Dark Rainbows Illuminate the Soul

A wild field of watermelons fluoresces beneath dark rainbows. Their soft luminescence reflects the warmth of summer's end and illuminates delicate souls. The cottontails gently sigh, a whisper so faint only the field mice can hear. They harvest the tiny kernels of corn that have fallen to the earth from ominous heights, at least for they that worship a moon of aged blue cheese. The watermelons are ripe and they smell delicious. Their ephemeral fragrance just catches the attention of Little Suzy who plays in the field with Jacob, the blacksmith's youngest son. They are playing a game called 'crackerjack'. Their laughter is carried by the warm breeze that floats toward a horizon infinitely wide. 

This is a special moment in time. An epoch when ancient past folds into the distant future like a ribbon of red velvet streaming in a sky of melted sapphire. 

The dying heat of the sun is ejected from its corona as tightly wound vibrations of light. The dark rainbows perspire high above sending fine droplets of rain to the earth, yet the children hardly notice. They giggle with care-free joy as the planet rotates furiously around its axis. 

Yet, there is a tranquil stillness to the ground beneath the ribbons of dark light. The rainbows cocoon the children, the mice and the field of wild watermelons beneath with a fatherly dedication only surpassed by the one who made it all possible. Here, in this quaint setting, the magnetic mosaic of life scintillates like one dimensional strings being plucked tenderly by hands wielding tremendous power. Only the dark rainbows feel the pull originating from the heavens. 

Jacob and Little Suzy grow up and the light goes out. A murky haze sweeps idly across time. The mice have gone for the long sleep. Still the prismatic droplets of rain fall, but no longer do they hit a pasture that is fertile. The watermelons are preserved, however, in the memories of Suzy and Jacob’s children and their children’s children. Above, a big heart bleeds love down for the ancestors. The children that played the game called ‘crackerjack’ are captured eternally in that special moment in history when wild watermelons grew freely among the corn and dark rainbows illuminated the soul.

It ended, it began, with a hug.

In an ancestral enclave hidden within the dense Indian jungle, an old Buddhist monk, ordinary just like you and me, reflected on his karma. He invoked the spirits of his past-lives to participate in an internal tribunal. How bitter-sweet, the sensations of longing and regret as he gargled on the waters of remembrance. The echoes of his negative aura reverberate up his chakras. They are his ghosts but they are not of the now. He has an undefined insecurity reflecting on his point of origin. The enormous leaves of the Banthanog plant swoon to the guardians of the wind as they vehemently observe him and cast howling calls. He hears with his heart and for a moment, he strangulates on the absence of oxygen. 

Then he remembers what his great grandparents said to him when he was but a child. That there would be a day such as this when he would endure the most trying of tests. The measure of his worth upon Lord Earth, in the form of a holographic projection of his primordial essence, would be scrutinized, examined. The memory sparks a furnace’s flame beneath him and in his tongue undulates producing a string of words within the sound vibrations of a dirge. The spirits congregate together in a furious and frenetic waltz to the mantra of his mind’s OM. He focuses on the zero point of the Nothing God of Solace and Tranquility and his thoughts undergo a deep freeze. He sees a blue child meditating in the lotus position atop the mighty elephant Vishnu. His black-hole eye connects with the child’s and they melt into one consciousness. Now, not even his bad karma could direct him.

He notices not the resultant levitation of his simple body humbled by the ages. If one were to record his alpha waves at that very moment, one would observe that the oscillations were highly irregular, although all the neurons of his brain were firing in syncopation to the beating of his heart. He was one with all, and all of nothing, indivisible from everything existing in the universe. He was of dark matter, truth, anti-particles, plasma, gravity waves, and love. 

The closest sun bathed him in its highly-energetic, life-supporting rays as he was taken, spiritually, on a journey across the star-network of his mind-space. Like a horse-hair brush saturated with white paint deftly swept over a midnight canvas, all the karma he had every accrued through an eternity of lifetimes, was ultimately erased as he hugged God on that early Sunday morning hidden within the trees.

We are all stardust

Why? The boy asked.
'Why do we die?
Why don't we live forever?'
All things must eventually die, dear
'But why, mommy?'
Let us ask the stars.
Listen.
Can you hear them whisper to you?
'Yes, mommy.'
What do they say?
'This star, the really bright one,
says that you can choose to believe
in the infinite. That matter eventually turns to energy
That we are all stardust. Born of stars.
When we lose this human form
we will make up the building blocks of baby stars.
'Is this true?'
That makes sense.
'What about memories. Do they have life. Are they eternal?'
If we listen to the tiny grain of sand at your feet, it will tell us.
What are it's thoughts on the matter?
I can't hear anything. Is there something wrong with me, mommy?
No. You must wait for complete silence
At the death of all sound, you will hear it speak to you.
'I can hear its voice! It is explaining to me that memories last so long as there are minds to contain them.
A memory is but a thread of pure energy waiting to be carried off into the wind.
Transferred from mind to mind until the end of time.'

The mother thought to herself, 'Children can be so profound'

My best friend,'Ben', really a pen.

My best friend, Ben, writes:

‘There’s the lunar orb rising, iceberg blue. Its rays spreading like tendrils of hair over balding heads. The arid dunes are washed in this light. The bitter gale, mourning the death of day, provides periodic howlings; lamentations fit for this desiccant, but magic, space. The locals call her ‘Banshee Ghyldahaal’. A bucolic fume-pot spews molten-hot magma in gleeful agitation upon the ancient sands. The sagacious Corinthian cactus speculates over the transformation of granules of crystalline sediment into cold, hard callous glass. Dark, and with beading perspiration, the nascent matrixes of glass glisten beneath the moon’s enchantment. Frankly, it’s breathtaking, the sand baking like this. Tiny Daizan scorpion warriors gyrate like puppets manipulated by the fingers of pale light that idly hang from the heavens.

Meanwhile, the aromatic notes of lavender, spruce and walnut are scintillating the taste-buds and olfaction devices as Arabian entrepreneurs, disguised as laymen spectators, down glass after glass of Chauvroui Reserve, 1872. From their tanned goat-hide tents, they ‘baa baaa’ like mountain sheep while they procure a delicate applause. Only the fingertips make contact with one another as if higher decibels would intoxicate the aura generated by the voluptuous belly-wavers at their front-and-center. There is submordial syncopation between the contracted fem-bots and the poisonous sand-vermin. Their stingers quiver in response to the cacophony of the ruby and sapphire-studded platinum bangles around the slender wrists of the damsels. “Baa Baaa,” again chortle the shriveled men with chestnut-and-amber-colored eyes that are dilated wide enough to capture the precipitating photons of light dripping down the stunning face of the moon. 

The eye, high in the sky, sees everything. It is adjusting and actively oscillating in orbit as even the most minute of detail regarding the proceedings are recorded and relayed to the armored hummer just beyond the farthest dune. Oblivious to the charlatans being so delightfully entertained, calculations are being made and plans are being scrutinized. The time has come: a cruel Caucasian pointing-finger, dressed in an excessively-extravagant, West-point class ring made of 24 karat pharaoh’s gold , depresses the evil, glowing red button located smack-center in the console and unleashes death-incarnate on the satellite-targeted rich, filthy rich, mountain-men.

Fortunately, there’s a 2 for 1 package deal on reincarnation in this most enchanting night. The oil tycoons, within purgatory, will have a choice of either coming back as charcoal or as diamond. If they choose the former, they will be ignited as fuel at some octogenarian’s 84th birthday barbecue party. They will then return as pious men. If they choose to come back as diamond, they will first undergo intense, I mean excruciatingly intense, pressure within the belly of a voracious mountain. They then will be discovered and carved into smaller pieces by their own kind and imbedded within the nose ring of some petulant King’s spoiled primogeniture until he or she passes beyond the great divide that separates the living from the inanimate. They will then return as some batty freelance writer that would no doubt subject even the most elementary of objects, to delightful personification.’ 

THE ALGRAMATHER (The story)

a/n: To read "THE ALGRAMATHER" (the poem) click here

a/n: The following story has neither morals nor true message. It is as incomplete as the evolution of the universe in which we live in. Its only purpose is to send ice-cubes of frozen sewage down your long-johns. However, the perseverant Reader just might reach the trinket in the spoiled box of crackerjacks that this tale is. Along the way, it’s possible that you will say ‘What the hell?! The author is disturbed or perhaps he has tripped one-too-many-times on ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’”. Rest assured, he takes in zero intoxicants or stimulants. An avid teetotaler, and human rights activist, he is a lover of animals and other soft, fluffy things. In fact, the author is a pleasant enough chap altogether. However, he knows that he must cater to all audiences, even those that derive pleasure in depravity. He, personally, ‘is above it’, but he loves to capture the imagination, even if it’s the disturbing kind. Be prepared to be confused, befuddled, and perplexed by the origins of the darkness depicted in the words you are about to masticate upon. And so, without further adieu, I give you ‘THE ALGRAMATHER’ 


THE ALGRAMATHER 
By Flat-faced Snorbelgorf, All rights reserved 1972. 

‘The Algramather’ is the term given to the apocalyptic civilization-blight that occurred between the years Q.I.O. 11875 and Q.I.O. 9565. Long ago, there was a ‘today’. And what a ‘today’ it was! But not now. ‘Today’ no longer exists by any sense of the word. Now there is only detritus and diuretics. But residing within the filth of the present, a thin, oh so thin! vein of splendor which only really belongs in the distant past, hides. Her name is Luvicrin. In this moment, unfortunately, the majority of beings are so horrendous that one would wish they had never pictured them within their abruptly-agitated brain-works. Let us begin with the blood-raven: A dirty, foul-mouthed beast, it consumes only bone. However, it regurgitates, diurnally, expletives such as ‘Krock-chucker!’ And ‘splass-mazer!’ The passing ear is inevitably incensed by the vile verbiage. Then there is the Great Eraser. What a monstrosity by every definition of the word! It consumes love and any vestige of the emotion. Its output is fear. And what about the Queen of the Inveigled and Objurgated? We’ll get to her later. Let’s begin with that damned bird mentioned earlier.

The superannuated blood-raven and its beady red eyes tell of a million lifetimes of suffering. Nearly too old to work for its sustenance the raptor simply decays. It scavenges within the night-soil for the nutritious and delicious marrow and periosteum within the endoskeleton of vermin-vertebrates. Enough about the damn flying carnivore for now. Next: the people. People, but not people: Zombies. Just kidding. Once sanguine hearts are now defalcated and buried beneath the very same waste and clay that the blood-raven pokes its serrated beak into. Actually, the people that remain are like zombies for they no longer have the fire of purpose burning within them. Incessant trickles of chalky, lithium cyano-nitrate tears escape the melancholy eyes of humanity in this age of pain. 

There is an onlooker to the misery: the Great Eraser and its nothingface. It gazes forlornly with drooping lips of dread. It yearns to consume all adulation, affection and amity (although there is barely any of that left now-a-days). In return it will inexorably excrete the darkest of shadows. There is a sadness. The sadness is of emptiness. This can be characterized by the color ‘off-white,’ the letter ‘Q’ and the symbol of the dirk, a cruel Scottish dagger once used to usurp the life-thread of the beloved Duke of Chutney. A horrid anti-lambency slithers like torpid flames across the surface of the violated planet. Volcanic eruptions spew hot magma and suffocating ash into the atmosphere, obfuscating the little hope that escapes from the sun in the form of heat. 

It wasn’t always like this. There once was one who reigned over a kind of utopia with a clenched fist of tolerance. But a vision of supremacy crept into her mind that would not be titrated even by agápē. Then, very rapidly, all the bliss of civilization was methodically crushed into an insipid powder within her vice-like grip. Today, she is known as Gretchamel, AKA, Queen of the Inveigled and Objurgated. She was the accursed wench who siphoned all the love from the youth with the help of the nothingface. Before The Algramather, an earlier generation had her constrained by solidarity, yet she brewed up dissidence which teased-apart the vigilant eyes from the apathetic, and she escaped in the form of agony and despair. She became Destitution incarnate: the one that bends the will of the dastardly Great Eraser to do her bidding. 

She was also a cannibal. Every afternoon, at high-tea time, she would dip fleshy lips, ripped off her harvested slaves, into her scalding-hot Oolong Tea. They tasted better that way, much like an Oreo cookie would when dunked in milk. She had a penchant for babbling nonsense to her reflection. For this reason, she had mirrors set up everywhere. Along the cobblestone streets of Grouser and Hackbut there were at least 852 mirrors of all shapes and forms. They also facilitated in spying on her unhappy subjects. All in all, her actions snowballed into an avalanche of destruction, pestilence and pollution that carries itself into the now. 

To be continued… 


a/n: To read other ominous tales by Flat-faced Snorbelgorf click here

A justified Existence?

Will we allow ourselves to become decimated by the aftermath of a solitary finger? A finger that just can't seem to counteract its own weight while hovering over an ominous red button? In this avant-garde, self-stimulating civilization, there is this danger that we have created. Our own unforgiving, toxic death trap. A single finger can crush the meek and chop down the mighty from their pillars of elite-hood. 

The society of careless actions has it gaping jaws around our throats, and we drown in the retched pool of selfish existence. The thick scent of unrest burns our nostrils. The rotting remnants of wasted ideas thrive in the decay of humanity and intoxicate us with impunity. These are of our loins. Our blood, tainted by decades of greed and lust, coats our flesh with a thick film of regret. And shattered dreams rumble like thunder in our collective consciousness. 

However, we are not so foregone to realize the folly of our thoughtless actions. We see but we hardly care. We wallow in the apathy like swine heading to the holy abattoir of spent misgivings. Too dirty to do anything about our putrification, we shrug our shoulders and shutter our eyes and ears to reality. Some even effortlessly stab a man in the back because making a quick buck on the sly is easier than an hour of honest work. 

So that is our state: A sick form of Industrious activity choked by a repulsive ideology that says, 'me first, the needy neighbor last'. We need a radical enema of redaction where we are fresh to lift a helping hand to quench the fires stoked by our actions. If we are so quick to point a finger at the politicians feeding us lies, then we have failed to take a cold hard look into the mirror of hard conscience. If we looked, might it be self-evident that we are merely automatons going through the motions of that which many call living? We must do more than just pass the time, feeding, fighting and fornicating before the stamp of death is imprinted on our souls.

Fantastic Franny and her Insensitive Fanny

Franisca daintily begins to use her cosmic calculator to quantify her success at biblical bowling but then realizes that this offends the tough bacterium encapsulating her calculator, so she stops. Instead of struggling with the wretched device, she unclogs the factory tubes on schedule to perfect her flaky fudge cooling on the crystal furnace. 

She surgically removes a tendril of the sticky goo, two scoops per cubic meter, only to realize that the dark void in her fudge pots indicates a deficit of delicious snow crisps that she purposefully poured into her pot along with the fudge. What could have happened to her successful snow crisp concoction? 

Franisca fears she overlooked the surgical petal pumps that conjoin the furnace to the pots. Nevertheless, she decides to go get some more, so ever so deftly, she adorns her gargantuan goat gear and makes the trek to Rodnam Caroo -- home to the twitterbugs and jabberclasps pedalling their prize pumps made of porridge. 

Franny purchases two porridge pumps playfully flirting with twitterbug number two who advises her to purloin a third pump from the sightless jabberclasp. She does so then quickly proceeds to the local crank-rockets corner to be catapulted back to her fudge factory. PheZOOO! Off she explosively ejects from her seat, and funny, she lands her insensitive bottom within one of the larger fuming pots only to splatter her mash all over the porcelain floor. Economically-speaking her surplus of goo allows her to heartily chuckle at her landing error without so much of a scoff or a G-ffaw! 

Finally Franny unscrews her trick jaw and delightfully consumes a handful of goo --but alas! It still lacks the salty snowflake crisps! Therefore, she proceeds to make them mechanistically with the petal pumps back in place and with a brutal paperback face, she intensely stirs her fine fudge into meatloaf shapes in preparation for tomorrow evenings biblical bowling sua-re'. 

The Wicked Warhorse

The heavens are in flames. The sky is infused with a blood-red luminance. Charcoal-black strato-nimbus clouds float heavily across the ether. An ancient warhorse balances precariously on the point of an upright, mile-long rusted needle watching the earth and it's guilty inhabitants below. At the same time, it is poised and waiting eagerly to infect the infidels with its sick armory of death. The dusk's cruel, biting wind injects its nitrate breath into the mammoth contraption and an ominous groan escapes its deep bowels. Hanging from its bellicose belly, it carries a wicked wicker basket laced with the thorns from the highly poisonous xytheron plant. It utilizes this apparatus to effortlessly deliver to its calculating master the worked-on brains of its most-deserving victims. Having the ability to induce an inhumane form of mental vivisection, the monstrous machine extracts fresh confessions from its captured prey. It spreads these wretched winnowing voices over its its cold, steel hide like rancid butter over three-day-old burnt toast: the pumpernickel variety. It pumps visceral slavery like a nine-nickel bullet point ejected from a spent chamber of an Italian-issued Beretta blue-band pistol.

This beast of death has jaws. The heavy lacerating jaws of the Great White shark. Only difference is that its jagged teeth are made of heat-treated titanium. A cobalt-irridium core lines its thick black enamel. Gums as ugly and vile as masticated tar form a tortuous seal around its gaping mouth.

The warhorse is a mind-melting machine of a magnitude much greater than the angriest of earthquakes. Currently it is processing nightmares for the forlorn. Faster than the blink of an eye, its circuitry fires up the enslaved cerebral tissue to a deep-fried supersonic roast. Only the spent crust of human brain anatomy remains: a withered hippocampus, a wilted caudate nucleus and a schism where a festered corpus callosum once was.

Nothing escapes its icy, telescopic foresight. It penetrates the immediate future like a constipated syringe to the left ventricle of the heart of a blind cyclops. However, it has enemies. As protons are pushed over the event horizon as exhaust, little children rise up like pop-tarts to battle its bulge. A big booming bulge built hell-high on its bloated back. Brick for brick, it is one bad mother! Accordingly, babies babbling incessantly bake for weeks in its built-in bread-basket. But first it lulls them into a deep sleep. Deeper than the darkest bathypelagic vortex of primordial ooze, it ferments the babies into a cerebral mud of sorts. This is the glue for integrating spent brain tissue into terror tantrum injections: a going-away gift to The Incriminated after collective-conscience processing.

Nothing but the maniacal mayhem of the children can ever hope to infiltrate the workings of the warhorse. Babies and the blasted souls of sinners are one thing but children are another. They are the bane of the beast. May the children never conquer the demonic inquisitor for all time. It's what I, the comptroller, pray for as I don my iron wool-knit socks every morning over my cankerous claws-for-feet. Come, my wonderful warhorse. Let us harvest!

The Life-cycle of a Rose

Never beyond the horizon we saw what was there for us:
an amalgam of lightning crystals and the fumes of preconceived hopes.
My best friend, Destiny, desired the fall, but I could only guarantee the vernal equinox against her imploring, smiling eyes. They were like the future. Time, dragged by the riptides of some restless, oceanic spirit, let her body embrace the starfish on the sand as we lay beneath a dripping watermelon. We lazily lapped the perspiration of the sun. 

The lips parted like golden butter yielding to a blade. We bade the resistance adieu. We knew that we would be carried away someday by His gentle hands. Waiting is effortless to a rose. Not just any flora we adore, for seven epochs prophesized the existence of reality in radical bloom. 

Trade in the material for the ethereal, my dear friend. Lest you be cast aside in the chilled shadows of matter. The superfluous energy fields of the idle, radiate with the dull intensity of those X-rays originating from the viscosity-pockets of the Milky-Way. 

Murky, quaint, cute, her face and porcelain teeth bequeathed the aspirates and labials of language to my discretion. Like an astronaut held by the throes of the moon, words were subject to my deft manipulation. All the while, heaven was on her galactic mind. 

It makes sense that all this should come from the far left. The right model will summarize any quandary of the heart as it had for me. Volumes of pedagogy instruct us to follow the information freeway of linear thought. I brought disparity into reason. 

She kept me grounded. 

Unfounded colloquialism rends the schism of the mundane and the mystery of living. As they take and take, I’ll maintain my giving until tomorrow forces redirection. But you, my dear friend, will never be carried in afterthought. To truly understand the reason for this Earth appearance, one must gently part the fog that coats the density of guarded inhibition. Time to be like children. Reach for my hand. I’ll journey with your trust along the horizon until we finish what was started at the entrance of our conception.

The Brain-Sun Moratorium

The dying sun, colliding with the killing horizon, sets the scene. A mechanical freeze-frame device, mounted at the apex of the Brain-Sun Court-Coliseum takes a snapshot of the hexadecimal photon diffraction. An electro-static, Aurora Borealis event ensues with viridian plasma chips flung skyward. It's visually pulchritudinous. 

Beginnings: the breaking glass sounds of ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ resonate in tune to the antidisestablishmentarianism of the court, dispelling the unusual beauty of nature's fomentation. The fusion-parallax universe of conformity, reigns supreme here. The insignificant minds dissolve; acquiesce to the might of the multitude. Manifestations ofthought-fumes, scattered by the strong nuclear force originating from the gelatinous sulci and gyri of the cerebrum, work in His favor -- He, the god that failed. 

Queen Envy invokes the conduct-biopsy of Prince Reginald. Will it be 69-sublime, divine castigation for the hellion? The mood is deep mauve. The ambient milieu of unrest ejected from the sun, envelopes what is, into an aeon-augmented pope-head bipartisan statement. Polemic, controversial, civil relapse collapses into the blackbox of the bellicose chain-violating brain. He whelps, "help!" Only deaf ears feign listening, making better as echo-receptacles than input-propagation feedback responders.

He is admonished and left in embarrassment, the sheen on his cheeks glows ripe like the spring plum. However, recant, he can't. His pitiful elocution would smell of heretic hearsay. His verbal lexicon, once as potent as neuron-thunderstorms, fails him as it is reduced to scattered chatter. The chosen scion could be banished into the blinking blind-eyed hurricane of Trion. 

Sentence should be issued. 

Were the brain-sun finally to explode, it would do so with zero remorse for the young God. But imperial judgment has been deferred. He must have come from the corner of somewhere. Yes, His birth began from no end: a brain-sun nightmare that, like dreams, lacks origin.

However, he is blown along by the acerbic breath of Queen Mother Judge- Jury-Executioner as autumn foliage. After all, he does deserve merit for his sacred existence. And so, his ultimate outcome is put on ice. Meanwhile, the thermonuclear space-bunnies of his belly are consumed by the ultra-saturated dark matter of night as the day for the Brain-Sun reaches its terminal point. 

The Midnight Dreamers

At dusk the darkness creeps across the destitute canvas of the sickly sky like phantom fingers. The dreamers hold their breath as the dying rays of the incensed orb rapidly fade. Time punctuates every throbbing heart in this era of dread and the chaos of imagination rumbles like thunder in every mind. The children in bed cover their heads with sheets of lead. The cancerous x-rays cascade down from the ionosphere as the last light lingers, but their poisonous tentacles fail to penetrate the cold, heavy blankets tightly wrapped around the younglings. At least they can dream. In a brief reprieve from the sea of misery, their thoughts gently roll amongst fluffy marshmallows for clouds and interlacing rainbows floating in a vibrant stretch of blue. The curiosities of the kids rapidly lead them to beyond the golden horizon and into a world diametrically opposite from their own. There is no poverty of happiness in the direction that they venture toward.

During the daytime, it is a different story altogether. A great sadness deeply saturates the skin of the waking populace, trudging along like zombies from shack to factory, factory to shack, over and over again. There is immense poverty here but also sequestered wealth. At the end days of an industrial revolution, the laborers are merely a step beyond an existence of dismal slavery. There is no savings to look forward to. Only mind-numbing repetition day in and day out. The adults are no longer able to dream. The governing party has driven the populace with an iron fist and dark deception is in abundance of what really happened to cause the sudden and irreversible decay of Earth. The planet's manganese core now emits deadly radiation as the ozone dangles like cob-webs against the thick, polluted atmosphere.

The only hope lies in the minds of the children. They are the future cosmonauts. They will guide humanity out of the misery and into a new dawn. But not on this planet. It's a lost cause for poor, wasted Mother Earth. No, the children's scion will find shelter on the quartz-encrusted heloid satellite of Jupiter, called Ganymede. Of course, they would have to come up with a way of transporting the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of remaining ocean water of Earth to their new home if they hoped to survive. But survive they would.

The years melt into decades, and then the kids who are no longer children, revolt, and overthrow the oppressive reign of tyrannical rule. A century roles on by and now the kids have developed the appropriate technology to escape from the toxic inferno that has become the planet they deem 'wEarthless.' They cast aside their lead-lined blankets and depart in there floating cities to begin their 26 year journey to Jupiter’s largest moon. For the first time, they find themselves as extraterrestrials sleeping in warm beds with soft, soporific pillows and sheets. They resume their dreaming at night. No longer are their dreams fantasies, but instead, they take the form of ideas and hopes that will help them bring in the dawn of a new age.

Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX

THE toxic smoke emitted from the devil pit suffocates the pallid light of the infernal hydrogen orb. It peers down with its billion blinding eyes from a hazy vermillion canvas. The shadows become ever more menacing as they elongate with the departure of the sun. Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX pries open his sustenance chamber with his warped claws for hands. The eroded enamel of his jagged teeth appears as cutting devices that some hell-bent assassin might use. The rusty colors of essential fluids cake the bicuspids of his maxilla. If this was his smile, I would hate to see his sneer. 

The burnt floor beneath us shifts under cataclysmic seismic pressures and my feet lose purchase from the wasted earth. Vadlinger IX callously reaches out to envelope me with his many oaken arms and legs on my inevitable return-trip. Then I’m tossed like yesterday’s trash into an ancient midnight-black oblong box. My skull cracks on impact and Sir Homunculus escapes using his tiny malformed legs. I endure a sharp negative 82g free-fall into the devil pit as Vadlinger IX’s heaving belly rhythmically moves in tune to the horrendous cackle of delight, brought on by my timely demise.

In the grey-goose universe of banal bourgeois, I was one of the most maverick of semi-sentient beings. My hallucinogenic and vicarious re-creations of what never was, seemed to pervade my marginally-mundane mind-machinations. For this reason, I was now here: within a Stone Mason’s coffin, with a cracked cranium, and catapulted by Dr. Shagra to beyond the event horizon of the devil pit. There would be no reversal to this fate. No second chances or slow romances neither. I was down for the count and in it for the long haul to do Hades dirty-work.

Iris (part 2)

Iris (part 1) - Click to view


Chapter 5

Time: June 20, 2000

Location: 10 00 N, 49 00 E

The raging riptide sucks them deep into the gaping bowels of the Indian Ocean. Neither Adisa nor Aamir are alarmed, however, for they have prepared for this. They know that the tepid but turbulent water off the coast of Somalia, right outside the city limits of Mogadishu, has a mind of its own. They were, relatively-speaking, safe for they carried with them the most advanced SCUBA equipment the United Nations Aquatic Committee for Free Waters could supply them. What brought them here? What was there latest assignment? This information is at the moment classified, so we find ourselves in the dark. Nonetheless, what we do know is that the two highly-trained Indian Operatives would soon be up to their knees in elephant excrement, figuratively speaking. Yet, the couple was willing to involve themselves in such an affair for it would aid in the liberation of a throng of oppressed Somalians.

For the Somali people, this is a time of dire straights. There is rampant political upheaval and continual famine. The average life expectancy is at the all-time low of 47.3 years. Many are left homeless after the calloused heads of the parliamentary federal government last year decided to leverage Somali housing against acquisition of new technologies to extract uranium beneath the ocean surface. The youth are screened after they are given three years of education beyond elementary school. Those that possess the desired attributes are unceremoniously extracted from society and are relocated into the deep-ocean mining institutes located at the political nexus of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. Their training is long and exacting but their incentive for success is great. They are promised that after matriculation and 7 years of indentured service to the government-sanctioned corporation, that their families would be immediately financially-taken-care-of. Those in the ‘know’, aptly name the current government administration ‘Jamhuuriyada Demuqraadiga Soomaaliyeed,’ or ‘Reapers of the Withered Harvest’. But the laborers do what they are trained to do, and they do it well. The net result is that the underwater mountain ranges jutting out of the Indian Ocean’s bathypelagic zone are, in an ongoing basis, purged of its vast quantities of uranium, a.k.a., ‘yellow-cake’, a.k.a, ‘radioactive melt-down sludge’.

Now, as the intrepid couple, Adisa and Aamir find themselves swallowed alive by the ocean, they are preoccupied communicating with each other via their nav-com microphones surgically implanted within one of their molars. On the receiving-end of Adisa’s micro-speakers, implanted in the ancus of her inner ears, she listens to the gentle boo-makudas of her husband. Aamir knows that this lovely Portugese humming pacifies her and keeps her calm at even the most precarious of times, so he never forgets to do so when each mission commences.  “I love you with all my soul,” she coos back.

“We have approximately a half-nautical mile to the Daphshan Ridge and the entrance to the mine,” Aamir tells his pulchritudinous, ultraviolet-eyed wife. Have your thunder-trident ready, darling. Thunder-tridents are depth-charge electron sabers that make use of the increased pressure that builds the deeper in the water one is.  Thus, as an underwater law enforcement ‘nightstick’ of sorts, it is quite effective when used against the skulls of unruly aquatic miners.  Aamir beseeched his god-father Dionysus, via a quick prayer under his breath, that they would not be forced to use their weapons.

Although he possessed a naturally-austere countenance, he was a gentle and compassionate Hindustani at heart. It was for this reason, primarily, that Aamir had found an entrance into Adisa’s heart. From an early age, his Greek father and Gujarati mother taught him to observe both the peacefulness and power that nature could harness. Aamir’s parents owned a little dairy farm where goat’s milk was either collected for personal consumption, or sold to neighbors. He would play with the goats with full affection towards them, and from the goats he learned the concept of innocence. On the other hand, in his gut he had felt the raw surge of violence that Mother Nature would muster on occasion. He had witnessed the destruction of villages and forests alike due to the passing of lightning storms and Class-5 hurricanes. These, he assumed, were the karmic consequence of a lecherous collective consciousness belonging to a nation, or nations, of pleasure-seeking, money-hungry ogres. As he gazed into the eye of Hurricane Gertrude at 1530 on January 16, 1973, an epiphany dawned on him that his life’s purpose was to provide the impetus for a quantum shift in reality for all of humanity. Of course, he would also preoccupy himself with the more mundane of activities such as peace-keeping missions such as the one he was on now.  He did find time to have some semblance of a leisure life, however, and in these free periods he would give his interpretations of Aborigine art through song and dance alongside Adisa. Of her, he had had a premonition that he would meet someone so special that their union would not be subject to the laws of space and time.  And so it was not.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Sally, the sparrow

Ashen grey, the old sparrow spreads her wings and releases the gnarled sycamore branch from which she is perched upon. Airborne, she struggles to rise higher. Finally, she catches a zephyr and gradually floats beyond the silken stratus clouds above the tired Rocky mountains. She sees with wizened eyes a vast landscape of lush greens and muddied browns, home to her ancestors. Old nests cling wistfully to the treetops. Years ago, when she was young she would warble an enchanted tune to elevate the spirits of her flock. Now the old bird has difficulty producing so much as a gentle squock. Yet she flies onward into the blue in search for her final resting place by the sea. 


Dedictated to Sally -
We will miss you

Bridging Sanity with a capital E

Sitting restlessly at the edge of sanity, I stare down the precipice with a hot earthen mug of Folgers coffee in my sweaty palms. My feet just hang there, listless, waiting for the flames to rise out of the gorge and consume my eternal soul. I carefully raise my cup 'o joe up to my muzzle and take a long sniff of the pungent brew. Hints of raspberry, cardamom and white truffle waft up into my inflated nostrils. At that moment, I let out a horrendous cackle! Midnight black vampire bats are startled from their inverted comatose state and with a swoosh, they fly away into the moon's mischievous face. I wonder where I was, where I am, who I am? Why does my head smell like roast pumpkin and beetroot? No time to ponder these nuanced thoughts anyhow. My hind limbs reach out from the crimson red pool of rhubarb soup I'm bathing in and provide my rostrum with a vigorous scratch only to be matched by the fiefdom of Carlighel and the duke's spotted antelope lover. I think to my other self that I must have left the oven on because my lower vertebrae are beginning to feel warm as stewed turnips. Boy George! I can't seem to get the saucy ideas of delightful delicacies out of my crowded cranium! Did I eat after I took the mayor's dog to the carwash? What if it rains tomorrow, and my underpants have not been fully baked? I put them into the oven only 20 minutes ago. Surely they will be done by yesterday's winter solstice! I hock up a ball of fur and this I mat out into a pleasant toupee. Plop! It fits perfectly over my pumpkin head. Sigh! Where did I leave my reason and rationale? Could have been in the bowling alley that I went to two weeks from today.

Guilty!

Hidden inside your conscience resides a dangerous and persuasive voice. The mind can bury it and pretend that there is freedom but the truth is that your Id is trapped screaming to break free from mental chains long placed upon it by self-control. This voice whispers to you ever so convincingly, "indulge! Act on all your forbidden desires!" Your attempts at ignoring the sound of your own weakness are futile and what little self-restraint diminishes to zero.

You spasm and touch! And taste! Lips traveling with a ravishing fury over soft, warm flesh. Like a beast set loose from its cage you explore every crevice with a rasping tongue. The signals in your brain are exploding with a million different sensations as tantalizing yearnings crawl within you. Let this be your moment of disinhibition. Your moment of forbidden ecstasy. For at every other point in your restrained life you will be captured by your longing rather than any actions you can actualize.

So you have sinned. So you have been tainted by an urging so profound to manifest as impulsive and sacrilegious. You are now sated and wasted. Spent. Facing the consequences of actions deemed unacceptable by society, you await the inevitable.

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A moment alone with her

I look at the fluffy white sheep grazing within the azure-melting-into-indigo sky and begin to question my mortality. I would like to be with her for all eternity. Naturally, I desire that we live until time's end. My Chilean wife, mother of my future children and my beautiful partner, lies next to me on the cool blades of grass beneath our backs. The warm breeze whispers their questions in our ears as we ponder existence. Why do I love her? Our relationship has demonstrated to me a thousand reasons why. Her heart beats for me and I for her. She lets me know this every day by the way she laughs at all the silly things that I say. 

Does life have much meaning without her? No. It would be insipid.

What set the gears of fate in motion when we met? Time places no weight on my shoulders while we're here dreaming together, fingers intertwined while resting on the grass. We will be together forever, I think to myself as this thought gently turns the tips of my lips towards my forehead. What of the beginning or the end? I conclude that their is neither in this timeless stretch of tranquility. The buttery sun spreads its rays across the horizon as day turns to twilight, yet still we remain feeling the zephyrs dance through the locks of our hair. There is no place I'd rather be, here beneath the early crescent glow of the moon. Seemingly, he winks at me as if sharing our secret happiness. 
Yet, its not a mystery to any of our friends or family. They saw it coming, the way we flirted with each other when we first met. Sure, I was a bit crazy with my thoughts of Buddha and solving the world's problems, but I was also crazy for her. 

My memories stretch back years to when we first met in the Spanish club. I was working on a Ph.D in psychology in the University of Otago in New Zealand and she was having fun traveling the country and learning the difficult language that is English. While we had our quarrels, none were long-lasting, and all were mild. Something just clicked between us that continues into today. Maybe our common culture, or the way we share the joke about loving life, but hating people. I don't really know for sure, but something told me that since we could often tell what each other was thinking, we were meant to share a life together. I will love her until the sun supernovas.

~Albereez

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Cardboard Universe

We took a long walk one gloomy September afternoon and we became lost. We ambled through a vast garden of wasted cardboard boxes A land of grays and brown hues. Various shapes and sizes of corrugated board flooded our sights and all that could be seen for miles were these small shanties of solitude. The sky was clouded over. A thick haze that seemed to blend in with the surroundings was all that one could observe above and beyond. Why we were here, you and I, was a mystery for it all seemed so unreal. Not another human around in this desolate garden of human refuse but ourselves.

The more we ambulated, the further we were from somewhere. For we moved on legs of string-cheese; wobbly at the knees. Left and right were non-different from forward and backwards and no matter in what direction we turned, we saw the same dreary scene. But we had each other and this was enough to cut through our stark decrepitude. Yet we were all alone. Together but alone, and a cold wind scrapped us to the bone.

I tried to speak but my mouth was sewed tightly shut so my silent screams only resonated within my skull. Yet you could understand my apparent distress. You gently squeezed my hand with a warmth to counteract the biting cold that I felt.  We were in the damnedest of dreams but if not for you, my sweet friend, I would find myself in not a dream but a nightmare.

He, unto himself

His mind is a diamond, the brain, soaking up information like a sponge. He asks God daily for strength to maintain a clear conscience. He sharpens his razor-edge life every morning with prayer and resolve. The straight and narrow is his mode of being. Impure thoughts long faded away. 

Thought control. 
Why? 
For power over self. 

Challenging his animal nature, he somehow manages to win time after time. Every night before bed he tells himself to focus his dreams, a mirror image of the path he takes during the day. This man learns as he sleeps and keeps the demons of capriciousness at bay. 

Always.
These attributes don't squelch his imagination, however. 
His creativity fuels him.

He sees the beauty of God within everything. These things inspire. He challenges himself to think higher, beyond the mundane. There is a spark of life inside of him that turns all his words into fire. Instantaneous combustion of ego sublimating raw essence of being. To exist is far from enough. No, he enjoys experiencing the future as he travels through the present, three steps ahead of the past. With a quiet mind, his actions and the movements of thought are quick, incredibly quick, and light, without the weight of guilt. There is a place within the depth of his heart that is so incredibly strong. It allows him to ask the question, ‘Why?’ without becoming perplexed.

All these ideas, revelations, envelope him. Yet, it is his love for life experiences that really keeps him moving forward.

A final drag off the cancer stick

Nicotine permeates everything he wears. Hot ash burns a hole in his lungs. One last drag off his filthy fag and he's a mummification in progress. His hair is already falling out in gray matted clumps yet he heeds not the warnings plastered on the carton of his toxic cancer sticks. Not long back, twenty tar-stained teeth hung loosely from his rusted jaw, but that was then. This unfortunately was the day his jowls would complete their rotting from the inside out. His blackened breathing apparatus strains under 3 millimeters of plaque-lined pulmonary tissue. He nurses his addiction without realizing that he is 10 hours short of a led-lined coffin. Nonetheless, his blood-shot eyes register a strange finality of living as he sighs his last breath. 

Ages ago, he was radiant. His piercing blue eyes shined with mystery and reflected profound thinking. Woman's heads would turn in his direction as if pulled by some unknown force of attraction. Magnetism could not have been stronger. However, he took a wrong turn when the tobacco industry set their talons deep into his healthy heart. He became a crippled man: a short straw lit up by an unforgiving butane torch. With his first puff, he began a dangerous hobby that would see him to his grave. Every day he took five step's, when others merely took one, towards death's dark doors. He was intelligent. But not enough to realize that smoking would prematurely kill him and destroy his life. 

RIP 1956 - 2010
Mathew Ackerson
Big Tobacco Sales Associate