Maybe You’ve Heard This One Before…

Tags

#rants #nonsense #streamofconscious #songlyrics #remixes #borrowedwords

The Pilgrims came in waves. Were these the same three ships I saw on Christmas Day in the morning? I know how you do the who do that you do when you do… Really, you make me want to ________. No. You don’t. But that’s okay. ‘Cause I did my best. And my best wasn’t good enough. Sometimes its feels like we’re islands in the stream. But we rely on each other. Am I right? Right-right, bloody-well right. I want to be just another brick in the wall as long as that wall stands between u.s. and Mexico. This is cheeseburgers-in-paradise-next-level shit right here. Right now. There is no other place I’d rather be. I’d offer to make a little birdhouse in your soul, but I know you’d think it just another dirty deed done dirt cheap. It’s true, you don’t bring me flowers anymore, which is pretty much why I dubbed thee unforgiven. 9-1-1 may not be a joke in your town, but you’ve still got to get up and get-get down every day. Alas, we could have rediscovered the wonders of nature rolling in the rushes had not the river dried up last season leaving my empire of dirt. As they sing every time it’s re-aired: So long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Good night.

Tags

21st century, experience, life, meaning, society, we all shine on

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

– John Berger

The Herdling

Tags

fiction, language, lost in space, missed spellings, space, spelling errors

JT Conway, Payload Commander, saluted me formally just prior to severing the tether that had anchored me to the space station. It starts as a drifting away but soon I’ll be herdling through– Wait. Herdling? That’s not right. Soon I’ll be hurdling through space. Shit. That would be like slow motion leaps over a series of small meteors coming at me. I’m like an interstellar track star. But the oxygen in my suit is malfunctioning. I’m struggling for air. A darkening vignette creeps in from the edges of my vision. The next meteor is there already. I’ve misjudged it. My front foot clears it by a few centimeters. My back foot catches and I begin to cartwheel. An already meaningless down switching places with up as starlight specks blur into celestial arcs. Rate of rotation increasing. A moment before I black out I think: Now. Now I am hurtling.

Tags

appearances, artifice, simulacrum

He was not really as rich as he pretended, and many of the artifacts about the living room were fakes. Each time he offered fruit to a visitor he took a calculated risk. …Someday, he thought, and not too far off, the fruit in the bowl would be real.

– Philip K. Dick, “The Unreconstructed M”

Amidst the Multitudes

Tags

crowds, isolation, loneliness, poetry, strangers, theresultsoflowbloodsugar

loneliness amplified

by the proximity and

quantity of strangers;

strangely reflected

back by unwelcoming

pupils, bouncing off

skeletons couched

in skins that don’t

hug, shake hands,

hi-five…

not lives of quiet

desperation, more

grazing in parallel

upon denuded

spiritual past chores

 

Tags

goodwill, government, honesty, politics, society, trust

There’s nobody here who has anything to do with governments! We’re all good people!

– Philip K. Dick, “The Last of the Masters”

A Flat Future

Tags

science fiction, scifi, smart devices, technology, tethered, the future, wired

Near catastrophe looks a lot like the everyday. Were we privy to the infinite close-calls and lethal near-misses we might be paralyzed by fear. And so it was not until 2042 that we Earthlings discovered just how close we came to invasion. One that would have enslaved us to a most ruthless overseer. In hindsight, we can chuckle at our good fortune. While the larger data transmission is still being translated and analyzed, a couple recently deciphered work papers of reconnaissance agent WWK-2r shed some light…

[WWK-2r FIELD REPORT ^*… EARTH YEAR 2013…
All local leaders identified. Moderate mammalian intelligence levels. Substandard technologies and defenses. Previous recommendation to initiate planetary colonization rescinded. Hold orbit 5 rotations. Further study of alpha class species required.]

[WWK-2r FIELD REPORT ^’… EARTH YEAR 2013…
Previous hierarchy assessment modified: Bipedal species appears to be second in command. Subservient to class of beings made of metal and glass. Alpha beings use bipeds for transport, power supply, and breeding. Control maintained through simple system of light flashes and tonal variations. Denuded bipeds in rock biomes stop in mid action to pet, talk to, or power alphas. Massive resources directed to alpha breeding and custom fit electrical grid maintained for life of alphas. Alphas vary slightly in size. Rectilinear outline with scant depth. Appear to have no appendages. Bipeds serve as pack mules. Majority of bipedal wake cycle devoted to flat alphas. Symbiotic relationship unknown.]

Scientists at the International Googlex Labs report that held-orbit resulted in a meteor impact of commensurate size and destruction wiping out what many believe to be the only class A PKD-Recon ship ever to appear in our galaxy. Field reports were logged in ship’s data fields but transmission to the central unit never breached beyond our solar system as far as current diagnostics reveal.

Tags

isolation, loneliness

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

– Ben Greenman, What He’s Poised to Do

Metrical Isotopes

Tags

bonds, chemistry, form, freeverse, language, life's building blocks, meter, poetry, wordplay

Poetic forms and meter..
like naming chemical

compounds…
Elusive. Foreign. A grid
placed over organic
living tissue.
Life’s building blocks
architecturally pigeonholed.
I screaming sonnets
whose bonds

-ous or -ide into
explosive reactions,
self-immolatingly aglow.
Ionic covalence joined
by pentametrical substructures.
Microscopic spaces

between Language–

weak forces barely
supporting a comma’s weight.

The unavoidable constant
of an eternal void.