u/natetheapple

See man laid out.

See him reposing silently, displayed in all his duplicates siamesed through time.

See the patterns habituating into being like so many cells forming agency and structure out of repetition, circadian and slower and some drawn out across the eons of his corded life like numerals of Incan knots, recording the texture of a mythos vast and vagrant, truncated at both ends.

His morphology is predicated on prior forms of course but oddly forward-fastened too, pulled along into himself until so distant to all familiar things he becomes alien and isolated, other.

See him now.

The song tousled hair, the symbol scored lips coalescing into curlicues orbicular and odd in the strata of his multitude. The digits that find fire in dead things and drive the mute complaining earth to common motion. The eyes, which take light and put out a thousand names, altering one syllable one photon one perspective to the next. Seamlessly dying and rebirthing into himself and seeing all the while.

He sees you now, but only in little slits and pieces, and he says your pupil causes your face for he always sees it first, and even conscious of his ignorance he cannot escape it.

Who are you pregnant with

You forgot her name but I know it but I cannot say it

There are gemstone vines fruiting winding on your thighs

There are eyes that see and hands that pluck

I have two eyes and two hands and one eye sees asleep and one eye sees awake and one hand plucks the fruit and one hand cuts the vine

Your hands are mine when you sleep and my womb is yours awake

But your womb is taken

Only while you sleep and you sleep

Your stomach unswells

She is climbing down she is returning to her seed

Who plants the seed

Who I will know as my own hand whose eyes I will look as through my own

The clocks have two hands

But only one of them I know the other changes too slowly to remember

Have we changed voices

Not anymore

There must be more than two Is

There is

Some portion of his soul recalled her, sent up brittle memories like little bubbles of blue glass, florid laughter a knowing gaze their fingers interlaced, fragmenting and reforming into a vast inarticulate yearn.

He stood there as her station neared them, throttled with the things he couldn’t say, he stood there choking silently as she turned the page, as she stood to meet her rushing stop, as the train hissed close its chorus, opened doors, as she left.

Her lover of a dozen lives was throttled, choking on a thousand things he couldn’t say, a thousand pieces tiling their mosaic out of time.

But she didn’t see, but he didn’t speak.

Little bubbles of blue glass shattering, tiny fragments falling somewhere, twin doors somewhere closing, something passes he can’t recall, hissing open of the train’s chorus, some portion of his soul is choking, closing, roaring chorus of the train’s going, going.

Through the interstice between one moment and the next there intruded a wrongness. Cold gaped the gap in time, and things stretched and warped, drifting in the eddies of an outer current.

Her soul was pulled leftward, leaving the husk of her body locked in time’s static pattern. The infinite object of the universe, its trillionth corner etched with the faint motif of all she knew, soon faded, devoured by spaceless distance. Left, left, down and ever left, until such notions of base geometry lost all meaning, and the wordforms gibbered ceaseless and mute as incoherent calligrams in the vacuous environs of the Great Outside.

In the purling tides of a blind phantasmal stream, her soul flowed Lethean. The fragile schema of her being admitted a more porous aspect, memories and perceptions and the deeper faculties for which language keeps no syntax swirled in and out like madly capering eidola. Her mind, endued with motion spawned of an alien causality, bled weird disjointed thoughts into her frothing consciousness.

Abstract, unimaginable thoughts. Strange and vast thoughts that impossibly mangled into forms. Images whose contours neither sight nor space could adumbrate, yet which nonetheless evinced ineffable curves and grotesque aphotic hues with branding clarity, shapes and shades of anticolor floating without frame, their ophidian outlines winding abdimensional like deliriant worms. A livid blank landscape unreal, ripe with lush bizarreries, resolving itself into terribly fathomable verse.

It knew her so well, and she knew nothing of it, yet recognized It instantly.

She saw Its hoary panfamiliar monstrously divine touch in the texture of human history, wefted umbilically through the warp of happenings like a live pulsating lattice, murmuring the cryptic bland ubiquity of being. She brimmed eons with corrosive liquid joy, felt the whip of hateful filaments like the cilia of galaxies scourging manic burning winds to tranquil waves, rippling ecstatically, atoms budding nanosecond bliss immortal, amber-warm with a symmetric admiration for their shared decoupling, something forever now.

Far, a great blot burgeoned on her motionless soulless form, swelling to obscure the conjoinments of her life, until all her was void. The spiraling offshoots of her little presence shriveled grey, marcescent and forgotten, cut from her vital causes. The final ledger of her doings ran black with inky tears, blanching under sooty vapors, quick blown out, traceless like sparks drowned in ocean depths.

And as the object of the universe revolved in the shrieking un-ness of the Great Outside, the nameless soul that once was her found enlightenment.

Opens his left eye a slit.

The dusk is lavish with phantom dancers, violet dandies whirl purple devas decked in blackly coruscating gems, sparkles ricochet off his eye and populate their jewels sending clouds of sooty light migrating across the room in a shifting chiaroscuro haze-

Acclimating, he can just make out the velvet couch behind a sultry widow’s sable gown, it has been surreptitiously chivvying all night and now is once again brushing up affectionately against the poker- itself stock still and stiff with a false formality belied only by the faint emberous blush at its tip.

Assured of his ambush, he startles up and locks gaze on the forbidden coupling of the dignified firepoker and that sybaritic gilded green couch. Quick the flush leaps from the static poker and diffuses gentle orange in the hearth, the couch is meanwhile attempting a mad dash to its former position and, were it not for an improbably buxom heiress heaving magnificently her blue-black décolletage gleaming with delicious dusky perspiration under a moon mouth rich with throaty laughter and vulpine delight, would surely have been apprehended, yet, as it stands so does the couch, and with a proud and solemn inertness too.

Grunting irascibly, he turns and falls asleep.

The Persian carpet, harboring a hundred tiny sultanates, dazzles his canopied bed with little sparking dreams, stellifying in an evanescent starscape forming brief and fulminous constellations, sent up in prayer by a grateful citizenry whose glorious golden age will grace sparse chapters in faded crumbling chronicles like microscopic noctuaries come dawn.

The winding labyrinths of her finger pads, the fine cuneiform on her lips, impossible to decipher, her eyelashes the sultry fangs of a carnivore plant, lids gently veiling and disclosing pearls immersed in beckoning nectar, the summer blush of her skin, winter flash of her teeth, a dozen springs and autumns flowering and fading in all the shades and hues of her cheeks, the hypnotic sway of her hair, its heady thorny scent.

On the forth of Miskuary I rose with the mourning sungloom. It was a benightful day filled with writhing lips and staring eyes and smiles that showed too many teeth. Bless Trivia my mind eschewed old habits and I tugged at the strings hooked to the inner corners of my lips with ersatz earnestee.

The puddles on that day were cool and I enjoyed the way they wiped away the pores still clinging stubbornly to my skin. At this late age I can’t have so many holes.

I remembered again how this here smelled when she would lean on me and surreptitiously sample it. She always loved that smell. Some sap or other and little bits of floral detritus. Good mark for a moment. Note to shell: don’t remember things from her brain. Too leaky.

I pre scribed again that aweful thinkg. Writ on the margins of her mind: STOP-PAIN. Works like a charm but it’s a horrible thing to do really. To level the scales I’ll have to brew something the little chemists would approve of. It’ll be hard. The little chemists make perfect work of chaos with their conjuring and mating and rotating shells. My own shell’s too big to turn like that. And even if it could it’d make such a ruckus.

When the mega-organelles were distracted I stuck a thorn into my looker. Perfectly aligned so it fully encompassed the tiny locus of my pupil. Nothing stuck out because of how perfect my placemeant was and they all kept up their halfbits.

The mechanism made the sound and they all filed out. The thorn had taken a sojourn to my brain and I corralled all the little nodes and knows out the hole in my pupil. I no; I said I should be having fewer but these perforations are so yousful. In my hand it all quivered in pale purple congeries. But now my head was hollow and I filled it with the engram of that place I wished to bring me to. I placed the squishy stuff in my pocket. Inside as out. Soon as the skull was brimming I am here.

Thus brimmed and herebrained I disquisite in all the toneless simultonatey of the intonet:

The more one knows the more one knows the unknown and the easier it becomes to know. So as the unknown shrinks it grows and its transmution into the known is quickened too. This is the holey trust of the little chemists. That their cycleopean diseyepils harness the self engorging cycle. The backfed loop called history that girdles even the great Dumdjutee (MD*)

Speech predates the speaker and we speakers make eager pray. The big voice consumes the cords that strum it into being. The little chemists fumble and careen in minus-cule arcks.

Body molts and molds and decomposes.

I’ve been again.

And though I’ll quick be gone, I’m glad in knowing that no matter where I’m going I’ll soon enough be back.

*Editter’s Note: broman newmerals for 14 ‘unread or so

The chattering keys, chirping mouse clicks, the exuberant whoop of the space bar, the air conditioner’s monosyllabic filibuster, two clocks discoursing six seconds and a room apart, the morning liturgy of the garbage truck anticipant or generative of the fetal sun. These are my sounds.

The satisfied hum of the lawnmower and the screams of the massacred grass, the glad cacophony of the servitor species: fire-eyed cars and lithe bicycles, proud roaring motorcycles, platinum airplanes and fiendish cachinnating helicopters, growling centipedal trains. These are my sounds.

Crusading sovereign sirens, crying razor red their sacred crises: fire, crime, countless failures of flesh- I know the sound; the hymnal violence of alarms, tolling the partitions of the day with relentless prophecy- I know the sound; dreamy recollections, stifled echoes, deja vu knifing soft and sweet, the quiet undercurrent sighing, frothing, stilling- I know the sound.

The clink of cutlery at work, assaulting food and crockery with equal fervor, chiming steady their workman’s song. The scrape of harried dishes, droning fricatives of tap water, the wafting plumes of vaporation, whispering a whisper hard to hear. These sounds I know.

The thrum of walled-off music, migrant basslines crossing glass and concrete borders with muscular aplomb. The abrupt percussions, toilets flushing and objects falling, varied clamors of surprise, tires bursting drivers cursing fireworks like pyres burning loud their bright brief lives. These sounds I know.

The mating trills of birds, the music of their morning gossip, sweet notes of their marital despairs, warbling of territorial disputes; the hushed nighttime talk of trees, brushing air to breathy speech with a thousand leafy fingers, whisper soft their ancient signing; the choiring of insects, hallelujahs magnified a thousandfold, singing prayers unproselytic, singing the gospel of their selves. Their sounds are my sounds.

The shofar’s triple call, rolling, undulating in successive waves, now stuttering in staccato bursts like the beat of a hummingbird’s heart, now silent now starting, reverberating, cycling forever in the fundus of my psyche. Its sound is also mine.

The crowned eagle’s cry, cuckoo of the apocalypse clock, wavering the aeon’s hand at twelve, and whether auguring noon or midnight or the unmarked thirteenth hour even its maker cannot say. Its sound is also mine.

Winged thoughts and crawling thoughts, highfalutin reveries and plans, hunger and a hundred scrabbling yearns, point and counterpoint, the tactile action coupled with its half detached cognitions, siren violins and deep avuncular drums. These are my sounds.

Automated compliments and casual love professions, dishonest but true, the gentle patter of small talk and the purling daily rhythms of domestic life, the collage of conversations conducted with a dozen mouths in half as many tongues, inspissating snippets now and then crystallizing words, the nameless throated sounds: coughs and grunts in countless accents, tongue clicks and snorts and smacking lips expressed with strict adherence to dialects unlexiconed, inestimably diverse. These are my sounds.

Jack springs from the box, summersaults, trips, falls into winter; fruitless.

It’s a ball, dancing round and round, seasoned by the spinning.

Maybe next time the box unlids Jack’ll bound free.

_________ : the recognition that one is participating in the narrative of a recollected dream, the odd feeling that wells up when perceiving one’s options: to reenact the dream even as it occurs, or else to extemporize, act outside

____ : feeling caught between an impulse and a passion

_________ : the peripherals of vision, where things blur to shapelessness and colors drain to vague and nameless hues and objects are known only by their motion

_____________ : the manic feeling of transcending one’s suffering by reveling in it, often associated with an inflated sense of self

_____ : inexplicable euphoria which clashes with one’s current circumstances in a somewhat unpleasant way

___ : the subtle thread of a subconscious habit shared by different people, especially across time, e.g. lip biting when nervous

___________ : a repeatedly recurring motif or symbol pertinent to one’s present life yet whose meaning with regards to it is ambiguous or unclear

The day’s miracle mundanities daubed thick with fog and smothered fugally in mist.

Few memories persist divulging the common oddness:

How dazzling and tremendous the sun doubled on the screen, killed quick by the sunrising out from it, bright adverts and glowing scrollings and blinding flashing messagings;

How animate the cars, half alive and half respiring in long flatulent exhalations unbroken by in-breaths, fed the juice of ancient corpses through proboscises inserted during brief transacted copulations with the mute and sessile prostitute machines, how eager-loud their waking rumble, sending light from eyes that never see;

How intricate the music, voicing delicately the perfect sounds with impossible fidelity;

How ubiquitous the art: perfect landscapes sprawling flat on branded tissue boxes, perfect curlicues engraved on cutlery, perfect moments swollen large on floating billboards and flashing signs, perfect angles and perfect lines;

Perfect and dexterous the cashier’s handling of goods, scanned and sifted with smooth fluid motions;

Perfect and dexterous the pedestrian’s dance across the pavement, winding lines of figures progressing and regressing with synchronized idiosyncrasy;

Perfect and dextrous the pickpocket, the con artist, the spam caller, the scammer;

Perfect and dexterous the bus driver, directing wheels like innervated limbs, maneuvering round corners at killing speed with casual and unboasted genius;

Perfect and dextrous the waiter, armed with food and sharp decorum;

Perfect and dexterous the teacher, chalking knowledge and watching with invisible spinal eyes;

The phone caller, the bank teller, the variform keyboarder, the secretary, the brick layer, the forklifter, the variegated gadget fixer, the mechanic, the electrician, the barber, the ambidextrous nail technician, the road setter, the trash picker, the earnest beggar; perfect, dexterous.

Perfect all.

He was not cold.

There was no heat by whose lessening he could be cold. No state of equilibrium to which he adhered and by whose gradations he could measure good or ill. He stayed in the dirt, stayed lingering amidst the absent and decreasing shapes not for any purpose but the lack of one.

He did not dream.

Still he saw her.

Saw her in the lines and static coils of the wood that was his world entire. Her face so close to his. So close her features should’ve blurred but her eyes and her lips and the cline of her cheeks and the flat of her forehead were clear, correct to her perfection as he knew it when his heart still could spring in her presence.

He would stare at her, frozen as she across a gap the faintest sigh could have bridged had either breath for it, until the wood took her away again.

And when she stood above him, stood in the place which was theirs before but now was hers alone; when she stood and said her prayer he did not hear it but through six feet of packed disintegrations he could feel the heat of the generating of her life. She was warm.

When she left he knew his own annihilation. And when next her face embossed out the oaken coffin cover like a mask set at skin distance but distinct enough to see, it did not satisfy him. It was not warm.

Animated by the lack of her warmth, the lack which was not cold, his muscles strained impossibly. His fingers moved and clutched, his lips kissed her wooden ones, chest trembled as if harboring a traitor’s heart, feet kicked.

The need of her which loosed the bonds of rigor mortis slid the casket open. The need of her pushed up the dirt, the granulations of a million dead formed limbs to lift him up, to raise him out, the one who knew of warmth.

The need of her birthed from the soil like some mythic zoophyte. The countless dead and him that knew her face and the living living need stumbled first on four limbs, then on two, and breathed on by insensate wind beneath a numb and throbbing sun the figure that was not cold sought out the sole thing it could feel.

And it could feel her. She was warm.

The master had five disciples.

When the five disciples and the nonexistent sixth sat in a ring centered on him they were seven.

The first had asked of life and found satisfaction in the master’s answer. Now the second disciple asked:

“What is time? Why does it only move forwards?”

The master was quiet for a moment. Then another moment spoke:

“Time is the distance between happenings, the change between moments, as with the sound that follows my silence.

As distance necessitates space, so is time space, being the space within which moments happen.

As space expands outwards, time expands forwards. There is an asymmetry between future and past: the future contains the consequences of all occurrences in the past, while the past contains none of the consequences of occurrences in the future. So the future is swelled with happenings.

As the contents filling a spacious room cannot be stored in a smaller one, so the contents filling the future cannot be stored in the past. So the future cannot be reversed, so the course of time is set.

And yet there is no future and there is no past, only distance, just as there is no top to the world nor bottom, only distance. Time differs from space only in its shape, where space extends in all directions equally time discriminates, fills out at one end and tapers at the other. So the mind calls one end future and the other past.

Limited in scope by its size and its structure, the mind cannot know its full extension through time simultaneously, so it splits itself across time through moments. Just as the lesser space of the past cannot hold the greater contents of the future, so the mind of the past cannot hold the thoughts of the future, so the mind keeps record only of the past, and makes guesswork of the future it occupies but cannot know.

Time does not progress at all, only mind.”

The second disciple who had been troubled with the question was now satisfied. The other three disciples had other questions. The sixth disciple that was not was silent, for the moment.