One: Ears

 Sitting there, calmly, I hear a distant noise, just enough to rise above the constant surf sussuration in my ears. A mechanical clack, electronic hissing .. the sound of an old fashioned modem synching into a network, maybe? I freeze, hold my breath, trying to hear more, a direction, a sense of distance

Nothing

Now I realise, I froze. Not stopped moving, I'm damn frozen. I strain to move my right thumb at least, and strain again, but not a muscle tics.I try to release my breath, and that doesnt happen either

Damn, and damned

Drinking

All the days that have marched past,

ground their heels into my heart
and laid waste to my guts,

make me stare and remember
all the fine ideas and gossamer moments
drifting on my fingertips

Moments I should have seized
Madness I turned away from

just ashes in my mouth. Oh, no
actually that's Coke.

One: Hands

 Every time I reach my hand out, it drags a thousand shadows behind and before it.

Each action is undone as I do it. I can see my future behind me, and look forward to my past. Is there no way out of this?

Who is the sacrifice, this time? How many many times ? Is there no escape, again?

Breathe
Breathe
Accept what is and is not

Here is Time, a fractured toy stamped into the floor, pieces sprayed away. Stamped means a foot, that stamps. Who stamps, again, who breaks Time. Let's find out.

She stops, opens her eyes, looks up out of the page at the author and shakes her head. 'Dont be an idiot, it's the same one it always is, I know that much already'.

Two: Night Hawks

 The diner is empty, the late stars peering in the windows

Just three of them, slouched against the polished wooden counter, waiting.

The door puffs open, a ting from the bell; they glance around but noone comes in. They look at each other, shrug, and the woman picks up her handbag, fiddles with a cigarette pack, pulls one out and puts it to her lips

A blink, a flick of flame from nowhere, and the cigarette lights.

She recoils, and the two men snap their attention to her, the tall one knocking his hat off the counter. The air swirls across the counter from her, a small vortex for a moment, and she's there. She stares at each of them in turn, pinning them to the counter one by one, her eyes all laser and onyx, She smiles, thinly.

When she speaks, her mouth doesn't move, the air swirls another tiny vortex in front of her mouth, and the voice takes a deep contralto twang. "So, you can control yourselves, good. So, listen.

One job, three million. One target, this". The air shimmers over the counter, an image blinks into place, bluefire wrapped in blue tentacles, the shape of an egg.

"Where", grunts the short man, nasal and flat

She gestures, the blue egg shrinks onto a map laid behind it. "There, on the coast, the Broken House. Anyone can find it, anyone can enter. Make sure you emerge. Three days". She smiles her thin smile again and makes a gesture overhead, and whoosh, a swirl of air, the door puffs open again with that tinny ting of the bell.

The men glance around, "She likes her dramatic exits, alright" says the tall one. The short man nods, while the woman adjusts her red dress and smiles silently, feeling an invisible arm twine around her waist from behind.

One: Rebirth

 I can see her, spectral lines hastily sketched in the ocean bed

she rises from below, wreathed in tentacles and strewn with seaweed. She does not feel, she does not know how to shiver, she has her knife, her smile
... and she has no fear at all

I can hear her, phantom bells tinkling with the waves, a ghostly crash of cymbals when she strikes the thermocline. She's been there so long, treading eldritch measures in the mad courts of the dead gods, yet now she rises.

Is it really time to walk the faded path, and break the mainspring? Oh gods, it's been so long, so long, and I'm so tired. 

Two: Followers

 “With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my litter mates who find a rich wallow in multi-species muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters.

I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking. My first familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, near where I live in North Central California.

Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes.

The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be: the Chthulucene.

I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try”; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.”

Words from her daughter’s anthropology homework. Chthulucene. How apt. How dryly, how sardonically, and how evilly right.

(with Kora Vee)

Two: Emergence

 Three knots in a rope ago, the tapestry of time came, comes, will come unravelled, unravelling.

The change was, is, will be both sudden and slow, more the cracking of a window than the spread of of a plague.

First, next, later, before, there is an impact, a crash, a buckling.Then, next, before, later cracks shoot, raced, forth from the crater like sprouts through pavement, irrevocable lightning fast. Then, before that, subsequent, finally, the glass pane falls, fell, will fall through.

Back when words like “then” had meaning.

The past tense no longer exists. No longer exists, will exist, has ever existed.

It is still spoken of, written with, to try to ascribe some sense to it. Numb hands grapple at the ravelling tapestry of Time, trying to seize, knot, repair. The world turns on the hinge of time--or at least it is used to. Entropy gives direction to the universe. One can distinguish the past from the future by the simple gesture of dropped-and-shattered pottery. Universally, uniformly, what is broken lies still and cannot come back together. There is a before-break, a break, and an after-break. Direction. A direct line of cause to effect.

Now, that line has become a circle, a mocking figure eight. Nothing ever stops because now it’s simultaneous. Now is unfathomable. Then is unimaginable. Tomorrow is yesterday is today.

(with Kora Vee)

One: Awakenings

 The woman is walking. She is also falling. She is also being born, learning to walk, hitting her first baseball, fighting her first cold, dating her first boyfriend, failing her first test, skating across ice, eating greasy pizza, molding a clay pot, laughing in the sunlight, twitching and gagging as she loses gouts and sputters of blood from a dime-sized hole in her throat.

All these images have collapsed and unified, her life transported boiled into one unending strip. Always the pain of birth and always the pain of death and once it began, once it suddenly began, it had never not been. Once it started it had always been.

It all happens, happened, will happen at once.

It is a terrible way to never die.

* * * * *

I, I, I, I can breathe. 

I can see. I can feel, slow sun on my outstretched legs.

I have LEGS! 

How long, how long in the void? I can twist and feel, and stand, and twirl. I can feel cotton brushing my thighs when I do.

Welladay, if it's time to try the Great Dance again, find the threads of fate, I have legs to dance with, and time to breathe in and taste, and smell.

Everything is so bright and strong. There's a click from behind me, and soft sweet horns start crawling across the air, pulling me into slow, graceful steps, turning.

"How high the moon"

(with Kora Vee)

Two: Slipping between your palms

 She sits on the cliff face, dangling her legs

Sea spumes up to tickle her soles, her soul, while the cables in the distance fray and splay, tipping suspended roadbeds into the brine, cars splashing with them.

She laughs, and coils her hands in the long strands of necklace, twisting them back and forth, and cries again: and the bridge stands unmarred, marred, broken again.

She looks up from the page you're reading, deep into your eyes, and gives a secret smile

"You think you have time, but you dont, you dont...... only I have time, in my hands"

Can you feel the dust of ages, settling on your head?

One: On the passing of time, and other funerals

 Good, she exclaimed