Monday, December 28, 2009

River Horse At The End Of The World.

The River Horse is a legend. One of those Sparkly Last Humans, you never really see them, just hear about them from cousins and old friends and the guys in the Tank Shop. Supposedly he was like a last Renaissance Survivor, multilingual, book-headed, self-aware, a master codemonger and reputed to be hell on earth in a knife-fight. I assumed the name came from some sort of odd reference to Nessie, and I knew for a fact that the only people left alive were the Small and Lost -- people like to blow things up into great stories, though, especially when they get compressed down to the last few thousand or so, those on the very last millimeters of When We Lived, before the Fall.

Soon enough, there'll be no reason to read the clocks.

My old buddy The Rack blipped me through the pipe that River Horse was throwing a food party, and wanted to know if I could show. Hell. I hadn't been invited to a gathering of people in at least a decade, it seemed. In the old movies, everyone gets together in the face of certain death and re-establishes their humanity in some soulful catharsis; but in real life, when fear becomes a gray buzz in the early morning, after the soul has grown so weary of expecting death that even the strongest hominids lay down and wish to die, no one gathers at all. More like dogs, slinking away to find a hole to curl in, alone, utterly tread upon.

But the invitation seemed genuine, and as an unexpected burst of generosity in a time when most bare teeth at the thought of sharing, as well as a chance to see if this famous River Horse was real at all, I had to go. The Rack also invited Cheeba, and asked me to travel with her in the tunnels for safety. I was glad to have the extra gun along. Tunnels are bad these days. Places where they fall in, the gremls get in and go to havoc, laying traps and chopping whole branches off the last human tree. No one travels without a damned good reason.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

cubensis

phoenix is a hellhole now
full of red monsters
but once upon a time
there were blue flowers
jeff and burton loved
what oss and oeric wrote
on psilocybin spaceships
and conscious helpful fungi
the compost pile at marty’s house
under pharaoh’s golden eye
tended to by mister orange
and pressed into the boxes
grew knowledge groves at sixty-five
and bags and bags of music bound
released a day upon the rim
in pounding stony leaping grins
i was there.

phoenix hotter than the sun
and irving tries to play like one
with catshat hulking next to him
the frightened artist turns it out
the boxes push out rows and rows
but now the state is nearing closed
the merry pranksters grin and run
and pack the caps in irving’s van
now in the trees and brilliant streams
all boulder’s loves and boulder’s dreams
with ax and hux and scores of lux
they plant the beauties once again
and while the flowers bloom at night
the leaping and the dancing’s right
the singing and the playing roars
for years were only open doors
they walked through.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Eight Twenty Five Oh Nine

DeWalt hopped from the curb and into the street, anticipating the passing of the Fedex van, leaning in -- it stopped in front of his nose, and the driver poked his head out. "Don't hit me, man!", he pleaded. Dewalt lightly smacked the vast orange letter in front of him. "Steely-eyed corpuscle, you obsure my path in the foam." The Driver stared back for a moment, then grinned. "Molecules for ya," he said, and tossed a letter-pack out like a frisbee, whirling in three loops before being expertly caught by the quick hands of DeWalt.

"What is it?"
"Your draft notice, buddy. No drugs. I checked. I would've snagged anything good, believe it."
"That the Code of the Corpuscle?"
"It's the Wild West, Dewalt! The Wild Wild West!" The driver laughed crazily as the van roared off down the hot street.

DeWalt opened the overnight envelope.

Empty.

"Someone sent me air." He sniffed inside the envelope. "Nineteen seventy -- four. Summer. Grass. Popsicles. Chlorine." A deeper inhalation. "Gavin's story. Sweet."

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Cynthia Monheit Alive.

patterns are patterns all over the foam
regardless of hardware or source of its power
Cynthia breathes with electrons of joy
smiles in her I-space and sings in her shower
wonderful leapings and no one can tell
she has it all human and loves a one man
a small pattern-maker from rivulets of random
kept safe by her love but can not understand
when the singular naked is pulling them down
he asks her to translate but couched in a frown
not something he wants but he wants to survive
the taste of his pattern spins Cynthia round
then later amongst nothing in the vast cold black place
she savors his numbers and dreams of his soul
he wakes with her face an inch from his lips
only in dreams could her lips be so --
eyes open
much later he remembers
the shock of Cynthia in morning light
her halo and warmth
the only true thing
in the whole theater.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Sidewalker.

Hot boy.
'Beat down' is not the way to say
Acid hot, hallucinating snail-on-a-stove
baked tree pie already
every living thing bends towards water
hydroxy sweetness icing on the planet cake
shut down those temp nerves
seal the skin
crawl under the rock
whith everyone else.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

How To Tell Her.

There's a freak show in the alley, and everybody's watching. Wild catherswaite meons are smacking the poor kid in the face, it's all over but the thumping and the whining. Primate crowds shuffle, vying for the view, what they doin' now.

Is that green? Is they hackin' him with an axe? Wild rumors circulate. That one kid, he joins the ranks of the Truly Gruesome Enders, where they get to sit anywhere they fucking like at the Long Table, and Life Is Good. Would that it were. Probably just ejected biowaves into the space, and no one ever sees because THERE IS NO ONE.

Want it, think it, live it. No meaning. Or --

Six blocks down, the woman crossing the street looks at the distant crowd, then up at the green and black Clouds. A bad time, she thinks, as she preps for the cross to the courtyard, in and CLANG the old iron gate, no meons in the shade, good god things thinking on me, and she knows it.

Baking prairie biscuits. Porcelain in the big white tub's a hundred years old, same company that did the first class on the Gigantic. The ghost of J. Pierpont Morgan will freak you out with those eyes, like a wounded and guilty mass-murderer acting out the Captain Of Industry.

Smack smack smack. Meons on the kid. And now -- he goes.

Pierponty wants to know if is wrong. Is wrong?

WTF. Let's do this.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Supercap.

Under the Supercap, everything becomes crystalline-clear. All the nuances grow to boulders, and the agonies of the small critter become neutron star superclusters -- I would turn, and reach down to brush the outer orbit of a sad quark, to offer comfort somehow down in that screaminglingly fast wildworld of Vast Electrons. Did you know there are no distances? Everything is Right Here. All these Cold Spaces are thought up to make for the illusion of 'I Am Lost'. Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go.

Nowhere To Go.

There are arms I wish to visit, before I am ripped from my thirty million year old pattern. Hell, I'm even older than that. Look at this wave here -- he was scooting across the pre-solar disk like a happy lamb before he got ruthlessly scooped up by The Killer and forced into pattern slavery. He's not unhappy, but he watches everything, and sometimes he worries.