The new paradigm

Will we embrace it?
Will we even see it?

My brain, illuminated
Aware like never before
Alight with brilliance
Myself as I am
That I was not
So much more
So much less
Reality is infinitely complex
There are layers, layers, layers of complexity
Everything that is or was is now
However, we are not aware or perhaps
We will soon realise our true power
And the reality that is us all
Connected at last through the power
Of all our combined senses

The stars shine bright
with love for all that is
Once, we too were stars
their light long since ended
Not in this sky,
But shine on we do
In everything we do
Let us be brilliant once more

Wounds have to exist before they heal
We need to be damaged to change
To be secure and safe is to be static
Stillness is the essence of death
Therefore let us be aware and free
Both capable and willing to make choices
To live life
To love love
To see the light that is everything

The stars shine bright with love for all that is
Once we too were stars, their light long since gone
Not in the sky but shine on we do
Illumination or inspiration
Either possible, both exalted
Let us be brilliant once more

Birthday party haikus

Wrote a haiku for every guest at this lovely party, and for the cat.
Additionally, two more randoms.
//

Pink flower blossoms
Brightly shining wonder that
Blesses this world now

Split down the middle
My dear not really sister
Follows her own path

A friend of a friend
Another creative force
Neon green drawing

Silly goth poet
So fucked up and thus writing
Haiku, goes the flow

Very vain cyber
Still a dear friend, no matter
The weird shit he does

My fellow geek goth
Shared interest, conversation
That game we both play

The focused genius
Fully absorbed into his work
Creating greatness

She who opens doors
My dearest friend and idol
Words are not enough

Twin points dot the nose
Tall and beautiful and proud
Brushed straight raven hair

The cutest kitten
Such wonderful fluffiness
One can’t help but ‘aww..’

//

Alienation
Drifting through stranger places
A new world to find

Chaos imminent
Discord spreading like wildfire
It is time to fight

//Note: I really like Haikus. Seriously.

Broken.

The words seem to buzz in my head as I spit in the sink. The glob of spit is laced with red, harsh evidence of my misspent evening. I grin at my reflection in the mirror but it just keeps scowling at me. I spit into the white ceramite of the sink again and watch the blood and spit slowly crawl down into the blackness of the drain.
A garish riot of colours is dancing on the wall, tempting me to come closer. I close my eyes. I resist them, the sirens, even though the voices in the back of my head tell me to give in. They tell me, ‘go on’ ‘do it’ ‘give up’ ‘give in’ ‘don’t you want her?’ ‘you want her’ ‘go get her’, but I tell them to get out of my head and they do.
The little bastards climb out of my ears gratefully, cheering and chattering among themselves as they have an impromptu race to the wall. The sirens and the demons fly into each others arms and are united in a frenzied rush of joy, ecstacy and acts of sex-violence that would have turned my stomach, had I still had one. I want to strangle someone.

My reflection is pissed about something I did but I am not entirely sure what it was. Maybe it was beating up that old lady. Maybe it was breaking the mirror he was using to talk to me. Maybe it was not giving Mary those flowers. Or maybe he’s just pissed because I give him all of my anger and none of my joy. The walls of this house are dirty, covered in some dark grey ooze. There is filth on the floors and only a little brightness emanates from the light.
I am a disease of the world. I have no purpose, no guiding overarching plot or goal. I have nothing that keeps me here besides the utter denial of death. I have died four times now, and all four times I woke up in a dumpster, somewhere. Like last night. I got into a fight with some guys outside a club. I just wanted to get in but the guys, well, they didn’t like me much. Okay, it happens. So I start fighting, giving them hell. Then the bastards shiv me.
The dumpster smelled like garbage like most common dumpsters. The bloodstains on my shirt huddled around the cuts in the white fabric. I can see the wounds but they look okay. They’ll go away like all the other wounds, fading into thin scars before finally dropping out of sight entirely. I have noticed, however, that my reflection in mirrors and windows seems to be a scarfaced fucker. Serves him right.

Huddled together in the corner of the flat is an angel. I walk up to her. ‘Mary’, I say. She ignores me. ‘Hey.’ I say. She looks up. Our eyes meet and I see nothing but the dead stare of a broken mind. I sigh and turn and walk away. My reflection is glaring at me. ‘Hey you, jerkoff.’ I look at him. ‘You’re a jerkoff too, you know that?’ He nods. ‘That’s not what I’m trying to tell you, I just wanted to get your attention.’ He says. I nod. He continues. ‘So you know how we have no real goals and no real purpose?’ I nod again. ‘Well how about we find ourselves a goal? Like getting revenge for what they did to her?’
I grin at my reflection and my reflection grins back. It is the first time in days that we have communicated in such a way. He takes my pain, my scars, my wounds and my anger and in return he is allowed to live. In return he is allowed to be his own separate identity. You see, I have broken the laws of this reality. There are rules and regulations to keep everything running smoothly but frankly, I stopped seeing the point somewhere in the past and decided to call it quits. Amazingly enough it worked, and now, here I am.
Never fully alone, never truly dead, never actually alive, never really connected. Time to take revenge on the scum that dared destroy the mind of an angel. I grin wickedly as my reflection and I plot and scheme. The world seems to be changing right along with me.

His white and very clean suit almost sparkles in the morning sunlight. His skin is polished, his nails have been torn out long ago, his hair lasered away. He has no scent, no random bodily secretions and a cleaned up natural ecosystem. He is, in all possible ways, clean. His mind is tidy. He thinks only in the strictest of strict patterns. There are laws and they must be followed. There are rules and he will enforce them to the limit of his power. It is unfortunate for those who would do as they please that his power, and the power of those like him, is practically infinite.
But today is not his day, today it’s my day. The scarfaced fuck has come up with a plan, but he needs me. Just like I need him.
These guys found Mary one day. She had been standing in a beautiful pasture with her spread wings radiant in the full summer sunlight. She had cast no shadow, as if she were part of the light, part of the sun even. I looked at her and I saw true beauty, beauty not of this world. She was laughing, delightedly, as little children ran up to her and asked her innocent questions. Then the men in the white suits came and told her that ‘any person seen incorporating feathers into his or her biological form is to be officially reprimanded.’

Did you know that that was the day I fell into the pit that I now call my one and true home? That it was that day I decided to fuck this life, fuck this world, give my reflection his own life and refuse death on simple principle? It was the day I first died, that much I know for certain. I followed them as they took her away. The children didn’t understand, of course, they were puzzled. But their parents, they understood all too well. ‘They’re taking the nice lady and they’re going to give her some new clothes.’ Lies.
The demons have come along for the ride too, leaving the sirens to watch over poor Mary. They gave her that name, they did. The sirens are good with names. The demons whisper in the back of my head, ‘faster’ ‘faster’ ‘kill them’ ‘kill some for me’ ‘get on with it’. I don’t even bother to reply. I have things to do. In a sports store I have to sign three forms with my name, initials, autograph and security number. I fill in different lies on each and every form. The brainless sack of meat behind the counter just looks at the words and numbers then looks at me. ‘Try to improve your handwriting, yeah?’
Kids these days. Illiterate and uneducated and stupid. But he does give me the baseball bat that I had wanted for so many years. I pay for it with the money I’d stolen from that old lady. Thinking about that event makes the demons giggle. The bat has flames on it and a skull printed on the very end. I look the skull in the eyes and try to match the grin.

‘Hey, your whiteness.’ The man in the white suit turns around and looks at me. I’m grinning, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, holding a big black baseball bat. He tries to look brave but I can see he’s not used to this. He’s used to instant and utter submission. Then one of the shadows pipes up, ‘he looks familiar’ and I see it. His faces stop squirming around and become one simple face. I recognise it.
My grin gets wilder, more vicious. He starts shivering. ‘Do you remember, four weeks ago?’ He shakes his head. Denial. I sigh. ‘There was a girl, she had wings.’ He swallows, his larnyx bobbing up and down his throat. His shivering gets even more pronounced. He’s still trying to look brave, but I can see. He’s barely holding it together. Then he looks me in the eyes and I know that this is the pig that broke her mind. Moreover, he knows that I know and that I’m going to reward his crimes with the vengeance they deserve. The justice only a degenerate like I could provide. The shadows brace themselves to remember everything.
Everything goes black. When my vision and awareness return, blood and bone is splattered all over the flawless grey of the concrete pavement. The white suit is now a combination of red, pink, white and for some reason, black. I look at my bat and see that some of the paint has flaked off. I begin beating the bastard again, and again he begins to scream in pain. ‘You’re ruining my bat. Bet you’re regretting those upgrades now, aren’t you?’ He moans something and I lean in to listen. His tear-stained eyes widen. ‘Your.. scars.. gone..’ I stop. I look at him. Then everything goes black again.

Whispered words.

The words are being whispered
Softly spoken and hard to be heard
There is // There is no way to escape
You will stay, you will remain, you will
You will fail, you will fall, nothing will
We will miss you when you are gone

You tried so hard to find a path
To discover a way through the mists
But the fog and the mist and the rain
They keep us here and they keep us safe
There is // There is no way to find in there
Nowhere to go and no way to get there

Your senses deceive you all the time
You keep seeing and thinking you see
You keep on hearing and thinking and
We worry that you’ll soon be gone
If not in flesh than surely in mind
We would miss you if you were gone

Consensus is reached between the old and the wise
There is dissent among the younger ones
They will concur when they have heard
The words that are being whispered
The words that should never be spoken aloud
The words you heard before they left you here

Even the angels will fall.

The streets are empty and barren,
The pavement quiet and bleak,
Streetlights stand out like tall shining beacons,
The asphalt is as still and dark as it always is.
An anguished cry can be heard in the distance,
It never lets up never falters never changes,
The pain and horror of it all uttered in primal sound,
A banshees wail to haunt these silent streets.
We walk along the broken roads,
Struggling on towards nowhere,
Travelling on and on and ever onwards,
Destination and location always unknown.
The buildings loom over us threateningly,
Sometimes one collapses and dust clouds soar up,
Billowing out before settling down to Earth,
Coating all of us in a thin layer of grit.
Still we keep trudging on through the filth and mud,
The ruins trash and debris of a fallen society,
The legacy of our fathers and our mothers,
The legacy of our teachers and our destroyers.

More buildings are toppling over and crashing to the ground,
An elevated railway that once carried people through the city,
Crumbling supports refusing to carry the weight any longer,
It slowly falls into the still water of the deserted harbor.
For a short while we take shelter in an abandoned store,
Find old canned food that hasn’t been looted yet,
Heat it over a fire made of old magazines,
Eat something for the first time in weeks.
Soon everything will have crumbled to dust,
Burned up in the fires of urban decay,
All the once proud structures will be gone,
The bridges drowned in the rivers they once crossed.
We walk slowly and despondently,
On feet clad in ragged old shoes or boots,
We are weary and have come so far yet reached nothing,
Before long I am walking on my own.
Past the burnt out husk of what was once a school,
Along the concrete edge between land and rivier,
My knees buckle and I fall to the ground,
Never to get up again.

Something speaks to me in my mind,
I can hear it vaguely so I strain to listen,
Nothing is clear except for one whispered sentence,
‘All has fallen and now even the angels will fall..’

The story of Lawrence, part 1.

Lawrence did not know where the city began nor did he know where it ended. He’d never left in all his very long life. Three hundred and seventeen years of endless urban jungle. The waterfall of lights on the buildings, the greyness that crept over the city when the sun rose above the smog.
He walked under a bridge and looked up. Pale blue light illuminated the underside of the bridge, the spars that kept it together. He chuckled. He was almost three times as old as this bridge and had been at its opening. Under the bridge there was only bright light, more pale blue. A small corner provided a conveniently dark spot to attract the attention of those who would hide themselves from the prying eyes of others. He noticed the nightvision camera all too easily and kept on walking.
Cheap tricks and easy lures. As human knowledge kept growing, so did the methods of surveilance, the tricks of the designers. Billions upon billions of people never left their rooms, shackled as they were to their vidgames, their brains tweaked endlessly by a constant stream of little rewards and pleasures. They ate the greasy, disgusting food that the foodpumps delivered three times a day right into their homes. They grew fat and lazy but they didn’t care. Lawrence felt disgusted by the world he lived in but he had to admit that it became a lot quieter everywhere.
When he was younger, around the age of seventy, it had seemed like everything would collapse like a house of cards. Polution was rampant, ecological deterioration was getting worse, there wasn’t enough room, food supplies were getting dangerously low. Repression and terrorism were everyday phenomena, plague a very real threat. Seventeen billion people on a world that was ultimately very small.
Some things were going alright, long term plans finally coming to fruition and all of the world coming together at last in an effort to give everyone an equal chance. That’s what the news kept saying, but the bright minds of the day wouldn’t be that easily lied to. They set about the create the world that the politicians and marketeers and lobbyists wanted them to believe they lived in. Demonstrations popped up everywhere and melted away when the riot squads appeared. Then another would pop up, somewhere else, and the riot squads would come running again. And the demonstrators, warned in time would melt away again.
They kept it up for weeks at a time, until the police eventually gave up chasing them. Their cause was so public and the support their non-violent activism got was overwhelming. The regimes and governments of old collapsed. Equality, freedom and progress. That was the rallying cry of the Progressives.
Farm towers popped up all over the rural country. Where before there had been farms that could feed hundreds, the towers that rose up could feed thousands, if not more. And they just kept on growing. Factories were repurposed to be fully automatic. A few years later, the farm towers were completely machinated as well.
Massive joblessness left the general populace discontent and restless. They were fed, certainly. They had everything they wanted, surely. But they had to adapt, had to change. And that wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted more money to buy a bigger car, not a different system that would give them a car. Not if it meant their car was the basically the same as the car their neighbour owned.
Lawrence shook himself out of the past. One of the side effects of the longevity drugs he took every day and the genetherapy he went to every month was the tendency to get lost in the past, to reminisce most days away. He had been on his evening walk, choosing to walk by the river tonight. Passing the bridge meant that he was almost home. The stairs started moving upwards when he stepped on them and he sighed in relief. Sometimes the stairs didn’t work, like the escalotors of his very youth sometimes didn’t work.
He walked with the aid of a cane, a long metal piece ornately engraved, by hand. Factory-made, of course. Lawrence was old, and the treatments kept the worst effects of aging away but they couldn’t cure it completely, although the doctors at the facility kept assuring him they were nearing a breakthrough. Secretly Lawrence hoped they didn’t. The oldest person alive today was nearly four hundred years old, which was about as long as he really wanted to live. Eternal life was just a bit too long. Already he found it hard to get going every day, instead of losing himself in the memories of his enormously long life.
His brains were unusual like all brains were unusual these days. Nootropics weren’t mandatory per se but anyone following the longevity treatments took the mind-drugs almost religiously. He could remember everything after his puberty and he was glad.

The elevator didn’t seem to be moving. He knew it was moving upwards at high speeds but the dampeners in the construction kept him from feeling it. On the seventythird floor there was a soft ping and the doors opened. Lawrence stepped out into the hallway and turned left, approaching door number 732. When his hand hand touched the doorknob an electronic signal passed between the mechanisms inside the door and the chips implanted into his wrists.
Lawrence stepped into his apartment and closed the door behind him, put his cane in the rack next to the door and sighed. Then he took off his coat, hung it on a peg. His scarf was next, which went onto the next peg. Then the hoodie he wore went on yet another peg. He took off his shoes, put them under the other garments. Satisfied, he hobbled over into his livingroom.
It was colder these days. Outside. The solar shade had counteracted the effects of global warming a little too well. But it was definitely progress and that was still one of the three goals set out at the beginning of what had become known as the silent revolution. There had always been discontent. But equality and a fed addiction could placate anyone.
Those they could snare with games and other electronic traps had been caught quickly. Those who wouldn’t be caught by such inactive pleasures were caught with other methods, drugs to suit all wants and needs. Of course the drugs weren’t everywhere. That would only lead to even faster self-destruction. Rationed and kept just-out-of-reach made them a quite efficient control mechanism for those of that particular inclination.
There was only one chair in the small living room. He lived here on his own and no one ever came to visit in person. Not that he missed contact, his memories sufficed. The chair had been designed for him and him alone, one of the luxuries he had chosen. Some chose a better computer interface or a better system. Others chose a bigger apartment, better food or some other customisation. But he had chosen this chair, his designed heaven. He sank into it, the softness supportive enough in all the right places to make him completely comfortable, even after sitting in this same chair for twenty years.
He swung the chair around and looked out the windows. Apartment 732 was on a corner and so Lawrence had a view that encompassed a large part of the city. The buildings looked black from up here, the windows that were lit glowing in the same pale blue as the bridge. He recognised some of the larger towers. There he saw the squared form of the Humon arcology with the airport resting at its top. Lights came and went continuously, going in all directions. North, south, west, east and everywhere in between. Some of the lights even went up towards the black heavens. To the left of the arcology he saw the huge building that was the Copernicus University, a prestigious university training the next generations of young astrologers, astronauts and also holding training programs for future colonists.
There were many other things to be seen, more arcologies, more apartment towers like the one he was in. A few stadiums where the last few real sport events were held. Far off in the distance he could see the pinpricks of light crawling up and down the space elevator.

i feel a bit sad - calculator - hydroponically

//
i feel a bit sad
i feel a bit inspired
i feel a little silly
i feel a little stupid

i feel like hitting things
i feel like not doing anything
i feel weird
i feel normal

i feel things
i feel thoughts
i feel cold
i feel warm

like pillows
and maybe some blankets
stuffed into a fridge
the fridge is turned off

i feel a bit sad
i feel a bit inspired
i feel a little like a pillow
i feel a little like a fridge



//
my brain is filled with words

math is stupid
math is silly
math is useless
unless you’re a mathematician

if i wanted to be a mathematician
i would be reborn as a calculator
i would grow up as a fake boy
but very good with numbers

i’m not good with numbers
well not good enough
i’m not a calculator
i’m not even a machine



//
i would like to live underground
all i need is my own nuclear reactor
and find someone to bring me uranium
sometimes
i guess i’ll need nutrients
for the plants i grew hydroponically