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 Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:36 pm
 The most spiritual men,
as the strongest,
find their happiness where others would find their destruction:
in the labyrinth,
in hardness against themselves and others,
in experiments.
Their joy is self-conquest:
asceticism becomes in them nature,
need,
and instinct.
Difficult tasks are a privilege to them;
to play with burdens that crush others,
a recreation.
Knowledge–a form of asceticism.
They are the most venerable kind of man:
that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ In the labyrinth.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxIn experiments.
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Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:37 pm
The garden stiffens and odors bleed
february 22nd Shadows clustered and ebbed like wicked seas, with undercurrents wrenching at the feet that passed them. Eyes prying and talons sharp and teeth serrated and bodies black and souls absent. Thin, crystalline walls only formed a line for the obedient ubiquitous, which bowed so obsequiously to the dominant will. They tasted no fear in the air surrounding their newest stranger -- this one of half-step from joining their own oceans of rank. But fleet foot and fleeter mind drove him from here to there, in their space out of time, in their time out of meaning, in their meaning out of mortal absence. He did not care, so fingers curled uselessly as a timid child.
Out past the clutch of double doors, cramped gave way to vast with his departure from the Hall of Shadows. So high rose the cavernous ceiling to this vast, unholy space that only the tallest, sharpest, most vicious stalactites punched their prying digits through an atmospheric fog. Lightning cut and split and blinded the landscape with its transient storms, where rain deserted like disheartened soldiers. These lands stood parched of men. Only the dead kept this place. He did not care, so thunder licked uselessly as a spurned lover.
The ground sloped knife-sharp and daring, where its careless cuts divided the ground into serrations and striations. Training obstacles for those bold and agile enough to test themselves in the land of non-men. He passed them immediately. On the right rose the remnants of a grand city like old, broken teeth gnashing at the horizon for a last taste of glory. Their parched walls crumbled ever more, shivering under thunder's rain. Somewhere within, old memories were devoured by once-occupants, with these old homes' purpose perverted and reformed. Now they held but monsters. He did not care, so spires glared uselessly as an impotent instructor.
He did not care. Tossed to the wind were his failures, his obstacles, his fears and hatreds, his worries, his meager accomplishments, his forlorn hopes, his egregious mistakes; each spat in the current of sonance.
The Rift did not care. Indifferent were its denizens, their likes from a time long before old, who saw the vagaries of human whim as meaningless. Who returned from Vico's circle to the truer form of men. Who wrapped tight about themselves Isadora's scarves. They found no command in wordless words. In captains, they seldom found tolerance.
In this one, they found intrigue. Curiosity. The intrigued and opportunistic emerged from their too-old holes in a long-destroyed landscape. They coiled and leapt and crept and flew and clattered and clopped and climbed until their most interested and most sociable mounted a thin, crystalline ridge. There they remained, each still as a painting, each an uninvited audience to anguish. Smoke poured aplenty from the boy like a cherished wine. Half-finished thoughts like a cheap beer. Paradoxically, they swam together in perfect symphony.
One sullen soldier finally broke the line. Down it ran, like battlefield blood, its spinebone tail lit in a blazing, wicked green. The body a sinew, thick and malleable as a greenstick, whipped its way over crack and rock and petrified root. Over human stones it climbed, their monument now an epitaph to hubris' creation. Down near a licking, ravenous stream. Out again it strafed over the vast, ghastly landscape toward their unorthodox visitor. The whipping flick of its flickering tail trickled fire in its wake, but it did not stop.
Neither did he. Bleak and blasphemous and bitter though the world was, it spared him the time to draw into himself. To walk sightlessly through the gardens of hanging. To listen mutely to the hothouse bake of once-men and once-women dining sublime on their subhuman lessers.
But a flicker of fang into wicker-thin wrist wove green into black. A too-sweet whorl of blanched peonies, of muculent orchid, pushed its sickly stink into is veins. A barked order fell uselessly as a forgotten casualty.
He crumbled. No one knew what minutes were in this place outside of when, so the line of gawkers stood still on their tyrian ramparts. They waited for the ink to dry. For the smoke to settle. Time never walked in this place, its preference to loom like an ostentatious master, and soon even it grew tired of the wait.
Finally their new-burning candle rolled its low smoke. Thick and wary it wandered, a resplendent perfume to its new master, and it grew thick with laconic coils. Uncanny grace befell not-him then, and avian bone lilted with its burning companionship. They passed like a wave back over the blasted landscape. Finally the line broke once more, the spectacle long over to an uninteresting end. Nothing ever happened here. Nothing ever would. The Rift did not care, so souls winked uselessly as a moment's tepid flirtation.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
He did not care.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Rift did not care.
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Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:39 pm
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
february 23rd It watched the concentration leave his face for the third time in moments. In swept consternation and fear, with panic screwing his brows high up on his youthful forehead. The mousey creature flattened and skittered when a hand swept out to banish it.
The Rift, in all its vastness, barred teleportation from Metallia's most cunning. Instead he stewed in that quixotic terror, and while he always poached his clever little mind for a new solution to a timeless problem, he found nothing and no one to turn to but the Green Lion herself. His hand quick-flickered with the shadow of a tablet and he spoke at once to its receptive decorum. Nothing answered back. Out from its speakers rang the seamless static, the atmospheric pressure of the Rift bearing down on its still-too-human occupant.
He would try and try and try.
ivynian Wrapped in stutter static came groans too deep for human throats. Brief, flickering catches of a boyish rasp came through, bereft of word, and his sonance spoke his naked fear to superior. No words left the Rift -- only monosyllabic declarations issued by once-generals long unremembered.
The Rift did not care. The scuttling youma cowering in fear under the captain's sudden temper change crept closer. Here, the Rift tipped its tepid curiosity into their yawning cave -- thick and still, heavy, dragging. The atmosphere pressed in on them both. The still-human parts, quick-witted to danger, urged him upward. He stood on legs much too weary for an hour's walk.
There was no Citadel in the distance. No crystalline ridge. No pockmarks where human cities once stood prideful and sleek. His view at the mouth of the cave told him all he needed to know -- that the Rift sprawled ad infinitum, and it spared no pithy pity for a brazen captain. It spared nothing at all. Here lay the grave for mankind, half-inhabited, and entirely devoid of his influence. Here lay salesmen, housewives, visionaries, prophets, models, teachers, children, mechanics, hobbyists, politicians, lovers, pugilists, agents, poets, musicians, philosophers, and all the fleeting states that men could make of themselves in their ever-malleable image. Here, poetry died. Here, ideas rotted. Here was a world made of humanity's bones, devoid of his influence, and thriving off his absence.
And his resultant terror felt exhilarating.
It was with fear emblazoned in his gaze that he first ventured over the rubble at the cave's entrance. Smooth, featureless rock hewn out of once-mountains gave no indication for which direction he came from, or which he should go. Tracks only happened in the scanty snatches of desolation where dust smattered the ground -- places where the Negaverse's better agents fought youma to subjugation. None neared this space; his surroundings looked untouched by man's suddenly obvious and desperately desired mark. Wherever he came from, however he came, he found that path locked to him now.
But brilliance burned a little hotter in him here. Warmth licked his bones and softened muscle, urging him forward. Even cut off from command, he knew to trust instinct and awareness. He knew the count of trials he survived. And while bruise and mark still etched into his back, newlywed to failure, to weakness, he felt his blood pump promise through him. He would survive this. He would traverse these ghastly roads. He would find where the Citadel lurked in its thick, soured mists. He would reopen the path through Negaspace's bowels.
He would return to the civilization from which he was reared.
Pushed from mind were the older abuses -- cane crack and scream, body aberrations, hospital harryings, corruptions, rent lives, slander, impotence. Adrenaline drove the lot like triremes over the Aegean. The past never mattered in a place outside time. The outside world could not be reached, not by communicator or by teleportation, so his options were clarion: wander. Hike. Survive.
Survive. Like I know the meaning of the word.┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
And that resultant terrorxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxfelt exhilarating.
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Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:31 pm
The moon has nothing to be sad about
march 1st How many miles have I walked? How many days passed under my feet? How many hours of how many minutes sucked the wet youth from my fingertips?
I haven't spoken since the second time I woke. My mouth dried shut with this parched land. My mind is tired of clawing my numb way through broken ruin after broken ruin. My company are the husks of unfinished lives, prefinished and refinished by Metallia's dictate. Men can't thrive here. Half-men can't thrive here. My mind screams its bitter revelations against my pounding skull while my feet drag me on and on and on. And where does that lead me? Closer to the truth?
I walked these dead city walls since the fourth time I woke. They stand like empty sentinels against the Rift's churning not-sky. Like they're waiting for these youma to bring them down in aberrant play. I spotted a half-dozen playing under a destroyed arch, hiding among black bits of rubble like overexcited children. I wondered -- when does the past become the future? When will these long-nameless walls be the remains of Destiny City, or Paris, or Stalingrad? Or will Metallia yield to her adversary?
Man is the Negaverse's nemesis for the Fall of Man. Man hollows out his highest accomplishments to house his enslavement. He searches for a better owner than himself. He created that better owner. And now he builds server on server on server through twenty sum floors of different skyscrapers to transfer his addicted data thirteen milliseconds faster. The Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler. These are the overlords men chose for themselves. Pragmatic chaos tells men what to watch. How to turn their brains off. How to still themselves without contemplation. And Metallia can only twist their minds by twisting their bodies.
Man plugs himself into his creation to die. To abandon the world to overbright lights and techno-noise blasted out into the furthest reaches of space. If the Negaverse can't finish its near subjugation, then these will be our new masters. So which is the better fate? To die human or to live posthuman?
These thoughts simmered in my mind until my legs begged for death. I stopped past the shadow of another spire where youma brought it to life. They approached me curiously. They always taste the air around me like they're scenting for my demise. Sometimes I let them close enough to lick my cheek. This time I chased them away with starved, sooty clouds before they saw me as an easy meal. This, I know, is the world Metallia wants to have: a wild, lawless land with all the world's creatures bent to her whim.
A part of me dies in both these worlds. My humanity misses trips and books and plays and cuisine and discourse and love and connection and growth. It knows the cost of a life left to our leader. But to abide man's new masters means the death of sentiment -- our actions become pregenerated with our behaviors grown to match their algorithms. In Metallia's world, Faustite is the ghost making meaningless circuits around a dead civilization. In Man's world, Elex Yorke is the ghost mixed and remixed into a hundred new stories across Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Both choices lose the meaning of Me.
I am I, said Sylvia Plath once. It's a proud statement. A profound statement. And as I look down into the throat of the world, its hubris loses meaning. I am not I. I look down into the deepest blacks where shadows never tread. It looks back at me with its benign indifference. Who am I?
Its endless gape says everything I need to know. There is no I.
It exhausted me. Standing at the throat of the earth carries this recondite emptiness. All my sentiments mean nothing here. The youma do not care. The Rift does not care. The world does not care. There is no I.
There is no I.
Desperate and tired and starving and parched and feeble, I was finally freed from the endless Story of Me.
There is no Faustite. There is no Elex Yorke. There is no me. There is no I.
I wanted to sleep right there, at the apex of the end of the world, because I was freed from fretting for the consequences. It didn't matter what befell me in my sleep because there was no me. It didn't matter if youma ate my dead-exhausted body because I was the youma. It didn't matter what came of this nameless, labyrinthine city because I was the city. It didn't matter how far I wandered because I was the Rift. It felt so profoundly simple.
And so desperately wrong. I can't reconcile my own insignificance as an individual. I crave meaning. I need intention. I yearn for connection. I must touch and be touched and know and love and seek. I need goals. I need friends. I need to find civilization out of this broken husk. I need to leave my marks. I need to know the world. I need those seconds of my lifespan to live and breathe and create.
I realized that a part of me has to die. The Rift always claims its price. The Rift did not care what it took as long as it took. There is no I, it reminded me. There is no I in these windless, desolate lands.
I'll write what I chose before exhaustion pushes me out of my mind again. Before I wake up in a place as foreign and unfamiliar as these feelings. As the dust on my hands.
I leave my pain with the Rift.┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
It felt so profoundly simple.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAnd so desperately wrong.
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Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2018 7:53 pm
Staring from her hood of bone.
march 2nd I spent my first hours feeling uncommonly light. Like a part of me was taken at command. Like my body cannibalized itself to find an unseen vigor. I forewent complaining about it.
I stopped smelling copper and moonstone. Nothing came from the pipes -- no soot, no smoke. My body desperately needed water, but the Rift evolved so far beyond human necessities.
The Rift hums with an energy that officers can't feel. Youma thrive on it -- they fight and chase around these pulsing crystals. They regenerate around them. Bask in those eerie lights. They're the watering holes for beasts of old. The call of a bar to desperate, lonely businessmen.
No. That's wrong. It's more primal than food or drink or sex. More basic. More needful than a heartbeat, than a breath. Men can't be compared to this simplicity. Neither can animals. Neither can algorithms. Neither can zeroes and ones. But I can't live by that light, not like them. My body's still pointlessly complicated, still burdened by culture and civilization. I still recognize boundaries here. Hierarchy. Tradition. Strange how we ache for familiarity when it serves no purpose anymore.
I passed another crystal field on the long circuit around the base of a mountain. Youma flock in droves there. Sinewy dogs, coiling snakes, brittle-boned mammals whose names were long forgotten. Each fight like the deathless for their place, paying little attention to me. Some found me curious. Others found me threatening. I kept to the rim of the fields while I rounded, expecting them to round on me. A wardog composed of a hundred sunk boats creaked and roared in tandem, and it staked its claim on the largest crystals. Others moved to challenge it. Others still retreated.
Something wet struck me in the side. I was almost elated until I saw its source: a squid youma, large as half my body, armed with tentacular pinpricks of light. It sprayed me with an ink so clear and acrid that I couldn't consider drinking it. Even touching it irritated my fingers. Still it advanced on me with tendrils spread like it meant to strike. Like it could frighten one of the Negaverse's untoward captains. I waited until it closed on me.
Bubbles blew out its ink-ridden hole when it reached for me. I waited until it touched me with dripping tentacles --
It screamed at the smoke pulse. We both fell to the searing heat, dry and desperate. Fire caught part of its mouth. An agony ate its way through my side until I saw the flame-lick up my shoulder. It shot at me again -- as the ink passed through the smoke, it struck a nearby crystal as liquid flame. I spent precious energy to refresh my uniform.
It wasn't enough. Flame-pain still ate through my side. Still promised to parch me more with its recovery. And the youma still stalked me; its thousand blue stars reached like a wicked tendril. I couldn't risk another smokescreen -- too much water left my body already. I let it catch me, let it pull me in where I could drain it. Its energy formed a violent, virulent purple mass in my palm and it reached at once for that energy. Playing keep away grew easier with more energy received. More tentacles moved to wrap tight around my waist while the pair of leaders wrapped whip-tight around my arm. When I could finally wrestle it to the ground, its orb sat fat in my hand. I hadn't realized my mistake.
We hit the sand-stricken floor hard. A loose crystal gouged at my hip while I tried to restrain too many tentacles with too few hands. Water wicked off of it like a fountain in its panic. Shock gripped me; I stared at it. Was it real? Was this aquatic monstrosity leaking genuine water? I knew youma weren't made of substance, but could they produce it? I needed to try. I had to taste the youma if I wanted to live. I was parched. I was dehydrated. I was desperate.
I didn't care what it looked like anymore. My death meant more than my dignity.
The Rift never cared who I was. Where I came from. The youma beneath me never knew my name. It never asked for my rank before it attacked me. It wouldn't take me to court for treachery. All those presumptuous systems meant nothing here, where etiquette and culture and sensibility were each empty words. I learned how to put it all behind me.
I stooped for a taste. For two. For a dozen. That water parched me more as the creature struggled. There wasn't enough -- I couldn't lick gallons off it. Couldn't sate the gulf. Neither of us had the time.
An old, wooden groan sounded behind me. Encroached on me. Blasting from its creaking jowls was a deep-bellied roar. Spit rained down on each of us, buried in its shadow, and I wasn't waiting for it to bear down on me. The orb called it, I knew -- I seized the crystal that dug my hip and pushed it through the squid. Pinned it to the ground. I scrambled from it, my only water source, and sprinted straight for the food of the mountain. Another creaking roar from the wardog sounded, and it shuddered through the fields. The orb vanished from my hand as I broke concentration.
I ran until I ducked into a wedge of cave, where the split formed an angry snarl in the mountainside. Stalactites jabbed down at me like teeth. What waters formed them long dried up, for even the stone looked desiccated. As I slipped in, the cavern widened out -- familiar purple crystals formed their gathered clusters on the walls. I spotted soda straws in purple. Cave bacon. Knowing the names alone revived the hunger pangs. As I walked, I smelled foods from old memory: frying eggs that wafted up to my bedroom through the vents; heady, crispy bacon that my father stole from the pan, fresh bread baked and left on the counter. But I was too starved to miss home.
The roar broke my reverie. The wardog barked from the entrance, where it narrowed too much for the wooden youma's wide shoulders. Its totemic snarl echoed back to me, flooding the winding cave. I dragged myself deeper until I dropped to hands and knees. My stomach pained and pained and pained until I couldn't straighten anymore. It never followed, and soon it left. But I didn't -- I couldn't. I could only lay on my good side and wait for agony to grow tired of me.
I don't know how long it's been. I stopped trying to count the times I woke. The Citadel is nowhere in sight. Water and food are nonexistent. Unless I learn a way to use the Rift crystals, I'll die here.
It's becoming more and more a certainty.┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
I didn't care what it looked like anymore.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMy death meant more than my dignity.
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Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 7:21 pm
She is used to this kind of thing.
march 8th They walked the way shadows did across the ocean wrapped up in their tired cynicisms They seldom cast their flotsam lots I need to move, I stepped on my wan shadow toward the starkest parts where youma sounded their eternal rushing. Ebb and flow ebb and flow water as far as the eye can see but not a drop to drink Time tasted like water in my mouth. I missed the taste of seconds and minutes and hours and tea and coffee and milk. Youma tasted nothing and we felt so far apart for all we have in common. Sailors hated the sea he said with a hitching inrushing chuckle i hated how that sounded like a braying donkey Most people died at sea sailors were drunkards in debt or men too poor to escape that trade Now I drift like a scurvied sailor.
Took me three months to come crying home to dad Three whole months At the end of it i couldnt take it anymore
I wanted to cry I thought while my feet dragged me forward. I wanted to cry and vent my frustrations and I knew I was going to die. I knew these days were final. I knew that crinkle in his eyes and how his skin cooked nut brown in the sun. Like cancers going to stop me he said with that same damned chuckle heh heh heh a whistle and he couldnt breathe I could drink the tears. My body wrapped those heartfelt thoughts up tight and ate them, savored them away.
Rocks crushed underfoot and they sounded like thought-distorted seconds from those wall clocks in the classrooms. They brayed their ticktock thoughts into our heads like it made a tocktick difference. And it did.
I want to die I said but that never meant anything. It was noise. It was just noise. Noise beating against my head with the youma rush.
You see it sometimes off the coast Some great big island rises up when you most want it when the thirst starts to really take hold and then you call all your buddies to the deck He took a great swig of that foul smell always swirling it around his gullet and the smell wrinkled my eyes I wanted to get away from it I taste it before I really knew what it was. It moved like the winding youma I spotted some sleeps ago. It hissed its asks into the air as if it didn't trust that I was thirsty. So you tell your buddies to sail for it to get on up there so you can feel land under your legs again but the closer you get the farther it gets Then you really start to wonder Then you really start to question I never saw my reflection and I wondered if I was already dead. Do you know when you die?
i will be your guide and lead you forth through an eternal place There you shall see the spirits tried in endless pain and hear their lamentation as each bemoans the second death of souls
second death His second death i felt it in the shudder of his spine
The river-not-river I don't trust my senses anymore tasted clear but acrid but an indomitable and indescribable taste. Like I liquefied every starseed I found mixed it with the world's most bitter tragedies and distilled it through an inconsiderate alembic. It was suffering and it didn't care. It was hate and it didn't care. I was a fool I thought and I straightened up before I bent a curve back into my spine. Ebb and flow ebb and flow Smoother it was on the outflow than the influx.
It tasted the ground and wore it away spreading out like a map. Unraveling like a cipher. I still smelled the graphite on his hands I realized then that i was in love with him but i didnt know what the word meant only the flavor of it behind the shy veil of my lashes He smiled at me and when we kissed i tasted tobacco for the first time
It tasted like I was dying. I was. Am. Is. How am I. I got used to pain very quickly. Thirsted for it. I yearned for its greater cousin like a lovestruck sparrow. I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times but somehow i am still in love with life This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away to loathe ones very being and yet to hold it fast to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away I liked the line i knew because i could taste its bitter resentment underneath my polished and prettied admiration Strange how our true selves are never tempered by that cultured veneer
Gold beautiful gold turned up in the grey and stark of a place like this. It looked buried. Forgotten. Restless. The way the shimmered molten Ebb and flow ebb and flow taunted me it wanted a smile. It wanted what I couldn't spare. With ashen hands I reached for it, clutched for it. I watched my shadow overtake it. Snowflakes fell like Vesuvius weather. And the taste —"I love you," he heard himself say, and then they weren't.
Years left the man's face, boyhood claiming its sovereign right. Youth played with youth in the spring of rains. In the rains of spring, he realized, with how droplets touched skin, with how they weighed on shimmer-silks woven about his wrists. "Are you ready?"
"Always."
"Take my hand." His nails looked fine, his hands soft, like he never knew a summer's work and instead worried his oils away at parchment pages and scribal lettering but that never tamped his endearment. No, as he caught that hand in his own unworried grasp, as he felt heat and life and passion between that close grasp, they endeared each other more.
He looked down past his boots, past the rough-hewn edge where the world sculpted at a whim, and saw the roll of mist. Saw the fog. Saw the way stone's steeples jutted out like fresh-made memories. "Okay."
He said it again. "Okay." The word tasted sweet and ephemeral and woven of the same gold that adorned each other's bracelets. They leapt or they fell. He paid no mind to which. His thoughts were on the way velvet's hair raveled out like a burst of endless ribbons.
Then they were, and he repeated himself. "I love you." He looked on the now-older face, remembered, seen before but not by the second-eyes peering through these ancient thoughts. Woven metal inlaid with luculent jewels left a chest not-his. They didn't leave words with each other the way others did — they parted with skin on skin and skin left skin, skin laid untouched and yearning behind veils of spun silver and starlight and expansive skies. A certain timelessness laid about him like a comfort now, like bedsilks wrapped up over shoulders and dried under the midday sun. But he left lover-his with no more words promised away. Faustite felt his hate for experiences punctured by men's words.
It looked like a university. Like a memory risen out of the enlightenment in Prague. Lifetimes passed on this building, through its construction, with genealogy of men woven into its finality. Decades spent on lattice and infrastructure like the years nature wove into its trees. His skin cooled when he touched the sturdy stones, when he mounted the steps to slip inside. It always felt cooler here. Faustite watched gooseflesh rise up, their thousand-thousand pale soldiers ready for a war unfought.
Through halls and walls and staircases he climbed, with whispers of students folding around him. Passing through him. Always he held onto a banister until he reached the very top of his trek, and he slipped his shoes to walk barefoot and untouched over sleek marble. His footfalls found no one.
Round the bend and into a space the side walls remained broken, fragmented with man's intention into a set of well-made alcoves. He smelled patchouli and lavender, jasmine and bergamot. He passed a wooden lattice so intricately detailed that Faustite thought a lifetime passed on them. But this skin wasn't his and these thoughts weren't his and he recalled an evening space so far and so foreign that he had no words for it.
Time broke and fell together again and he stood over a box, metal and worn, too old for his youthful mind to comprehend. Papers and letters sat folded in its bottom, and off came the woven metal and luculent jewels from his-not-his palm. They fit into velvet divots just like his name, and all he knew unraveled into fleeting sensations — silks, hard metal under hands with a texture that bit into his fingers, patchouli, the evening sun spilling its sweetness through framed windows, echoed clops of heels on marble. — was divine like a soul on my tongue.┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
His second deathxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxi felt it in the shudder of his spine
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Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 7:22 pm
Her blacks crackle and drag.
march 9th i remember the taste of myself being sharper than it should have been just dregs just salt a bitterness on the tongue the way the ocean raised its smell to heaven its offering its pride it came out the way it came in it smelled no higher in heavens nostrils than the crematoriums i remember those words these days corrupted in their fragile human way
the ground rises up every third step i see as far as delirium will take me they meander and scatter when i get too close like bored women picking purchases they havent settled on strange how were indecisive beyond death what do you think elex does it match my dress and how it never improves when staring hunger in the face we cant decide what to eat with so many choices in the fridge no mother and your thighs look like overstuffed greasy sausages in that dress where are we going
where are we going and where can we go does it even matter anymore
all this thought where does it lead where can we go am i asking a question that's beside the point grinding my shadow into the dirt as i go where do these questions take me she calls you elex like its a curse i know but isnt it
what lives here but us but the rest of us im so tired of tiring when the ground rises up to meet me it smells loamy i want this place to free me but is it a want is it a want these fears collate with my shadow it never lets go grind it into the dirt grind it its supposed to
someday son youll raise your own sons and theyll ask you the same questions youd be surprised what kids come up with heh he whistled that laugh so well i thought his lung punctured dont worry about it kid its just your old man getting all misty eyed on you nothing you havent heard before now if you dig a hole
if you dig a hole i am the hole part and whole weak over week i keep walking
the way the ground rises to meet me it doesnt ask questions it doesnt grant objections i dont remember saying that this task was to be the sum of your expected basic training drafts starting place proposal and review are all key listening words you could have interpreted you were assigned to chysocolla because you are likewise maladroit and need demands your hand held once given a directive in how to carry it out the glassgrind of her voice still plagues me now i wish i could drink it i wish it would cut my throat open but all my wishes are so effective as my lead while i appreciate being proven correct better it were less in estimations of ineptitude
i fell with that ineptitude that same one i couldnt eat my teeth gnash at air so dry they are thought swims thick and rancid like my blood like my shadow that holds me now ever in the dirt it smells loamy
i thought about the certainty of death and how it lacks all that rare elegance in books and novels and the whites of peoples eyes put some stars back in you
i thought until i couldnt think
until i wouldnt think
i thought until
the way the ground rises to meet me it doesnt ask nothing did no one did
there are no ones in the rift
in the rift there are no thoughts no think just move always move always circling and eating and snarling and coming up from dust like unborn phoenixes i cant remember the taste of water anymore ebb and flow ebb and flow i cant lick the ash from my fingers with no spit my tongue just sticks it sticks like the too cold of canada how it wears on venerable metal
the feel of his hands the way time pressed its memories in those little divots he knew and faustite saw through othereyes the pretentiousness of the bracelet he knew and he felt it for how all times favorite breaths paused his heart hed seen so many lifetimes unhis and he treasured them for all the ways he couldnt feel them
people felt so fresh so beautiful so hopelessly complex when he knew just a few splinters that built their image sad it was yet ever inspiring
velvet was a passion hot more than a man but an idea a sound a feel on the tongue when savoring a word unsaid faustite knew it then through othereyes through thought unhis
the wheres dont matter i remember thinking the whys and whens and hows meant nothing it was the smell of my own insignificance i caught on each of its breaths if you see one lie still play dead dont fight its heat felt wet i wanted to taste it this demon of a mammal bearing down on me if you see the other be as loud as you can be all spikes and teeth and bad intention but my hands couldnt crawl me away i laid and faced it and knew there were no words left at the edge of the world all my thoughts and meanings were wet tissues to instinct stone and hatefeeling time
all the world dropped dead once then twice then thrice
lamely i accepted
i was too tired
then ill just die┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈
i am the holexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpart and wholexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxweak over week
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