Ragnarök - a five haiku poem

Ride, Valkyrie, the
Aurora Borealis;
Ravens at your side.

Chooser of the slain,
Bear the fallen heroes up
Into Valhalla

To drink with Odin
Mead, and prepare evermore
To fight the last war;

Ragnarök, the end,
The battle of the doomed gods,
Black becomes the sun,

Flames rise to Asgard,
Consume the broken Bifröst,
Tremulous no more.

haikus are dead. long live haikus

under the red sun
black holes become white fountains
doves turn inside out

Subtle Higgs boson,
come out wherever you are.
Fermilab might win.

Out among the stars
Where comets glide with green tails:
I'm still fucking broke.

In a hot shower,
I washed my dirty laundry.
It smells like shampoo.

I am full of borscht,
but vodka is elusive.
winter crushes me.

Coffee in the morn
In porcelain, sweetly worn,
To rise and conquer.

Hey Albert Einstein!
Procure for me a burger.
Oh, that's right, you're dead.

Hey Archimedes!
Why don't you invent a gun
That brings me summer.

Brain-raping pigeons,
Rockstar and ranch doritos
Made you who you are.

A war by proxy:
Avenues shall run crimson
While I write part two.

part II

Puddles congealing:
An avian holocaust.
What can staunch the flow?

Houses Haikus

House of the dead arctic hare
Bleeding from its mouth
On carpet you could drown in.

House of the dead gorilla,
Flayed skin like petals
Crown exposed bones and organs.

House of the dead grizzly bear,
Pink tongue lolling
In cold coffee mixed with milk.

House of the dead elephant,
Eyes eaten by snakes
Escaped from calid glass tanks.

House of the dead albatross,
Headless and twisted,
Next to the potbelly stove.

House of the dead lioness,
Teeth bared and throat slit
Sitting at an oak table.

House of the dead antelope,
Covered in egg yolks,
Surrounded by brain matter.

House of the dead buffalo,
Sprawled across the couch
With broken horns and white teeth.

Pattern Recognition Breaks Down After 5 and a Half Minutes

The crooked building leans toward the water, feverish and weather worn. It dips its facade into the cool water and tries not to inhale. A shuddering grinding whine from deep within the steel structure vibrates out into the water. The fishes hear it. The crabs feel it. They don't know what it means. The building rises slowly. Steam and warm water stream from the windows. The crooked edifice turns from the water and faces the canyon of skyscrapers snagging clouds on spires and antennae. The sun gleams on their silvered windows. The crooked building sighs its sagging infrastructure and meanders back to its little trash strewn plaza.

I Imagine in 1951 the Noise from that Orange Grove Wasn't as Loud as that Six Lane

You arrive like candy on my tongue. We play drums for a while and the extra pink tongue that you don't mind keeps playing at the corner of your mouth. The street becomes the blue-skinned jewel, the fake blood you keep in the refrigerator, and the fresh blood you keep in your thermos. We take walks and dream at the same time. Caught in the cool dark shadows over your eyes, the deep cave under your brow where we sometimes play together like silver fish. The pulsing is the frequency I use to contact the ovular mothership. As you rotate, your neck sighs. It opens doorways and windows in the sky. Velvet skin upon my teeth holds the secret pleasure under threat of death, but the pink candy breath you use to calm the beasts swaying in the glaze under a canopy of a hundred thousand guitars is our secret weapon.

Deeper then Night. Stronger than Death.

As the animals lay dying,
the sky parts to reveal two red
suns feeding off each other
like cannibals.

A caterpillar weaves a tomb
For the white worm to build a world.
A caterpillar weaves a tomb
For the white worm to build a universe.

Golden Dirge

Ancient mirrors. Face-to-face. Sing golden dirges.
To the black dog head. With the emerald eyes.
As weeping willows. Throw electric locusts.
Screaming into the sky. Searching for the eyes.
Searching for the mouths. Of God.

Oh, lay me down.
Lay down my body.
On the stones and horns.
Let them into my mouths.
They build cities in my throats.

Atonal Dirge

The doves are moaning again. Atonal dirges for god. And everything fades as the blood seeps from your head, turns into white angels that fly away through the holes we made. The Blue folds in. Lightning strikes the eyes of the silver flower. A shower of sparks, twisted horns, and blind eyes.
One turns red. The other upends, spills broken moons like quartz necklaces eaten by horses made of ash and plastic.

Rivers of blood.
Angels are meat.

Reconfiguration of Sonic Booms and Platinum Sunrises

The red mouth rips wide open in a grin
To let the murky ocean in.
Lap the green water from cupped hands
Yellowed with callouses.

Dandelion roots hide in snake pits between
The cool, soft, breathing, legless
Bodies dreaming of ostrich eggs.

Rusted falcons clasp black centipedes
over jungle covered calderas.

Thrashing in their death throes,
Howling like pipe organs,

The centipedes turn blue and fall through
The verdant canopy.

Released from iron talons,
They die upon the decaying earth.

Eaten by ants.
Eaten by worms.

My Molecular Baby

Through the veils of corruptible sadness
I have seen your eyes light up like red suns,
Swollen and heavy, ancient and insane.
You carry scars with pride and fortitude.

I Get Paid To Write Poems About God

A black sermon of intermittent beeps.
Ten story organs drone deep, resonant,
Concussive waves of ultramer blue light
Straight to the center of animal brains.
Black-red holes open and geysers unfurl
Like dancing flowers entwined in the air.

10 Second Light

Mother brings the rocks, red insects and bears,
Filling up the shadows beneath her wings.
Liars fill fingers full of dynamite.
Cold lead mirrors face to face sing golden
Dirges to the black dog head with green eyes.

Explosion for a Heart

Slowly splitting open a moldy peach

While planting explosive charges
Inside open heart surgery patients
I think about the black mushroom garden
Just at the foot of the spiral staircase
Where I left my finest red fedora
Next to a half eaten box of raisons.

The churning worms near my stomach cancer
Split in two and become beautiful trains
Hanging upside down from ice covered tracks,
Not unlike coal belching ballerinas
Pretending to be shivering black bats.
I touch my belly. The sensation stops.

I put plastique in the left ventricle.
It looks exactly like cholesterol.
I put plastique in the right ventricle
And then I nearly fill the aorta.
I zip the heart up and slip out the door.
Tomorrow, an explosion for a heart

Black Gravitation

In the hundreds of billions of years since
The universe birthed itself with white light,
Photons have raced through curved infinity
Devoured by black gravity masses,
Split open at the seams deep in the heart
Of wildly spiraling galaxies.

sick winter meat//alpha relapse//rape wedding//dead puppy orgasm

she lays eggs inside my mouth when i am sleeping.
i can read by the blue light coming from her fingers.
she eats my spinal column as i tense my muscles.
cell by cell dissolution. maggot children in my brain.

Old Dirge

carry me down from the mountain
back to the place where i was born.
bring my body to the river,
scrape flesh from bone with sharpened stone.
down in the valley of sorrows
lay the corruption that was me
under a scree of broken rock
with sparrows and cherry blossoms.

Porcupines Do Not Equal Bees

Her arm loosely dangling hanging baking
in the sun turning red and blistering
blue diamonds eject from her pores
like pods from spaceships. her fingernails
painted red and black flick open like hatches
and out pours Kool-aid and Pepsi and ladybugs.

Waves

The incarcerated man rolls his eyes to the back of his head. He takes two of his fingers, sticks them into his mouth, down his throat and into his stomach. Puncturing through the wall, he pulls at the blue bands of light mired in brown ichor. Radiant gossamers and vibrating pink tendrils surround his knuckles. With a quick wrench and rip he withdraws his catch back through the rent in his gut. Up the esophagus. Out his mouth.
With a shiver, he blinks his eyes forward and looks at the things in his fist. His teeth ring in the wave.

Messianic Ultra Gash

Our coming is heralded by the appearance of the _____. Shining heart bathed in white light. Concatenations of blue hands tic, embedded with effulgent teeth, spinning, grinding in swollen holes. In the sea sleeps a serpent, green and crusted with agate inside a broken ship. It's mouth contains lion cages filled with hills and delicate pink cocoons of metamorphic fulminations.

Messengers

fey hermit, gray and deaf
in mouth of cave above sugar
cane fields with one match.
dragonflies with tiny scrolls
bound with silken threads
buzz through the magnetic
distortion and land at his feet.

Three Silver Snakes

Three silver snakes appear in the air above the spot we planted our flowers. Amber bubbles fall out of their mouths and crack open in the grass. Each crack emits a subtle yellow light. with time, the light dims and the cracks peel of like scabs, soften and curl in the grass and are black licorice in the sun. Moist to the touch. Sticky and sweet.

Alabaster

Rivers eat splintered breasts of the doves piling in our faces.
Listless.
Silver snakes suffocate golden angels aching blue faces.
Listless.
Fingerless, gray and deaf, marching through a field of dead children.
Listless.
Corpses bathed in moonlight erupt alabaster meadowlarks.
Listless


Sun Splitter

Cairn of Old Eyes

See the girl with the thorn necklace hanging high in the old pines?
her blood smells like honey. her blood is black upon her neck.

Seasons change, cold rain turns to snow

And men from all over converge upon the site to stare at
the corpse high up in the pines. 1000 faces transfigured by time.


Sun Splitter

Ponies

The instant of brutalization:
a rise and fall of soft voices, then a crack which causes a spark that dissipates. dying photons crumble like a decadent culture and weeds grow in the cavernous eye sockets of the fallen juggernaut surrounded by insects with luminous carapaces and diaphanous wings. mandibles fold and gnaw, click and grind. voices of the long dead. voices of belly cancers. and the blood saturated ground fertilizes flowers and wild grasses perfect for ponies.

Dead Dragon Mountain

the psychedelic priestess

the psychedelic priestess of the wild wood
leaves black marks
where she walks.

the culling of the psychedelic priestess
leaves black entrails
in the wild wood.

the brown lizard in her mouth.
the small breasts in her hands.

the carotid artery explodes like a sun
in the dawn of the winter,
the black night of spring.

the splintering wing

sucking breath of the last parade
march boots crushing,
slogging through the musky blood
and mud.

boiled ocean

the rape of Mnemosyne
the cutting of Moneta
barren earth, failing star-
cislunar no-man's land

Black Wail

brethren hear the black-wail choir,
slit-throat guttural missive under
bullet hail.
rivers eat the splintered breasts
of doves piled in our useless flesh.
corpses wreathed with cherry blossoms
glisten like wet candy under lapis sky.
worms unfold and bloom white datura
antennae pumping silver narcotics
for the nation builders.

may your mother rise up from the grave.
may your mother murder you.

penetration cavities

staring. backwards. through the holes.
dry tongues unravel. lap rusted water
from decaying fountains. trapped
within the gravity well of a singularity,
breeding. like animals fucking toward omega.
sucking mouths, insensate. riven teeth
headstones, crooked, blurred.

For Ursula K. Leguin

come on down to the fields by the highway
let's listen to the cars scream by and watch
the stars until we sense the earth moving.

Probably Something to do with Drugs and/or Death

brittle pills pass grinding molars. massaged
down esophagus to belly. aurora lights play
on the brain, eyes explode like napalm. fire
running down cheeks in rivulets. lips swell
like snakes in the silence of the moment.
heart beats a little slower. ribs expand
to accept the fluids leaking from a million
tiny holes.

Solar Leper

From the slow breathing - the rise and fall.
The indentations. The susurrations.
The ribs extend like lepidoptera
With violet filaments and golden strands.
Webbed interstice of bone.
The sun is the eye in the dead man's hand
Plucked at by carrion birds
Out on the paprika dunes. By the ocean.
All the moon's in your throat
And the volcanoes in your breast
Vomit ash and meadowlarks.

The solar leper accretes from the rings
around him the flesh he has lost.

Dead Dragon Mountain

Ablutions

far from the dead eyes you fear will see us yet, you hold your head erect in the subsections of time where red wines spouts from a dead bear's mouth. our throats boast with mountainous sounds of the mastering of auroras and the splitting of the sun - its thermonuclear yolk hurled across vast distances. consuming. ablutionary. holy fire.

The Insensate Hunger of Matter for Matter

bring the white wolves to the coast,
fracture their legs and toss them
into the ocean. Howling through waves.
sinking. dragged by invisible currents.
the silver schools feast upon their crumpled bodies.

Plum Blossom Drone

plum blossom in the brackish water under heavy stone
open belly of the sparrow losing songs
quiet like an ocean in a black room
dead foxes, dire wolves in the green light of the moon
always closer, guns bloom like teeth in angel's wounds
lurid voices sing in the poppy fields of Arcadia.

Sun Splitter

Solar Nerves

breath fails me like dying horses falling from the sky,
like the last echo in the wild wood.
basil flowers fall onto our hair on the empyrean road
as the myriad knives rotate in my stomach.
looking for holes left by firefly flashes in the night.
a drunken clamor. a clumsy clasping.
i will love you 'til the sun splits open like an egg.

Earth Burner

earth-burner lies hungry, dying,
scoured faceless, blackened body.
machine mouth filled with stars,
blood violets and dandelion leaves.
wracked with gilded rape and excruciation.
ragged edges twist into the sky,
cerise and vermilion pulsar beats
rhythmically and pulls silken
strands from lion throats.
a universe of bared bones
stripped muscle
sinew rope.

Sun Splitter

A Notebook Glut - Artifacts Gleaned from an Old Yellow Page

aureate - golden, brilliant, decorated, affected style, grandiloquent, heavily ornamental, excessively rhetorical, employing foreign words.

ambion - greek for pulpit. also means something that has two functions

barren sky. wide open. fist thrust. through ocean crust.
above these bones, a scree of stones. ophidian arms
wave at helicopters with opal eyes and radar screens.

prowess of liars. smokey and velvet.
eat the flowers left at their feet,
squat and unfold at the house of the
soothsayer. telling her stories
brittle and yellow
paper and teeth
milk and ash
ghost hands blur the trash brain.
a sick lump in the corner, dead
to flash in the numb of hypno.
eaten
in the rise of the indeterminate.

-
bones in catacombs fuse together. a cathedral and its radioactive
musky blood slick polluting millenia with christ as the middle finger to reason. are the gutless reanimations eating our brains as we twitch simply a dull occurence like watching t.v. or buying toasters?

-
when the head splits open, that's when the magic starts breathing stars into the open. sheathed in wheat clones and echoed out to blackened drone like some sort of alcoholic priest boy fucking to god on the hyperplane existence of arbitrary trials and simian blood. excessive cosmological archeology. positions in sand written on toes in enamel. when that's not enough, the edges come closer. pinched skin, puckered lips reddened. pacified. browned.

-
ankle bones:
bastard son of black-eyed john
riven throat of sea anemone carcass

Blessed are the Mouths of God

Ganymede and Thet 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 Byzantines," she coughs, and then, "the Byzantines and their 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, Ganymede. Go to the elephantine mountain peak of Lakshmi mother lotus. Seduce her, exploit her spectral corona and take the five-sided-shield to the Byzantines."

all the bright tigers in the endless jungle

as i scatter your ashes on the thousand mile plain.
as i erupt red birds from my lacerated chest.
as i ride backwards from predetermined routes.
your bones in my legs trembling with the speed,
your eyes in my brain oscillating like fingers
supercharged with electromagnetic aurora.
a muscle breaks with a cracksnap and tendons
creak like dilapidated air conditioning units
held together with duct tape in housing project
windows blackened by grease fires.
a churning gutlessness prattles endlessly in the
everliving electrical field in the subbasements
of exotic atoms. armed with precision guided
vibrations like poison dart tongues rapidly
disintegrating out on the fringes of the
continent where echoes die abruptly,
the artless shuffle like asthmatic schizophrenics
stuck in the radiating sonic boom of daisies.

sliding sideways, westerly.

there. silent. in your little town.
is a wet begonia menstruating
on a capitalist. orange stillbirth
from a split airplane in a pale
blue sky rains down on the
circling crowd.

some are armed with cattleprods
some have come with gasoline
and matches.

Desert Songs: And Oh, the Visions We'll Share

Moonrise on the desert floor. Rocky crags in the distance gain a deeper shadow. And our eyeballs rotate. Searching for signs of life in each other. In the deep grooves of our face. In the leathery skin. Search for. Some sort of. Movement. Movement that belies. Or. Movement that confirms. The inside will.
As the stars gently revolve. As the ghost honeybees pollinate our lips. As the delicate stingrays slip through the sky. I, and you, bring our skin closer. Closing in. Closer to you. To me. That’s when the holes open up. And the piglet colonies push their noses out. Hesitate. Suck sibilant first breaths. And. blind, the colonies merge in a swirling pink mass that expands and takes our throats deep to the left of everything and we are left swaying, giddy, slightly sick in the pits of our stomach.

Desert Songs: And A Great Beast Shall Rise from the Sands

Vero needed to be alone. And so she came out into the desert. She took her shirt off and let the sun eat of her skin. She sat in the golden sand and buried her hands. She felt her shoulder skin bubble and pop. Harden and curl. The sun heated her spine column by column. Disk by disk. But her hands were cool underneath the sand. She concentrated on the two distinct sensations. Then searched for the middle point between the burning and the cooling. It was in her stomach. That was where the calm was. She allowed her self to dwell within the tissues. Amongst the acids of her belly. Vero imagined her mind becoming worm. A white worm curled over and around itself inside her skull. A subtle stinking worm. She let it have her head and kept herself inside her belly. And now, inside her belly, she turned her attention to her fingertips. Not because she wanted to, but because she was drawn there by a sensation. And she explored it. She went to the tip of her index finger. Because that was where the sensation began. And was now strongest. She discovered she couldn't go as far as she used to be able to go inside her finger. And realized. She couldn't go any further because there was nothing more there. What could make her fingertip nothing? She wondered. And edged her awareness forward. To the place where she remembered the flesh had been. And encountered. Movements. Life forms. What are these forms? She wondered. And entered the first one she encountered. She explored its little body. Explored its warmth and blood and found its tiny brain. It didn't know what it was. She found. So she accessed its memories. There weren't many. But soon, she realized she must be inside a desert mole. And the desert mole, the entire colony, moisture starved, were eating her fingers and drinking her blood. How holy, she thought. They must be worshiping. She pulled her consciousness back into her belly and allowed the supplications.

Desert Songs: Everybody Sits in this Desert

The white white man has great slabs of teeth filling his mouth in an unsettling jackknifed randomness. He checks his silver watch.

"Two minutes."

He jerks his house shaped head back and his neck bones grind. Cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere slide by. A miserable thing to see in the desert. They never give rain. The white white man scans the horizon with gray marble eyeballs slipping back and forth. He smells like oil. He doesn't see the birds he wishes to see. The vultures. Curious birds that warn.

He looks at his silver watch. Taps it. Inhales.

"One minute."

The sand around him popcorns into the air and a jasmine scent surrounds him. white flowers form for seconds out of the air and disappear.

"Early." he shrugs and looks at his silver watch. Taps it. Removes it and tosses it away.

"Junk."

Desert Songs : Laser Space Trance/ Sunrise on the Second Side of the Ship/ Super Massive Star, Breathes and Expands

Sitting in the desert:
as the great pig descends toward the head-spirit-opening, the Baron whispers slowly- “Unhooked, unsheathed from the terrorface, I have been imagining greater loves than you.”
Mary, she makes an effort, tries to make him believe that everything she ever wanted, she got, and now she needs nothing, by a casual flick of her eyes up, but instead of communicating this, she sees at last The Great Pig hurtling down. down, and she opens her mouth. Wide. Hoping to distract The Great Pig from its destination and invite it into her.
But The Great Pig is oblivious to her. It knows its home by scent, and pure animal attraction. Open mouths cannot distract the Great Pig.
Mary closes her mouth. She knows The Great Pig will never be hers. And the Baron, he cocks his head to the side, licks his lips with his small purple tongue and says, “You've seen The Great Pig?”
Mary nods somberly.
”You see that he will never come into you?”
Mary nods again and frowns, just a small twitch of the eyebrows, but the Baron sees it, says, “You can't steal The Great Pig. The Great Pig cannot be stolen.”
”How do you know I wish to steal The Great Pig?”
”All who see The Great Pig desire The Great Pig. Once they see that they cannot entice The Great Pig, they scheme to steal The Great Pig. This is the reason cannot love you anymore. The Great Pig has taken you. Your lust corrodes your heart.”
Mary changes shape. Her bleached features blacken. Her cheekbones, obsidian spear tips. Moist feathers jut from her pores. And she hums the duotones, a keening dirge, high pitched and resonant. The flies scatter.

Sunrise on the second side of the ship:

Under the heat from our troubled sun, the baron crunches lamb skulls one by one like popcorn from a greasy bag. Sitting in the desert conversing with Mary. Swatting flies from her nose. Lifting her tattered brown skirt. The plastic bits beneath are glistening like soapy airplanes under the summer sun.

”You can't test me,” she says between flies.

”You can't test me,” she repeats through wing clouds. She pulls a hair lock to the left of her eye but it insinuates itself back across red rimmed green cloud eye like a drugged snake.

”I would never test you,” the Baron says. He blinks and The Great Pig rises from his head with ivory tusks tipped with silver and blood. Out the spirit-head-hole into the great expanse of sky. Shoots toward stars.

”What was that?” Mary asks and her finger flicks the languid serpent hair-lock back again.

”It wasn't much of anything. I don't think.” the Baron rests on his haunches. Great hackles prickle razor mohawk-like down his rigid structures. In anticipation, he decides. But what? But what?

Mary sets her head sideways. A question look. Always unable to hide her intents and emotions. A fidget here. A black look there. Like hungry dying dancing birds paranoid and fragile. “This will end in death,” she says.

”I hate when things end in death,” the baron says, spits, and emits a butterfly from his lip.

”They always end with death. Even if they start with death and the middle is death, they always end with death,” Mary whispers. Flutters fingers. Nervous gesture.

The Baron shrugs.

Super massive Star, Breathes and Expands.

all the black nights were never so dark as this night. all the deep wells, all the murky depths were never so impenetrable.

the Great Pig shut his eyes and pushed his mass forward through the dry air. forward. toward. he couldn't see it. but he knew where it was. it was as though a thousand warm filaments connected its opening and his nose. he knew exactly where it was. the deep black night couldn't keep him away.

he slid across the sky and allowed his body shape to flatten and elongate behind the great head. his nostrils flared and he followed the molecular road before him. it was easy. nothing could keep him away.

soon he felt the subtle shift in gravity and a sharp pitch in incline to a near straight dive bomb. he open his maul, roared into the wind and osmosed through head-spirit-opening of the host.

and everything was red. and bright. and right. he looked out the eyes. he saw the girl.

Desert Songs: All the Tiny Little Holes

Neuroveda is silently twining her fingers, making them dance about between the fine grains of amber sand. In the instances between each passing, minute sparks shiver out like splinters and she draws them up into her mouth. Saves them for her dead lover. Buried beneath her. 1000 feet of shifting sand.

Perfectly good meat. Beneath the waves of sand.

With her knuckles and her fingertips, with her palms and her nails, she coaxes out the white lights. With nimble finger dances around granular sand atoms. exploiting interstitial proximity. The lightning comes out and lunges for her mouth.

Soon I’ll come and get you. Through the mighty weight of sand.

Neuroveda, electricity filled, twists her body. Head down. Follows her hands. They push back the grains of sand, compact them into tunnel walls. Held together. Electro-statically. She swims beneath the surface until she finds him, grabs his ankle and ascends toward the light. On the surface she lays him out. Arms above his head. Legs parted. Her mouth touches his. She forces the electricity through his cold lips and it rips through his body. His toenails and fingernails melt, cloud. His lips and nose blacken. Smoke and the smell of cooked meat waft from his body.

Now you are done.

Neuroveda inhales the smell. Takes it deep within her lungs. And with her sand worn fingers. Plunges deep into the bellymeat and rend intestines with her brilliant white teeth.

Desert Songs: The Desiccated Cell

Re watched the horizon. Sunk her teeth into a bologna sandwich. Spicy mustard oozed out the sides. She dug her toes into the hot sand.

Sun goes up. Sun goes down. She thinks.

In the distance. Over the dunes. Black shapes rose. Long, pointed at the ends. So black in the middle it hurt her eyes a little but she didn't look away. Three of them, and they were coming this way. Slowly. And then. In jerks and spasms. Like badly spliced film eating itself. Backward and forward. Blinking out and winking in.

This distortion of motion has something to do with time, she thought. Something to do with time. maybe. these black violations are a manifestation of the opposite of nature.

She didn't like these thoughts. They possessed her in an odd manner. She touched the top of her head. A nervous habit.

Tricky thinking thoughts such as these.

Her attention returned to the black shapes. She still did not know what they were. Re finished her sandwich and rubbed her fingers together. Knocked crumbs off. They disappeared into the sand. She reached into her pocket and took out her watch. Held it in her hand. Put it back in her pocket without looking at it.

The black shapes were in front of her now. Hovering. Undulating. They were extraordinarily long this close up she realized. Re looked left and couldn't see its end. she looked right. Same thing. But when she looked right toward them. She could see them all. in their entirety.

She thought. What a strange vantage point I occupy. She shrugged.

She looked only a little bit to the left. And the thing was close enough to touch. She reached out. Slowly. Couldn’t touch it. But. The middle part of it - right as she achieved the limit of her reach - turned gray. And her hand was gone. Re jerked back her arm. There wasn't anything there. There didn't seem to have been anything there. Ever. She felt as though she were forgetting something. That she lost... what was it?

Never mind. She thought as she rubbed her stump. It was a nervous habit. She stared at the black things. The gray spot was darkening.

Like the sunset in black and white.

And then just as the spot was about to become black again a sound blast erupted from the exact pinpoint of zero within the blackening circle. A high-pitched keening wail like a thousand bagpipes, flutes and mothers mourning. The gray circle matched the black majority and the sound disappeared.

The backward forward jerk spasm motion of the traveling black things began again. And as Re watched them go. She realized. It wasn't temporal fluctuations. They weren't aberrations. That was just how they moved.

Very inefficient. Re allowed a bologna sandwich to slide out of her arm. And took a bite

Desert Songs: O, this languid eternity and the caustic breath of a rotting cell

there was. a pulsing, buzzing sound in his ear. and then. a white flash, just off to the left and right in his peripheral. and then. he was blind. and he was floating. he reached out. nothing. nothing. nothing. and then, he could just barely reach it. grains. the sand. he was still where he was before. that was all he knew for sure. but, why was he floating? how was he floating? this, he had no answers for. what was that flash? what was that sound? were they related to his current situation? again. he didn't know. it was useless to ask these questions. so he waited. occasionally. he reached down and touch the sand. took one or two grains and rolled them around between his fingers. it was the only sensation he had there. it was the only thing that reminded him he was still alive. well. still being, anyway.

then, after a time, there was a new sensation. something moving and touching his back. small. soft hands. tiny fingers running up and down his spine. it was then he realized he was not clothed. he didn't know quite how he had missed that before, but right now that didn't matter. these hands. whose hands? and then, like a slow wave, he heard their voices. a low murmuring tone. like the rustling of feathers. getting louder, rising and crashing, echoing as if in a great chamber. but he was outside. he could feel the sun. he could feel the sand. he touched his back. the sensation of his fingers on his back was added to the sensation of the many hands. but he couldn't feel their hands with his hands. but he did feel something else. a smooth, thickening liquid forming droplets and dripping from his back. he couldn't see what it was, but he knew what it was. blood. his blood. were the hands doing this? how long had he been bleeding? why was he bleeding? again, questions he couldn't answer. how could he stop the bleeding? could he? he had nothing. maybe it would stop by itself.
he folded his hands across his chest and waited. it was all he could do. besides, if he didn't allow himself to over think his situation, he could imagine himself in the most comfortable bed receiving a light massage. he floated. and smiled. he fell asleep and dreamed. he dreamed he was in a vast prairie running through grass with some sort of animal that he couldn't quite see. Every time he tried to look at it, it was as if his vision was pushed away like water resisting oil. so he stopped trying to look at it and just bounded away in the grass. jumping higher and higher and laughing. and then in the middle of a jump he felt a sharp pain in his back and he folded over backwards. he woke up. shaking. there was a great pain along the center of his back and neck. he tried to reach back with his hands, but that movement hurt him extraordinarily. and so he lay, floating. hands out to his sides. mouth open. the voices rose and crashed with greater frequency. he salivated uncontrollably. small pops and bone cracks resounded and his body was overcome with seizure. he welcomed the seizure. it negated the pain. and through the cloud he felt his point of view shift through his body and he saw the tiny white hands pull at last his spine from his body, sever nerves and muscle in a fountain spray of red. the white hands shucked the bone from bleached yellow interior of the spinal cord. and as he looked he saw it was moving slowly and had small black eyes near the tip and thin purple line for a mouth. it bend itself toward his consciousness and took him into its mouth. and now. again. he could feel the white hands holding him. warm hands. caressing gently. carrying him. somewhere. it didn't matter. he felt content. and even if he wanted to know where he was, his eyes and mind couldn't comprehend it. his vision slipped around the reality. and his mind simply forgot that anything was really there at all.

warship settles in under cloud cover: part 1

Judge parted his lips and forced the blood out of his mouth in a great geyser spray that came to rest on the sand before him like a delta.

behind him lay a hulk of a man. broken and battered. skin purpled and rent. jagged bone spires jutting at odd angles through red meat.

The man had to be put down. Who comes upon a man alone in the desert and does not expect violence? the battle had taken its toll on Judge. he wondered if he had the energy left to make the crossing. a black speck on the horizon marked the worn rocks of the mine site. that was his destination.

Judge turned back to the man. searched his broken body. found one energy bar in his pocket. and. there was something in the sand. a few feet away. half buried already by the shifting sand. his pack was almost he color of the sand itself. it contained two bottles of water. and. a plain silver ring. it was too big for any of his fingers. he put on his thumb. put the energy bar and water in his own pack. and started out for the mines.

Awakening

it wasn't the electrical tape around her wrists. or or the layers of tightly wound plastic wrap around her naked body that concerned her. no. no, that wasn't it all. it definitely wasn't the way sun permeated those layers. it wasn't the way the plastic wrap trapped the heat. magnified it. though that was certainly part of it.

the long, green, bent back creatures with tiny fingers sunk their faces into the bellies of the dead folks around her. she didn't know who the dead folks were. didn't feel much for them. it was the wet sound of hands inside bodies. it was the ripping and cracking sounds. it was the teeth. that clack clack clack. their teeth stuck out from their faces. and when they weren't chewing they were just clacking their teeth together and sucking their tiny fingers.

clack clack clack. ssssssssslurpp
clack clack clack. ssssssssslurpp

that's what was driving her crazy.