You dive through the most packed constellation\nof peopled selves in memory's silent halls.\nA bad sign rising the pleadies,\nodysseus before the blood and milk.\nYou summon shades to feed, the caterer\nfor crowds of grey, a Hades of the mind.\n“Now thoughts” you fling your voice above the crowd\nballista-high, and drop it with a crunch\n“now thoughts and memories, attend and strike\nmy words like flint knaps striking steel, spark up!\nYou forms, though dim and ghost-like are my core,\nchess-pieces to my game, you shape my life.\nI lived through you and left my record there\nas you were left within me. Recent ones,\nwhose faces glow with detail swift recalled,\nyou lovers crackling bright with memory's scent\nwho burn with secret power within the heart,\nme enemies who only showed one side\nto me and cut a bloody lesson each,\nmy friends who wind in slim procession through\nthe rest, fading in ages and blurring\nas they reach into the past, yet you glow\nmore distant than you grow from adult sight\nbecoming knots of colour, touch and sound\nstrange, angelic and elemental things.\nAnd you! Great Titans!” Strong, you hurl your words\ntowards twin looming shadows, mountains. Gods.\n“My memory of my parents, shaped from birth\nabsorbing every hate and love, worlds each.\nAttend my words as drowning men clutch waves!\nA climbers grab the rock, as wise men fear\nand fearful ones observe, obey me now\nand fight! I'll break the sky like Chinese plates,\nas lance-sharp water from a broken dam\nflows forth, we'll fly, birds in murmurration\ngunshot fast, thick as bats in stagnant caves,\nescape this place and with me save us all.\nCollapse in tangled violence on the dog\nthat haunts my steps and scents my sleeping thoughts.\nArise!” And rise they do, like candles catching cloth\nigniting the close weave, making you run\nfor water. Sky- grey mother-of-pear, cracks\nat your command. The silver rope un-knots.\nThe Farrowman awaits, you sycamore\nlike brightly coloured streamers in a wind\nand dash upon him wavelike, grey and gold\nbreaking in tangles on the twisted shore.\nThe Nightmares window-crack claws severslash\nthrottling a memory here, eagling\nanother in its blood. Your childhood dies\nbefore you, crayon bright and loud, weeping\nold secrets and screaming cartoon samples.\nYour friends are torn apart silently, faster\nand colder than a friendship lost in life.\nA clutch of Authurian lovers charge\nknightlike on chivalrous bodyheat steeds\nand crack one lance against its carapace\nof oil-slick bird-wing black and score one mark\nthat rocks it forth and back. It petals knives\nand razorwire stop-motion leaves unfold.\nThey pause to charge again. The Titans loom.\nYour bodyguard of enemies looks back,\nreading your gaze, hanging on your signal,\nthe battle-volume curls like falling silk\ndrifting from the joust point, speckled with blood.\nYou lick dry lips and shiver at the sight\nfeel rage and sorrow tangle in your heart\nand tighten to a knot, you cannot win.\nYour fear of childhood bullies takes a knee\nbefore you like a squire “your orders Lord?”\nAnd just before you draw your breath to speak,\na distant gleam of gold attracts your eye,\na tiny sunspark, reflected in black.\n\n[["You fortress here, I'll seek that point of gold”|47]]\n[[”This omen guides our fight. Saddle and charge!”|48]]\n

You kneel and bare your neck, a winters breath\nhold enobling, you feel the artery\nbehind your ears hammering like madmen\nthat bang on gates behind a secret wall.\nYour skin chickens and plucks up on your skull.\nThere's something scratching around inside you.\nA horror:- hunting selfhood. Memory's bane.\nA spiders touch, the inner of your eye.\nBut it finds nothing, an old dog, hunting\nin dark and secret treasuries, its paws\nbrush padlocks it can't open, and it's nose\nhunts fear that isn't present. It can't see.\n“Tabula rasa then, the slate is blank\nand brightly thrones the unwrit word. My word\nand signature I'll carve into your spine.”\nAnd this the creature does, a bloody scribe\nand long. “Now hear, the heralding I hold\nwith you in mind, my name unknown to all\nwho live, still feels one bond. A collaring\nthat tugs insistent but mild, leashing me\nto the burning bright orrery of day.\nA hand rests on that leash, in onyx ringed\nand gold. You seek it now, and speak my word.”\n[[You fly|55]]\n

You rabbit-scan down, swiftly, evading\nthe blow and feel its backwash flat your hair.\nYou centrifuge the fire within your heart\na spinning sling burns 'O' in meteor\nand matchhead red. You swing cretaceously\nintending a Yucatan impact strike.\nThe ill-dream't mind-thing serpents, question mark's\nand quicker than that sign to read, escapes\nthrough curves, and ice-picks an uppercut blow\nwhich twist-flicks like a calling finger through\nyour loosely knit defence and strokes your chin,\na graze that whips your spine and filigrees\nan ice embroidery, cold mosaic\nscar works rivering up your chin, cut lips\nmeandering your face and to your eye\nwhich burns and hates and melts the ice to tears\nyou bleed. Stagger and rage. A crow a crow\na bird of Onyx black with golden beak\n\n[[Your heart pinions and tremors like spread wings|56]]\n[[A speck, the gold falls, black on black on black.|57]]\n

You sleep, and trip, escaping talon’d day\nIts razored fingers grasp you as you fall\nthrough nights dark orbit girdling the earth\nwhose vector turns you gently in your bed\nas mothers shift the child against their breast.\nBut, missile-bright, dawns arrow plummets down\ncharged with pale fire of times recorded hours.\n\n[[You rise, and bear your skin to memory’s cut|1]]\n[[You turn, and plumb the dark aurora’s depths|2]]\n\n

You watch, and tie your hands in knots “Unkind\nwoman ruining my sleep filling up\nthe night with noise I'm a burglar I\nhave break and entered I have committed\na crime the door no door was open so\nit isn't illegal to be here I\ncan just leave stop screaming stop I can't hear\nmyself my thinking I'm talking talking\nI can just leave but if they see me go?\nIf someone sees me leave I'm escaping\nI'm escaping a hous with a victim\ninside screaming stop STOP if someone sees\nme go in through the open unlocked door\nthen I'm a hero friendly neighbour man\nstop STOP SCREAMING but if they wake up late\nand only see me leave and what is that\nafter all a few minutes difference\na few seconds them I'm a criminal\na monster oh oh the police please stop\nplease stop the screaming please oh what if you\nwake up wake up and see me here what then\nawaking from a dream of violence? No\nit's not my fault its's not I was only\nattempting STOP to do the right thing STOP\nSTOP IT STOP SCREAMING NOW you can't see me!”\nThe pillow's in your hand\n35-You force it down\n36-You let it drop\n

You leave the girl behind you, still and calm\nthe centre of a familiar nightmare\nmoaning like a tear in twisted fabric\nthat seems to hold its place while the pattern\nthat surrounds it is destroyed. A wound eye.\nIt's gaze pricks your back and shudders your breath.\nYou run\nand turning memory's doors like leaves on wind\nyou flickerstep the public legion dreams\nentering and escaping as each dream\nin turn is twisted inside out, the flesh\npossessed and bone beneath revealed, the sky\nof fifty fantasies is peeled, exposed\nthe voiding grey behind the stars, the eyes\nof twenty lonely lovers bulge with fear\nas secret terror animate, engorged\nwith blood from beating hearts. The children’s dreams\nfall fast and monstrously dark and cold\nwith terrors pure forgotten by the old.\nThere is no path. The sleep ends at a wall\nwhich, bounded yet mobius infinite,\nextends forever, back and forth and through.\nYour sobs ebb from you, snatched by hands of scars\nand held like pets, caressed, you fall, and scream.

“Get back cracked thing get back! Escape me now!\nI'll smash you, I'll coathanger you! Get back!\nYou smiled to see me run and became brave,\neclipse eyes setting on me as I fled\nnow know! If seeing flight amused you so\nand confidence sliced grins in you, no more!\nI'll face you now whate'r you are, and if\nyour glee was fear reversed then know still this,\nalthough I cannot win, I can still hurt.\nYour armour of my fear has turned to dust,\nI'll endanger every aspect of you\nand mirror every monstrous riposte,\ncome on! You'll bleed! And know the fear you sought to tame!”\nAnd come they do, a schizophrenic dance\nof electrolysed tendons, tortured bone\nyour fists compound and heels foundation down\nscissoring the grass in imagined soil.\nYou feel a space behind you, like a noise\nheard sharp through sleep, from inside a locked house,\nyou turn, the girl is gone, awakened, but\nher dream, though she escaped, goes on. They come.\nA bone spur takes you in the chest. The birds\nas unconcerned as rendered backgrounds are\nsing on. You're down, and heaving, surrounded.\nThey squeal and drool like dementia patients\nand kick. A claw foot pins you to the earth.\nYou fight back, hammering. Too late. Too much.\nThe blows and wounds arachnid you in pain,\nyour eyes roll back, your breathing coils, but then\na voice. Soft, bovine-low and regular as clocks.\nA hand, a space, onyx and gold.\n\n[[Escape.|48]]\n

You seek the empty space within yourself\nthe melancholy heather-marsh that's trapped\nbetween competing fields of green. Unknown\nand marginal coppiced scenarios\nthat skirt the self-describing self-sustained\nhomestead of who you are:- waxing and wild\nwith order-loving beehive lunacy\na castle of platonic forms to guard\nthe curve of water at a whirlpools edge\neternal, always dying, never still.\nMove away, move away from there, leaf-like\nskirt the ripples and spin the hours between\nand find the memory where you lost your way.\nA sweat stained map anoints with ink your hand\nyour feet rebel and ache, the streets unfold\nahead and tangle like abandoned wool\nbehind, like actors swapping masks backstage\nand lines. Confusing the story, and time.\n\nYou are resting, anonymous grey lion\nin the most known least seen part of the city\nstone sentinel for the lost travellers\nwho criss-cross in bright colours, metronome\npredictable, unknown to each other,\nobserved by you:- sombre imperial\nreminder of an excess age that spewed\nstone forms like food into a gutters run.\nYou, dreamer, lost yourself here once before\na flight, delayed, left you arching your bow\nin your old life, the string pulled back, the sight\nupon the targets cross, the arrow gone,\nwaiting and wandering your old self's trail.\nThe margin of two chapters in your life\nthose chapters- notes, footed on history's page\nthat page, between two ages. Stuck between\nbetween between, unfindable. Forgot.

“It's a fucking pleasure to meet you too”\nthe thing replies and grins “and rare it is\nto be afforded courtesy by those\nwho dream. They flee so often, heralding\nwith screams; my shield and badge, feudal pennants\nof dark-rimmed yes and shields of shortened thoughts\njousting my colours in day, announcing\nmy presence just beyond the gate of dawn,\nI wait, I cannot enter, forgotten\nso swiftly over breakfast and the news.\nBut still, I live, imprisoned by the space\nbetween the rays, a cage of gold and fire.\nYou please me Fragment, edged like glass, you cut\nand cuts are my amusement in the dark.\nI'll motley you, my shard, hollow wheat husk\nforgotten one, last dreamer, you'll be mine\na livery of tears, checks black and white\na velvet square cut cloth, snow spread below\nor paper carefully folded and held\nagainst an empty sky, the eye, confused\njuddering illusionwise,what shapes what?\nThe horror crooks a limb, crab claw crazy\nmore backtracked than a housefly pilgramage\nand gestures at you. “Thing, you'll play the fool\ntake up my motley or die”\n[[”I think not”|51]]\n[[”Of course sir”|52]]\n

“No? No. It says” It curls Trilobitish\nand knots its flesh, peeping through its own folds\nblinking and weaving like light from water\ndrops held in orbs on stalks of cellulose\nchlorophyll-green, twitching in the cold wind\nand sceptred by the first grey light of dawn\n“you dare? You flesh-infested moving thought\nyou dare deny or disobey You shard.\nYou fragment of a whole you worthless thing?\nI'll make a fleshrag of you and contrail\nyour blood across a thousand nightmare skies.”\n“Allow me to apologise” you say\n“I see you take it personally,please dont\nassume a wounds intent. Un-knot your flesh,\nwere probably both gentlemen, allow\nsome time to reconsider offers made\nor threat of slavery, conquest, or deth\nor just total psychic apocalypse\nthe worlds destruction, death of all, ah.. fuck.\nYou know what friend, go fuck yourself you loon.\nThe Farrowman falls upon you\n[[You scream|53]]\n[[You flee|54]]\n

Screams fill the room, worming in the carpet\ninsecting their way through the wallpaper gaps\nbuzzing, blotching, miraging in the air.\nYou see your hand suspend in space, string-held,\npuppeting with your panting breath. She screams.\nYou've broken in. You don't know her. She screams.\nYou are about to grab the naked flesh\nof a frightened woman in her own home.\nShe screams. You take her shoulder in your hands\nand shake. Gently at first, then violently.\n“Wake up. Please wake. Wake up. Stop. WAKE UP NOW.”\nHand grabs you. Silence plummets from her mouth\nlike something fallen from a distant height.\nHer eyes are hazed, blurred like spinning leaves\nbeneath the waters surface in a stream.\nHer look hangs slack between you. Sharpening\nand slowly tightening\n\n[[You stand and go|33]]\n[[You enfold her|34]]\n

Sol’s blue claw breaks the curtain gap with bars\nof widely levered light that pockets sleep.\nThe thief carts sound like beggars tracked by smells.\nA hundred tires bite tar, a fitting hums,\nhouse pipes squeeze water through the walls, the room\nleaps shivering into shape at eyes salute.\nIn the still grey street outside a scream burns\nyou rise up from the bed\n\n[[and go outside|3]]\n[[and brush your teeth|4]]\n \n

Your bitten toes repel cold concretes teeth\nthe unfamiliar chill seeps through your flesh.\nThe half-lit light holds houses face to face\nand fills the space between the cars and doors\nmaking everything clear, still, quiet and calm.\nThe scream pulls like a leash, you cross the street\na door swings wide, you enter someone’s home\na neighbours house, as strange to you as Mars\nexcuses fail, stairs herald fear, you climb.\nShe’s twisting in the bed\n\n[[You wake her up|23]]\n[[You watch her scream|24]]\n \n

There is a deepness here that’s sonar-black.\nYou fall into its heart, too far, whale-song-long.\nYour memory of yourself wake in your head,\nexplodes like flocks of birds from sudden sound,\nyour logic turtles, shrinks into it’s shell\nand plumb-bob drops away and out of sight.\nAwareness frets behind your eyes and fades\nAlzheimer-fast, stained glass under long suns.\nA cruel thing comes, it does not know you’re there.\nYou have two hands, you grab\n\n\n[[Your mind and heart|5]]\n[[Memory and mind|6]]\n[[Memory and heart|7]]\n

You feel weight in your hands, you’ve made your choice\nan ink-scratch creature comes, a living tear\nthe stain behind the sheen of a photograph\nthat lies between related faces\nirreducible with time, but alive.\n‘You Sleep’ is says, you nod “Reassuring\nto hear it explained” you say “I thank you”.\nIt’s workless gesture asks your name and place\n“I’d tell you if I could sir, certainly\nbut sleep has tricked me and reversed the chairs\nI have no name to give you though I’m sure\nwhen dreams forget the dreamer, something’s wrong\nI beg your pardon”. Now, you curve a bow\nAnd graze it’s edgeless shape with your black eyes.\n[[“But could I beg your name, if not uncouth?”|10]]\n[[“What brings you here beneath Aurora’s dark?”|11]]\n

Clean teeth, bright shoes, the scream goes as you pass.\nIt dopplers in the morning like alarms\nyou dodge the eyes of others, they dodge yours,\nwork fuzzes in your head and thicks your blood\nthe cursor leaves a ghost across the screen.\nYou see in that, the silent flight of Owls.\nThe mouse shifts in your hand, your fingers claw\nthe cursor swoops, you lean and gaze the black\ndot, smallest pixel on the arrows edge\nyou dream you see a figure there, it’s you.\nYou raise the mouse above the desk and feel\nthe talons in the room; routine, and time\nclose on you. Does your own heart thrum as fast\nas the terrified beast of that small mouse\nin the silent surging grasp of the Owl?\nYou stand, walk out, and quit your job – They say\n\n[[“Why do you brandish a computer mouse?"|8]]\n[[“You can’t go, they’re all sick and no-ones in."|9]]\n

Black. Dark. Dreaming but alive. Breath. Clench hands\nlost here and alive. It comes. Monster. Foe.\nThe empty one is here. “You Sleep” it says.\nYou strike! Ghost heart surges remembered blood\nand Irons ethereal fists with archeo-bone\nferocious as rock-weaved dinosaur skulls\nfished from museum memories years ago\nyour pulse hammers in your head like fireworks\nyou clothe your reaching arm with muscles torn\nfrom old sensations of rusted bridge-steel\nwound like delicate thread, a suspension\nbridges straining man-sized foundation cord.\nI living memories armoured, you heave forth\n\n[[and drive your fist into it's moon-dark eyes|14]]\n[[and wrench it's neck in vice ten fingers wide|15]]\n

You've slept too far, circumnavigated\nthe dreamers clouded reach and lost your path\nnow trapped, you turn, ascends before you; scars.\nA web of living cuts with shape and life.\nDream clouds tangle in the weapon-worked wounds\n“You sleep” it speaks, you flee, impossible\nto face the violent absence in it's flesh.\nYou salmon-curl and plunge-ascend the dark,\ndream-black waves vortex round you, silver tides.\nThe thing pursues, you feel it's hunting sight\nbehind you – a fish-school of arrow shards\n\n[[You break unseen and through anothers memory|12]]\n[[You breath deep and sprint up familiar thoughts|13]]\n

“We're really pressed right now, scheduling's fucked\nand god knows we appreciate the time\nyou're willing to put in, would treble pay\nfor three days, some time in leau, a card”\nthey whisper “for the executive loo?\nWe wish we wish we had more time to give,\nunforeseen circumstances, business needs,\nthe timetable, so many still asleep\nso many sick, we thank you, yes we do\nwe see now we were wrong about you.”\nYou drift back to your desk, the grey throne calls\nthat final pixel glares from burning screen\nlike daemons from a page of ancient text\nmarginalia of a lost craftsman\n'I am cold, I cramp, the monks mistreat me'\nThe brothers lament echo's a thousand\nyears, lost in an unexamined margin.\nYou reach your talons out and catch the mouse\nthe next day you come in but no-ones there\nand there are no days after that.\n

You wave it and explain about the Owl.\nThey ask politely of you'll leave the room\nOutside a guard is waiting “This way Sir”.\nThe empty street beyond slides fingers cold\nand long under your jacket's rim and down\nyour neck, they pass the fingers of the guard\nwhich slide the imaged key from plastic sheath\nmedallion'd round your neck. The door clicks shut.\nThe empty tomorrows accordion\nin front of you, the absent days, blurred hours\nof unemployment, silent as this street.\nWhich, now you come to think of it, is quiet\nas far as you can see, no people move,\nand why the empty chairs inside, and why\nthe scream that called this morning, why the dream\nwhose memory ducks your eyes like sun-struck motes?\nA dream of falling, of deepness, and fear.\n16-It doesn't matter, drown yourself in beer.\n\n[[A mystery of some kind. Investigate!|17]]\n[[Do both at once, investigate while drunk.|18]]\n

“My Empire chafes. It's on the shadows edge\nbetween the sleeping seconds as they march\nin ranks through day. The corner of your eye\nthe moment before sleep, the fall that wakes\nyou just as eyelids close, these fortresses\nare mine and there I circuit endlessly\nawaking while you dream, I watch through cracks\nand from the gaps in the bright-woven world\nmy sight upon you always. But it chafes.\nI am cupped ink, by surface tension held\nI curve and bulge the rim of my confine\nurging to expand my purpose, and spill\nand so deluge the page, obliterate\nall signs, dividing lines and boundaries drawn\nof all things make a glorious oneness.”\nThe scar-one leans towards you, fingers curl\nfrom risen trauma-tissue and enfold\nyour arm. “But you sleep, dreamer, and should not,\nyou see?” It turns your head towards the night\nans shows you the wrack’s of man's unconscious\n“The last free sleep, free dream, is yours alone\nthe last walker on the border of night\nthe rest are mine. Forever. Join me.”\n[[”No”.|21]]\n[[”Yes”.|22]]\n

“Nightmare I have been called, Last One, Old Night\nand Farrow-Man, for the furled ridges of clay\na stylus leaves when scribes in temple halls\nen-lettered lives of Kings on river-mud\nand seeing how each memory cut that ground\ndrawn from the earth bank where those kings had cut\ntheir fate in history's heart and mortal flesh)\nand shaped each sound in living figures dark\nthey asked, for the first time, does the absence\nshape the mark, or the mark shape the absence?\nThey found me in this choice and silently\nsingly, fearful and alone, they named me.\n[[”I'm guessing you went with the absence-thing?”|19]]\n[[”We'll, it's a fucking pleasure to meet you."|20]]\n

You pause. One thought. Memory's silver ribbon\nnow dangles like a rope before your eyes\nyou reach and grasp and feel, far far within,\nbeneath the skull, in the living pattern\nof flesh and molecular fire that wraps\nand roots your spine into your brain, your hands\nand fingertips brushing; the whorled print-ridge\nthat's pressing in the rope – within yourself.\nYou climb. Rise seeking some safe memory.\nThe barracuda-sight of the monster\nwhirlpools beneath you. Hide\n\n[[In wilderness|27]]\n[[Within the crowd|28]]\n

Like bursting through a curtain on a stage\nthe living enactment of a strangers thoughts,\nA hospital bed holds a dying man,\nhe's ringed by silent watchers, faces turned,\nis this his dream or theirs? The bed grows thorns\nthe figures turn towards you, faces white,\neyes screaming empty like cave entrances\nsomebody weeps, worms slither from the sheets\nyou break. A sun-greened hill where couples lounge\nand ease out summer darkened limbs, a girl\nwhose head lolls against your chest, her soft hair\nthat grazes your lip and thunders your heart,\nher scent roots your limbs into the dark soil\nyou feel her breathing, count the smaller hairs\nupon her neck, but cannot see her face.\nA distant couple moves, a sound, a crack\nshoulders through the still summer air like crowds\nare parted by a bounce. Clean limbs move\nskylined and silhouetted on the hill.\nA gasp, a cry, bones twist in patterns new\nand muscles ribbon and curl confetti-wise\nnow something else is born. The girl leans back,\nthey stutter forth on broken legs\n\n[[You run|25]]\n[[You fight|26]]\n

The pulseless neck writes in your hands, squid-strong\npowerful as mushroom pushing through stone flags\nand just as white and silent. Myconid\neyes blink. An ancient unknown phylum stares.\nA many-riven mouth, like cracks in glass\nice-wails, as the cutting-bergs on hulls\nin cold and killing seas sound wine-glass tones\nand pluck survivors down. The sprinkled dead.\nIt takes your neck. You feels the fingers close.\nIt's strong. Stronger than tides. You feel your veins\nand arteries clamp shut. Breath stills, the hearts\nbeat synopticates . The wailing slows. Squeeze.\nYour lungs wrinkle and shrink within you. Squeeze.\nYour tongue escapes your mouth. It's eyes close. Squeeze.\nYou fall together dying in the grasp\nof eaches hate, dream clouds whip past. You squeeze\nan fire each final signal from your brain\ndoomed transmissions and diving commandments\nannounced to colding hands to kill, to squeeze.\nAnd yet you feel the life inside the vice\nthat slaves your neck, this creature will survive.\n\n[[No matter. Execute the sentence. Squeeze.|31]]\n[[Let grace un-knot your hands. Release it now.|32]]\n

Impact shock twists your arm in its socket\nthe eyeshapes rag-fray out like ruined clothes\nit's broken face-edge howls and nitrogens\nyour hand. As cold as distant scattered stars\nA door that opens on it's opened self\nand nowhere else, like the paralysed light\nthat's locked between opposing mirrors, chained\nin its own links. You gasp, and yank your hand\nfrom the prism'd un-space, your bone marrow\ncrackling with sharp-cut frost. You drive it back\nand incandesce your bones with magma-red\nrememberings of rage, and darkened thoughts\nonce slumbering like ash in a cold grate\nglow glow sunset slow, peeping golden eyes\nlike dragonfire through fog. It strikes back.\n\n[[DUCK!|29]]\n[[BLOCK!|30]]\n

#17\nHow does one measure a circle? Begin\nat any point to discover the whole.\nA distant sense of connection flitters\nlike moth wings in a vaulted cathedral.\nNow where to first apply your attentions?\n\n[[The dream|39]]\n[[The scream|40]]\n[[The chairs|41]]\n[[The empty street|42]]\n

You walk, then reach the door then run downstairs\nthen run then stop and turn and lock the door.\nAnd walk across the street and lock your own\nyour back slides down against the wood, you sit\nwith feet spread in the dawndark hall and stare\nas gold infects the light that hunts the wall\nbright heads of day nosing through the window\nthat blinks above your lintel like an eye\nas clouds occlude the sun and trucks pass by.\nThen blue, the sapphire strobe that heralds pain,\nno siren yet, the cars tyres stop outside,\nthe expected openings and closings\na murmured conversation. Steps, a pause\na knock, a shadow on the glass\n\n[[You run|60]]\n[[it's done.|61]]\n

Yes. Drunkvestigations. Yes! Immortal\nLi Bau who drowned in the moon's cold embrace,\nhe stood in his timorous rolling boat\nand leant down to kiss Luna in the night\nblack water where she alone reflected.\nImpressed the August Personage in Jade\nwith wild heroics and was invited\nthrough the stellar constellations gate to\nsit beneath the celestial tree, but\nhis spirit being too impetuous\nanarchic, chaotic, irreverent\nand pleasure seeking he was ejected\nfrom Heaven with some prejudice and thrown\nback down to earth to walk as a hero\nrighting dark wrongs with impossible deeds.\nA wise choice, unlikely times, Vodka\nis portable and has no smell you're told.\nA shop. A note. Some change, and there you are\nhalf emptying pale fire in daylight street.\nYour throat burns, head swims, pocket bottle thumps\nagainst your thigh as stomping and slurred with\na sheriffs badge from fucked-up county you\n\n[[En-route and chase your dreams track on the streets.|43]]\n[[Run to your neighbours house, the girl that screamed.|44]]\n

Then death, and hope the anchor of your arms\nis weight enough and hope your stubborn hands\nun-manicled from lie slack not, but quick\nen-sculpt themselves in rigour-mortis stone\nand lock your thumbs like keys in trachia\nand let no atom pass, assassinate\nthe songs in chorded slumber on the tongue\nso rolling up the bridge to starve the thoughts.\nWho dreams of death in dreams? And such an end\nsummation of a life's worth, nothing more\nthan living tomb and dead chained albatross,\nsilent guardian and latest victim\nof heart's forgotten horror, falling still\nwith orbit un-delayed and flesh untouched\nbut nothing falls forever, even so.

Like a bicycle blocks a car. You sprawl\nand spinning, skitter. Tangled tumbleweed\ndancing briefly with the bare earth. Skipping\nlike thrown stones are, on dabs of your own blood.\nSleep tickles with you, mussing up your hair\nlike lovers do, she cups your face and neck\nlifts your head and drops it, kissing, laughing\nher breath is dabs of black behind your eyes.\nShe dumps you. Rising up, a second's passed\nthe fires escaped your heart, you let it go\nescaping through a shadowed ventricle\nit burns straight up, a welding torch in wind\na ruined oilhead in a hurricane\nthe blue tounge flickering behind your eyes\nit bends you like a bowstring, flicks you up\nand foots you on your earth stained blood. You scream\n\n[[”Till time and love are dead. I'll fight you still!”|58]]\n[[”Back flame, back death, you monster hold your guard\nI fear the rage within me more than you.”|59]]\n

“So, do you mock me fragment? Do you dare?”\n“Looks like it” you reply. The creatures strike,\na cold, coathanger-crooked backhand swing,\ncaves in your face and the agony shrinks\nyou to a silent point inside yourself,\na spray of blood-ice starrs, cartoonish red\nand curls a question-mark parabola\nthat gently tracks your fall. One eye is gone.\nThe monster haws you and talons a strike.\nYou are a flat leaf lashed by rain against\nthe nadir of a rollercoasters loop\nas cars tip down above and rush. A bird\nparalysed, ironed in soft air, by a jet\nthat whips you in it's vortex engines whirl\na blur of razored steel diametered\nahead, beneath, in front, you spin and fall.\nThe Farrow-Man meteors on you, and\na hand, a strangers hand from nowhere, ringed\nwith gold and onyx reaches out\n[[You grab|48]]\n[[You fall|49]]\n

On The Borders Of Night

So live, and set this evil free with peace\nto dove-like flit the way to history's end,\na merciful green tick in the last box.\nA pen that signs the fate of many soon\nbut soonest is yourself, your hands float free,\nthe creatures claws do not. Delicately,\nwith care, like flowers unfurling in spring\nattend the sun, they feel your life within\nand like a petal hunts the golden ray\nthey tighten slowly, plucking at the string\nof life that harps your mind with columned air\nhe thrums in silent song against your pulse.\nYour hands beat on his grasp, his open eyes,\nyou kick the glassy chain and scratch the cord\nthe mad blue light within you bounces round\nthe confines of your skull, illumes the sign\nwith frantic movement, life's last character,\n flame of blue that meets the red of wrath\nand vomits from your lips, crazed lillylicks\nof flowerlike white, a pyroclastic cloud\nthat wracks its icy flesh, dropleting him\nin plasmic water – steam. Skin hammered beads\nghosting from the arm, it screams, releases.\nBreath plunges from your lungs, agonizing,\noxygen hunting the iron in your blood\nand painting your arteries red. You fall.\n[[And grasp in desperation at the weft\nof other dreamers dreams, escaping out.|12]]\n[[Impossibly, apocalyptically\ndown and down, blinding the bright mark with ink.|1]]\n