This poem originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of The Linnet's Wings.
Cigarette Gallery
Stuck in a dank mausoleum
Choking on the dust and ash
All one with you, my love
Missing you, my love
I see the cards placed all around me
Touching at older things, and brighter things,
At memories with you, my love
At the dead and the past, my love
Soothing my nerves in nicotine yellow
With the little fire enclosed inside my hand
Feeling crumbling bones and distant clicking
Decay growing within my lungs
I see Death out of the corner of my eyes.
I see smoke blowing out his nostrils.
I see and I have peace and hope,
Hope that we are reunited soon, in my slow suicide.
Showing posts with label sadcore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sadcore. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2015
Monday, October 13, 2014
Fiction: Where the Minotaur (A Babylonian Medley Story)
Out of the books must you be judged, and out of the books have they been judging you. Have they judged you?
They have.
Out of books that are a pale, forged book of life. You remember the hearing of your crimes, even if the memory of them is sometimes faded in this place. You remember, and you remember knowing you were not a monster.
They have.
Out of books that are a pale, forged book of life. You remember the hearing of your crimes, even if the memory of them is sometimes faded in this place. You remember, and you remember knowing you were not a monster.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Fiction: The Cloud
This story at Fictionpress
Sadcore warning
The Cloud
I was born into the apocalypse.
They knew when my parents were young. They thought that they could still do something. There were some wars as everyone tried to sort out what was going to happen, but ultimately we gathered under a single banner and were able to focus our full energies on saving our people.
It didn’t work. It never would. They realized that a couple of years after my parents had me. The birthrate’s been plummeting ever since. Fewer and fewer people want to have kids like this. How’d Ligotti put it? “Wrenching lives out of the peace of non-existence and into the agony of existence.”
I don’t know. It was something like that.
My chest hurts.
There’s this thing that the scientists came up with a long time ago. It’s called Fermi’s Paradox. You see, the universe had been going on long enough that it was a strange thing that we didn’t see evidence of any intelligent species besides our own. Was there something that kept life at all from developing? Multicellular life? Intelligence?
Or were intelligent tool-users pretty common, and it was just that they kept dying before they could spread? For some reason.
We know the reason now.
Science fiction writers were talking about them for generations. RKVs. Relativistic kill vehicles. Kinetic weapons. All you need to do, you see, is speed an object up fast enough and it’ll punch through anything. A dozen rocks the size of a house could smash a planet.
Some of them are the size of Australia.
We can’t stop them. We don’t even know where they are, really. That’s one of the problems with tracking objects going almost the speed of light. You can’t. Track them, that is. You can know where they were but it’s dang hard to figure out where they are and flat-out impossible if there’s any kind of course-correction going on.
Doesn’t matter where they are, though. We know where they’re headed. We’ll be right in the middle of it, and there’s no way that we can block it.
Someone had to have assembled it. A cloud of metal and rock and just about everything that you can think of. Big shards, little shards, they’ll tear our solar system apart. Even a chunk the size of my fist could hit with all the force of a hundred nuclear bombs, at the speed they’re going. Some of them will crack a planet like an egg. Some of them, if the size and the make-up is right, might trigger a supernova.
Not that we’ll be around to see any of that. The gravitational warping will probably kill us before the rocks fall. There won’t even be a world for the rocks to hit if Earth is torn apart.
Imagine fifty moons. Imagine a thousand moons. Imagine them. Not even hitting our planet, just passing by. Slinging asteroids. Pulling orbits out of whack.
There’s no running from this. They had to have dismantled five star systems to get as much mass as the astronomers have detected. We could leave, leave right now, and we wouldn’t be able to make it out. Even if there wasn’t a supernova to catch us in transit.
And where would we go?
Do you know the thing that gets me? It’s like some kind of sick joke that the universe is playing on us.
“Hello there. This is the universe. You never, ever had a chance. You didn’t even do anything to cause this.”
Homo sapiens wasn’t a thing when they sent the Cloud. Do you get that? Using tools wasn’t a thing when they sent it.
Whoever they are, these Cloud-makers, they had to have sent it before there was anything but the barest promise of future intelligence in our ancestors. No carelessly-released radio signals tipping them off to our existence. Maybe they didn’t even come here. If they were here once, why not do the job then?
They probably just sent the Cloud because Earth was a life-bearing planet. We knew the signs to look for. We knew how to judge the possibility of Life As We Know It on another planet in another star system, without ever going there to visit.
What if they did the same? What if, looking through their alien telescopes and collating whatever data they collected, they saw that there was life, or even the potential for life, they started working and built the Cloud and flung it at us. Just in case our world might bear intelligent fruit.
The Earth is the cradle of the mind. So said some Russian rocket scientist. But you get older, you don’t need the cradle anymore. You can build your own habitats. It doesn’t matter how many cradles you hit.
And if that’s the right way of looking at it, then it reminds me of the massacre at Bethlehem. The infanticide of a species.
Do you know about Bethlehem? Have you read about that yet?
The Cloud’s been going for millions of years. Do you get that? The Cloud-makers, they might even be dead by now for all we know. Maybe they’ve been dead for a billion years and the process is just automated. Berserkers, like.
Have you read Saberhagen yet?
And the thing is, the thing is… I won’t live to see it.
Civilization’s dying already. Why art? Why music? Why love? Why look to the future? Why, when this is what we’re going to see?
Better to look at the past. Exult in our glory days— no, better to close our eyes, lay us gently down to sleep. Forget the world and our deaths in a haze of chemicals
They’ve been subsidizing suicide for thirty years now.
But how many people are going to live to see it? Some of the kids, maybe. Not me, and I’m not even fifty years old. But I can see my grandson’s death. It’s there, up in the sky.
So listen to this. Listen to what we’re saying. We’ll send this message out again and again until the Cloud comes. We’ll send it all. Everything that we can transmit, forever and ever until the bitter end.
And maybe, if you get this before you see your own Cloud, then maybe you’ll have enough time.
Good luck kids. It’s a hell of a universe to be growing up in.
Sadcore warning
The Cloud
I was born into the apocalypse.
They knew when my parents were young. They thought that they could still do something. There were some wars as everyone tried to sort out what was going to happen, but ultimately we gathered under a single banner and were able to focus our full energies on saving our people.
It didn’t work. It never would. They realized that a couple of years after my parents had me. The birthrate’s been plummeting ever since. Fewer and fewer people want to have kids like this. How’d Ligotti put it? “Wrenching lives out of the peace of non-existence and into the agony of existence.”
I don’t know. It was something like that.
My chest hurts.
There’s this thing that the scientists came up with a long time ago. It’s called Fermi’s Paradox. You see, the universe had been going on long enough that it was a strange thing that we didn’t see evidence of any intelligent species besides our own. Was there something that kept life at all from developing? Multicellular life? Intelligence?
Or were intelligent tool-users pretty common, and it was just that they kept dying before they could spread? For some reason.
We know the reason now.
Science fiction writers were talking about them for generations. RKVs. Relativistic kill vehicles. Kinetic weapons. All you need to do, you see, is speed an object up fast enough and it’ll punch through anything. A dozen rocks the size of a house could smash a planet.
Some of them are the size of Australia.
We can’t stop them. We don’t even know where they are, really. That’s one of the problems with tracking objects going almost the speed of light. You can’t. Track them, that is. You can know where they were but it’s dang hard to figure out where they are and flat-out impossible if there’s any kind of course-correction going on.
Doesn’t matter where they are, though. We know where they’re headed. We’ll be right in the middle of it, and there’s no way that we can block it.
Someone had to have assembled it. A cloud of metal and rock and just about everything that you can think of. Big shards, little shards, they’ll tear our solar system apart. Even a chunk the size of my fist could hit with all the force of a hundred nuclear bombs, at the speed they’re going. Some of them will crack a planet like an egg. Some of them, if the size and the make-up is right, might trigger a supernova.
Not that we’ll be around to see any of that. The gravitational warping will probably kill us before the rocks fall. There won’t even be a world for the rocks to hit if Earth is torn apart.
Imagine fifty moons. Imagine a thousand moons. Imagine them. Not even hitting our planet, just passing by. Slinging asteroids. Pulling orbits out of whack.
There’s no running from this. They had to have dismantled five star systems to get as much mass as the astronomers have detected. We could leave, leave right now, and we wouldn’t be able to make it out. Even if there wasn’t a supernova to catch us in transit.
And where would we go?
Do you know the thing that gets me? It’s like some kind of sick joke that the universe is playing on us.
“Hello there. This is the universe. You never, ever had a chance. You didn’t even do anything to cause this.”
Homo sapiens wasn’t a thing when they sent the Cloud. Do you get that? Using tools wasn’t a thing when they sent it.
Whoever they are, these Cloud-makers, they had to have sent it before there was anything but the barest promise of future intelligence in our ancestors. No carelessly-released radio signals tipping them off to our existence. Maybe they didn’t even come here. If they were here once, why not do the job then?
They probably just sent the Cloud because Earth was a life-bearing planet. We knew the signs to look for. We knew how to judge the possibility of Life As We Know It on another planet in another star system, without ever going there to visit.
What if they did the same? What if, looking through their alien telescopes and collating whatever data they collected, they saw that there was life, or even the potential for life, they started working and built the Cloud and flung it at us. Just in case our world might bear intelligent fruit.
The Earth is the cradle of the mind. So said some Russian rocket scientist. But you get older, you don’t need the cradle anymore. You can build your own habitats. It doesn’t matter how many cradles you hit.
And if that’s the right way of looking at it, then it reminds me of the massacre at Bethlehem. The infanticide of a species.
Do you know about Bethlehem? Have you read about that yet?
The Cloud’s been going for millions of years. Do you get that? The Cloud-makers, they might even be dead by now for all we know. Maybe they’ve been dead for a billion years and the process is just automated. Berserkers, like.
Have you read Saberhagen yet?
And the thing is, the thing is… I won’t live to see it.
Civilization’s dying already. Why art? Why music? Why love? Why look to the future? Why, when this is what we’re going to see?
Better to look at the past. Exult in our glory days— no, better to close our eyes, lay us gently down to sleep. Forget the world and our deaths in a haze of chemicals
They’ve been subsidizing suicide for thirty years now.
But how many people are going to live to see it? Some of the kids, maybe. Not me, and I’m not even fifty years old. But I can see my grandson’s death. It’s there, up in the sky.
So listen to this. Listen to what we’re saying. We’ll send this message out again and again until the Cloud comes. We’ll send it all. Everything that we can transmit, forever and ever until the bitter end.
And maybe, if you get this before you see your own Cloud, then maybe you’ll have enough time.
Good luck kids. It’s a hell of a universe to be growing up in.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [B]
Continued from Wednesday.
The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.
For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.
The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).
And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.
And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.
Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.
Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.
The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.
For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.
The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).
And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.
And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.
Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.
Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Story Notes: A Story Across Years
Notes to: A Story Across Years
The writing went across the years just as the story did. The story was complete when I first began to upload it. It ended with chapter seven. Very open ending, and hella hopeful IMO.
TheRoseShadow21 is the reason that it went on for almost twice that length. She asked me, at chapter four, how many generations it would continue on for. That's when I realized that the story had to keep going. It wasn't much longer before I knew just how and when it would end.
Skeleton Scott's legacy was truer than he thought, and his great-grandson fulfilled his dreams, perhaps, like he never would have imagined. Becoming Scott; surpassing Scott, shedding Scott like a butterfly does its cocoon.
And Skeleton Scott came back from the grave with a vengeance. He came back as the discarded mask, a copy of the original but all the same for what it represented, and he struck his killer down.
Skeleton Scott is a reference to the Skeleton Army and a possibly-folkloric character that I can no longer find any online refs to but was associated with the same.
The Face, referred to in the first chapter, is a poor man's lawyer-friendly Joker. His enemy, of course, is an expy of the Batman.
Alejandro Edgar Hess is half-Latino, just to be clear. I don't know for sure who he married or who Marilyn or her children married. I was never let in on that part of their lives.
Marilyn, Allison, and James all refer to one of their parents by first name at some point. I imagine that Marilyn isn't as close to her birth father as she'd like to think (understandable, seeing as how he was dead for so long) and to a certain extent is holding a grudge against him for being so weak as to die. Or so stubborn as to ignore Skeleton Scott's warnings. Allison has a grudge against Marilyn for obvious reasons, and James... Is he holding something against his mother? Because she didn't do enough, in his opinion, to keep Richie from becoming Skeleton Scott and then the Spook? Because she brought them back in contact with Marilyn, without which the Skeleton Scott legacy would have died out after just two generations?
The writing went across the years just as the story did. The story was complete when I first began to upload it. It ended with chapter seven. Very open ending, and hella hopeful IMO.
TheRoseShadow21 is the reason that it went on for almost twice that length. She asked me, at chapter four, how many generations it would continue on for. That's when I realized that the story had to keep going. It wasn't much longer before I knew just how and when it would end.
Skeleton Scott's legacy was truer than he thought, and his great-grandson fulfilled his dreams, perhaps, like he never would have imagined. Becoming Scott; surpassing Scott, shedding Scott like a butterfly does its cocoon.
And Skeleton Scott came back from the grave with a vengeance. He came back as the discarded mask, a copy of the original but all the same for what it represented, and he struck his killer down.
Skeleton Scott is a reference to the Skeleton Army and a possibly-folkloric character that I can no longer find any online refs to but was associated with the same.
The Face, referred to in the first chapter, is a poor man's lawyer-friendly Joker. His enemy, of course, is an expy of the Batman.
Alejandro Edgar Hess is half-Latino, just to be clear. I don't know for sure who he married or who Marilyn or her children married. I was never let in on that part of their lives.
Marilyn, Allison, and James all refer to one of their parents by first name at some point. I imagine that Marilyn isn't as close to her birth father as she'd like to think (understandable, seeing as how he was dead for so long) and to a certain extent is holding a grudge against him for being so weak as to die. Or so stubborn as to ignore Skeleton Scott's warnings. Allison has a grudge against Marilyn for obvious reasons, and James... Is he holding something against his mother? Because she didn't do enough, in his opinion, to keep Richie from becoming Skeleton Scott and then the Spook? Because she brought them back in contact with Marilyn, without which the Skeleton Scott legacy would have died out after just two generations?
Monday, December 16, 2013
Fiction: Absolutely Positive
This story at Fictionpress.
See also: Things Unsaid; Sixteen Hours
A Story Across Years: Chapter five. "Tradition, of course. I wonder when it started."
Secret Life: Chapters seven and eight. Sci-fi horror. "He is afraid. Afraid that he knows why he is here."
You made the lentil soup yourself. No-one can make it the way that you do. A dash of this and that. Humble ingredients that are spun together to make a meal fit for a noble. At least, you think so. Many nobles have disagreed with you on the matter.
Perhaps that is why they needed to die.
It isn't that you killed them for lacking in good culinary taste or simply disagreeing with you. But they couldn't appreciate the simple things. They couldn't see the refinement of humility or the grandeur therein. This had many different consequences. One of them was that they were unable to appreciate the best things in life. Another was that you have been been killing them whenever you could get away with it.
See also: Things Unsaid; Sixteen Hours
A Story Across Years: Chapter five. "Tradition, of course. I wonder when it started."
Secret Life: Chapters seven and eight. Sci-fi horror. "He is afraid. Afraid that he knows why he is here."
Sadcore warning.Babylonian Medley: Absolutely Positive
You made the lentil soup yourself. No-one can make it the way that you do. A dash of this and that. Humble ingredients that are spun together to make a meal fit for a noble. At least, you think so. Many nobles have disagreed with you on the matter.
Perhaps that is why they needed to die.
It isn't that you killed them for lacking in good culinary taste or simply disagreeing with you. But they couldn't appreciate the simple things. They couldn't see the refinement of humility or the grandeur therein. This had many different consequences. One of them was that they were unable to appreciate the best things in life. Another was that you have been been killing them whenever you could get away with it.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Fiction: Things Unsaid
See also:
Sixteen Hours
The worst part about being alive, you think, is that you're dying the whole time.
You have seen other men vomit at the smell now assaulting you as you make your way through the clogged, winding streets of Babylon. Plague and famine are evident on the face of every body that you step past, whether dead or nearly so. Only the dogs and rats are well-fed these days, it seems. The stench alone is enough to make other men sick, but not you.
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