Nocturnette 13:Scrapbook of Song. By Jan Lakowski.
"Sailing downstairs to the northern line, watching the shine of the shoes"
All snuffing candles. Every child. Myopic eyes behold the grainy Betamax world. Through saturated colouring real time. World place tea time. The tape heads are black with pumice from Mt St.Helens.
(Under the spell of 1978 summer Spirit lake. All Boy scouts in the sweet turquoise water and Harry Truman with his whiskey and coke shining in the glass, like the darkness of the occult in Cairngorm Quartz, smoky quartz. Crystalline mythology stoppering the quick blood in the arteries.
Underneath the lake, underneath the landslide. A pyroclastic flow full in the face. The human condition mutated to geological process. An anomaly. Watching the unearthing of the victims of Vesuvius on a National Geographic documentary. Fascinated by the fear and anguish, and horror expressed fluently in the skeletal memory fossilized in your mind at that moment. Pompeii burned.)
Human is an unattainable ideal, you're merely an animal. Move on. Cry like a bear.
Why is my life an antique video copied from a copy of a copy someone unspooled to edit with an oily straight razor? Why is it degrading so swiftly, and leaving bright eyeholes that show me deeper. An encrypted graveland gaudy like the arcade, and the stop-motion jerk of atrocities filming atrocities. Oh, this sea rope is just a necktie, a cravat, and the lack of circulation makes the sun seem like a green dandelion or a sunflower with a bubble bath face, and I'd rather finish flush gallows ground with guillotine. A worked up arse of art. One erupts at neck separation while the facial arse continues to talk, just as depraved and sarcastic as before.
Kid's a genuine genius, doc, let's fuck him up.
Even so, whatever's in the room now? That deliberate clattering of a moth intent on the moon's light only now. The hooded lamp in the dark like white shining lotion. The ghost of the old darkness that ate me up. The ghost of me as I was, disembodied, rapturous, watching me sleep, barely containing the landslide of evil within like the toxic sludge of the sea conspiring like mercury. Red mercury. The spinning bell. That Nazi myth that could turn men into froth, flowers into slime, the air into venomous buzzing fire.
Or. Bells from the deep. Has anyone listened long by Baikal or Vostok? Loch Ness has its own religion.
"Come to me once more my love"
That was all that was said.
"You come from far away, with pictures in your eyes"
That was all that was said.
The very furthest reaches, of the shore at Usan, only revealed for 3 or four hours every year, bring to mind a battleground. A place of atrocity. This is where massacres of chitinous flesh occur nightly. This is the boundary between the inner earth, and its outer cladding. Its shroud, almost worn. Yet the most intimate nature of the planet of your birth is far more mysterious than even the scavenged bald plates of mars and the moon. Europa's proposed lively inner ocean is far more likely sterile and barren.
What is lurking downstairs? Did you forget to latch the door again? I am sure I heard the golden hand brace turn. To admit the bulk of what I wonder? What weathered demeanour? A glint of smile teeth and drop of eye. A slow deliberate gait like our stalking heron. Scrabbling through the kitchenette. His ghost rides a portly spider.
Oh, what a dream! Or another nightmare?
Nothing more, or less was said.