged, and daring schemed in an understood accordance of their quiet pens. Such was the confident undercurrent of an unpresent eye guiding, and truthfully, providing for, their each and every signature. “Shall there be a name for this page?” An elder man present and signing his share inquired. He held forth a blank white sheet that would sit upon the directives and orders set to firm action today. The group sat and though for a moment, eyes meeting but only twice, all else cast to the sky or to the esoteric of fantasy or tablegrain. “A name for this operation, then? We have all reviewed your plan, minister Soual, and while outrageous it is just the thing to begin a new epoch of human civilization. This undertaking shall henceforth be called the reclamation, for on this day did we, the builders, the heirs of this city, set forth to reclaim the impetus this city was originally founded upon, now so ironically, irreverently ignored by those living in the once-grand skyscrapers. Soon the height of the city shall be united as one…” Smoke had already begun to wind into this depth of the air filtered throughout the city’s body. Floating though the distance, bits of fluff began to adhere to the wet sheet on the window’s surface, obscuring a whole horizon with a clinging sexuality that drew in and seduced anything so unanchored as to be drifting through the torrent of streaming air that day. Only Anthea noticed this in his deliberate survey of the scene before him. In a moment prior to thought or discussion with either himself or the group, the fiery fate of those who had set the heated black cloud overhead into its orbit had been decided, and upon realizing this, the ends of Soual’s lips brushed upward in a taut smile, unseen by his fellows. They shall have their earth… Raze the inner city, from beneath, from below where no one would ever know or realize what was or might ever be taking place because no its just too absurd noone would ever suspect and to he who directs I must flee to only return to guide this new gentry, this new dream, and the new upper division shall be grander than this and so much higher, so fantastic, so truly truly truly godly…. And they shall know fire, And they shall know fury, And they shall witness all confidence drawn out from beneath them Unbeknownst Their eyes bewitched with doubt Their eyes blinded by will. (Comment on this)
12:15 am	Second Day. Consideration. A glaring orb shouted nuclear fire from the sky and the many-faced crystalline structures of the city’s skeleton spat the shine back into the upper division in full thousandfoot cloudshafts. Anthea Soual stood within his office looking over the central spire, its enormous point a gyroscopic compass guiding the outer city, through eons of a wavering magnetic field like a plate of ice on arctic seas. The city, forever, onward, Autopia… A static buzz on a small, smartly-shaped speakerbox broke the silence in the room and Anthea’s thoughts of the rising steel and concrete garden before his window. A rough click followed, and then a voice, perhaps soft in person: “Minister Soual, sir, there are a few others here to see you. I believe it is the group here for the nine o’clock?” “Yes, then,” Anthea replied with pressure upon a simple black button, “Send them then in, if you please,” he released the button, focusing the force of his will on the quiet rage that waited within him. Those who kept Soual waiting rarely had to force their thoughts upon him, as his attentive patience was his greatest intelligence. Those who made a habit of underestimating his memory saw their misstep take subtle root, flowering in plans that drew fools into years of misery in unrealized pawnship. Anthea’s deep knowledge of his own character cost those with whom he dealt much if they failed to maintain a parallel faculty, though his quiet, direct posture lent him an air of simplicity which the truly foolish attributed to simpleness. Many but not most or even more than less read him as such and rare were those whose clever caution in dealings of business inferred such a calm when with Soual and the ministerial tribunal. Alone, Anthea was less threatening but more dangerous and he saw deeply through all that lay before him. Removing himself from these final introspections, the belated group entered the room, having noisily fumbled with the knob of a darkly marbled door of composites and wood, the lock clacking, predicting their disrupting presence as they spoke with one another in low tones before quieting, stilled by the dark gaze that Soual cast over them as he stood by the window, silently waiting, though now looking at them rather than over the stained concrete spires that spread for miles through the insular, smoky fog, blurring in the sweeping rain. “Gentlemen,” he greeted them, “And ladies,” he continued, smiling gently at the minority of three in a group of eleven. “We have concerns to discuss which truly tender to us all an interest in the city and its direction, no matter our smaller, more personal interests.” At this, the casual calm of the conversation at hand drew to a chilling halt like a stillborn fading to the receptive abscess of a frozen alleyway. Those in the room found their faces ticking, culled yet feverish, brought to roiling by Soual’s intense stare that began to focus slowly on empty space or something that could simply not be seen. Going coolly on he said, “We have before us the issue of the inner city’s dissatisfaction, which we feed with our wealth, ensuring poverty, ensuring their dependence. The riots have blocked our authority for the last time, for we must direct the city wholly, not in meager partition. So too must we draw to a point the flailing industry therein that couples us with the past. “The earthly mothers’ milk on which that asynchronous center of our city depends is an anchor from which we must draw back! The slumbering ignorance of the past has ignored the reasoning behind our best innovations! The poor denizens of our inner city center have never tasted the affluence that would free them from their earthly dependency.” At this some in the group laughed, never having known the taste of cows’ or mothers’ milk. Borne into their assumed position of social and governmental grace that fed so on the science of progress and cultivated convenience, each one drank deep of chilled bacterial milk that fed the outer city so readily, bottles waiting to be caressed hanging in closets circulating a cold, subtractive current. Soual waited for their laughter to die without killing it himself, instead pausing for their attention which was drawn into focus by Soual’s cool inertia. “Indeed, these riots have troubled us only because we have lost several of our peers to the fires set into frenzy by these reckless hounds, these moping dissatisfied. It is these antagonizers we can no loner tolerate nor placate.” The severity of his words spoke to the trembling ears of the group and an uneasy disquiet came over them, unanticipated. As if a chill had entered the room on Anthea’s breath, one of the women, a motherly, elder woman dressed well in leisure shivered at dark imaginings that she had not quite recognized within herself. She fostered a question, “There must be something that we can do… something effective, as we have never truly been?” Anthea’s puerile smile masked the darkness in his heart, directed singularly at the naïveté the elder blonde had unknowingly known in her unconsidered words. “There is a great deal we must do,” Anthea said, continuing, “but what stands before us is something of potentially immeasurable force and importance, and to master the force of our will for the future’s making we must be more human, more compassionate, and with greater wisdom than any who have preceded us. “Since the breaking of the nations and the old regime of local rule was necessitated by the ferocity of the unaligned, we have grown so much and yet evolved so little…” Upon the trailing edge of Anthea’s speech were arrogant words fostered by a shimmering red-tied man, uttering, “Evolved? Minister Soual, I care to beg your pardon,” he almost laughed, scowling humorously, “We have mastered life itself! We have realigned our most basic genes, cultivated supply for our every want and wish. Though diseases still multiply in their affronting aim to undermine our species, our cures are but a halfstep behind in their counterpoint. “As our air clouds we rinse it clean more quickly than ever, and our economy, our politics, and our schooling have in the past fiftyseven years become unfettered by the purposelessness of art. Instead we have applied our measured confidence toward the continued refinement of our least desirable psychic elements.” A pause. Breath, “And what more should we see as a necessary aspiration?” Simple in its asking the question hung in listless prerebuttal for but a moment. Anthea’s almost-smile stopped short as he spoke, “Have we poor? The unable, and those unwilling…?” More scoffing, “Indeed…” Almost embarrassment, but no a quick reconsideration of browborne dew glowing under heatless scrutiny, “but we must connect that to the inevitable bellcurve that we undeniably assert in our understanding of the science behind our adjected, adverbial world. The cream peaks, minister Soual… and we are the apex of that everlasting, parabolic oscillation.” A dishonest tension flashed across taut musculature, washed out in the office lights against the shimmering red column beneath. Like a bloody sun setting over an unlightable dark. The formal frame of his dark suit did little to draw the background in this plane of uncertainty on which Anthea trained gaze. And yet fearless continuity, “We here in the outer city are part of a long tradition of excellence that stems from our humble understanding of what we are as earthly servants and what we must strain to become. We must build towards a height of perfection, a flawless society, not utopia, certainly, but certainly some society to continually strives to be a utopia. We have been given this opportunity by the providence we cannot claim as well as the providence we must claim: the wealth of our forbears, their legacies, our education, our hallowed cultures, even our ability to become cultivated, refined, for which we are indebted to our creator.” At this, Anthea could not help but smile. “As one of the last remaining chrestusians governing, sir, do you see your personal calling as morally indicative for our purposes here? or of this ideal which before yourself you have laid? Certainly the riotous mass before us we must agree to quell, but truly, do you see something about our present existence that cannot be identified in history? Something has ignited these stragglers of economy as I would claim and of morality as you would claim, and something must,” here, gravity, breath, “change about our most basic psychic elements. We must evolve.” Anthea’s eyes caught a rim of brilliance in the misty edge of the light gleaming off of his alighted iris. The man in the red tie responded with steady caution and gathering caution, giving and taking, saying, “The poor are as animals, blessed in their merciful resolution unto death’s arms by the inevitabilities of the common world.” Defense, taut diction. “Surviving,” choked, “Their dreams are not to be realized, they shall not.” Anthea’s smile gave way to a callous blankness that absorbed any tension between the two and said, “What should serve to differ us and them? Is it merely that you shall be anointed in heaven and they shall enjoy a lesser state, forever beneath you? Or is it simpler to look even further down upon the truly damned?” Taken fully aback the redbound man resolved his distress after a mere bit of shaken faith. “In my rest after this world,” he, stirred, said, “I don’t believe I shall look upon you either, minister Soual,” and hesi~ Sighing. Soual’s eyes clasped shut for a second, letting sink to an engrained depth the need to humble this man, his flushing political pallor in his profession of passionless mediation. Stumbling the politician hefted forward, “We shall see on the day of judgment, minister Soual,” adjusting his tie from its spontaneous restriction. A brief murmur slipped in hushed breath beneath the table. Anthea regained the reign of the room, “We must arrive at a place where we may choose to continue along our perpetual refinement and perfectly, failure, or we can reduce what you, my red faced friend, would call the smallsouled pagan spirit within us, and thus, within our whole society… “To a view of life that exerts the force of our imagination as well as our hands as the steerage of the world in opposing that pathetic view that submits to age, death, tragedy, illness, cancers, famine, and the plethora of imperfections that gods or nature or absurdity has cast upon us; we who are capable of so soundly a reasonably defeating all such unnecessary ailments of the human species.” At this, Anthea paused, tasting the sweetly vacant air and replenished his clammed calm. His cold sky eyes drifted back to gaze upon the vast palette of space that was so minutely mirrored, inattentive to the straying will of the group at hand. Notes were made, intentions logged, and daring schemed in an understood accordance of their quiet pens. Such was the confident undercurrent of an unpresent eye guiding their every signature. Soual caught sight of the dingy weather stains that surely would be exacerbated by this new ember, whose ash hung so freshly in the air. Smoke had already begun to wind into this depth of the air filtered throughout the city’s body. Floating though the distance, bits of fluff began to adhere to the wet sheet on the window’s surface, obscuring a whole horizon with a clinging sexuality that drew in and seduced anything so unanchored as to be drifting through the torrent of streaming air that day. Only Anthea took mental note of this in his deliberate consideration of the scene before him. In a moment prior to thought or discussion with either himself or the group, the fiery fate of those who had set the heated black cloud overhead into its orbit had been decided, and upon realizing this, the ends of Soual’s lips brushed upward in a taut smile, unseen by his fellows. (Comment on this)
12:12 am	Chapters of a Life First Day. Alight In early morning’s protodark, that glowing buzz, incandescence overhead, light flooding down, spilling forthwith from filaments to cling to sinister edges below, metalframed geometries revealed, islands shining forth in shadowsea! thought one present poet. In the inky black, he caught sight of one officer glancing at him. Empty eyes above, obsidian eclipse. Write that down, thought he. A pencil etched metered phantasms into sheaves clasped in his trembling left hand. Hot breath condensed upon wiry wool woven into a checkered scarf wrapped about his neck, glasses fogging and lips roughed against snotty wet. He coughed into his crook’d arm stepping into the gathering crowd. Gleaming lines alit betray the professed quietude of bodies resting, arms so bluntly presented to our wary eyes, guards paired and flanking the gates, authority sharply stenciled in ivoryblock, broad chest and shoulderblades bearing, policstat. Inner ego still in poetic reverie, his thoughts strayed further into dark figures posturing before him. From form, from substance, arises truth. A stretch of hellenic mausoleums, housing sleeping diplomats, automats, delegates, and other relegates who served the upper division of the outer city, lay in a halfmile parabola beyond the gates. Ideals framed and upheld by virginal marble pillars, bases busted with historical worthies, boldly guarded the traditions actuated into inner city life by the ministries. There were twelve ministries. There were the ministries of assumption, consumption, edification, industry and economy, which were the five corporeal ministries; there were also those of elements, expansion, revision, policy, and execution, which were the five abstractive ministries; foundation and justice constituting the remainder, which fell into neither category – these two categories themselves ephemeral fabrications of academics in the business of classification. All those cheap flyers fluttering about town had declared was, meet there, early. No explication was necessary, not these days, not with these problems, and not with such an evident enemy, shared amongst all. Just an advertisement for empty, aimless angst, thought so many. “Meet here,” arose inflected subtleties amidst the gathering social body. “Meet here,” some offered, uncertain, curious eyes gazing about for authority. “Meet here,” mustered a certain minority. “But…what’s early, exactly?” the poet mumbled to himself within a chuckle. His coldnumb fingers fumbled for a bent cigarette he then clenched betwixt sticky dry lips. Skrickscracklepopping flint grated upinto sparks and flame milking from crackling paper a thick, slow smoke. They’ve got it all, control it all, media, state, economy, our fucking lives for chrismssakes, throwing families in prison for crimes without victims! Crimes without reason, a stress-fractured voice muttering to others who’ve family, as he does, all in prison, all for fulfilling the wealthy outer city’s need for poverty and the consequential criminal proclivities of those forced into being shit, that sick paradox of capital logic! The imagination’s costliest profit.... “Fuck man, this’s war!” a punk shouted towards a collared professional who’s come but only to find dialogue, “You gonna dirty that suit? Is it even worth it, boss? Scuffed shoes, ground slacks, charred tie? Break a bone, bust a lip wide fuckin’ open and live up to your words with blood, man.” Zealous unshaven students milling about cleancut seminarians quivered with passion, hot words flying amongst them, of traditional dogmata and suppression and repression and poverty and all gathering fiery force in the cold air. So optimistic, these schoolboys. No assembly permitted here, there, anywhere. “But here we… …no, no. Fuckit… fuckit. “Hereandnowthisisstirringusall “Andweand But I? “Andthey But I? “Arealleachonealive “Andfuckit!nolonger! Nolonger? “Everyone! AndI… “Andeveryone! IamwhoIamamInot? “Andwearehere Arewenot? “Andnoothershall “Forceinjusticeuponus! “Nonebutus! “Forcingresolution! “Andwhatoftolerance? “" “ ” Because… aren’t we simply worth it? From shadows beyond the gleaming rifles and shining metal gates came three more well-armed officers of the peace. Thickbarrelled rifles of grave mass aggressively framed the five anonymous blackbodies, tall lines gaoling the new arrivals. Heat flushed through the poet’s cheeks. And goddammit! isn’t damnation assured from the beginning for these maligned fucks?! striking unrelentingly unknowingly as though armor’d hide anyone anymore a blow to one a blow to all a blow too many and each as vulnerable as the next. A small girl in a retarded delerium, unnoticed by the crowd, bounced out from behind brush hedging the concrete lot. Below sky cloudy and aglow with citylight she giggled, babbling as she swung her arms about, a raggedy doll gripped in her tiny hands. As she ran she huffed, steaming like a coal engine through a wintry dark. A child!? The metaphor newly manifest before his musing eyes wrenched up a choking premonition. She stopped and doubled over by the foot of the broad stairway leading to the gates. Still gasping dramatically, she looked up and thblated out her tongue towards the two officers outside tall double gates gating from the governed their governors. Spit flew out in sputtering arcs, her lippy trumpeting in a wavering chorus with streetlamp filaments. Underlying that eerie duet was only a quiet creaking of composite on steelscale, emanating like dinnerware on china from the towering figures opposing her lithe young form. The little girl, dodging imagined foes, twirled and danced towards the guards, ducking playfully out of harm’s way, advancing slowly. The officer stared at her for a long moment before snapping up the buttend of his rifle. Stumbling back in surprise, the girl tripped, tumbling down, her head slapping against a step’s rough edge. Her chapped elbows skritched against concrete steps and red stains bloomed out from her pale, gritty flesh. Then rising and shaking her hurt off in a diffident swagger, she snerked and snuffled snot and sweat and citystink into mucous gathered up and hocked out upon the cop’s obsidian eyegoggles. Gleaming in the punctuated urban darkness, bubbled spittle dripped. Neither officer budged, gazing directly ahead, utterly unresponsive. Cries from wail-coarsened throats came, “Fucking fascists!” Or, “We starve daily!” And, “Can’t you fucking care?” And also, “Fucking romans!” “We’ve no fucking doctors or teachers!” “Can’t you hear us?” “Fucking philistinians!” “Nazionite…” Sighing for breath before defeat. “This is fucking totalit~” Thethwhapwhapwhapwhapwhapfrom above thundering downward, permeating the quiet jests thrown about the crowd, a godly, reprehending roar. Drowned yells grew more desperate as a small aircraft suspended by a chopping blade swung low over the crowd to perch upon the largest building Seeking reparation they come, and instead more offense they find, returned again and again with the Liberality of genocide…. Settling upon the roof the craft quieted and before the crowd fell the distant sight of dignitaries disembarking. Here, a branch of the ministry of execution, on behalf the upper division of the outer city, took upon itself the burden of administering policy in the inner city. Here then, thought he, is where all true power lies. “They’re returned from some meeting, something not covered by the news,” came murmured estimations from no one in particular. Something, ignored, delayed…but, certain…and immanent. Still advancing on the gate, the little girl, babbling, gaggleyed and aimlessly in a string of disconnected vowels, played closer and closer still. Halting, she crouched. Peering about the open space she began to lean to the left, as if to ambush some unsuspecting sprite. She slipped, losing her balance, tumbling over and losing several steps’ worth of altitude. Drawing herself to a stand the little girl, still unnoticed by the crowd, stepped up and she scrunched her scarlet face up and remembered a lesson from her catechism. The little girl approached one officer directly and clasped herself about him as through he were family. He merely looked down upon her and seemed to sigh. Holding fast, the girl laughed in shrill staccato. With a grimace, urine flowed through her threadbare skort and thus upon the officer’s legs. Sulphuric acridity split the air about the spatter, steam permeating her woolen pantleg, rising off slick black leather. What the fuck? The glowing tip of the poet’s cigarette guided his inscribing of this confusing courage, scratched out by the light orange welling emphasized in passing wind and puffing drags. He frowned, just as Justice would frown upon the grave disparity between glorious sunlit metalmountain above and muggy roots of skyscrapers and alleyways between, old and young alike entrapped in the tarry gravity of poverty…. Holding fast, she nuzzled her face her trembling laughing face even more so into him. The guard shrugged and brought the rifle to his shoulder. The guard stared down at the girl now, holding fast his gaze for a moment. He then raised his rifletip to the little girl’s laughing face and nudged her. Fair warning? The poet drew one last breath through the tarry tobacco heat and tossed the nub into a muddled puddle, sizzling to silence. Crack! of heavyrounds cracked! whipping though tissues flossed about! like bloody gossamer, inthroughout bones split! and unfuckingseated! shoulder expelled from socket and holy shit is anyone else seeing this holy shit holy fucking shit she’s – they’re – The poet gagged, an aconsonantal gasp caught in the back of his throat. The little girl shouted with breath coughed out in awe trailed by coagulate, eyes open and empty before falling with a dead stare and hollow flop to the concrete. The front lines of the pathetic crowd spilled forward. Several citizens caught shots splitting calm, dark, morning, falling so fast and we’ve seen this before…. A gale-dulled stamping murmured in the distant dark, drawing both the crowd’s attention away from the guards and that of guards’ from the crowd and for a splitsecond the violence stilled. But wha~? “We’re reading disturbance behind the crowd, advise?” radiochatter pierced the din. Am I crazy? Voic~ As heated spontaneity grew more present, an immense crowd late in rising rose nonetheless and captured the guards’ attention for a moment, an amorphous presence just a block or two beyond the incandescent glare. Ohmygod… Firelight exploded and revealed hundreds and then thousands and in awe before shock, radios squaked though static, “They’re too many!” “We repeat! Too many, advise!” Vodka and whiskey and gin and bourbon and grainwater spirits all charged the air exploding furiously, and with a laugh, having raided liquor stores, filling heads and hands for the night ahead. Flaming cocktails and swigs and shots spilled forth as raucous glee pranced about, all stained in hadean glow. As waves of flaming alcohol seeped into plastic armorshell, the guards’ countenance melted underfoot dancing flame, sparkling about like smoky roman candles. Several protesters battered the last officer, bats and bars shattering his eyegoggles, helmet pried off his bloodied head. A young man in torn jeans and leather and another in professional attire parted his bodyarmor out amongst their fellows, beating down upon the fallen guard. Beneath co-opted nightsticks and long crowbars and oaken bats and tire irons his jawline crumpled, steeled crowsclaws, arterial gargling stifling his wail. Moving uponto gates before them, a collected weight leaned and slowly uprooted steel under the crowd. Like a redwood catching the waterweight of one squall too many, the swarmed fence toppled over and threw into the shuddering scene flecks of concrete. Head- and hand-sized in heft, stony flotsam channeled hundreds pouring through high posts remaining upright. As the crowd flowed, its amorphic silhouette blotting out emergency signals just now raised. Inside, ministerial secretaries and aides and interns and officers pulled themselves from slumber, some fleeing, many unclothed, yet all unmolested. Outside, electronic eyes surveying bedlam beneath a whirlwind of news helicopters swarming overhead. So that the policstat, the upper division, any part of the outer city might intervene and cut short this hangnail… The poet, sketching his thoughts from the wayside, hesitated. Vigor infused his veins and his nodding and shaking gave way to tearyrimmed brilliance. And tonight the meek inherit the earth. He stuffed sheaves into his coat pocket and wiped away the slick wet hanging on his stubble. Shifting in place for a second longer his eyes fell to behold stray ribbed rebar, aged and disused, rustedged… and suitable. He aghemed phlegm from his throat and spitting leapt forward with the masses coursing into the courtyard. Sunrise was still hours away. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 26th, 2005
2:51 pm	Jazz Review In Tacoma, there is a fledgling jazz scene aching to break into the open. While Tacoma's several lively bars and clubs host an eclectic mix of indie rock, punk, grassroots hip hop, and jazz fusion, locales such as Jazzbones, Bob's Java Jive and Hell's Kitchen don't hold a monopoly on nightlife in this recently revitalized Northwest burrough. The scene can also be found at Affaires Cafe, Pour At Four, and other smaller, food- and wine-oriented venues whose atmosphere can be a warm and welcome departure from the grittier clubs and crowded bars which host much of Tacoma's live music. At the forefront of this burgeoning jazz breakout is saxophonist Kareem Kandi and his band, which often includes drummer Jacques (~) and keys player Brian (~). I make time to seek out Kareem and his fellow troubadours, who at the very least represent a growing musical minority in Tacoma's emerging scene. The backbone of the Kareem Kandi band is drummer Jacques, who has been a consistent player at most of Kareem's showcases. His is a spastic style utterly reminiscent of classic Harlem jazz, with tight rudiments and sharp snare pops slicing through a chatter of cymbal wash. This gentle and virtuosic balance hearkens to jazz sounds drifting through the static of an old radio, and there is both great nostalgia and energy behind Jacques' self-contained rhythm section. His beats are never repetitive, and his spontaneity speaks to his natural grace behind a drum kit. Solos are confined to tasteful interludes which never fail to emphasize selective moods in a single piece, ranging from simplistic tom flams to epic crescendos on a single cymbal before giving way to a rolling cascade from the crash and ride to the beefiest bottom end, accentuated by the crisp claps of the high hat and the spot-on timing of a thumping bass drum. Bringing Jacques' rhythm towards the melodic side is keys player Brian, whose double-handed dynamism easily covers the classic Hammond organ tone so many are instinctively familiar with when thinking of jazz and the classic walking bass lines held in place by the sinister of his two deft hands. I found myself in grave doubt of an organ player's ability to cover two distinct voices at once, as good jazz bass always finds its own voice within a mercurial pocket which, wherever it wanders, never strays from a metronomic consistency. Brian surprised my expectations and I have never revisited them, having been so soundly disproved by his continued performance as organ-and-bass player. This brings us to the ringleader of this particular group, Kareem Kandi, a local finding ground in Tacoma's dreary days for a slightly brighter musical mode. Kareem's style reminds me both of softer modern movements within jazz which seek to expand the appeal to wider audiences and yet speaks of the technical attentions of New York bebop, for which such stars as Charlie "Yardbird" Parker became known. Kareem's ability to blend in the sharp and voluminous changes within single keys and chord structures and the uncomplicated tone of softer jazz (not smooth jazz, mind you, that banal, wallowing filth passed off on the radio for a style which is to classical style what punk is to pop) is one to be admired, and perhaps, envied. I find listening to Kareem to be a marvelous experience, but I also find myself in wont of more. Kareem and his band are talented, to be sure, and they have no trouble either covering standards of the genre or expanding the bounds of jazz by playing originals. However, I get the sense that Kareem is a conservative musician, and there is an aspect of jazz which demands innovation and bravado, a daring which finds only greater impetus to be when assaulted by the disapproval of the conventional. This is a ground which Jacques drumming speaks to clearly, being the most outspoken of the band's instrumentation. Brian's keys are also finding their way to this new ground, particularly when opening up the treble register of the keyboard to wailing frequencies which sound at once Creole, Blue, and yet white-hot while being at their soul, black-and-blue as can be. Shall Kareem lend his attention to convention or to daring, I wonder. He may yet go either direction, and it is a truth a solid as bedrock that convention becomes the willing slave of innovation, lest it be left in an irretrievable part of the past which, droll, evaporates under the brilliant light of fresh inspiration. I certainly hope for this brilliance, for Kareem and his band have every necessary part of the puzzle to succeed - chops, technique, and edification. What must now evolve, in correlation with the emerging metropolitan center Tacoma is struggling to become, is a vision so broad it knows no bounds, and a vision so bright that one can hardly speak of it before witnessing a spectacle that though now known, leaves one breathless. Daniel Lenaghan, Unaffiliated Press November 26 2005, Tacoma Washington. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 30th, 2005
3:35 pm	Thoughts on Hell Dante seems to have pre-empted all of my worries; I like the tropics. What light is better than firelight? What light more romantic and charming than that of a Mirrored moon casting off a glimmer of A distant nuclear rage? And all of those other twinkling fusions Polar, Magnetic, Casting off Radiance in hues beyond those which we Can even possibly perceive? Hm. While I prefer not to be with Lawyers Sophists Betrayers and Mutineers, I would like to be With the premaritally sexual The intoxicated, The inventive, irreverent, occasionally incoherent Jostle of laughter Biting in cynicism, Fearless of any judgmental retribution. What bravery in succumbing to a tradition The worth of which is written not in the hearts of its Practitioners, But in the pages of history? History - Blood Rage Death Entropy of intellect Because clearly a more efficient More objective life Presents us with a self-presence Not even worth entertaining - Or do you never look into the mirror hoping or wondering If one day An empty plane will be all that returns your curious gaze? I'm for hell. The Christian hell, anyway. I prefer Lucifer, If his opponent is a God Whose Jealous Insecurity Abetted only when a suffering servant by the name of Job Lost Everything In Order To Prove Nothing. I prefer rebellion. I prefer invention over wine and lusty eyes, And I prefer wading through ambiguity and essential pains Which drive us to reinvent the Known To say "My Knowledge of the Passed Is not Enough!" And by so saying enter a new Knowing. So Let us call to order the first meeting of our club, Wherein - We are bound to knowing that a static, decaying knowledge So insufficient for Life So as to wither under our childish scrutiny Condemns Us. We are so bound, And thus, Unbound, Cast into the fire! But how else Does one work to Forge New Implements of Inspiration? Aha. I think I've got this one figured out Enough to say "I haven't the foggiest!" With a smile on my face. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 8th, 2005
2:41 pm	Cosmos Once there was a darkness Much like the nights of which you already know - Many, Deep, And varied. This darkness had a breath and in this breath Was Light. Darkness unstirred, Motion unmoved - This was beginning. Hardly to say "In the beginning," Hardly to say "At the first," For no outset sets out in the night In which there is neither beginning nor end. Yet there was more than just darkness. Like a pond, some breath rippled across the deepest surface of this dark And whether darker than dark or lighter than dark, in the Dark was the Light and in the Light, there was Dark. Stirring with greater force and vivacity With greater and greater breadth and capacity For complexity and overwhelming Unity Was this One of many shades Was this One of many Colors Was this One of Many. Am I to tell you that in the dark was God, For in the Christian Beginning There was but the Word And the word spoke LIGHT! And it was therefore so? Or that there were indeed images and identities of the Godhead and of motion and Sound and the sound of the Universe in the Discourse of Love Said ohm! Oh - What shall I speak of that you do not already in your heart know? What shall I say that non have said before? Shall I forge a new word? Yet I am spoken of by embodiment I myself Already a word Of material frequency And energetic Propoensity Chanelling the greatest in the smallest With so vulgar an action as a squatting shit Or a blissful - ! Wordless, I am worded. Lend me your hand Where shall I take you That you have not already been? What shall you see of that which Remains Unseen? You are the Seer Seeing the Seen This is the Scene And no part of it escapes you. Modus Operandi - Affection, Purely Wholly Never impure - Does Being tarnish Spirit or Spirit Being? They are Expressions of the Same. Did not the wind blow before I was born, Waves crash, Shores break tides and sands sweep into the sea What was Grey becomes brown becomes green becomes grey again. Organic matter? Nothing is otherwise! Not-a-thing... Ask the world for yourself And test your own patience And in abandoning such an absurd postulate as "That table before you breathes as you do" Ask if it is either your assertion or CAPITAL CERTITUDE Which defines your certainty. Shan't you spend but another moment? Can't you wait but another minute? Haven't you wasted enough time already waiting? Wait no longer Seek no longer Search no longer and See What Is To Be Seen! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:04 pm	Another lonesome crowded room somewhere North of the West Sons of God, Sons and Lovers. The prince. He who in ideal space defined a noble utility, He who in real space confines us to foreign war. I am no politician, but should I feed my own people Before starving others? Ravaging and tearing with a warwrought lust For something so particular it cannot Be named? Or is there no name and do those who lead Have no greater idea than what They So Blithely Speak To us already? This is a short entry Despite the energy of breakdancers Massive Monkees Bold in Red-clad Black-marked Bandanas and baggy pants Which so outmode my conservative quietude - Shall I only observe Or shall I break myself out in order to Break myself in? My consciousness is skeletal Western, Analytical - Yet soul is Wholly East, so far East that East becomes West and it is impossible to draw distinction between them and there are no sharp angles or boundaries but instead and open state of an empty Not-Yet-A-Thing which we succinctly call Nothing Though sometimes this scares us because BY GOD! Look at that man fly, feet spinning, acrobatic, hip-hop Automatic Ecstatic Freeze - - And there's a sharp look that would melt either pretension or a heart and Does this threaten me or Inspire Me Because BY GOD! I too have a body. And I will move. And I will be beautiful And I will throb and thrum with every frequency from the low whum to The midrange hum To The kilohertz Megahertz So Beautiful I hurt So I must move and groove in order to order This chaos which we might laughably call Harmony. I will be so massive. 12:20pm on a Saturday after a great night in. Be Cause. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 2nd, 2005
11:15 am	Rainfall And as the skies grey like stained metal the Earth clenches the downpour and responds. There now, is the weather I have been awaiting. Yet, my interests have passed in the fruits of sprouting spores, and I enjoy more commonly a different sort of intoxication... I suppose all things have phases and come and go like any celestial body, any circadian rhythm, andthing so simple as a breath or that ULF THRUMMUMMUMMUMM of the cosmic microwave background which someone once heard and called Om. The chill sets into my bones but I'm more aware of the weather, and the way my body reacts; I've acclimated to this Northwest, such that during descent early this morning, seeing the haze of Seattle through the low cloudcover, I thought - I could live here. That's a new sort of sentiment. While I will not forego travel, nor living abroad sometime, I've a sense of return that I had lost since I was aware enough to not call myself a child any longer. And now I return, a child once again, still aware, still making terrible, slow mistakes that grind into my mind with a wrenching RETCH of antagonized metal. Not yet a graduate... Soon... A teacher? Professional student? Musician? Writer? Artist? Things I do, thigns I become, not WHAT I AM confined to a decision of giving up others to pursue perfection of one. There are too many languages to know to ignore the rich breadth of expression contained in each. No ink in sound, no music of a pen beyond its quiet scratch, Yet in each An opportunity for the other. And service? Am I free enough to be useful to someone besides myself? Or am I still caught in idealizing the world Silvering the mirror Galvanizing the skin of something moveable Such that in its infinite luminesence I am blinded and prevented from touching Something real Of Its Own Accord? (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 25th, 2005
1:47 pm	Woe and wont just won't do So in injury one seek reparation, one seek reconciliation, one seeks, through resolve, resolution. And one fails. I don't suppose that those I have bypassed, ignored, offended or injured take any comfort in any aspect of my own regret, and it is only the one who regrets who is weighed down by That Sensation Of falling and freespace which is not free but Dissociative Like a long fall from a cliff into water below, many many lengths of one's own bodily shape which surely must receive your Intended trajectory but instead Doubt overwhelms and one's breath is lost and evacuated in a silent wail which is too meager to be a protest or a YAWP Not barbaric But in the freespace confined. So in passing the present one looks ahead to the future but that future is obscured by not clouds or divisive bells or even bands playing different tunes But instead Those very things which make the present harmonious-- Does it escape you that Your good is not The Good? My goods, these goods, these fulfilled desires and foundations of further dreams are instead Graves to others Entombed, the things that one could not possible hope to mend because In seeing the worth of one's own actions A mirror image of one's own faults and failings? And these words This word This line Nothing More than a melody to distract from the ache of knowing that What is done cannot be undone And nevertheless not seeking such undoing But instead A simple apology Yet cast off Oil and water Oil and fire Sparkling violently Threatening to char one's open eyes if one approaches too closely To that sputtering pan Flames beneath No hotter No less violent No less. I would quake with thunder but I am subdued in my own longing For a time which was never even my own Because I lived in a dream A dream on another An Idea Of Another Not another. Simply, another. Another worthwhile, another lost to those goods which, shortsighted, I cast myself into while ignoring the very shape of things which had come to define the present moment which I so thoroughly abandoned. "I'm sorry?" "Fuck you." Breath Breathe! Breathe! Breath. Empty mouths, karaoke between quarreling friends Friends no more? Friends torn apart by the idiocy of one and the insecurity of another? Was I so insecure as to flee? Was I so idiotic so as to think I might flee? Did I flee? When was it we parted? When was it that we were truly together? Alas These words exist only for myself, my own solitary audience confined to the walls within which I hope the thing I find I can call my own mind. Am I even so real? I am so real. I am my question, and I am without answer Because I have caused This loneliness before I was even Alone. Ahem, amen, I say to you - - - Ahem. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
3:28 pm	Re: Purposes and Places, Placements thereof, Spaces between. This blog serves as a forum. This forum is the sane counterpart to schizophrenia. In it, images, text, random assortments of things that I have no idea of until so struck, stricken. "Who knows where thoughts come from, they just appear." - Lucas, Empire Records. Quotes, obviously. Less obviously, lenses by which the capital Logik which moves us as Magik did once of those peoples of an intelligence too primitive to be well-served by the idiocies of a formalized worldview, lenses which contort, distort, wind, wrap, and weave about everything any one of us believes we once truly knew. Have I grasped it? Have I missed more than I suspect? Here, A story of a story, A story of the world, Godless and lively and uncommanded but by Earth and Heaven By Fire and Wind and Sea and Salt By Rain and Mirth and Revelry beneath dichotomous suns - Dichotomies seeking to be expounded of no accord But Their Own. People and Impressions, slowly building upward from the soil only to become diffuse in the inescapable metabolism of a breathing world drawn out of itself by the void of infinite possibility. A redirection of Light A reinterpretation of Metaphor - Justice or just-is? History or his-story? And a reconfiguration of gender that will revile All those who would call out, Uncouth! Forget Purity. We here seek - 3:35p9-18-05 First Entry (3 Comments |Comment on this)