The Far Queue

I once read a book and I was contaminated by its contents...
Now within the cage of my chest there beats a second heart.
An arcane construct, engineered in miniature brass rivets and braided copper membranes, silver tubes, gold valves and steam hissing subsonic.
No blood here; the medium being pumped is an abstract rendering of emotion; a word on the tip of my tongue; a memory of perfume.
I am no mystic; no third-eye me; but the feelings evoked by this machine bypass what I say I am and what I patently am not.
As the heart runs its tiny articulated spider-like fingers over maps creased from being folded closed for too long; makeshift bandages over ancient wounds unhealed; I lift my hand to wipe the tears in which my vision struggles to swim.
As chambers echo the erosion and the lifelines, the rusted clock cogs and toys without eyes, the memories that exclude words, I cry out to the night and to the howling moon.
And having read the contours of my life the heart proceeds to project an avatar of that life upon the screen of my day; adding street signs at left turns unturned and tinting the lens of my calling.
I am no more than a simulacrum for the days I have that lived and the mistakes I have made.
I once was content for the book to read me...

Eden ~ Kris KuksiGarland your sky with florid visions
Stations of the double-cross
Raise your hem show the incisions
Stitched with the hair of a horse

Spread your arms you junkshop Jesus
Crucified post-pixel priest
Declare your aphorism-cobbled thesis
The glory of a short-term lease

On hemstitched heels misunderstood
Your winged words ascend
Notching grooves on wooden heads
With nails not made to mend

We (Baltic Version) ~ Carrie Schneider
Pico Faraday never stopped to wonder if he was doing the right thing. Mind you, nobody was likely to tell him that actions infringed on some or other rule or ethic; not since Mishka’s death anyway; and besides, everything was in short supply.
To quote the lady herself: “Waste not, want not”
He dug the knife in, gingerly at first, feeling around for the bullet.
The priest had been dead for long enough for the wound not to bleed much; but not long enough to prevent it from oozing blackly at the tip of Pico’s exploring knife.
He used the serrated edge on the top of the blade to hack through the ribcage.
He wondered at his ability to abstract: the priest’s flesh represented nothing more than a goal; a means to prosper. The irony was not lost: Pico knew for a fact that this inanimate meat was no sacred vessel; it held nothing – no soul, no intrinsic value other than the material value of the bullet and the more altruistic value of the nourishment offered to bacterial and insect entities involved in the process of decay.
A glint of dull grey at the knife’s tip and the dull pressure carried up the blade’s length told him that he had found the bullet, the open chest cavity, despite being a gory mess, did not deter his seeking fingertips, he lifted the mangled blob of lead up to his one good eye; his shooting eye – bingo.
“The wages of sin” Mishka might have pronounced at this stage “subsidise the lives of desperate men”

Winsor McCay

Prime Time ~ Laurie LiptonRise with the flood
Bodies float in the reed-bed fecund
Clothes bubbled buoyant
The smell of my fears made real

Our digging ordered
To offer the end of your world

Nobody knows
About your burial anonymous unmarked
You went to the river
And never came back with the water

Our gunfire unprovoked
Announced the end of your world

You are the watermark
That marks my understanding my awakening -
The politics of control
Pays no mind to your life or mine