read the small prints

our rebellion seems small, misplaced somehow – the gestures crafted for a larger arena than the ones they are forced to play out in. it is not good when humble acts designed to inspire people to seize the reigns of their own destiny appear overly grandiose. i suppose it is unavoidable when you are a big fish in a small pond; well, more like a big stone in a small puddle.
we sprayed our graffiti messages on the town hall walls and the parish council were confused becaause the people whose freedom we were campaigning for were not known to them. none of the members of the committee tasked towards cleaning up our vandalism had the vaguest idea about world politics and saw little connection between the target of outrage and them.
we wanted to make people more aware and all we really did was make them angry, frustrated, and eventually apathetic – not only about the vandalism but also about the things we were most passionate about.
some will say that we might have picked our targets better, but in truth we fored what we had at the world. we knew our short range missiles would not reach their intended targets, but they at least caused trouble for people who one might consider to be the establishment, and we perhaps made some people who weren’t aware of the issues at large what was going on, even if only for a second.
stillborn punks – that was what we called ourselves. our protests lasting as long as a flame denied oxygen. but at least we tried – we stuck with the ethic of do it yourself and we turned others on to the notion.
writ large, squinted at, but never passed over.

now is the time

time scattered; skittered outwards in small glass beads. they had found a way to map the truth of reality onto control analogues and they needed a fact an instantaneous history stop. all of the different elements of the reality were represented by easy to understand shorthand archetypes that even novices could plug into and operate.
he stepped back from the debris – tapped the subdermal control in his left eye orbit and brought the shatter analysis routine online. their previous analysis had revealed that the break-up of the medium was patterned along belief schismatics and that would help them identify system flaws.
it seemed that a rapid decentralisation of power had occured when it became evident to people that those nominally in power actually had no answers to the questions which the evolving world was asking of them all. the ones who knew what direction to row the boat in were those who had been decried as radicals and seen as those operating on the fringes of society; the survivalists; those who had set themselves the task of preserving a whole range of skill sets that were under threat of disappearing.
the upheaval in the societies had not initially been a traumatic one – it had involved a peaceful turning away from the centres of commerce and information trafficking towards the hinterlands where these people might educate them in the ways of survival that were going to keep the wolf from the door and the food on the table.
it was when those who occupied the positions which had now become untenable because of their obvious irrelevancy realised what had happened that the trouble started. government, like any organism seeks to protect itself and moved swiftly to depose those who sought to supplant it. but the groups which were under attack were no longer fringe interest groups but had alloyed to them the majority of the populace, and these were no longer the toothless consumers of yesteryear – these were educated, hardier, beings entirely. they did not lay down like the meek lambs they were supposed to be. civil war erupted and it tore down the edifices of the old defunct order and severely limited what the intial scope of the replacement culture had promised. dissent, resentment – attack, couunter-attack; destablised, the whole thing escalated and soon the world pulled the biggest trigger it could find.
they were benevolent gods though – well, of a kind. this was, after all, a modelling system designed to thinktank the problems of the day. they wanted to get the jump any of this kind of societal breakdown and see if they could address the needs of their people before they gave up on the establishment and went their own way.
he downloaded his cognitions into the scope-banks, tracking them to the visuals; gathered up the pieces and put the time module in a rebuild cask. it wouldn’t take long before they could reattach the broken element and get the whole thing running again. while he was waiting for that he would be formulating a meme-underpin to soft-wear the data needed to prevent this particular outcome. whether it was the answer that would bring the best outcome remained to be seen, but this was what he lived for: the science of possibility.

tick shit

goddamn motherfunkin’ shit-tick rolls a perfectly turned ebony marble of guinness shit around and fools some schmuck into believing it is a god. he crawls around on his knees offering up new nuggest of crapola for this uncaring and aloof god. the man’s wife captures him digging around in his own arse-crack and inquires as to what he thinks he is doing.
they find the wife a week later, head split open by a rolling pin, infested with blowfly – vast and swollen and purple (full of gas).
the walls are smeared in excreta that appears to be in different glyphs. less distinct stains that appear to be smegma are interspersed. this is the birth of a millennial cult.
psychiatrists rush to write papers on the phenomenon. philosophers theorise upon the mental rewind to an earlier state of being. and the lost and the hopeless, finding copious links on facebook and myspace, burrow down into the heart of the rotten apple, pruriently lapping it all up, until they become infected, start hallucinating their own dung beetle deities, executing their significant others, and redecorating their houses in socially unacceptable ways.

commune

he was chewing the fiction, breaking it down into smaller pieces so he could swallow it. he’d choked on larger stories before and he hated it. gagging and retching as some metaphor came gushing out, hitting the floor, half-digested. at the time they’d recommended a diet of haiku – something lighter on the stomach, but he refused to compromise on what he ingested.
his skin patterned up as the data was displaced there, waiting for processing by the backbrain shunt he’d had wired in yesterday. he hadn’t tried the autopilot function yet but it was an attractive feature which allowed the mind to game while the body was directed on a command string through fourspace.
he touched her fingertips which were pointing upwards to signify readiness for outside input and he watched a cascade shiver of scattered poetry move through her hair. he hadn’t realised she’d had the medusa stranding worked in already. she’d had the stone glare added last week which allowed her to freeze information surfaces until she was ready to read them. she was still kind of hooked to sequential processing and hadn’t been won over to the idea of parallel processing; she said that having it analysed and filed independent of conscious process made her feel slightly out of body and that she didn’t find it pleasant. it’s true there were some small number of people who suffered dysmorphia because of the protocol and she hadn’t got rid of that fear yet.
he was lost in the data-shuffle of her. she smiled as if in dreamsleep. all around them worlds realigned themselves in the data repositories that were the communal group.

or net – cold man

high noon, stoned immaculate, jim morrison masturbation moment. he’s stood there with a shotgun aimed at a melon shouting jackson pollock’s name to the four corners of the room.
‘i was born under a ceiling decorated with picasso’s guernica, you understand?’
‘i was squatted out in the gutter of a slaughterhouse.’
’same difference.’
‘we found our aesthetics early, eh?’
’sure, sink to the bottom, rise to the top; all to do with the roughage.’
she is dressed in a dress that she fashioned from the cut up pages of time magazine; her most beautiful extremeties released from the caging of traditional clothing.
‘i sweat and have something to read later,’ shes says, distractedly, one finger engaged in the preliminary circling motions of a session of manual stimulation.
a camera shoots. polaroid instant and a dead image drops to the floor. the child with the safety scissors runs into the room, picks it up and cuts the face out.
‘not real; not reel,’ it cries, de-sexed in its innocence – free of the strictures of common society.
he puffs away on his joint while staring at a captain beefheart caricature of the great god Zappa.
‘there is an Ornette moment coming.’
‘how do you sense it?’
‘my antennae are twitching.’
‘i see them.’
‘take a kirlian.’
‘of course.’
a small black hole forms in the centre of the room which is blanketed in theoretical particles; they step through the breach in normal physics and enter a jazz moment. the universe begins.

know time

er, ya know, some things don’t make sense, like when matter cooled down and condensed into different forms did time do the same thing? ah mean, we’re always talking about time as if it were this big old uniform thing and yet there is this persistent idea of relativity, so uh, if it’s like not behaving the same way under different conditions, is it not possible that it’s like, uh, not the same thing?
cool hours sipped at in afternoon seclusion with smooth tableau of womanskin beneath fingertips and he is singing a subtle melody as restless fingers trouble his flies and extract his throbbing penis.
hot stale hours of airconditioned failure hell crowd out the next day and he sticks to his shirt as prayers for a cool breeze escape his lips and die.
next day is consideration of the trap – and the taffy minutes stretch and distend out of recognisable shape as he remembers that soft cool skin and an afternoon of energetic fucking where reckoning of time mattered not.
a fly is sat in his tear-duct drinking. a red river whose wellspring is his crushed forehead explores the contours of his cheekbone. it was a lunchtime get away; a planned exit from office boredom: it had ended in automobile punctuation. time is confused and moves around at speed for certain durations and then slows down as mortality presses in and around the smashed shape of his outline.
how does time react? is different time gathering here? he feels like an experiment. he ceases to feel. no time.

scream in

the yawning horror comes in the babydream dawn where breasts extrude human filth and the monsters grow fat on the codified obscenities of farmed abortions.
she screams but she is alone in a room decorated with meat, painted with human fat. gravewax tallows, hands of glory lit and burning. all these atrocity bodies are the given flesh of the unspoken yesterday as it crawls its way out of shallow graves to claim the innocence of today. thin veneer, blistering paintwork, it all goes down under slash and burn farming methods.
joy division choirs; new order orchestras. come and get your tattoos and drum out the underpinning rhythm of deathcamp century. there are prayers of denial here in the holocaust antechamber. devils in the green room with fake grails and corrupted peace and the stink of all of that fakery masquerading as concern.
crossroads, cross swords, and burning crosses, as the grand dragon pulls itself up through mountains of faeces sculpted into the visage of every single face that every masked an emptiness claiming to be a big idea.
there are photographers lined up and they are taking pictures for the rubbernecker children of spectacle attention spans. it suppurates, it bursts, and we all go down screaming.

headfurst

ah, my headfuzz sputters. packed in the matter of self. innards spooling out tickertape loose to bundle and wrap around crap-full skull of empty. we stutter to break the hold of syntax, semiotics and grammar.

there is a tapeworm in the dictionary recording every word that we look up so it may construct arguments from the ghosts of our stupidity. cupidity – oh, arrow love, and point the way as the neon fractures in spitting sparks of bulbs dropped in water to kill the wet amphibian dream drying out in death.

i kind of sort of maybe understand that something i thought i had a handle on only opens from the inside out.

there are butterflies zipping themselves up in suitcase cocoons to unpack their caterpillar dreams into eternal postulates of youth forever after captured. all the vampires held in amber and strung along the ribbon spines which click in the breeze of hookah smoke at the lewis carroll beatification talks.

i am asking someone who once seemed to know something but now professes to know nothing what exactly is the difference between denial of the non-specific and admission of the general? is there not a cancelling out of the significance in the no-man’s land of no definition?

we set off fireworks and in the condensing moment of a single bang which hearkens to the big bang we see a possible fourth dimensional rift open and espy a way into the data-strewn algorithm that is babel.

in the beginning was one big long primal scream that when downloaded and unzipped proved to be merely a dirty joke passed between demigods in the back of the class.

you are tuning out my headfuzz. picking up on some loose harmony and tightening it until the ripe skull bursts and coconut milk or seminal flood erupts outwards, lands, pools and becomes the ivory tusks of ganesh, destroyer of obstacles. this is the key.

between the pages

he opens the draw and he takes out the bible that seems to come with all these hotel rooms and he flicks through the pages – more often than not someone has left something marking a passage in there. sometimes, if he’s lucky, someone will have left a piece of their own wisdom … a haiku, a poem, some social commentary. it was like a private network of communication that he had plugged into.
there had been some back and forth throughout the years – as with his discovery of the first piece of writing, the first reply he received was unexpected; a total pleasure; a new sun in the sky. he was lucky because he passed through the same places regularly, although sometimes he would mix it up and try out a new place just in case there was something he was missing. so there was still a certain amount of serendipity at play when he found the words.
he had always wanted people to think of him as a poet, a man of letters, but most people just thought of him as a travelling salesman – which was fien in some respects (it was a respectable occupation) but it didn’t speak of who he was; didn’t speak of his soul. so when he heard the first whispers on the road about a mysterious poet who left his work in motel bibles his heart leapt. it sank a little after that initial elation though, because didn’t this change everything?
it became apparent after a while that someone was following him – had heard whispers about what was going on, and had decided to write a story on it for their magazine.
some of the purists – those early people in on the whole idea, did not like the idea that their unique means of communication had been hacked by an outsider; but in a flurry of heated arguments that stretched across the country, stretched across the months, many pointed out that this person in search of the poet had discovered him in as natural a way as any of them had.
many felt that this spelt the end though; that the system would be perverted for other uses; would be misunderstood and abused by those who did not see the value in it.
the chase for him continued amidst collapse, amidst a civil war of words. a slow unfolding detonation of anger. it was suggested that the hunter and the poet meet – that if the chase stopped, if it stopped being a story, then attention would turn away. he didn’t want to do it though – if he sacrificed his anonymity to save everyone else then he would have to stop doing it, wouldn’t he? if he gave himself up then he gave up his writing – he had never been able to do it in any other way; there hadn’t been the inspiration or the audience. if he didn’t give it up, then what then? he would be responsible for killing something beautiful. he left a time and a place between the pages of a particularly battered copy of the new testament at the Terminus Motel – a meeting for two weeks time, when he would be swinging back through. he had no doubts that the person would be there.
she was young, punky looking, a cross between courtney love and siouxsie sioux. he walked towards her, noticed he do the body check, sneer slightly, and turn away.
‘You’re waiting for me, I think.’
‘Nuh-huh.’
‘Between the pages?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The motel bible poet, i think that’s what they’re calling me, no?’
‘You’re not what I was expecting.’
‘You either. Do you understand what you’ve been doing to the network by chasing me? Do you get what you’ve done to me by calling me out?’
‘Not sure what you mean.’
‘You’ve killed something.’
‘Hmm, well, I saw a story – something my readers will want to read about. You know it might actually help you. I know there might be some publishers knocking on your door when the article comes out. Might want a bit of a makeover though – although what you look like now makes it perversely more interesting.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Look, I want you to be a part of this article. Since I handed the proposal in to my editor I have to write it, and I’d rather you had some input, instead of me just churning out any old crap that springs to mind, or that I get second hand off of whoever I find that’s willing to talk, and they’re out there, believe me.’
he decided she was right – get himself on the record; try and make amends for whatever part he had in the transformation of the scene. the article was friendly – she’d really done her research. he still checked the bibles when he stayed at certain places but he didn’t write anything for them anymore.
he reached up and pulled down the latest collection of Bukowski poems, held it by the spine and shook: a small piece of folded paper dropped at his feet. this scene was slightly different – people would leave instructions as to what the next book should be that you would deposit your reply in. the book was generally to be regarded as some kind of prompt as to what the reader might like to read. he read about a first love lost, a drink problem, and the book he was to leave his reply in was Klingsor’s Last Summer. he smiled – no one knew him here, he could write again.

capture

a light conversation of rain; it’s unwanted. he was sitting outside turning himself into a photograph – an idea developing slowly. he’d been struck by the angles of the docks the last time he had sat out there, how the change of perspective played with composition; worked a totally different effect.
he lit up; half a cigarette he’d been saving: savouring. had he been close to a choice to stop smoking again? maybe. it was stupid, he knew, but there was a certain romance to the whole act, and he’d been suckered in by those old black and white films, where the thin ribbons of grey appeared as unspooling thoughts from the head of some troubled PI or some French intellectual type.
the wind was picking up, making the waves choppy – he watched the horizon break up in the scattered light of distant storm and calm, and wondered distractedly whether he should get up and go inside. he wished he had his camera with him – his idea was changing.
she’d be back soon; he’d use her eyes – try and see what she saw. he often grew tired of the way that he looked at the world: so studied; so informed by aesthetic considerations, by various branches of philosophy; she was raw, untutored … and that sometimes translated to him as more real.
a fancy caught him up – that he was a kite; dragged out and over that body of water. he was benjamin franklin’s kite, or some replica of it, key and all, and as if his daydream drew it down, lightning struck the water about four feet in front of him.
how often did that happen? he wasn’t sure. a couple of fish leapt and flopped back under the slate mirror, birds evacuated the sky, the rain got heavier. well, he thought, much as i like this and what it does to my surroundings, i don’t want a cold – better go inside.
next time he would take his camera; he knew what he was looking for now … would know it when he saw it. would capture it.