work in progress, update 3

Ganymede and Thed slither along the balustrade, trading orange pork specimens gathered from the heart of the purple quasar in the room with the long windows.
Balancing pink Spanish slug lips laterally, avoiding laser moonbeam locators, elegantly. They speak in low whispers. Tongues caressing ear-shapes and chests erupting red flowers and snakes light bites on soft shoulders. Battle scar beauty mark – long ragged road across the eye, pale and hypnotic in soft shadows - Thed of swords and rape, inside out goddess of meat and viscera, teeth clacking like silver tree branches in core of winter peers into Ganymede’s amethyst eyes. “What vulture must the great pig pass on his flight to your moon?” Keening, drops razor, axe, and flail, machete and poniard from her black horse mouth, absence of infinity.
“Abasi’s vulture. The Inchoate One – the nest of your desiccated womb, automatic, beyond repair – the lyre in the maelstrom. The messenger circles.” Rending rotten meat with perfect teeth, Ganymede wiggles his little finger and sighs.
Thed sets her mouth into a grim straight line as her florid cheeks erupt small brown moths splashed with oxblood red patterns. The moths curve up toward the high ceiling near the holes where the moonlight invades, flutter in a chaotic arc and fly back into her skin. “The Architect,” she coughs, and then, “the Architect and his whores. The whores with their flaming red hair that whirl about like tempests with lightning eyes, them and their black sword bearers who ride the tall azure stallions with armored steel plates on their necks like centipede bodies, they will ensnare the messenger with their magic totems and five-fire-nets.” She coughs again; a great ragged hacking, moist and smelling of musk and ancient cellars. And with her eyes heavily lidded, she says, “Go, pretty Ganymede. Go to the elephantine mountain peak of Mother Lotus. Seduce her, exploit her spectral corona and take the five-sided-shield to the Architect.”

Ganymede stood naked in the center circle, his elegant hands upon his milk-white thighs, and stared up at the hole where the moths have fled. When the last dun-winged insect was lost from sight he opened a small hidden cell under his skin with his fingernail and dug out a single silver capsule.
“To Korros,” he murmured and put it in his mouth. “Abasi befouled.” As the silver capsule dissolved on Ganymede’s pink tongue ophidian arms writhed upon the sills along the jackal pen where carcasses were shoveled after revelries. His pinprick pupils became fathomless black windows framed in blue-white shot through with scarlet swords. His blonde lashes fluttered as he fell through the obsidian bricks of his cylindrical keep, fingers curled and crow sounds scraped from his throat.
Traversing secret byways he came to the arête before which, the verdant Plains of Korros opened up and extended like a wedge to the distant rusted stones of decaying Tharsis. Ganymede’s toes found the sharp edge of the ridge and gripped it like talons. Ten thousand black stallions grazed below milling beneath the sour-eyed glower of the hulking megalith of Korros. Vermillion and magenta clouds churned on the horizon. Indigo folded through violet and was lost to lavender haze.
“I have seen mountains,” he mumbled. “Cairns of bone and foul flesh stacked to Abasi.” He cracked his knuckles and glanced back at the megalith. Viridian moss clung to its leeward side and silver ivory reached its curling tendrils into its prodigious cracks. The amorphous head’s hundred eye sockets filled with indanthrene shadow stared down at the stallions at its crumbling feet.
“Korros.” Ganymede rolled the R’s, allowing them to fill his mouth and purr between his lips before letting the last syllable slide out with a sibilant sigh. “Korros.”
The megalith moved. The hundred empty eyes stared up at him. A light wind pushed at Ganymede’s long blonde hair. He searched the sky for eagles or condors and saw nothing but the distant cirrocumulus above. The great churning was far in the distance yet. He stared at the Korros megalith and it spoke into his mind.
“I, Menhir, King of Dolmens see you, pretty boy. What do you want? What do you want? You must say it before the dust comes and rasps your pretty flesh away. Say it before I send my stallions to shatter your young bones with estrapades.”
“Korros, dear stone, your horses hold no sway over me.” He balled his fist to his chest and made a shallow bow. “Don’t you know I am a Taraxippus?”
The megalith stared a silent millennia. “What then do you want?”
“Simple protection of passage. Unmolested free range from point A to point B, there,” He pointed, “Out in the churning. And further, yet.”
“Then go, pretty boy.” The long grasses parted and there was a pathway that started at the foot of the arête and extended until distance obscured its narrow winding. “Follow only the path. A simple step beyond it violates the law and you will be consumed, Taraxippus or no.”
Ganymede leapt from the scarp and began along Korros’ highway.

There was a loud bang and a wet sound followed by laughing. Before long the grasses on the left side of the highway began to recede until he saw two figures on the ground. They were shadowed by tall sheaves of yellowed grass bound in brown rope. One hopped up and stuck out its hand to the other. It was agitated. The one on the ground raised his head. It was covered in blood.
“Give it to me. Give it to me.” The standing one danced from foot to foot.
“Hold on.” Mumbled the bloodied one.
“Now. Now!” It reached down and picked up something small and made of metal from the ground and looked around. “Where are they? Where are they?”
“They’re inside. Inside, Effrim.” He gestured weakly toward the metal object in Effrim’s hand.
“Ah! Ah!” Effrim put it to the side of his head. There was a bang. Red and gray erupted like a geyser from the other side and Effrim collapsed to the ground shaking.
“What do you see?” The other one got to his knees and began shaking Effrim. “What do you see?”
“I see. I see,” Effrim sputtered, “Silver, no, white spires… ah! A mountain with blue flowers. Blue. A golden haired man.”
“A golden haired man? Who is he?”
“Ask him for yourself, Gowl. He stands behind you.”
Gowl turned and saw Ganymede. Small black eyes widened in a misshapen head. Little drops of blood fell from flaps of raw scalp meat onto its narrow shoulders. “Who. Are. You?” It pointed with a filthy finger.
Ganymede turned his head to the side. There was a bang and another fount of blood.
Gowl turned toward Effrim in a rage and beat his shaking prone body with his fists. “Don’t hog the bullets! Don’t hog the bullets! It was my turn. I get two turns now.” He picked up the gun.
“Lotus flowers. Lotus flowers on a mountain. Too high for lotus flowers.”
“Bullets?” Ganymede said. “Where did you get bullets?” His fingers curled like withered blossoms and touched the empty chamber at his thigh. “I heard they were extinct.”
“Not extinct. Not extinct at all,” Gowl said as he raised the gun to his head. “Raaaaaare.” He pulled the trigger. His blood splashed on Effrim’s already bloodied face.
Effrim sat up.
“What are you doing?”
“See visions. See visions, colors, words, future, past, time,” Effrim nodded vigorously.
Gowl sat up. “I saw you in the wastelands of Tharsis. What do you want to do there?”
“What did you see me doing?”
Gowl laughed. “Come here. Come to Gowl and Effrim and we will show you. You will see.”
“You think he’ll come? You think he’ll do it?” Effrim hopped up and down.” C’mon, c’mon, golden boy, come! We have thirteee-ates. Better than nine emm emm.”
“I can’t leave the road.”
“We can’t leave the shade of the sheaves.”
“Then where did you find the bullets?”
“A Cestor case.”
“Cestor case?”
“Buried.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Throw it to me.”
“No. You must come to us.” Effrim beckoned. “Come golden boy.”
Ganymede shifted from foot to foot and scratched the back of his neck. “No.” He pointed. “You. Do it again, but answer this, if you can: When the hollows collapse between the granite spires and the spectral corona expands, where to prod for the pentashield?”
Effrim bashed Gowl in the head and Gowl stuck his claws in Effrims belly. They grunted and mewled, rolling around on the ground.
“I will do it!”
“No, me! He said me.”
“He said no such thing.”
“I get one more turn, remember.”
“No, I do.”
“Liar!”
Ganymede held his hands out, palms up. “Oracles. Can’t you do it together? Are the visions not stronger that way?”
They ceased their struggles and stared at him. “How?”
Ganymede pressed his palms together. “Put you heads together. Side to side. The bullet will go all the way through.”
“Ah! Ah!” Effrim jumped up and pointed at Gowl. “We could’ve saved so many bullets that way.”
Gowl shook his head. “It’s you who should’ve thought of it.” He stood up and looked around. “Where is it?”
“Here. I found it.” Effrim inspected the gun with one wide bloodshot eye. “Put your ugly head next to mine, Gowl.”
Gowl sidled up next to him and had to crouch a little as Effrim was shorter. “Put your shoulder behind mine. There. Ready.”
“Ready?”
“I said so.”
There was a bang and Gowl’s head exploded. Effrim fell back and shook, spouting nonsense. Gowl simply slumped to the ground, headless, an arterial fount spurting high.
Ganymede, palms still pressed together, cocked his head to the side.
Effrim sat up slowly, shaking his head. His eyes were unfocused.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. Eternal blackness. Nothing. What mission are you on Golden Boy? What do you do?” His eyes narrowed and regained their focus. He glanced down at headless Gowl. “What happened to Gowl?” He whimpered.
“His head exploded.” Ganymede let his arms fall slack to his thighs and stood up on his toes.
Effrim crawled to Gowl and cradled him in his arms with a keening wail.
Ganymede shrugged and drifted down the highway.

Battle Haiku (epic nonsense)

Brass blares brazenly
Singing psalms of the sonless
Deceased descendents

I call unto you
From darkness, amidst ruin
To your starless death

Arise titan horde
Delirious berserker
Cracks open the sun

kamikaze hash
obliterating gnasher
rain falls on blood tears

ancient deiclast
hacking limb from ragged limb
roars into the night

wearing human skulls
of the slaughtered fortunate
to become jewels

knife that cuts through time
wielded against infant throats
all hail the victor!

the axe torn apart
upon the atomic sword
rests upon the stones.

arterial spurt
your god is but a pale light;
dying firefly

I see your body
strung out amongst the cosmos
debased, diminished

brains scrambled like eggs
fall in chunks at your blue feet.
death is a blessing.

Whence the dawn shatters
There lies the river of blood;
Shimmering torrent.

Open up your chest,
I intend to eat your heart
Full of black bile

Sun implodes under
The great annihilator
Black hole remnants glow

You, who are starving,
When you see your ravaged land,
Know that it was I.

Ignominious,
Thine own hand turned against you
Slated for slaughter

As Jupiter sighs
Mars takes up his flaming sword
Your swain is befouled

Death arrives with spring
Doom laden cherry blossom
On your pallid face

I see your troops have
Entirely lost their minds
The cannibal plague

Sunsets over oaks
Bare branches bent arthritic
You hang by the neck

Mourn, desolate brain
As a smoke clotted wind howls;
Interstitial death

Call forth demon swine
To devour your children
Stacked like cords of wood

The belly cancer
Grief, sorrow, vermin and plague
I bequeath to thee

Along the edges
Of your precious sanity
There I lurk, pushing

Tiny white teeth rend
Splendid arcs of viscera
Like a wood chipper

See the heaving sun
An insect in its death throes
An eye growing dim

Solar analogues
Collapsing suicidal
Consume each other

Shades of fallen leaves
Magical hues of bruises
The dusk of your face

The universe ends
Collapsing bubble of time
Pinpoint of zero

We have been waiting
Watching the dying embers
Like distraught mothers

While a red cloud forms
Over the blackened city
Once, we called it home

Now looking for stars
Through the holes in the ceiling
But they’re lost like us

Hammer strikes the Earth
Dust obscures the gegenschein
As the world is split

Cold season arrives
A clotted cloak of black mist
Settles in the vale

Your wretched faces
Lips smeared with belladonna
Blue eyes just staring

Like a fresh laid egg
Cracked and dropped into the dirt
Sun shines on your brains




She sifts through the dirt
For some nugget, some image
Some anamnesis

Digs frenzied like a
Neurotic caged animal
Seeking the outside

Fingernails bent back
Eyes purple rimmed, ringed in black
She murmurs curses

Her vision is blurred
Her colorful skirt is torn
The dust spirals up

She sits back, shaking
Breath heaves in great ragged tears
Shaking hands held up

Knuckles are swollen
Cuticles stained with soil
She can’t remember

She kicks her leg out
Settles back against the wall
And closes her eyes

She dreams of the grave
Surrounded by umbrellas
And the sound of rain

When the morning comes
Her green eyes slowly open
Taking in the sun

She turns and curls in
Forehead scraping through the dirt
A dirge for lost thoughts

untitled work in progress

Ganymede and Thed slither ‘long the balustrade, trading orange pork specimens gathered from the heart of the purple quasar in the room with the long windows.
Balancing pink Spanish slug lips laterally, avoiding laser moonbeam locators, elegantly. They speak in low whispers. Tongues caressing ear-shapes and chests erupting red flowers and snakes light bites on soft shoulders. Battle scar beauty mark – long ragged road across the eye, pale and hypnotic in soft shadows - Thed of swords and rape, inside out goddess of meat and viscera, teeth clacking like silver tree branches in core of winter peers into Ganymede’s amethyst eyes. “What vulture must the great pig pass on his flight to your moon?” Keening, drops razor, axe, and flail, machete and poniard from her black horse mouth, absence of infinity.
“Abasi’s vulture. The Inchoate One – the nest of your desiccated womb, automatic, beyond repair – the lyre in the maelstrom. The messenger circles.” Rending rotten meat with perfect teeth, Ganymede wiggles his little finger and sighs.
Thed sets her mouth into a grim straight line as her florid cheeks erupt small brown moths splashed with oxblood red patterns. The moths curve up toward the high ceiling near the holes where the moonlight invades, flutter in a chaotic arc and fly back into her skin. “The Architect,” she coughs, and then, “the Architect and his whores. The whores with the flaming red hair that whirl about like tempests with lightning eyes, them and their black sword bearers who ride the tall azure stallions with armored steel plates on their necks like centipede bodies, they will ensnare the messenger with their magic totems and five-fire-nets.” She coughs again; a great ragged hacking, moist and smelling of musk and ancient cellars. And with her eyes heavily lidded, she says, “Go, pretty Ganymede. Go to the elephantine mountain peak of Mother Lotus. Seduce her, exploit her spectral corona and take the five-sided-shield to the Architect.”

Ganymede stood naked in the center circle, his elegant hands upon his milk-white thighs, and stared up at the hole where the moths have fled. When the last dun-winged insect was lost from sight he opened a small hidden cell under his skin with his fingernail and dug out a single silver capsule.
“To Korros,” he murmured as he put it in his mouth. “Abasi befouled.” As the silver capsule dissolved on Ganymede’s pink tongue ophidian arms writhed upon the sills along the jackal pen where carcasses were shoveled after revelries. His pinprick pupils became fathomless black windows framed in blue-white shot through with scarlet swords. His dark lashes fluttered as he fell through the obsidian bricks of his cylindrical keep, fingers curled and crow sounds scraped from his throat.
Traversing secret byways he came to the arête before which, the verdant Plains of Korros opened up and extended like a wedge to the distant rusted stones of decaying Tharsis. Ganymede’s toes found the sharp edge of the ridge and gripped it like talons. Ten thousand black stallions grazed below milling beneath the sour-eyed glower of the hulking megalith of Korros. Vermillion and magenta clouds churned on the horizon. Indigo folded through violet and was lost to lavender haze.
“I have seen mountains,” he mumbled. “Cairns of bone and foul flesh stacked to Abasi.” He cracked his knuckles and glanced back at the megalith. Viridian moss clung to its leeward side and silver ivory reached its curling tendrils into its prodigious cracks. The amorphous head’s hundred eye sockets filled with indanthrene shadow stared down at the stallions at its crumbling feet.
“Korros.” Ganymede rolled the R’s, allowing them to fill his mouth and purr between his lips before letting the last syllable slide out with a sibilant sigh.
The megalith moved. The hundred empty eyes stared up at him. A light wind pushed at Ganymede’s long blonde hair. He searched the sky for eagles or condors and saw nothing but distant cirrocumulus above him. The great churning was far in the distance yet. He stared at the Korros megalith and it spoke into his mind.
“I, Menhir, King of Dolmens see you, pretty boy. What do you want? What do you want? You must say it before the dust comes and rasps your pretty flesh away. Say it before I send my stallions to shatter your young bones with estrapades.”
“Korros, dear stone, your horses hold no sway over me.” He balled his fist to his chest and made a shallow bow. “Don’t you know I am a Taraxippus?”
The megalith stared a silent millennia. “What then do you want?”
“Simple protection of passage. Unmolested free range from point A to point B, there,” He pointed, “Out in the churning. And further, yet.”
“Then go, pretty boy.” The long grasses parted and there was a pathway that started at the foot of the arête and extended until distance obscured its narrow winding. “Follow only the path. A simple step beyond it violates the law and you will be consumed, Taraxippus or no.”
Ganymede leapt from the scarp and began along Korros’ highway.

Into The Broken Lands

Out of the poison seas
Into the broken lands
Under a dying sun
Under a white fountain
All eyes are wasted
All eyes turned inward
Back to the poison seas

It walks in the desert and
Dreams of a lake of blood

There is nothing in here
As there is nothing out there

Two Cold Oceans

With eyes like two cold oceans
She watches the flickering star
Through the leafless branches
Of a fallen tree.
The drone of a single engine
Aircraft breaks the silence
As she looks down at her hands
Trembling in her lap like
Dogs in the throes of death.

She can see her bones through her skin
And all the lost stars inside her bones.

Acid Green Thorazine

We were two snakes in the wide ocean undertow eating octopus and cod, plump bellies expanding like pink balloons. Sinking lower past the continental shelf, we imploded, and now, we're eating acid green Thorazine on a platter in the back of a black stretch Cadillac. We were syncopated. Now, we are blurred. As you reach your skinny arms around me, dangling your cigarette behind my neck, each individual hair standing straight, the fuzz that was your voice is now your eyes. Tones, sapphires and frozen ozone. A minister minding the front entry. Livid pink brain. The holy rider. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said. That's what you said.

The Next Star

Riding in an old car
Out across the plain
On the edge of forever.
Can't feel pain.
Underneath a white sky
Fingers circle the mouth
Like vultures to the dead.

"Our bodies have already changed,"
She said.
She said,
As she brushed the ash from her hair.
She said,
"Our bodies are already dying,
And you'll find
That the darkness at the edges
Will overtake us in the end."
She said,
"We will travel,
Hurry on
To the next star."