Agate Scotland

On certain, oblique occasions, cutthroat days when daylight is mourned as one is still yet trapped in daily toil. When the moon is correctly pinioned by a holocaustal shadow, a night jaunt is thusly provisioned. 

        During precursory occasions in memories long buried with the dead, an oil lamp was in order, but this made your predicament a great deal more perilous. Lost, and dreamt tales tell of many a curious scatterling accessing the shore in nights of chalk and soot, only to have the lamp slip from their salty fingers and blind in the blackness they proceeded to dislocate an ankle in the cobbles. The tide advanced ravenous, and wolfed them in foaming runnels, like kittens, especially so that the threshing delirium of spume might make them early crustacean breakfasts. Don't you forget those tales of no telling, and never tell. 

 

Who could remain in the smoking and moustachioed Blackbeard blacks now bereft of their moon white rider, his statuette's howl, a demon hung on the bladderwracked manes of white horses? 

 

A thousand whispering riders, like dead rabbits a month sunk in summer grasses, conversing in reverence, in the disgruntled croaks of gulls shaken from their snow white slumber. Yet you cannot see that which they hail. 

 

There's a romance in darkness. Luminous lipsticks of other worlds painting the  eddying sea.  

       

I loiter, an elegance of torture, fits of incandescent fume translated into morbid reveries by set and setting. It's just another Friday night. The usual phantasms. To some, delirium tremens is a sport. A blood spurt as much orgasm as agony. Not in this night. 

 

Consider the agates born of the geology of other worlds. A jet black Plutonian specimen, with whorls of scarlet, viridian and lilac. Also displaying agatized extraterrestrial arthropod-like creatures, in grey and violet. Like headlice with the heads of crows. Quite something. 24 centimetres across, and a miniature of its species. The largest agates on Pluto are mined on the down slopes of abyssal rifts, and measure up to 32 metres across. 

 

Recently, in the anxious dreams that come in convoluted sleep, a woman appeared asking for me in darkness, with foreign eyes, lips and smiles. Her teeth were adorably crooked. I took her for a mercenary Pole, or Russian toymaker. We only require our glances to become conjoined in order to be at ease. We talk. The moon is larger, ever brighter. More luminous than before. Blood is laced with electrical fire. 

 

I slowly come around to the delectable notion, that she might hail from the Mediterranean. There's that Romany danger in the descriptive verses, the fruiting orchard of her brown eyes. The caustic declarations, and doomy frowns that cleave a grave silence in the hush of evening.  

 

Then am I awake? 

 

Agates from Charon. Obsidian chalcedony hybrids. Skeletal forgeries of measured gothic script in the vermilion inclusions. Such writing! Surely there must be some translation in some other dimension of worlds. Yet, I would suggest, much too black, almost sickly so.  On occasion, while cutting such stones, the cores are still molten and partaking of the resulting spray full in the face will dissolve your resultant contortions, flesh part inclusive. Sagenitic needles ably penetrate your brain. Psychoactive acid, gelatinous, superheated goo, a cornucopia of pallid shades and vivid walking nightmares before the mind is burned through.  

 

Ashes to ashen.  

 

It is a pleasant excursion, the night-capped coastal rides. To hear the wanton trills of barn owls that ride the hedgerow updrafts. The bubbling shore crabs wander their dominion, like scavenging aboriginals on the vanguard of an unknown world. Their larger cousins, hunted and bashful, lie wedged in rock fissures and often can be heard to shift if your boots unleash a clock face of ripples.  

 

Enter Ambrose Bierce, an intellect of imposing architecture. Observe the firework eyebrow explosions, the tendrils of beard inquisitive as smoke. The bright universal eye that breaks illusion and illuminates the finer details of your darker dreams. 

 

Bierce could easily swallow Twain, but instead lodges his snowy nut in a cheek, and shatters him under his eye-teeth. 

 

As we live, connoisseurs of poison, some endured in provocation, some unavoidably huffed. Others sneak in during a meal's masquerade, or are welcomed as if they equalled ambrosia. As we live, wound in fumes. Do all loves decay? 

 

People walk through me, as I assume not to be really here nor there. Some referred in circus days, to a carnival charade, of which I was never an initiate, and now I could not hope to cross the threshold, invitation or no. Don't waste your days with me, fair maidens, you must seek a king. At a cold pane in a spindling tower that like a spear punctures the green at the mountain's shoulder, hunches a demon. Yellow waft of skin and grey dust haunches. The demon at the pane. 

 

  As this life peters out and becomes a waking dream, only lonely vistas welcome me. An autumn of everything. The flowers must die to be born again. 

 

You ask me of the Kraken. First, a swift draught of elderberry wine. A snatch of opium flight, and snowflakes in your hair. These dreaming days. The time between the times between....... 

 

The snowfall in the night like a murmuration of volcanic ashes. Haemocytes In the moonless void. My blood there too. The torch batteries die and the wind ceases as if someone shut the door on a draft. The snowfall becomes impossibly dense, with interlocking flakes of black and blood red, shining with radioactive fallout like slug trails and charged with lightning. Shockwaves criss-cross the sea like dueling serpents. A chorus of many thousand screams from the seaside town reaches climax. Now snow falls with globules of fire, in a haze of iodine, tatters of yellow cotton, hot webbings of molten plastic, undulating communities of human hair drifting like jellyfish begin to burn.  Lava rolls in a mile high swathe like a brilliant strand of titanic embers. Far out at sea and approaching at a gallop. 

 

The apocalypse does not disappoint.  

 

A dusky girl strolls in, out of the swirling chaos, nonchalantly lights a cigarette on a flaming origami chandelier that came out of nowhere. Who are you? I ask, aghast, perplexed. Charybdis, she answers promptly, sexily nonchalant in the face of imminent doom, blowing smoke rings around the body of a crackling earthworm carried in a cloud of helium and polythene. It's time we made tracks my friend, she adds. A stocky, well proportioned girl, dark haired, darker eyed, old rainbows of clothes, explicit smile. A gift.  

 

Just as this new Tsar Bomba is born, a mile above our heads, dropped by satellite, and at the very moment we should be vaporised. Instead, we move like beams of light through time, intact and jocular, like old friends.  

 

Out at sea, the Kraken rises, and surveys the earth's end. Riven in two, dragging a writhing rat king of wormholes that circle the punctured sphere like waterspouts, the planet heaves like a great beast under the death blow. The horns of the Kraken, silhouetted against a garish horizon of fire, descend into the depths. The void pulls all below. Vacuum stripped and beaten to dust, it's instantly love.