Beneath, And Up Again

Beneath, and Up Again

The dry season is hot, painstakingly and energy-sappingly hot. Even as the bloated, enormous golden disk sinks below a ragged horizon; syrupy heat wavers from bleak, cracked ground.

Endless, bone dry footprints left by vanished ghosts highway this way and that and there. This ground is scaly like dragonscales. Black, brick red, husked brown. Stranded lonely rocks lie in unhappy shadow beneath termite mound spires, pockmarked craters hissing with endless insect armies. Ancient remnants lie like collapsed cathedrals in all bleached bone glory, shrouded in the mists of twilight and the crimson dunes of time.

I wander this primordial expanse, wander it away from my diminutive tent beneath an endless sky richly black splashed by starlight older than the first conceptual organisms that once dwelled in simmering pools. I’m drunk on campfire smoke, on whisky that seems to burn harder than my dying firelight. I chuckle at jokes only I hear, and feel fingers in my hair from a Love very, very far away.

Something howls in the dark cliffs far away. How long have I been wandering? I am in a maze of shadows and curving eroded labyrinthine eternities, somewhere far away water gurgles in wet whispers down, down, down..

The crimson rock walls are wet now, covered in mossy growth, in gently swaying clover. Is that a breeze? Earthy scent fills my nostrils. Birdsong? Where is that light from, soft and pulsing, gently violet-orange, like sunrise and sunset at once..

When I exit the caverns, I look on in silence.

Sunset at Dawn

Time is changing.

Things waver like heat rising off of distant highway asphalt. They shiver and shudder, mirages in the desolate desert, before vanishing.

Cities melt in on themselves, warping beneath Gods’ gaze, disheleved and surreal, glassy dreams crashing without sound. Highways buckle to dust. Swallowed by hungry earth. Monuments vanish with furious whispers as history is rewritten under an unending tide of revision. For heartbeats—for moments—the Earth shudders beneath paradoxical floods, human history and construct devoured by nightmarish blur.

And then: change. Birth. Colossal woodland seems to warble into the timeline melody with vigor. Wet greenery. Enormous trees hundreds of meters tall, centuries old, armor-plated bark crisscrossed by slippery clover, dripping moss. Soil dark as midnight, alive with scent, moving as living things course inside. Forgotten mountains blossom like stony flowers, topped by monumental glaciers or vivid lava flows down shadowed sides; visages turned real from this ethereal fog. Angry rivers pulse through reinvigorated channels; rebirthed by new waters. Valleys crag from split earth, swamps and marshes millions of years dried once again humidly infernal.

Life. Creatures once again. Beings big and small. Armored in scales, adorned in feathers. Titanic structures of black stone thrown up at the sky, thorny, and imposing. Crimson light hums, throbs, glows.

Humanity lies in fragments. Quiet and enthralled. Afraid. Night comes, speaking in a million animal languages. Gifted new breath from fossil tombs. And electric minds dance, electricity and glass, electricity and glass..

Home is where the heart is

I’d like an island. Hidden away in the South Pacific, right in the middle of where warm western waters mix with the colder currents welling upward from Antarctica.

The southern portions of the island are chillier, it’s mountains shrouded in thick misty fog and bruised-cloudscapes. In spring and summer it rains plenty, drenching downpours that flood down the lowlands in muddy torrents while in autumn and winter it frosts, even snows sometimes, pristinely alasbter.

Northwest, my isolated home is richly alive, from spring to autumn, with well-watered woodland sprouting vibrantly. Enormous trees illuminated by glassy slanted sunlight. Crystalline creeks chatter enthusiastically down rocky paths, branches hanging low over their beautifully still surfaces, dew-coated leaves gently swaying. Craggy inlets hold comfortable, wet ponds in tiny cup valleys as if carved to be quaint.

Northerly are the lowlands and endless grassy plains, scattered with island forests or birds-egg blue lakes. The air is sweet and ripe and welcoming, winds tussling endlessly.

I • Am • Risen

The world is on fire.

Black flames rise and scream with horrendous agonized howls, spreading to every corner of a wretched, twisted, blackened globe. The fire is grotesque, like liquid night that scalds, hungrily ablaze.

Buildings fold in on themselves—inverted, bending lines that groan out in terrible pain. Wriggling worming tormented shadows of human beings are glimpsed in those half seconds before thorny tendrils snatch at them, impaling, grasping, pulling.

Midnight fire warbles in non-Euclidian geometries. Resonant symphonies made in un-sound notation ring out like some nightmare cathedral billowing it’s bells, but these notes scream and scream and scream, the very fundamentals of reality aglow in this awful terror.

An unending sky cracks with jagged shards like broken glass, like starving and diseased teeth; shattering downward to devour all of the Earth, all of forever..

Ocean waves curl upward and upward and upward, unnaturally colossal. Crimson waves shake and shudder and squirm with livid suffering from unseen slithering serpents.

All of the Earth is burning in black flame, rising and screaming, crumbling sanities cascading into unending dark pits.

I

AM

RISEN

An Unlikely Pair: The Colossus and the Scout

Derros grumbled and Nastrea chuckled at him. They were both sweating in the sweltering, primeval heat. Insects, some as fat as a charcoal-colored chitin finger, orbited about their exposed skin along their heavy scaly armor. Angry sunlight stabbed between colossal tree trunks like glassy shards, wind tussling richly enshrouded trunks covered in mossy plated growths.

“Derros”, said Nastrea with a smirking laugh on her lips, “you seem like a hatchling, you know that? Pale as a weaver-worm freshly spurted from its-”

Derros interrupted. Irritated at the tall black woman, and also trying to hide his own laughter behind an unhappy expression.

“Would you hush up, you talkative squaking menace? I’m not sure what’ll drop me first: the predators, the parasites, the heat, or goddamn you!” Much to the young mans dismay: Nastrea burst further into laughter and clutched her stomach, wheezing in syrupy humid heat.

Derros sighed, wiped his brow. The young man was tall, but not as tall as his companion, and pale skinned. His lengthy curly hair was unruly. His armor was light and simple, fit for a scout to traverse the steaming jungle with ease. Nastrea on the other hand was tall and crowned by midnight dark hair, with vigilantly speckled green eyes. The woman’s armor was heavy, but organic with slick curves and tactical gear: ammunition cartridges, communications maintainers, chemical disperers, even a small active reactor that could be used for a rapid deployment vehicle or long term campsite. The pair trudged through the scraping forest floor.

As they walked, little did they know: they were being hunted. For deep in the shadows of the murky jungle, predators are abound always..

The Heat

My kill attracts flies and buzzards, skittish pterosaurs that fly like twisting columns of exotic color when I gurgle. My laughter is a booming hiss felt in ones chest.

The heat is intense. Syrupy air swirls with dust. Far away thunder rumbles with electric laughter, lightning flashes snapping intensely in bruised purple shadows. I yawn, letting a familiar flying creature clean each of my enormous, obsidian teeth.

Herds down river grumble this way or that, some species so mighty their steps gently rock the ground beneath me. I don’t mind. Not at all.

Not at all.