The Collective

A new day had begun,

she found herself

among the collective.

Watched, and watching him

from her booth, the only place

she lived these days...

Beneath pools of black coffee

between cracks of maroon

pleather upholstery,

She spied him surreptitiously

with her little eye - those childhood

games played on continual loop,

ooops... did he catch her glance?

Now smiling into her compact,

the blush of her mirror reflecting

hope as often reapplied as her lipstick

in shades of Apple Pie in the Sky Red.

A Maybelline bestseller

America, America....

God paint his face on me.

Me was the new black.

It's the century of the Me, yet

Everyone thought they

were so down with empathy.

E to the M to pathy.

was that spoonful of sugar

helping bitter truth go down as we

Fed on the holy host, its communion

formed by states of a union

where the dissolute and the destitute

sat side by side - Some eating their fill

of themselves, and others rummaging

through garbage bins hungry

for any scraps of attention

Adam's Wake

"The pigeons can smell the fear.",  Adam said cryptically, before wandering off into the night. His leaves drifting from him, his castle caught in the eye of a mindstorm, the grains of its sandy citadel howling in an inherited wind. He morphed into a walking haboob, buttresses flying - wildly divergent, and we averted our eyes to shield ourselves from the impending destruction. See no evil and you escape your lot. Look upon the face of it, and you become a pillar of salt; just so much seasoning for dead cityscapes and nearsighted, arthritic archaeologists dusting off the last bits of you from buried fossils & broken pottery shards.

 We found him the next morning in the neighbors shed using a bicycle as a blanket. We just left him there. Any vehicle for escape would probably be welcomed by him, if & when he ever woke up. Dead or alive... was there a difference to the walking wounded? Too bad no matter how fast he pedaled, he couldn't outrun himself... but who could escape time, even if he wanted to? Some people refute the concept of time. Choosing to believe that there is no distinction between then, when and now, but they're the wannabe time travelers... with a dire desire to become bicycle thieves, spinning spokes and grinding gears. You'd think they'd know better.

 

The Present-Weary (as we like to call them) dream of a landscape where all moments in "time" co-exist in a steady static state, like Kodachrome colorslides, carefully stored, overlapping dimensions of space; that it is only the projectionists in our minds that play each frame in a semblance of succession; that the flow we choose is arbitrary for we can just as easily travel forward, backward or present - Hopscotching our way along. Streaming in steamy dreams, montages of moments like flash fiction narratives, 100 words or less, following no logical patterns, yet set on an irrevocable path with not two forks, but infinite forks in the road.

The idea of everyone & everything that has ever or will ever exist co-existing is seductive, it means we are always alive... We never die... Think of all those lives trapped on a cosmic film, playing for eternity on celestial screens We become the stars...  movie stars... Interesting, but we knew it was untrustworthy. We wanted to navigate our own course; to be the auteur directors of our own film. Quite impossible to do, if our scripts had already been written, the stage was already set & every scene already played...

No, it was not box office enough for us; we would negate it. 
"Let us leave theories there and return to hear's here."

Time is a real phenomenon. The way we perceive time; however, is likely an illusion.
Only our present is real, the Past is just recorded memory and the future does not exist.

Now is all we've ever had, but now becomes then, before we can even say when.

We live in our memories, and die in our future which is why the future must never exist.

Acknowledging the future is Certainty's death wish. 

Just ask Adam who still sees pigeons in his wake,  all broasted in fear, logic like burnt feathers tickling his mind's colorless void, waiting for his slow fade to black.

Fly Me To The Moon (Bell Book & Candle Pt. IV)

Serena was sitting at her favorite table at the boulangerie and watched  disinterestedly as the fidgety young woman was nervously rummaging through her enormous Marc Jacobs' bag. Funny, Serena thought, how fashions do seem to imperiously dictate what was merely acceptable and what was so very chic.

Take this young woman she had been observing. Mid-twenties, rail thin, flip-flop clad well-manicured feet, hair carefully tousled to give that "I just fucked my brains out & need a a ciggy" look who now after digging through a suitcase-sized purse was wielding her Marlboro Light cigarette like Darth Vader engaging in battle with Luke Skywalker in some Star Wars flick with one hand & loudly & crudely screeching, "Alright, alright, already... to make a long story short, here's what the fuck he said...." into her Blackberry with another.

All while the young woman's table companions engaged in similar modes of behavior. Chomping on their gum, slurping their overpriced five adjective coffees, blowing their noses, making maddening sounds as they tore into their pastries like lions tucking into antelopes. Gorging themselves on everything at once, appreciating none of it as they did!

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!



A choler rose within her.

Such cretins offended Serena's well developed aesthetic sensibilities.
The desire to crush the offensive sight was strong, not unlike that of a dutiful housewife who has just spied a roach climbing on the dinner table.

It was a combination of revulsion & rage, how dare something so vile show itself so brazenly!

Serena came so very close to demonstrating her disgust, it was just a matter of unthinking her, a small but distinct chasm would form between the right & left hemispheres of the girl's brain, slowly but surely creating an avalanche of neural synaptic dysfunction all at once, like watching a stunned insect frying on a light bulb, but the creature was simply not worth the energy expenditure.

When Serena plucked the gowans fine with some of the creme de la creme of La Belle Epoque society no more than 100 years ago, this young woman wouldn't even have been thought to have sufficient charm to use as a scarecrow for a field of corn.  Though Serena likely would have hung her out in a lonely field back then.
Crows needed food, too, poor things. Ah, those days of the 19th century neo-renaissance.

Now women like that were considered the height of desirability.
Astonishing.
What an era....

No wonder, Serena had been so depressed as of late without any desire whatsoever to practice her unique type of social intercourse. She could find no one worthy of assimilating during her daily prowls around the city these days.
The UnBecomings had been just that these days....
Unbecoming.

Ugly, mentally flaccid, completely unsatisfying...
An intellectual abortion, a lonely ghost ride in a barren, inhospitable desert.


Serena was ravenous.
Starved for the kind of mind & souls that could fill the vacuous void that threatened to annihilate her...
It was an endless hunger, an aching need that became excruciatingly painful during long droughts like this. She could feel the tsunami of tears rising within her, inundating her...

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

All these years amongst these beings had left a truly unwelcome emotional imprint upon her, she must refocus.

Being what some would crudely call a mental vampire, an intellectual succubus was just not the same existence as those creatures of the night that flopped around as the occasional bat & drew the plasma out of their victims. They could feast on rats, vermin, and other undesirables easily. This would sustain them, but not never an Eskaran like her.

Unlike the Nosferatus of this planet, Serena could not survive for long without a particular kind of mind... she couldn't conjoin with just anyone or anything. It would not fill the hollowness within her. Such things would would be too ephemeral like air through a flute, making music for the length of the player's breath, yes, but no more than that.

She was so weary... of it all.
The false charm, the luring, the constant search for the perfect prey...
To what end all of this?

Perhaps it was time for her to be assimilated...
The truth is she longed to love & be loved as these humans did.

To look upon the face of the moon and see not merely some satellite to an unimportant planet in some obscure galaxy, but instead to see the ivory-laced visage of what Italo Calvino explained to her on the starry night that he un-Became so willingly in her arms:

My return was sweet,

my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the color of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first silver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

Blogophilia 50.2 Topic: "To Make a Long Story Short"

Bonus points

(hard, 2 pts): mention a scary movie (i.e., the movie title)

(easy, 1 pt): mention a brand of cigarettes (i.e., brand name of cigarettes)

Click HERE to learn how to join this wonderful group for writers

The Un-Becoming: Bell, Book & Candle Pt. 3

The shades of night fell over the bay.
Darkness cloaked the sky in its inky phosphorescence as the stars began their nightly dance quiring to their ever attendant cosmic audience. Serena spied the very first one to trill out to her and she sang back sweetly to it,

"Star light, star bright; first star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might... have the wish I wish tonight."

The old childhood ditty taking her back on a walk down memory lane.
All magnolia blossom-lined and honeysuckle-scented.
She could fairly hear the chirruping of the cicadas and see the liquid-flashed lovelight of an amorous firefly flickering through the sweetness of a midsummer night....

Only they weren't exactly her memories, were they?
Serena smiled as she realized that it had happened again, quite unconsciously.
Not in the usual way that she invoked her powers.

Her native Pyrenees held many charms, including starlit evenings and fragrant flora, but no such saccharine-soaked musical pleas of youth were part of her past. No, she thought while chuckling to herself, that quaint picture burning like incense in her mental retina came from quite a different source.

Her mind held many such thoughts in proxy, that spun kaleidoscope-like in their random patterns, but they were not her own memories. They were the residual energy she had appropriated over the eons , a byproduct of the assimilation of her victims. 

Sadly in these modern times of Twitter and Play Station 3, most of her prey was so provincial in their worldly knowledge & so limited in their mental capacity that they offered very little pure entertainment value as they un-became.

Serena sighed wistfully, moving away from her expansive bay view, sat down on her Ruhlmann club chair, reached for the glass of reposado on the Mies sidetable & sipped slowly. Drinking deeply from the font of the agave nectar as she began to muse...

She licked her lush lips in contemplation of more interesting times; feeling the phantom taste of her very first victim. Such ambrosial essence did that beloved Queen of the Nile exude the night Serena took her. The many-headed supposed it was just an ordinary asp that drained the lifeforce from Cleopatra's milk-soaked body. 

Never realizing it was just a parlor trick, really, an easy bit of transmogrification into a lower beast.

Serena still remembered the creaminess of her first dip into immortality; the excitement of suddenly feeling every hope, every dream, every tear, every scream flood out of that woman of the Nile and into Serena's own empty being... This emotional napalming nearly annihilated her at first. Prior to that Serena had been just an empty vessel, an inanimate thing, needing to be filled.
The un-Becoming of a victim was like no merely visceral orgasmic experience ever known. The KNOW-ing that came subsequent to the un-Becoming was something many an ancient Eskaran poet had tried & failed to describe. It was an intellectual & emotional smorgasbord. The feral hunger for it, a terrible need when left unsatisfied. 

It was the oldest parasitic force in the galaxy and the most creative...
Certain human scientists, like the famed Professor Hawking, had come close to revealing their truth. They were stopped, of course. 

No such lower life-form could hold such a sacred trust.

Serena did take pity on him, though...
She coveted his brain, but loved his spirit and allowed him to live, though in a sadly incapacitated way. Still, he was allowed to continue his work but was slightly misdirected by her gentle molding into the soft clay of his grey cells. He never knew it was she who persuaded the others to allow him to live or that she had ever so slightly derailed his life's work. Allowing him glimpses of "heaven" but no real promise of the milk & honey that he had merited on his own.


She took quite a bit of ribbing for her rank sentimentality, but her wishes prevailed, as usual. She was a remarkably persuasive creature.

Funny to her how the pages of human history were nothing more than incoherent scribblings, really. Mythologizing the most important truths. And turning the myths into what they called empirical facts. Why the Eskaran race ever deigned to descend upon this third rock from a rather ordinary sun in a such a dull spiral galaxy that was peopled with such cosmic mutants was beyond Serena's ken. Many of the original pilgrims, the Elders, (the ones who didn't assimilate into this race of glorified monkeys) joked that it was likely some accident, some existential joke that landed them here... The old we ran out of light fuel on our way to the Virgo Cluster.

Yes, every Eskaran was taught the hard way:
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong...."





Blogophilia 49.2 Topic: "Walk Down Memory Lane"

Bonus points:

(hard, 2 pts): incorporate a Murphy's Law

(easy, 1 pt): mention a species of poisonous snake

Click HERE to learn how to the join the group.

Bell, Book & Candle (Part Two)

Over the entrance to her front doorway was an ebony plaque, an heirloom, in which large gilt letters were rather elaborately carved into the antique wood with a calligraphic flourish. The words were written in Euskara, the official name and language of her mountain ancestors from deep in the Pyrenees.  It was her talisman, her touchstone and served as both a conversation piece and a true warning for the few who were "rewarded" with her hospitality.

When pressed for both the meaning of the inscription by those who were less than astute and the provenance of the unusual piece, Serena would feign ignorance and then embarrassment, waiting to be coaxed into the telling.

Like a frisky kitten with it's trapped prey, she would toy with her victims before enjoying her morsel of meat. She always did like playing with her food before consuming it, but eventually she would reveal the meaning...

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here -

By then, of course, it was too late for her guests to leave.

"Dear Dante", she would say cryptically, "never did learn to keep his goddamn mouth shut..."

But, of course, no one ever suspected the lovely Serena of being anything more than the Bohemian artist, the consummate performer who with dramatic flourish and the occasional impish grin managed to charm all those who swam into her ken...

And what a pool of knowledge she gave them to wade in.
When she intoned her enchantments in her ancestral language reciting the poetry of the famed Joseba Sarrionandia Uribelarrea:

"Sartaldeko oihanetan gatibaturik
erromara ekarri zinduten, esklabua,
erremintari ofizioa eman zizuten
eta kateak egiten dituzu.
Labetik ateratzen duzun burdin goria
nahieran molda zenezake,
ezpatak egin ditzakezu
zure herritarrek kateak hauts deitzaten,
baina zuk, esklabu horrek,
kateak egiten dituzu, kate gehiag"

Translating it into English after the initial recital in Euskara:
"The blacksmith slave
Captive in the rainforests of the West
they brought you to Rome, slave,
they gave you the blacksmith work
and you make chains.
The red iron that you carry out the oven
can be adapted as you want,
you can make swords
in order that your people could break the chains,
but you, this slave,
you make chains, more chains."


....the singsong lilt of her voice lulled her guests into a trance-like state. That coupled, of course, with plushness of her little eagle's nest perched high atop the zenith of the foggy city's residential universe while not technically living in the lap of luxury certainly was graciously appointed enough to make any personage extremely comfortable. 

Before she began the real crux of the evening's entertainment, she would ply her unwitting victims with the lush fermented juice of a few crushed grapes, convivially pouring rare vintages into the large crystal bowls of their wineglasses. Overriding their protestations with a pretty laugh & a wink, assuring them that they were indeed worthy of the '45 Petrus, never telling them of course what the real cost for the burgundy would be...

Serena's script never varied.
She had perfected each gesture, every word, every look...
There was no need for her to depart from it, after all, she would never see these people again.
No one would.

After serving the drinks, she would invite the poor soul to sit on the large semi-circular Ruhlmann sofa while she herself went to the Erard, sat on the bench & began to sing some popular nonsense that always appealed to these mortal creatures. It was the only bit variance for her nightly performance. Tonight she sang sweetly, "Don't let the sun go down on me. Although I search myself, it's always someone else I see. I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free ..." with an irony that no one but she could appreciate. Playing on the instrument that Franz Lizst himself taught her to appreciate a century and a half ago. In fact, she kept the death mask mold of his hands on the piano...

A little souvenir for a job well done. 

She was so excited when she saw them at auction in Christie's last year where incredibly she also saw the world's largest cut diamond known as the Fancy Black, containing small red diamond crystals which at 555.55 carats was sadly beyond her means at the present. 

But finding Liszt's hands was truly a bonanza after she had carelessly lost them some time ago in another incarnation and Serena was happy to have been reunited with them...

They became the equivalent of a rabbit's foot for her. making her feel that her San Francisco enterprise would be fruitful one, after all. Her last venture ended rather disappointingly where she was forced to flee Bristol and settle quickly in the new world...

Here, in this city by the bay with earth that quivered like a virgin's thighs.  Where the sun is something of a stranger  & the mist swirls ominously on most days of the year and the sun drowns spectacularly in the Pacific's frigid waters, sending frissons of pleasure coursing through her body every time Serena witnessed those last of rays grasping at passing clouds, begging for life. 

Serena enjoyed witnessing that daily murder, all those red streaked wispy clouds like bloody gashes in the sky...

Reminding her that the dark always won the daily struggle with the light and so would she, she kept reminding herself.... and so would she.... 

Blogophilia 47.2 Topic: "Living in the Lap of Luxury"

Bonus points:
(hard, 2 pts): incorporate a record from the Guinness Book of World Records
(easy, 1 pt): use a line from an Elton John song  

Click HERE to learn more about Blogophilia.

Bell, Book And Candle... (Part One)

Serena had a small flat in a fairly non-descript, boxy building of an early 40's vintage that was desperately trying to revive the glory days of Art Deco when glamour ruled the feverish little imaginations of all the best and brightest artistic minds the world had to offer. Sadly, its architect failed miserably with his intent of celebrating that era's achievements.

It sat atop one of those impossibly steep hills that blighted the city for those who were unaccustomed to scaling such heights on their daily walkabouts, but the building's seeming inaccessibility and resistance to gravity's pull as it clung tenaciously to its precarious perch is what made it appeal to Serena all the more. Its remote dead end street location not only gave her the feeling she was the only person on the planet, a feeling she relished, but also afforded her one of the most glorious views imaginable outside of Zeus' vista of the world from Mount Olympus.

Here she felt powerful, inviolable... and most importantly, galaxies away from the prying eyes of those whom might otherwise feel compelled  to interrupt the serenity of her inner sanctum with their notions of what most in her society would deem as unreasonable and uncivilized behavior for a charming woman seemingly full of joie de vivre.

They would not be able to understand how her work required her to remove herself from the din of humanity in order to become immersed in a cache of consciousness privy only to the select few born to the vocation.

Over the entrance to her front doorway was an ebony plaque, an heirloom, in which large gilted letters were rather elaborately carved into the antique wood with a calligraphic flourish. The words were written in Euskara, the official name and language of her mountain ancestors from deep in the Pyrenees.  It was her talisman, her touchstone and served as both a conversation piece and a true warning for the few who were "rewarded" with her hospitality.

When pressed for both the meaning of those words by those who were less than astute and the provenance of the unusual piece, Serena would feign ignorance and then embarrassment, waiting to be coaxed into the telling.

Like a frisky kitten with it's trapped prey, she would toy with her victims before enjoying her morsel of meat. She always did like playing with her food before consuming it, but eventually she would reveal the meaning...
Abandon hope all ye who enter here -

By then, of course, it was too late for her guests to leave.

"Dear Dante", she would say cryptically, "never did learn to keep his goddamn mouth shut..."