Turn on...

Turn on your neurons. Consciousness explores. Trace your genes. Watch the droplets of blood on the cross turn into butterfly hearts. Give the devil his due – a shape in lucid red. Brush stroke the ancient Gods. A religion without a cause.

Tune in to the rebellion. Expression in distorted riffs. Talk to the acoustic strings. A song for the bicycle days. Divinity is near. Change at hand. White rabbits to shamans. Acid tears behind those shades.

Drop out into the azure. Alone in the sky, learning to fly.  Rebuild Babel brick by brick. You did succeed. Look at the world. It is painted blue. Semisynthetic children of flowers and stars. Eve displaced, Lucy high above.

Salesmen's death

It was on the tracks of the bourgeois that our fantasies began. The dead took their last breath from them – the fragrance of humility, while the living slipped into their half heard stories. Rumours that would re-invent themselves along deserts and seas, changing with every whisper until a lie over a drink had turned into some poetic epic. Maybe it was the desert that changed their minds.

Living in mirages the merchants walked under the sun with Siddhartha and silk, Ming and Jade, Nefertiti and incense, Ahriman and lapis lazuli and so many others. Most names are lost for now and a few have changed.

Those masted ships were the bones of the seas, they chartered through storms, found the winds, dreamt up the stars and named the depths. It was in these depths that they saw the fears of humanity reflected, they called it the Kraken. Homer’s sirens had long ceased to sing and frighten, the world needed a brute beast and it got few. Perhaps Phorcys had resurrected Syclla and given her new forms.

Then things changed - the lines stopped walking in single files, the ships stopped circling in search - the machine was breaking down. No more illusions were to be churned out. New machines replaced the old ones, panzers replaced lines, bombs replaced circles, and ideology replaced illusions.

It is all just a story, beginning from Siddhartha to Karl, Sirens to Nemo. It all depends how you listen to it. It is still on.

Electronic dreams

I have stayed awake through nights till morning, night after night. But it's been a long time since I saw the sunrise or the stars. I have seen my brains splattered on the walls by a shotgun.

I have been awake in those shadows in a shiver without a spine. I have stalked people along alleys and halls, and repaid them in gory deaths. My heart skips beats in atrophy hoping for a call.

No one has come and no one gone. No conversations, no lies, just a consistent mad bee buzzing in my head, editing all my thoughts. I have spoken to the Gods and incurred their wrath.

The mind wanders and I accompany without any direction at hand. Trapped in a dying world, caged in clockwork orange, dysfunctional batteries run out, life becomes last week. Vainly I try to strangle Lady Macbeth as she whispers in my head.

Two stories

The moors cannot be defined geographically they slip into the crevices and cracks of our souls, which we try to plaster with red bricks of a Dickensian nightmare. An androgynous cult to an unknown god painted over with shadows of civility to restrain the ghosts.

It could be a romantic rebellion or deep slumber, where passion reverberates in depths rumbling across the Styx. Or could be left over Victorian calmness of the deep seas, across which there is still the unknown to be conquered. What dreams may come in this sleep or what the unconquered is only the dreamer knows.

For now lost in dazzling light there is nothing hidden nor there is sleep in this city. This grey portrait though unchanging has its flaws, because it is a picture painted by change that once was young.

A Ghazal

One spoke of her as unrequited love, another called it illicit, still others gave her many names but the sobriquet ‘unfaithful’ remained. Always a mistress never so faithful, she will love you and leave you, kiss you and kill you.

Her husbands are constantly jealous for treacherous as she is, she slips into beds as through nights they tossing in memories remain. Her lovers afraid, for they know they will lose her in a frivolous blink to a stranger and to you.

She never grows old pampered by kings, queens, jesters, knights, lords she as an enigma will in stilness remain. In robes, frills, laces, purdah she seduces anyone who would but look, though vainly we think that naked she walks up to me and you.

This city is old, she is new, she is joy, she is sorrow, and she is many that men carry in their hearts with longing and pain. Her coquettish charm will pander to all your dreams though she will always say goodbye in between.

This city is a Ghazal long and true. A song that eats your heart to become it.

Yellow Noise

The Titan stubbed the blue amphetamine cigarette at the edge of the town, as if to mark the progress of his army of androids and ghouls. Maybe he would let this colony of humans live but first he needed to know if they are worth to be shown mercy.

Strolling disguised among its inhabitants as they crowded the streets on the carnival of the waning moon he judged the lost souls. He had nearly made up his mind about complete annihilation when he caught a glimpse of the dark girl. Their eyes locked a gaze then disengaged.

His metallic heart seemed to have changed under her ultraviolet stare, it must have been love. But devoid of emotions his synapses failed to release it into his soul, he knew that. Justice didn’t interest him anymore; he dismantled his army and underwent a complete psychosis to erase all memories of the past. Not to forget her, but so that he could earn humanity in order to love her.

                                              ***          ***

The dismantled army after years of futile roaming finally found an heir to their lost throne. A dark ruthless cannibal of a goddess, a mistress of time who let lose an orgy of bloodshed and destruction unprecedented even for this aged band of killers.

She stood at the edge of the same town years later with the same army behind. Her view was devoid of any justice, the moon was absent and the streets empty. Except for a man on the street, who although had passed out seemed to pose some sort of defiance. Another symbol of intoxicated humanity proclaiming their innocence through ignorance, she thought. She despised such pathetic display of weakness, so rushing forth she decided to chop his head off.

Their eyes engaged locked in a gaze. She calmed down; he was the lost titan and she the dark girl, who in order to find him had undergone a genetic transformation. In her search she had become the search itself as if the cosmos wanted to fill a void.

She bent down to kiss and revive him to his former being. Her tongue touched his. 

Tall Tales

Standing behind the lines of the Marque he thought this was it, this is how it ends. The hallway was crowed with leapers, wallflowers infected with ideologies trying to get to you, but they weren’t that bad compared to the Angels and Boilers. He hated those waves of Boilers on whom now he unleashed his spear of destiny near the toilets, he bashed their heads into pulp with complete satisfaction.

The show had just begun, some movie from SS-TV channel showing mass conversions through cannibalism. One could hear those witches giggling with Odin in the Opera boxes. He couldn’t care less, he was busy hammering his point home, and the thick heads never seemed to get it right. Interruption he thought would most likely come from Heydrich’s dreaded Steelheads, so he was surprised when he heard “Down the Volga” blaring from the speakers. Damn those Clovens in the projection room and their plans to burn Paris down.

He had just enough time to scribble a last few words on the wall with the blood of a Slipskull hunter before the whole thing went up in flames. His etched encryption read “Kilroy was here”.

Hollow

…a man stood between a graveyard and a few mourners, without any memory. He tried to search the lamenting faces but they didn’t give any sign of recognition nor of estrangement. Unable to reconcile reality from illusion he looked beyond them to the town past the cemetery gates. Over the irregular roads a few houses were lit, and a few stood dark. One of these lit houses with its strange ambivalent glow and shadowing darkness attracted him.

With steps of reluctance and anticipation he made his way towards it; fearful of what he might find and hopeful of that he might find. Coming up to the door he knocked once then twice, no one answered so he let himself in. A crowd had gathered in the house, scattered here and there he spotted a doctor by the window and the priest by the hearth. He examined the other faces, they were either too busy to acknowledge him or in their wait had decided to ignore him. It was then an awareness that he may be standing between the living and the dead dawned upon on him; frenzied he searched the objects in the room for some sort of attachment, indicative of the life he may have lived, but there was none.

Two people stood deep in grieve beside a bed in a far corner, it seemed his last hope lay there, to which he made his way. On the bed lay a sick woman, who he thought might be the answer, fantasying himself to be her lover in this life or the past he touched her forehead. She opened her eyes to look at his and there was recognition in them both. A noise died in her mouth, it could have been a cry or a broken smile, then she passed out.

He had finally found the answer to his amnesia, both a curse and a blessing. A curse that robbed him of any identity and a blessing that kept away guilt, for he was Death. Death walked out to the street fading into the night with its thirty seconds memory.

…a woman stood between a street and a few mourners, without any memory.

Fear

The curtains are drawn just a bit through which the night peeps in. Darkness seems to be objectifying me. The night is long and throws me into spells of boredom yet I don’t want it to end; somehow it has seduced me, sucked me into it through the window. A thirsty night, undying, unyielding lying still until the wind ruffles its cloak. Growling, unsettling, it prowls outside scratching the windowpane with drops it had stolen from some distant dying drizzle. Falling drops swept of the skies by some dusty black broomstick on which rides a storm. 

Cries from the sky try to shock me to the news of some unexplained death in the room, but I lie alone. Then the drops come creeping on the rooftop to take the unborn being’s dead soul. Seeping through the ceiling the crawlers add yet more elusive shapes to the stained walls. They posses the house in a cocoon of strange noise, speaking in an ancient language they seem to exorcise themselves of memories. And they wait. Hours later the playful madness of the children of men disturbs and frightens the darkness with their lost innocence chasing the night away.

The excuse

Sitting at that café alone one could do terrible things, commit a crime with precision, perhaps, like holding Claesina captive in some failed attempt at a dream. A failure so vague in itself, that it leaves melancholic imprints of redemption. Or one could go mad around one o’ clock and decide to kill oneself with that switchblade or better still a shotgun.

Sometimes it is better to run off to far away places like India. The only problem with it is Margot taking poison - at another elusive endeavour  for some sort of stability. Or one could meet Daisy, another strange home to run away from, into the familiar olives and cypresses. So there is no place to go actually, with all the birds crowding everywhere chirping at your thoughts, like wave after wave picking on the pebbles.

Thus one is bound to destroy oneself and finish what began with Eugenie at Clarissa’s doorsteps. That way they will always pass through with perfect elegance in our reminiscence like Sally does. As for the future it is supposed to be l’avenir, so can’t picture that. For now lost among the undergrowth we just pass by.