Tales from the Apocalypse - in the air

The Cheyenne speak of Wolf Star, sent to steal the whirlwind bag that contains 'The Storm that comes from the West' and now as their thin dreams cover the dank, turpentine forest they prop the body of the late General George Armstrong Custer beside the sparking kindle of yet one more arid camp-site fire.

The magic telephone is placed beside the cadaver and they wait..

and wait…

and wait…..

until at last it rings.

'George, is that you …. ?'

In a white Zen arcade somewhere back of Dealey Plaza a clown dons the ceremonial leather head of a tooth-studded wolverine. He picks up a telephone and dials whilst a skeletal crew, bowed and oiled, clanks past in chains, cutting out an easy path through the forest.

The Cheyenne have gathered to dream. They breathe out. A thousand years fly in peyote nightmares of a dancing clown-head storm. They breathe in and a calling telephone rings.

'George .. is that you???!!!!!!'

Then Wolf Star comes, frozen above them. Lupine and sharp-toothed, her flanks still glistening, she is caught in the air. Hanging, on the line.

We watch as their reverie dissolves, spitting smouldering ashes and a wasted bakelite handset in its wake.

'George, is that you …………………………'

There is no sense he is hearing any of this.

Polaroid dream

Their feckless razors cut mean red slits through the night. We sleep so restlessly, tossing and turning as the door knocks time and time again.  Somewhere a disconnected telephone rings and we pick up the receiver to hear the voice of the late General George Armstrong call.  He chants the number 6 …

… and the nightmare 

pads

into

the

room

dressed

in

the

thin-veined

moebius loop

of

mr

wolf

Lycanthrope scratchings, rabid at the door with the voice of General George repeating his chant in time to the background.  Some sweet smelling flowers of romance to lay his grave by ...

number 6

number 6

...

The last stand of the late General George Armstrong Custer

They're circling now ... we shot the last of the horses as a bulwark and now he's at the centre with the severed chord of a dial-up telephone dangling and disconnected before his very fair visage.

This is Custer in dream and we are the young men reading the story of the last stand whilst the Lakota and Cheyenne ride out from the pages of  'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee'.  There, look! The gatling guns are long behind us now and no sign of help to hand.  Just an endless William S Burroughs cut-up dub that reaches a finger into the dial of the disconnected telephone and pulls it around and around.

The bell rings …

A blue-gloved hand that shoos us away in the sweating heat-filled dusty afternoon of long-reach copse. Shooting bullets senselessly into the flies, pooled and limpid in a nightmare visitation of a telephone that rings and rings and rings …

He dare not answer it for fear of failing.

The Lakota Cheyenne rise hot tail-feathers up and plunge deep to the ranks of serried and terrified cavalrymen who have now surrendered all hope of ever seeing wives and children and loved ones ever again. Why won't Custer just answer the 'phone?

He is lost and forever at the potential crossing point on the Chickahominy River where his dream splits in three and dust-choked soldiers scurry to keep pace. Flanks exposed they whither and die in the relentless fusillade. This is not going well, but the late General George Armstrong Custer is baptised in cinnamon-scented hair oil.

A disconnected telephone rings across the battle-field of Little Big Horn.

There is no-one to answer for two bullets have penetrated the now lifeless form of our hero, struck down from the saddle by the blows of Buffalo Calf Road Woman. 

He stands …. no more.