Through something to meadows 

I was sweating now, the salt hit my eyes and stung. The street was a blur of greys, some blues, some greens. Everything was harsh and rusted. Sharp and Bent. Twisted things. 

I saw Concrete Lake. It was somewhere beyond my flickering eyelids. I went there all the time, once. I scooped and dug and buried everything I needed. For something. I forgot what. 

It feels nice to have Juice. I have a lot of Juice. Juice is very important. It’s very important to have Juice. If you have Juice you can do anything. Juice is the most important thing. It is more important than love. 

Also, you know … 

Love fuck and Fuck love. A w w. 

Ahhhhh 

Manhattan Raised Up Caught From A Windowsill. A Child With Dirty Bean-Caked Fingers. Holding On Tight. As The Iron And Concrete And Glass And Steal. Rise Up. He Grows Old And Dies. Manhattan Lasts. A While. 

Shot into the air and turned on its side, the island shows it’s true self. One Thing. The Forge. 

The Forge starts to speak.

I AM THE FORGE 

“Forgiveness is not a virtue. I have seen within me countless lives ruined by dreams. Great love suffocated. Stolen treasure discarded like a cheap expired wine. Don’t beg. Don’t ask. Be and Take. Speak and move, your life depends on it. The only way out is in. Only the hollow survive. Nevermore. 

My memory and Memory were burnt through. I know it’s all falling apart. But this is all I have to give. It’s everything I remember. And I don’t feel like letting you know it all so cleanly, anyway. 

This is not a something to fit on the back of a box of . . . pick a box. Soap, Pizza, Kank. 

Yeah. You KANKIE WHORE. Cheap gutter swine. 

Ripped from CUNT to KOON, a hard day’s work, a fun night’s play. Slag, slut. Filth. 

I opened the bottle and took a sip. 

Somewhere down there in the valley was my ticket home. 

I swam the short length of the river from side to side. 

Big balls of plastic swam with me. Or just floated. Bobbed. Bob up, Bob down. 

The madness is the blanket we provide to only the highest of intellects. 

In The Meadows

“Are you the oracle?” I asked to the open air. 

All I could see were the meadows and the blue sky. 

Ghosts have a way of causing fear, when there is nothing to fear. What can a ghost do? Go Boo!? 

I wasn’t scared of the meadows. But I could feel them around me. Standing out there in the green grass for miles and miles in every direction was a litany of dead dreams. Lives lived and lost in the cruelty of the world. 

Young children ripped from their mother’s hands 90 years early. 

Men innocent of their crimes hung by the neck or shot up against the wall, electrocuted, poisoned. 

Young women at flower shops exploded by a martyr’s bomb. Some issue, some cause. Bits of chocolate hair, charred liver, melting teeth. 

Poor them. They all wanted me. They wanted to pull me in and distract. I refused. The oracle was somewhere in the meadows. And I had to find it. 

I had been walking 30 minutes, lost in thought, the time flew by me, I don’t know what I was thinking. It wasn’t about anything relevant to my current circumstance. Just zips and zaps of this and that. 

When I finally came back to the clear light of now, the meadow had completely changed. The hills now surrounded me on all sides. How the fuck had that even happened? 

And these hills were a lot bigger than before. More mountains, shooting straight up into the skies. 

They didn’t look real. They distorted and swayed with each step of my tired broken boots. I felt a heavy nostalgia here. I’m not sure if the feeling was being piped in for whatever reason, or if it was real. Maybe nostalgia isn’t right. It was too strong. But I couldn’t remember, definitively. 

Death innit Ive Lee 

I felt a Krackerberry advertisement crawl up my skin. 

And. 

I had black eyes watching me, following me along. I was a big boy though. I was a man, and much more than a man. 

The blue sky stayed blue for many hours, and then it went black. A small window of shades before all light was gone. The hills hid behind their cloak of darkness. The wind picked up and spirals of ice tore at my fleshy earlobes. 

What was I wearing? 

I saw myself from another’s view. A horrible fighting gray wreck of a man. Sliced by wire in all manner of ways. The silence of the ending of man. 

I took my hand flat and dragged it across my chest. How many organs had been stuffed in there over my lifetime? … 40? 50? 

Probably more. 

After what felt like an hour walking straight in the dark, I came to a realisation. This was no search, no great hunt for an “oracle” . This . Was a fucking war. Against my very being. Myself. Thrown into a game to trap me and wear me down and extract my secrets. I screamed. Taking out the knife in my pocket I slashed at my chest and arms. 

I felt the pressure of The Backstain Collapse. It was like I was there with them. 

A rush of metal filled every atom. Laughing clouds spat dirty rain at me. A train came speeding towards the world. No-stop. Non-stop. Impossible to prevent. We were all to be cut up and churned. Fate had it written. I grabbed the handle of the knife with both hands and centered the tip of the blade at my heart. I imagined a large crowd on the hidden hills watching, and those black eyes, all hoping I took the action. I felt the totality of the Nothing nothing. I needed escape. 

Burn my name into the wall at the start and end. 

Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something or something? 

Suddenly the sky lit blue. There was a television on one of the hills, and the hills were now much closer, and smaller. I could make out the image on the screen. Behind a veil of static. There she was. 

I knew her. 

Alive.