Visions Vicarious
Glimpses through the eyes of a madman.
Glimpses through the eyes of a madman.
She’s all sharp angles,
each corner waiting
to trip me up and open my skull.
Tall and orderly,
she stacks dreams to the ceiling,
each in a dull desert wrapper.
She keeps it limbo inside,
silent and still until
I’ll pay.
She’ll withhold affection
and let it collect dust
on the steel.
She churns in emerald,
every motion unraveling
foam and sediment
from my murky edges,
stirring stern with the smooth rotation
of each distant body’s force.
Our tangling tendrils trace greedily
the shape of each other’s
black gold hearts.
We pump and dig
and frack each other empty.
We refine every ounce
of that crude emotion
and burn it by the barrel,
to scream at the stars
with voluptuous light.
We pray it’s seen,
that we’re not floating alone
across this vacuous sea.
His octane obsession
with high speed beauty
in cruel concrete curves
left those ashes indestructible
in the salted furrows of his tongue.
No sweet flavor
flowers there now.
The city’s rude little kiss of death
spiderwebs across the sky,
intersecting the auburn clouds.
He’ll burn it down
just to get close one last time,
to shift that guilty bearing,
to tighten his clutch.
The evergold hills rise from the bed
of that gibbering sometimes stream.
In the night, her recollections are warm,
but the sun reveals the piney closets where
she keeps my skeletal secrets,
evidence of a tiny Attila, who passing
left cryptographic gouges
on the holly’s.
Only the verminous crows read their message now
and whisper it as they skitter
through the timbre tombs.
The mounds’ mistakes are murder
in the cold aural light of dawn
and they creep away under forgotten
barbed wire fences,
placing boundaries between themselves
and a ditch that lies
sleeping.
The scholars at The Lyceum taught me that the world was once covered by a vast Empire which had ruled in the name of the Gods for three millennia. Then again, the Lyceum also teaches that a black river of blood runs beneath Baal’Fa’Gur, which any dwarf will tell you is an outright lie. Despite their lack of knowledge on Deep maters, I’m became inclined to believe them about the Empire the day I first laid eyes on the Lightless Tower.
The strange iron tower stood upon a precipice about a quarter of the way up the southeastern slope of the small mountain, known to the dwarves as Daar’Fim. The rusty, square structure raised the height of ten men out of the rocky slope. Around it had been built the shabby cobbled wall and with it the structures needed for the support of the prison itself. Below, lay the village which passed for a Baronial seat and the Qogsul itself: That dark and frozen marsh which stretched on as far as any man had ever seen. The Hymns say that this is the place where Somnus entombed Mahr in the days before the lesser races came to inherit the land. Regardless, that it stretches on forever seems true enough. From the walls around the prison one can see past the base of Daar’Nal and the misty reaches of the Qogsul continue on beyond it.
The scholars studied the strange, windowless spire for a decade before finally abandoning it and allowing the Baron of Qogsul to turn a profit by using it as a prison. In the end, The Lyceum said the ruin had once been some kind of guard tower looking over the Qogsul in the days of the Empire, though what they had feared the scholars could not be sure. The Somnic Priests claim it was placed there so that the Empire might be vigilant against Mahr’s rising. In honesty, I must wonder myself what enemies the empire must have had that they needed to place such a fortified structure in such a remote place.
For the past four generations of Qogsuli Barons, the lords of three neighboring provinces paid tribute to Qogsul in exchange for the services provided by the master of Qogsul’s dungeon. That ancient Decid had a method of extracting secrets considered uniquely effective by the Nobility of the Somnic city-states. Locuststorm was famous for what his fellow elves referred to as “ringing” his prisoners, a practice that involved cutting or burning rings of skin and flesh from the extremities of his detainee, working his way to the trunk of the person over time until they surrendered to him what he wished to know. The practice served a dual purpose in the eyes of those who paid for the service. While its primary function was fulfilled in the extraction of secrets, the marks left behind were not easily hidden. Thus anyone who had ever spent a significant amount of time in the Lightless Tower was easily enough identified and shunned as a undesirable element by the people of Somnia and Centuria.
And so things had been for Four generations of Qogsuli Lords before my own capture brought me to be interred in this iron tomb. By that time Locuststorm had passed his autumnal years, and though he would likely outlive myself, it was obvious to any who looked at him that his century in the Lightless Tower had taken a heavy toll on him and would soon be his end. In a way I think I must have brought some of the life back in the ancient elf, perhaps because of the futility of interrogating a man who cannot speak. His fervor is now eternally visible on my flesh; He had used the smallest and the sharpest of his knives on me.
Mama,
My flight leaves at two forty-five,
Riding a bird named for you
To deliver a momentous passenger
To Japan and the lands beyond.
He reminds me of myself,
Waiting in his mother’s belly,
To be born at eighteen hundred feet,
And spread his arms wide.
His brilliance will melt the flesh of the poor.
Love,
Your Little Boy
“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear to be a fool
Than to open your mouth and prove that you’re a fucking moron,”
Grandfather’s voice croaked out over the whir
Of the boat’s trolling motor, spurred by the frustration
Of teaching me to thread my hook like a needle,
Not use the oar of out tiny tin boat
To knock blackberries into the bow.
In the distance, the cliffs of Greer’s Ferry
Shifted with the clouds that come over the horizon.
Lincoln’s wisdom escaped me then.
My head reeled back, brass knuckle busted with the uppercut.
The sharpness delivered with the expert hand of an experienced brawler.
I forgot my butterfly float and got stung.
The way the light shimmered of cerulean curves, who could help it?
First cold kiss in the street, against the powder coated postbox.
Her azure permeated the desert sky, blinding the wildflowers;
The earth fissured and bled aqua into the sapphire desolate.
My hell was blue, its wall painted with my cyan blood.
