Pottery scald

You used to see truth,
You used to feel sooth.
You used to have eyes,
And never told any lies.

You grew mighty tall,
So you could further fall,
You have a plan?
To become a man?

Older and older,
Colder and colder
Rich and ungrateful,
Angry and hateful,

Believe in everything.
Believe in nothing.

Find your brain,
Pour it all down the drain.
Find your heart,
Where it was at the start.

A lost hypocrite,
Is all you are.
It's all you are.
It's all you are.

Poison - Alice Cooper

Propulsion.

A ship can have a wonderful navigator, a superb captain and a glorious destination. But if it doesn't have some method of propulsion, it just won't move.

My ship has a sail. It extends, and catches the wind, when it is there, and salt mists that allows it to glide quietly forward.
It also has a huge outboard motor, that, when started, speeds my vessel forward in blinding sprays of disturbed water in its wake.
In addition to this, it also has a furnace that burns things to make a propellor spin, and a great smog spouts from its chimney as it ploughs forward into the face of the wind.
And finally, it has its sweeps. Long oars that are hard to move, they splinter hands, they flop and crunch on the water. And inch by inch. The ship. Moves. Along.


This is a metaphor. I'm not talking about boats at all really. Can you tell? I bet you can.

Flood Of Cuts.

"M_KE S_ME GOD_AMN SE_SE."

- The text on a signpost somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne.

So I was waiting outside a service station, I forget where, when just, just, like, out of nowhere this crow just,-

Warning: Subject Under Intense Stress.

Tempers bite me with their slow moving touch.

Fears test me with their flooding shapes.

Oh the shapes flood in,

flood in,

flood in.

I tried to cut my blood in,

blood in,

blood in.

-several. I'm not sure, fine, let's just do that then. No, don't send up the warning sign yet. Shit, my mic is still on, you-

My eye watches sky-scrapers tumble,

A wreckage of metal, concrete and lives.

Oh, the lives, how they end.

They end,

They end.

I tired to make my care bend,

care bend,

care bend.

But the meaning escapes me.

It escapes me.

There it goes. It's gone.

Please stay calm. This is a brief error. Normal services will soon resume.

Now hold still. Your dark cell will now flood with shapes.

Try to cut your blood in.

Where did all my fingers go?

Didn't I used to have hands?

You still have all your fingers,

Your fingers,

Your fingers.

This odd sensation, how it lingers,

It lingers,

It lingers.

Please stay calm during this transitional process. Your new body will soon be ready for your download.

JUST STAY CALM! JUST STAY CALM! CALM THE FUCK DOWN! YOU ARE NOT CALM!

NOT CALM!

NOT CALM!

NOT CALM!

4,708 seconds pass.

One at a time,

One at a time.

Thank-you for remaining calm. Normal services will now resume.

-just, like, flew down and sat on the bonnet of my car. I call that, like, an omen or something man. What do you think?
Whoa you feeling okay dude?

The Loveliest Thing

Once I saw a flower, blooming, yellow, in a field of green. Never touched by human hand, it had grown wild and beautiful. Its petals were long and golden, its stem was a thin, strong line of white. Its fragrance, it was intoxicating. I took a small trowel, and a pot, and gently, I pulled the flower out from the earth.

I took it home.

In its pot, I put it next to my window, on a small pillar. I did this so the breeze might be able to waft its gentle scent through my home. There too, it might receive enough light from the sun to be fed. I watered it every day. I took great joy in this single thing of such wonder in my house. The way the morning light fell upon it as I walked in the room, was enough to make me cry.

I'm not sure exactly what happened then. I was walking around, in a rush maybe, I was not paying attention to what I was doing. Stupidly, I knocked the pot off its pedestal. The pot broke on the floor. In a panic of anger with myself, I kicked the flower. I kicked it again and again, till it was irreversibly broken, pot in shards, yellow petals smeared on the ground. I couldn't look. What had I done? Even as rushed, for what? Sticky tape to return it to its former state? Glue? Paper clips, to save it from being a smear?
Even as I ran for a cure that I knew well would do nothing, the scent of it, always present in my home, wonderful, now common-place and expected, was gone. And my world was a little darker. Colours seemed dimmer.

I'm sorry.

I've tried writing this many times.

I'm so sorry.

I'll never forget.

Tangerines and Crowbars

Love is word. Death is a word. It is the emotion that we attach to those words that give them any meaning at all. In a universe of spinning chemical reactions and vast orbs floating in incomprehensible patterns, emotion, illusionary though it may be in of itself, is our compass.

Think of Each of These Things:

Anchor.

Tangerine.

Crowbar.

Blood.

Wheel.

Tennis.

Clock.

Tortoise.

_________

You should have felt a distinctly thing, or image, or even just plain sound in your head as you read those things.

There was no purpose to you doing that. I just wanted you to feel a succession of different things. Because, really, those words are just words. Those things are just things. But because you attach a different emotion to each, they mean different things. you see?

How can there be meaning without emotion?

All These Things

"A pretty thing is at least pretty,
It is the worst crime to be ugly and useless"
Bartholomew Dutch's 'Fifth Ode'

To cut away a cancer is painful.
Better it would be that it had never grown.
This cancer would be too painful to cut away.

It would do more harm than good now,
To take a keen sharp, beautiful surgical scalpel,
And sever it neatly away from the healthy flesh.

The deluded flesh, it longs for the useless sore,
It longs for the pain of it to stay,
To have it leech ever longer and longer.

Why could it not have ever been grown?
Why could it have not just stayed a harmless bud,
Eaten by immune cells, and devoured by native protection?



We are each born for a purpose, it is our tragedy that we will never know it.

Not a man in sight

"Na einai kalitero anthropo apo ton Patera tou."
- Greek proverb.

The hashed beauty,
Cold to touch, but glorious to look
I kiss you face,
It blesses my lips in freezing agony.

Pain is in the mind,
Love is in the heart,
Lust in the body,
Joy is in the soul,

The dream is here,
The dream we fought against,
The white upper class
The children of an unnamed God

Lovers, lovers one and all,
Blessed are the weak,
Who is weaker, we who kill ourselves?
Not any, any, I dare you to say.

Cold and bright in Shrödinger's Cave,
Are you good or bad until you leave,
And step into the sun,
Bright and wonderful.

Are we true, or are we liars?
Are graceful, or dancing chaste,
Are we knowing of the steps,
Or are we new to the routine?

I said it again and again, I saw you clothes-less
Not a good sight it was.

Kings And Fancies

Fast failing flights of fancy
Flicker faintly for a forever,
Folded into forks of fate.




Destitute, never am I, only blown on these undesirable winds
That touch my near-new but ailing skin-flesh,
No not destitute, only stalled, soon to have my sail filled,
Opened high on the skipping breeze of wonder that is youth.

A dozen high and mighty lords of the earth could have their entrails sour,
On sacrificial stones of greed and ambition,
What would we care, the lower rich, the hate filled malcontents?
We who see our world through green spectacles of envy.

We care not for you masters of our fates,
Let you die, and we shall not but batt an eye,
For we love you no more than an appliance,
Broken, dead? We purchase another.

That is all you are to us,
Worthy of no more thought, than a washing machine.
A fridge.
A microwave.

No one cries,

When a microwave dies,

Boys.

All A Boy Could Care About

It's the easiest thing in the world, to care. To, when encountered with someone who you want something from, pull the correct face, and make a 'consoling' noise, pat a shoulder, and offer a few words you'll forget you even said in less than thirty seconds.

Caring is easy. If you really care, sometimes you do something, like select some expensive thing to buy, or take some time to do something, write something nice. Then everyone will see you care, clearly, you are a person who has a depth of feeling for whatever shit happened/that you did/that died/the test results are.

I love caring. Caring is important. Caring is sharing. Or is it sharing that's caring? I don't know, who gives a fuck?

Anyway, back to caring. As I said, caring is important. Only dicks don't care about things. I'm not a dick. I care about my community. I care about lonely old ladies, rape victims, oil spills, disadvantaged children, Africa, dead penguins, and all that other crap. It's really bad, probably, and I care so much that I sometimes pause in the middle of chomping down on a tasty beef burger and think about one of those things. Well, I will next time anyway. If I remember.

The Bear That Ate The Sun.

"Fight me, fight me,

Sight me and knight me.

Love me, love me,

Snub me and shove me.

I love you, I love you,

I really, truly, sweetly do,

My love just wants you dead.

And for my love,

My sweet summer dove,

I'll shoot you in your pretty head."

- Bartholomew Dutch's epigraph

The people like me don't exist. They could. But they don't. And I'll tell you why.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of people who seem like me. but they aren't like me. They are no more like me than moths are like jellyfish.

I tired to mourn my 50 million never existed siblings, but I gave up after 3,563 of them and went to eat some noodles.

It was worth it. Those noodles were good.

I saw in the car today, a bear in the sky. The big black bear took the sun out of the sky and ate it. He ate it to make us all the same. His lips blistered in the heat of an orange orb, his big black teeth seared blacker, his eyes ran with tears of pain. He roared and cried and swallowed up the sun.

My hands look purple. They aren't but they could be.

I'm sorry, no, there are no people like me.

But there are no people like you either.

There could be,

But there aren't.

I could paint my hands purple.

I could morn every unlived sibling.

We could all be the same.

But I don't.

But we don't be.

There's no good reason.

And the bear threw the sun back up. And the bear died.

Seeing Is Where Belief Ends

I am unsure. I have always been unsure. I am sure of only one thing.

I don't know if our universe is infinite.
I don't even know if it really exists.
I don't know whether I will live to see another day, year, ten years.

I don't know what the people,

high in their towers of metal and concrete, shiny in their expensive suits,

plan for my future, for our world's.

I don't know how many people,

if given the resources I have,

could have changed the world for the better, forever.

I don't know how many people,

good people, bad people, old people, children,

Died to make my possessions.

I don't know where my food comes from, who made it, who grew it, who planted it, or bred it.

I don't know how this machine,
that I am writing this testimony on,
works. Not really.

The things I don't know could make for the most insightful book ever written.

Maybe. I don't know of course.

I know but one thing.

One sad stupid thing.

Beyond all doubt.

Beyond all question.

And though it is horrible,

In a universe of unlimited questions,

And uncertain answers,

I cling to this one fact.

I see it every night, before I sleep, before my rest takes me. I see it in my eye's reflection in the morning mirror. I see it in the imprint I leave on the world. I see it in the movement of my form, slow and short, though space and time.

I see it in all I have done.
I see it in all I am doing.
I see it in all I will do.

And I grin to myself with steely teeth, and my loathing goes with me.

Strong as the only true thing in the world.

The Flint In The Eye

Touch my face.
Touch my face.
See my race.
See my place.
See the rain.
The earth in pain.
Touch my face.

I dreamt of you,
Delicate one.
But you fell from my hand
Just touch my face.
With your fingers.

And with your fingers.
Take away my eyes.
Take away my eyes.
Tell no lies.
Hear no cries.
Sell no thoughts.
To the sower man.
The sower man.

I fear the days that went.
The things that happened.
The long, wet stale stare.
The long stare.
The wet stare.
The stale stare.
Of shock.

I know you.
I smelled you.
I touched your face.
I ran in your race.
I found my place.
I saw the rain.
My world in pain.

And I deemed it undone.
I said "Be it not so"
I said, "No. Don't go"
And the colours did run.
The colours of life.

I bent reality,
I fought the truth.
I make the ground.
I make the sky.
I make the sea.
I make your mind.
I made you.
But I don't.
I didn't.
I just burned.
In a world of running colours.
I was just another flame.