Stories from the apocalypse - the dreaming

 

the entry to his dream lies beneath the billowing windswept tufts of a thousand hissing devil-point thistles...

 

...that blot out the bold red sky and sinking low to the pits of an ancient seeping stomach, a familiar place, blurred and distant in his mind. Where is it?  He scratches his head and looks round for clues.

 'White'. What might that mean? The thistles continue to fall in sharp shards, cutting his head open to the elements and the sky and the sinking sun seeping blood red to the lobes of a distant memory that crawls in cawl-skeined flight...

 ...where he remembers the brief presage of a rainbow cloud before it too sinks into the fire bush and awaits the staked claims of the vultures. That's how the ancients pass to the next realm. He remembers now,

he remembers

staked to the ground...

... and how they heap cold tiles to his cadaver, scales and feathers, dust and bones to the long night of passage...

.. and the shaft of light blinds between the trees and soft mossy places where once he danced young and proud to his maiden-headed joy

.. and still it comes flooding in rich arced jetting spumes through the thistles and blood red pulsing in his head...

.. to a silent Amish barn and the sad hangings of dusty hessian within which a gun scythes the crying children thistle-tipped to the ground.

...and they are nailed in feathers and glue to the circling birds that descend

on this joyous fecund seed bed as these images flash for one last time...

 

... into dream

and wonder

and

silence

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.

Tales from the Apocalypse - the wolf's eyelashes

He watched her like an animal - lycanthrope howls, needled and cooking up some fine free-base sun in the early hours.  He pined for her.

Every stretch, every shallow, sullen yawn as the hours broke across the top of yet one more turpentine forest morning.  There were saws coming this way, chained and skeletal chanting, easing down the trees in a line of least resistance. The startling flower in some dark, foreign soil that called this fresh field holler…

'Just like a tree, planted by the waters, I shall not be moved.'

Yet he was circling her, scratching out the ground in deep longing. He watched them pass and she danced like fine-spun dew as the skeletal chorus chanted …

'I'm choppin' in this bottom with a hundred years,

Tree fall on me, I don't bit mo' care.'

He marked his territory carefully, claw-cut patterns sundered in the bark, repeating the colour of the glistening flanks he would deem possess.  The feral perfume traces still lingered in his nostrils, musky beckoning.

The skeletal party now no more than the dying echoes of raddled chain in an oily, mosquito haze, he advanced. She was there, sunning as he pounced, pinned to the warming mossed ground. Flying fur and bloodshot eyes roiling under the lashes. She was taken, howling.

Tales from the Apocalypse - Marilyn, JFK and the Sugarman

Marilyn is shot

She is such sweet billowing sugar, spun up in a frothy white dress and spread wide across the street fall gutter-grating.  They wait in darkness beneath, scarce daring to breathe as they rub, jowl by jowl, and then ...

Hot air shoots up into her white-pantied crotch and the camera-man swirls around and around capturing each billowing fold in a 'snap-snap-tatta-rat' shutter-bark that chases back the mongrels to their subterranean lair.

"Paws off, paws off … "

His boot slams down as the last of the fleeing curs disappears howling from the grate, nursing deep bruised tissue.

Marilyn is shot.

Motorcade

It's forever 22cnd November 1963.

A white zen arcade where the films spool endlessly in a series of celluloid mobius loops, one-sided and one-surfaced, as shots ring out and we cut-away to a grassy knoll, a blurred pyracantha tree and the Texas School Book Depository Building where a red-wigged clown draws semi-circled eyebrows and men in dark coats rush hither and thither as small pieces of JFK's brain and skull scud across Dealey Plaza.

They are projected.

A pool of light

I find myself of late stalking the silent world that exists between normality and waking, strapped to the dead images of Marilyn and JFK as they embrace.  They want so much to be alone together.

I watch as two bullets enter and kick back, dissolving into the easy laughter of, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" amidst a restless flow of discarded brain tissue and breast-milk micro-calcifications.  This is their place of living where no pause for relentless thought exists. And I watch, enraptured and mindless at my study, haloed by the flickering backlit screen which etches yet more cold neon tracers into my dilated pupils as my mouse clicks play once more.

Look see!

Marilyn sips champagne in the cold-crusted air of a Santa Monica evening beach warmed by a thick, woollen Icelandic cardigan.  Then off it comes and she's draped in a moss-damp muted green beach towel as George Barris circles looking for the angles.  The sun beams and pops across Marilyn's body, glowing pink and ripe as shards of bleached blonde hair wrap her face.

''Snap-snap-tatta-rat' and Marilyn is shot one last time.

The President looks on impassively, staunched and winched into position so the impromptu tracheotomy can bleed the last of the bullets from his raddled body, a neck-braced stigmata from which no air now passes.

It's a wrap and Marilyn heads for the rock-pool.  I follow, uneasily, in her footsteps.

The watching

To this place it is we come in uneasy footsteps faint heart spits bullets and champagne discarded towels she is looking at me through the screen I am seeing a rock-pool she is casting neon traces running through my pupils as her hand-maidens administer the touch of grace deep kohl eyes that throb and roil the dead President is propped alone in his thoughts I see more she sees me she beckons me onto reefers in the discarded filmy sand where sweet soft sunlight surfs the waves disrobing the towel dropping in my study

and watching ……

I should not have looked.

Sugarman runs

She beckons him forward to the edge of the screen and reaches out, hands him the antlers. He dons them like a crown. She passes him the coat of many sugar-bags, each dripping sweetness and he dons it. She withdraws and the screen goes cold, blue … dead.

Smiling Marilyn.

The weight of sweetness now strapped to his recumbent, studied body, she releases the formicary of ants, bold and emblazoned. In search of sweet stinging pleasures as the dead President stands propped by the rock pool where Marilyn is disrobed. Leaning forward to touch the screen as they hunt him down.

The ants march relentlessly toward his neon-tattooed eyes.

And Sugarman runs and runs and runs …. to the alms of a silent zen-white arcade, wherein lies his end, punctured by a thousand, thousand pin-dot hunters.

Stop, look, listen … the voice of electrofried

For those who braved the latest in 'Tales from the Apocalypse' here's the spoken version …

Happy listening!

electrofried(mr)

Tales from the Apocalypse .. stop, look, listen

A big smile cracks open his face as the wind sears hot-jets steaming past.

"We're on the way, baby!"

The vintage grey Suzuki Hayabusa pans metal to the road.  It smears rubber-scorched tarmac and he flies helmeted toward the city with the film safe in camera. What an affair! It's sure to make his fortune, easy as cutting open a Chinese New Year cookie.

The sun burns deep scars to the the motorway while she waits patiently for him to arrive at the very end of the road.  Stretched taut and thinking of those photos, pin-cushioned.  Oh yes, she's waiting! She's just waiting for you, baby.

It was a hot, torrid night, tossing and turning against the dying embers of the day.  She squeezed fresh lemon into the cusp of the glass and pulled faces.  He contemplated a liquid-cooled, inline-four engine with sixteen valves driven by double-overhead cams. It was a very strange mixture indeed, fuelled by lust and power and longing and a secretive oil-based recipe known only to the inner-few. It was, truly, an image to behold.

The final course was cheese, Italian and accompanied by two deep glasses of crimson wine. They gorged on salted Pecorino Romano, thin-waxed Provolone and a deliciously oozing Caciotta, saving the Grana Padano to last in contemplation of the fruit-sweet pleasures to come.  She reached for the cheese-wire and drew it across the hard, thick rind.  A sharp pull and it split open revealing its savoured core.

He reached out to take her hand, carelessly up-turning his glass in the process. The dying dregs spilled across the crumbed white table-cloth.  Blood red stains.

"Easy, boy … there's lots of time."

Prime metal and flying!  This sweet sensation of passing time, gliding hard-core past the stalled traffic and on the way.  A cookie fortune hand.

They left the restaurant full, ripe and ready to the night. And then he came upon them with a mighty, mighty …

"Flash!!"

Two lovers, endless lovers captured forever in the celluloid frame of a paparazzi camera.

The crescendo builds ecstatically and she waits so patiently for him to come.  One mile, half a mile, three hundred yards and there he spies the opened entrance!  Home and a warmed chemical-bath awaits.

An operatic voice wails and in slow-motion he guns the Suzuki Hayabusa onward. He sees the stretched wire too late as it draws across his throat severing the flesh and tendon and bone like a knife through butter.

His severed head prescribes a parabola and in that very instance it is stop, look, listen …. to the wailing diva voice and a million taken photographs spewing back in the wind until his head bounces once, twice, three times to the feet of the lady who waits so very, very patiently at the end of the road.

Dreams from the Apocalypse - Fly Free

The lines of traffic flow like blood through veins, trailing red light smears.  I watch them ... pass.

Arriving at the control point, captured.  We're lead into a glass-walled room, scared and trembling as the stern lady arrives with her clip-board.  She reads names, and the Zyclon-B prussic acid gas lies but a tender-embrace beyond.

Her attention diverted and I reach for the out-size metal safe-lock mechanism on the glass wall behind. Spinning and spinning a glass door reveal opens and I run out.

A long corridor.

Running in blind panic, terrified by the pursuer behind.  But proud. I'm broken free.

The dead-end reached.  A brittle wooden-wall and the pursuer closes fast behind now.  I feel her every breathe on the back of my neck, calling me back.  I smash through and tread a path between shattered glass-optic glinting kaleidoscopic shards and up to the ramp.

Black smoke pluming.  All this way just to die?  The black plumes give way to white-fleck steam clouds and it's out into cool night air where ....

The lines of traffic flow like blood through veins, trailing red light smears.  And I chase after them ... flying free!!!!!

Stories from the Apocalypse - Sand

Some people say we're all descended from story. Story is all, and all is story. I think some people just don't read so much these days, and perhaps my eyes grow. Dim.

The biting wind is endless. A long, eternal stretch where sand is withered, whitened bone-rib, riding out the storm. Swirling.
Do you see, out there in the distance? Running down the molten wave, each step bleeds a glassy stare. We cannot avoid his eye.

Crow flies and we quicken down the sand. It stands before us, the skull, rictus grinning as wind whips in and out of the deep-set sockets. Motionless, grinning. We circle the wooden stake and return to face the skull. Bowing down we take our knife and carve out the eyes. For him to see.

Time passes and the sands snake silently down. A woman approaches the stake. Gold-ringed and bronze, she bears a purple scarf. Scraping the crusted blood to kiss his eyes. In rapture. The woman takes the scarf from her shoulders and wraps it tenderly around the skull - purple binding the coronal suture. She falls to the foot of the stake.

The words fly home. Crow bound and circling the stake, they lift the condyle voice as one. And so a story is borne on the winds. Story is all, and all is story. And somehow people just don't read so much these days.