Gillian Prew DISCONNECTED #9

DISCONNECTED #9

Gillian Prew

Morning hangs like a tapestry of soft violence;
everything sewn so slightly wounded. Love,
under her assortment of onslaughts, bathes
in the light, in the shade of the gossamer-hung hedge,
in the heat of my lap; an echo of evanescence. The gull that visits
- how familiar his white eye,
intangible as weak silence, dignified as marble.

Each day, the launch of hegira;
fleeing the memory of amber summers
that suffocate from the sullen touch of birth.

Childishness lies in the hands,
in the vulnerability of protruding veins, as if desire
could hold them flat and they could smell of rosewater.

I have drowned my fury in salt water.

But I do not strive to adjust the sea
- it all comes,
thin as waning consciousness,
delinquent as youth raw with life,
like the aura of poets who endure
by having things to say. They rhapsodize
beyond the grave, and I unable
to speak for all the wrong words
tearing me down.

Currently living in Argyll, Scotland with her partner, two children and a cat, Gillian Prew ditched philosophy in favour of poetry even though the former still haunts her. She has three collections of poems and has been published at Full of Crow, Gutter Eloquence, Gloom Cupboard, Fragile Arts Quarterly, ‘ditch’, and The Glasgow Review among others. She has also been a ‘Featured Artist’ at Counterexample Poetics. You can follow her blog at http://gillianprew.blogspot.com/

SCIENCE FRICTION

AN EXPERIMENT

1) Read “Trade Surplus” by James Kendley.

2) Watch Andrew Swainson’s “I Lovely Cosmonaut” (music by Monstrance, 2007).

3) Repeat 1) and/or 2) as needed.

4) Report effects in Comments section.

TRADE SURPLUS

James Kendley

They first exported mesh bags of plastic army men, all jumbled in platoons of prime numbers. Each soldier was unique. Each was svelte and androgynous. Each sported a monstrous hooked nose and an improbable weapon: this one aimed a defoliated tree branch; this one cradled a gigantic spiked dildo; this one stood tip-toe in the act of hurling a boomerang made of broccoli.

We passed them around. Trade them! Collect them! All one-hundred-and-thirty-seven!

Ha-ha-ha…

When the clothing came, we fought over it.  I wore a vest of acrylic burlap in shocking blue. It had seventeen pockets and an eye-shaped vent that let the breeze up my back, but that was a small price to pay for an ironic fashion statement. My girlfriend wore a shimmering blouse with extra sleeves flapping like rectangular wings. We laughed aloud at the late-night talk show host who proudly displayed his new blue jeans and then had the cameraman zoom in on the superfluous fly at his left ankle. It was open, ha-ha-ha.

Durable goods were dangerous. The filigreed tableware was almost hypnotically gorgeous, but even the spoons were frighteningly sharp, and the pointed handles were so long that diners couldn’t sit side-by-side without risking injuries.  The trivets snapped like terrapins, the gardening implements were reminiscent of medieval torture devices, and the drinking glasses required bibs at best. They just couldn’t get it right.

The workmanship was superb, and the quality of the materials was never in question. The utility of these objects, however, was in great dispute. Enthusiasts took a neo-Taoist approach, arguing that those who disparaged these objects were simply using them for the wrong purposes. Gorgeously crafted nine-inch golf tees, for example, made wonderful chopsticks, and twelve-pound, razor-sharp butter knives were a serious chef’s dream come true. Use them for what they are, they said. Just ignore the instructions.

Ignoring the instructions was not an option in my set. The instructions were cooler than the products themselves, Zen kohan with illustrations consisting of stick figures in awkward poses unrelated to the products. We blew them up on tee-shirts and bumper stickers:

NOW POCKET NECK WISHES—SLICE!

(stick figure apparently shot from cannon)

and

HAPPEN ABYSS 11x11=123 POTATOES—BAM!

(stick figure apparently crying or sweating on toilet)

and

SPORT CHEST COOLANT POWERS—TRIP!

(stick figure apparently asleep in colander)

and my favorite, the ominous and enigmatic

EAT GLOVE NO BABIES—DESTINY!

(stick figure apparently smoking a dog)

Consumer electronics appeared overnight. There were no design innovations to distinguish them from the products of established makers. There were, however, unexpected functional anomalies. We heard of these UFAs as rumor, but we all faced the reality sooner or later.

Eating directly from the new refrigerators destroyed melanin, which led one feebleminded school nutritionist to tell children that midnight snacks caused albinism. The picture quality of the new televisions was superb, but even limited viewing left owners with a desire to hoard ball bearings and a voracious curiosity about Paris in 1473 C.E. The new hairdryers left users starry-eyed and anemic, but their hair was so lustrous and full-bodied that few could forgo the pleasure.

The products were hard to avoid. We started buying them by accident, which ruined the irony—or worse.

A canned drink had me seeing infrared vapor trails with the first sips, then in x-ray at the half-way mark. By the time it was empty, I was counting mites on a bluebird three blocks away, and I was afraid to leave my bench due to the yawning crevasses and gigantic crawling creatures on the sidewalk, so unaccustomed was I to the startling shift from telescopic to microscopic vision. It was dusk by the time my sight returned to normal, and by that time, I had examined the can as no human had ever examined any object with the naked eye. Below the ubiquitous point-of-origin label, below the allergy information:

SHARP SHARPER SHARPEST CAFFEINES—DANCING!

(stick figures apparently fighting over a pizza slice)

The products penetrated all markets, everywhere. By the time we understood their synergistic effects, how using the products in close proximity to one another created new and more alarming UFAs, it was too late.

We had dug our own graves with our debit cards.

I threw it all out. So did others. The streets were littered with indestructible, immaculately wrought objects creating overlapping fields of complementary and increasingly deadly UFAs. They did not rot or rust or fade, and no one collected them because the sanitation workers had been issued the new smart phones.

Everybody got the damned smart phones. They were better than free; they flooded the market.

We learned to hit the dirt when we heard that peculiar warbling ringtone.

I have examined one of the phones, by the way, a broken one with bits of the former owner still clinging to it with some sort of molecular desperation. It was a flip model, nothing interesting about it except the single instruction on the receiver:

BATTERY LIFE CONFETTI OPEN/HANDS—TRANSMISSION!

(stick figures apparently joined at the heads)

As UFAs tore the world apart, the decision finally came to use focus groups and beta testers. The legacy of our journalism and of our culture is the cynicism of the final headlines:

BETA TEST OMEGA GOODS—POINTLESS!

(stick figure kneeling in prayer)

 and

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE—GOODBYE!

(stick figure exploding)

We forage now. We’ve even learned to joke as we skulk beneath the crisped husk of the little girl catapulted into a tree by her own bicycle or as we step over the poor shivering bastard whose skin has melded with the lining of his seven-sleeved fleece hoodie or as we dodge the lurching woman whose headset has burrowed into her brain.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

We joke, because we are still urban sophisticates, after all, but we cannot laugh. We still hope for escape to the suburbs, but energy-smart and passenger-hungry vehicles prowl day and night, and the new traffic signals are dreadfully efficient. Petrified forests of would-be jaywalkers crumble at every bridge and tunnel leading out of the city.

We forage till one of us opens the wrong cabinet or uses the wrong can opener or steps on the wrong floor tile. Only a matter of time.

We forage, and we read labels. We’re don’t care about high fructose corn syrup anymore.

We look for unusual instructions. We look for the point-of-origin label:

MADE ON ALDEBARAN VI—FANCY!

(stick figure and ice-squid apparently playing pat-a-cake)

Ice-squids from a gas giant, little entrepreneurs with big dreams, ha-ha-ha!

Nobody’s laughing now.

I LOVELY COSMONAUT

FULL-SCREEN MODE RECOMMENDED

• Monstrance was an experimental improvisation project featuring XTC’s Andy Partridge (guitar), Barry Andrews (keyboards) and Martyn Barker (drums). Get Monstrance here.

• James Kendley is senior editor and archivist for Danse Macabre. More scribblings @ http://www.kendley.com/.

Saki THE OPEN WINDOW

THE OPEN WINDOW

Saki

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come.  Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping.  I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there.  Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.”

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.

“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

“Hardly a soul,” said Framton.  “My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here.”

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

“Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the self-possessed young lady.

“Only her name and address,” admitted the caller.  He was wondering whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state.  An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

“Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that would be since your sister’s time.”

“Her tragedy?” asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.

“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.

“It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?”

“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting.  They never came back.  In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog.  It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning.  Their bodies were never recovered.  That was the dreadful part of it.”  Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human.  “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do.  That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk.  Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves.  Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window—”

She broke off with a little shudder.  It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

“I hope Vera has been amusing you?” she said.

“She has been very interesting,” said Framton.

“I hope you don’t mind the open window,” said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; “my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way.  They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so they’ll make a fine mess over my poor carpets.  So like you men-folk, isn’t it?”

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter.  To Framton it was all purely horrible.  He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.  It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

“The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,” announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure.  “On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,” he continued.

“No?” said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment.  Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention—but not to what Framton was saying.

“Here they are at last!” she cried.  “Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!”

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension.  The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes.  In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.  A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.  Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: “I said, Bertie, why do you bound?”

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly-noted stages in his headlong retreat.  A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid an imminent collision.

“Here we are, my dear,” said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window; “fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry.  Who was that who bolted out as we came up?”

“A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton; “could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived.  One would think he had seen a ghost.”

“I expect it was the spaniel,” said the niece calmly; “he told me he had a horror of dogs.  He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him.  Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

Saki (1870 -1916), was the pen name of the British author Hector Hugh Munro, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture. The name Saki is often thought to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, a poem mentioned disparagingly by the eponymous character in “Reginald on Christmas Presents.”

Anita Kainthla FOR OLD TIMES SAKE

FOR OLD TIMES SAKE

Anita Kainthla

For old times sake
I returned on the 150th year
of the house, nothing is left
nothing
in the empty embrace of the rooms
cracks
in the kitchen walls, here and there
creepers
eavesdrop like curious neighbors
on a once people at a table full of politics
while the servants have no roof
just a cookie-jar room
always open, always empty
of all scandal some loyalty
for old times sake
the crib baby-wobbles
in the attic, lost a leg
in the corner
broken legs, heads, hands etc
in a heap of dead toy things
Among other things
Monalisa smiles in monochromes
an assemblage
of four generations in frames
for old times sake

Happy Valentines Day from Danse Macabre!

Sunil P. Narayan PĀNCHĀLĪ

Pānchālī

Sunil P. Narayan

Pulled into my husbands’ court by my uncombed hair

Thrown onto the floor where hundreds of feet touch its thick, red silk

The flowing carpet rises and falls like the mist of my lotus-laden lake

I know you are immovable in your rage Shákuni!

Your ego knows no limits, it is like a snake stalking a mouse

Quietly without remorse in its meager heart

All eyes watch me cry in anguish as you pull my śāṭī

To the end of this room it flows like the Gaṅgā

Shining with its thin, gold-laden fabric

And crippled by your greedy fingers!

Dignified beauty you tossed with your dice

Human emotions you sacrificed with your heart

Bring your eyes to mine to see one word: regret

Ha! You are the nectar’s enemy: regret!

If you spit on my chastity then Kṛṣṇa-Devá will smite you this instant!

His cakraṃ: a knife for your spineless body

All my fears that followed me at night when I visited my lord in secret

Nibbling on the black pearls around my neck while I watched the roses rise

They are you…a shadow that rapes Sóma-Devá

I cannot give you my body for it belongs to Keśava!!

My life will one day be returned to his village

To live as a cowherd while churning milk for his hungry pink lips

The boyish smile and curly hair barely touches his shoulders

Eyes so wide yet shaped like the waning moon

Little specks in the corner of both are galaxies unknown to us

So far away where other people exist for whom Kṛṣṇa-Devá is their mahārāja

If I am his then he is my ruler too!

Shákuni, you are the drunken ego: a corrupted seed for humanity!

My body is a vase holding the virtues of Sūrya-Devá

He touched my spirit to give me a bit of his own

Disrobing me in front of my husbands and all the Āryas of their kingdom

is a sacrilege!

I beg you to stop this great injustice!!!

Can’t you see I have sunken into a sea of distress!?

No, you are busy drowning my voice with your wicked laughter

Brahmā-Devá gave you a boon that protects your life from any physical or divine harm

Yet, has he no shame when seeing this monstrous deed?

Ma! You are Sarvāsuravināśā-Devī, come to my rescue!!!

Show your terrifying face to this savage

Make him cower under your crippling stare, ma!

Turn his limbs into brittle sticks so he will stop treating my honor like a toy

 

Sunil P. Narayan: “Sunil’s work has been a long, enriching journey that absorbed the world’s eccentricities to create a masterpiece of color, surrealism and human emotion. The past two years witnessed a climatic moment in which his writing churned out emotionally-inducing poems. It is his intent to help people access feelings they rarely get to experience.”

James Beach HE’S GOTTA STOP LIMITING HIS CONSCIOUSNESS WITH WEED

HE’S GOTTA STOP LIMITING

HIS CONSCIOUSNESS

WITH WEED

James Beach

…Read his latest? There are huge sex circuses underground. The hero, after being selected, wakes up in a parallel earth existing underground. He’s informed of his death, how he died, must extrapolate the truth beyond that starting point in a strange land with a hazy void that his experiences on Earth used to occupy. The strange land utilizes a different 10% of the brain, with you in the same body encountering entirely new laws of physics; you’re like a human baby. The land is new and enticing. Frequent synchronized sexual activity is the norm. Everyone in the society is born looking thirty (the opposite of or perhaps parallel to Logan’s Run, wherein everyone dies willingly at thirty) and eventually vaporized in the cited film’s cyclonic Juggernaut, after becoming too physically feeble. In the underground society a person is birthed into the entry-level circus. There are twenty circuses. Tunnel Vision is the name of the next life-plane where the hero wakes up. He’s told by his nurse not to worry about his low status until he’s been here long enough to fail a hundred times over. The object of the game in this society, he soon ascertains, is to climb to level twenty before injury or aging reduces certain stats below a qualifying mark. Rather than strictly progressive, the circuses vary in kink and style and often skip ahead or vault back along the hierarchy. Little intermingling between circuses occurs and yet therein lies a drama, when one member of a higher status seeks to couple with a member of the one beneath. Much tension exists in this type of relationship, intensified by the exotic backdrop of recreational group sex. Everyone achieves at least one PhD-equivalent certification. Work, education and sexual recreation are weighed equally, and often overlap — it is here that persons from a lower circus may meet and intrigue a person from a higher circus. Classes are offered only once, differentiated and classed by circus, with intricate paths that achieve specialization within a discipline that will clumsily branch into another discipline… In the first circus Rec Sex is a lot like joining a gym, except membership and attendance is mandatory and easily seen as enjoyable, with different rooms for different types of sexercise similar to wrestling, swimming, gymnastics, yoga, dance, miming, etc. As for breeding, the creatures born in this universe are sprouted from a seed, fully formed, already formed, in a puff. (A past life history is basely useless at this point also.) Any violence is allowed between two or more persons if consent is given beforehand. Often violence factors into private (voluntary or extracurricular) sexercise, with the same consent rule applying. The hero maybe swings in this category for a few scenes. At the beginner’s set Tunnel Vision, the hero finds out that the stage is an exercise in focusing wherein three humanoids are forced into a love triangle wherein the first to score sexually moves on to the next level, while the remaining couple awaits a new third to complete the triad and compete again. In Tunnel Vision, couplings occur which must be stopped, lest the hero remain forever in Tunnel Vision. Rather than random attraction, these triads are generated by the massive admin computers that keep the sprawl of circuses running smoothly. (Compliance is mandatory yet designed to be irresistible to humanoids.) There are no other creatures in this underground universe. There is no vegetation other than the puffs. There is no eating or sleeping. There is no growth of any kind except the cerebral. What gets tricky then is the motive behind the plot: why the hero tries to jump to the ensuing circus, Exotica, immediately after he reaches the next level, Patina. Patina being intensely smutty, lust-based on the exterior. Exotica being a circus of intrigue.

James Beach is 39 and single, and lives at-large on the beaches of California and in the high deserts of New Mexico. His recent fiction can be found in Ditch, Paraphilia, Antique Children, and Mad Hatters’ Review. A hiatus from his project Wood Coin (woodcoin.net) leaves him wondering: what made van Gogh paint like a madman?