off the page into your head; disencrypted they tangle with your neural software storing new associations and creating new pathways between the world in your brain. Burroughsian virus demons lock horns with everyday physical and psychical junctions hard and soft wired into the combination action /contemplation nervous system inspiring new thoughts and actions. Words chosen at random can generate new and confusing mental pathways. Pulling poetry out of a hat can start a riot, but combination and recombination of carefully chosen words can start a religion.
The palette, alas, is a difficult one: boredom being the first note inevitably sounded on every writers trumpet; gray, black and white their first colors. But read a great writer and notice the wide range of emotional and intellectual states they can evoke, the strength and stamina of their subtle Magicks. This too may to a degree be learned, studied and practiced. The primacy of the image should not discourage the student but bend them more frenetically at their task. And lest we forget, the spoken word carries a striking force if accompanied by a multimedia event that can literally sweep people off their feet. Crowds tightly packed so you are lifted from your feet at a rock show, dancing feverishly for hours to Acid World Techno.
You protest perhaps that its all in the music, the beat, the hypnotic
flickering of the lights; but its all this and The Word. Never forget
the
word, sneakiest of your allies. A few squiggled lines, a three word
reply
to an unvoiced question, an essay on words lure the audience forward to
better understand your position. Then with the proper
techniques...Streaking the paint with a broad knife and sharp movements,
blurring
the vision,
animating it.
A muddy Babylon red haze stretches from horizon to horizon, a bloated dead body drains slowly at the rivers edge panty hose around ankles dress up to her breasts. Pasty white skin stinks gagging at twenty feet. Shafts of light streak down from the red clouds, huge spotlights swing across the darkened water. The Temple of Poseidon crouches atop a cliff at our back awaiting new human sacrifices to carry beneath his waves. A shaft of light spears the piles of corpses on the rocky cliff. Bloated dead eyes stare into the bright sun, swollen fingers clutching nothing, arms akimbo in an impossible dance with asphalt. Hair matted with weeds limp on the water of a tide pool an infant floats face down diaper sodden at ankles. Crabs and fish nip at exposed flesh as sirens pull darkness over the bloody remains.
Standing in back of his burned out house Shawn studied the smoke stained remains of his life. He lived on detonations, breathed explosives, used the rockets red glare to illuminate his vision of the American Way. Lonely survivors of a collection of hundreds including all his personal notebooks.
"Look at that underpass, striving upwards against gravity, forever yearning forever to be free from the horrible restraints placed against it by man. Begging to fall, pregnant with the angst ridden energy only gravity can endow. It calls out to me. Screaming crying moaning in its gravidity..."Set me free!" it groans "Set me free!".
Four books sat on the ruined head of his snare: 58th Edition of the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, Aleister Crowley's Book 777, Lou Gramms Latin Rhythm Method (stolen from UT), and Godel, Escher, Bach. "How can I refuse? I offer it sweet release with C4 and down it tumbles to my knees, offering up it's pristine untainted form for true and final grace in the penultimate ground shaking orgasm."
"Besides which blowing things up is a blast, I get off to it..."
To Shawn explosion was the ultimate religious rite and the closest he would ever get to sex. He had to blow things up like a nymphomaniac had to f k. He had never made a conscious decision to be a mad bomber any more than a rabbit decides to be an herbivore. The smell of burning plastic reeked thick in the air, wafting off his wounded drumset with each new breeze. It almost bends growing watery at its weak spots, imploring me to gently apply my devices, offer my services, to render it, aid it, abet its destiny, release the locks of linearity and restore the true flow that is gravity's ancient dance. Leaves swirled aimlessly around his feet. He hacked in the cold air and green-black plastic smoke phlegm spattered the dangling stair rail leading up to nowhere. He needed more meth...
He felt the smoke stained bills in his pocket, striving upwards against gravity, forever yearning forever to be free from the horrible restraints placed against it by man, counting to himself.
"Set me free!" it groans "Set me free!".
Ken finally showed up in his silver Dasher and he loaded the remnants of his ruined life into the back seat. Sitting in the front he sighed through clinched teeth, the smoke stinging his eyes.
"How can I refuse? I offer it sweet release with C4 and down it tumbles to my knees, offering up it's pristine untainted form for true and final grace in the penultimate ground shaking orgasm."
The Temporal Collapse was cut all to hell so they weren't going to get but about six hours but they were drunk so they inhaled it all. Alyssa turned the lights down low and they sipped beer to enhance the collapse. It happened so quickly that Shawn almost missed it, Methistopheles shadow momentarily darkened the room and the air seemed to grow thin. The cigarette and the beer in Shawn hands both evaporated instantly as heartbeats pounded in the air. Alyssa's voice sped up like a fast forwarded tape and the air began to swim with lights. Shawn remembers standing on a hillside in the wind. The wind blows his long hair in front of his face, through the strands he glares down on a primitive thatched hut village seeking revenge. It is dark and torches light the village dimly, interrupted occasionally by the blue white lightning behind him that erased every shadow throwing the village into visual disrepute with it's searching glare. The wind continued to rise but the rain stayed high in the night except for a few large drops that touched his face. A torch suddenly blew loose and collided with a thatched roof, flames billowed and blew igniting another nearby house. The thatch of the house on his side of the village ripped free and blew rustling through the village passing the flaming houses and picking up the fire and spreading it in a thousand directions. Voices of alarm grew from the village, people ran about looking like ants whose mound has been kicked. He felt the power flowing through his chest as the wind continued to rise fanning the flames into a great conflagration. He turned to walk away from his revenge and stepped into Alyssa's darkened room.
"It's seven o'clock in the morning and I have to go to work at 10, make me get out of bed and go. I'm going to lie down now.." Alyssa mumbled tiredly.
"Okay... Let me just smoke a cigarette and I'll come to
bed.."
Shawn floated bodiless in a great sooty black void, God walked in and
shook his head disapprovingly, looking away. Who once dug up his
stinking
old corpse anyway...not Shawn... his head was filled with the burnt
remnants of a thousand gleaming ideas, social interactions as chemical
reactions leaving the afterproduct of memories tainted with overpowering
emotions. Half finished experiences cut off in their prime by
uncontrollable circumstances, he lay down next to Alyssa in bed and
stubbed
his cigarette out in the
ashtray.
