by Tomorrow's Man
Epic drone, fit of center, somewhere a piano chirps three notes to a newborn, there could be rain in the sky, but then it may just be my eyes closing.
Found out today that a new Federal law requires any American born before 1975 to henceforth refer to it solely and exclusively as "Your Sharona."
Finally, the gov't is working for me.
Diamondminded glitterwhirl, a speck of sand goes sailing in the flow;
But soon's it's surely hot enough, the speck'll become Window.
Crap. I'm in a cell again. When will I learn?
It feels as if I drank myself through the DTs and out the other side. I hate waking up this way, locked up in yet another cell, once again my own victim. I can't bear to open my eyes to the humiliation.
I can feel the rumble of something large approaching. The tremble is enough to make me open my eyes.
I roll quickly to my left, barely in time to avoid being crushed by a barreling mitochondrion. As the monster ululates and turns I bolt to my feet, scrambling away as two more of the massive beasts appear behind the first.
I'm frantic. I make my way past the gnomonic overhang of the Golgi. Ahead to my left is the ridge of a centriole, and I labor toward it, my shoes and hangover a trinity of heavy liabilities as I cross the thick murk of the cytoplasmic floor. I collapse behind the centriole before the mitochondria reach the Golgi - I'm safe for the moment.
The cell is larger than most I've been in, and my cellmates are by far the most drastic I've encountered. I've been interred with bikers and slashers, malcontents and psychopaths, but none of them compare to the hungry bulks of the mitochondria intent on turning me into fuel. I have never before considered the idea of breaking out of a cell - it seemed a choice that could only make things worse. But if breaking out of this cell means survival, then the path of the outlaw will be mine.
I can hear the mitochondria approaching, snuffling after my scent. I glance around the centriole. Two of the three are huge brutes, though the smaller one still dwarfs me. They've cleverly fanned out to block my way as they inexorably comb the cytoplasmic floor for me.
I dart into the open, and all three turn in my direction emitting a united, hungry moan. I fight the supple floor and my pounding head as I pump my way toward the arching surface of the nucleus. The nucleus lay so close to the wall of the cell that the mitochondria will not be able to follow.
I'm almost there, nearly at the cell wall, when I hear a ghastly sound. I turn to see the endoplasmic reticulum waver and shiver as if about to heave. Sure enough, like a cloud of murderous bees, a dozen crimson transport vesicles bloom from the reticulum and speed toward me. Even the mitochondria cease their approach.
I am cornered between the cell wall and the nucleus. Desperate, I drop to my knees and dig into the cytoplasm, my fingernails clawing through the translucent, viscous pulp to grasp at a shadow. The shadow proves to be what I'd hoped, and I pull the blade of cytoskeleton free. I brandish it with a howl as the vesicles swarm about me. I thrust, cut, and slice; I spin the blade in arcs, I jab, I gouge and sever.
The battle passes in a blur, and the shredded remains of the vesicles litter the landscape. Behind me, the largest of the mitochondria bellows.
My bone sword in hand, I step to the cell wall. With a quick slice I open a rift in the peptidoglycan and leap through - a new outlaw, founded in the fading echo of his enemy.
With her eye pressed to the inside of the window and his eye pressed to the out, their lashes navigate the viscous silicate surface of the glass. Somewhere inside, they twine.
The same happens at each of their fingertips -- ten hers and ten his press to the window, hers on the inside, his out. A human eye cannot see the wriggling strands of DNA trickle and tumble from the sweat on their fingertips to push through the glass, seeking the heat from the other.
A human eye cannot see the surge, the urgent chemical transaction that occurs as these strands strive through the silicate surface with a drive not unlike that of spermatoza starting new life. Incensed and alive, these precious pieces of their selves wriggle and writhe as they drive on, headlong.
The glass heats to liquid beneath her fingertips. She presses out tighter, her fingertips. Just beyond the glass, on the outside of hers, are his. He is receiving.
Behind him, lightning crashes across the stars and indigoes bleed from bruise to red as chemicals cut the sky. Inside, the space behind her is vacuum silent, vacuum empty, vacuum deadly. Yet, she lives. She is a new form of life, and she is limitless. He is the way of all things. They peer through the window, and a new form of creation has been engaged.
They open their mouths and press their sets of lips to the window, hers on the inside, his out. Her blue eyes blink and his green do, too. Sealed in this O-ring kiss, they inhale – her the vacuum, him the stars.
A skin like mercury bubbles into the cavity created by the kiss. It takes four minutes for the glass to cease to resist. The sound that shakes them apart is not a shatter, but a torrent. The sound that shakes them apart is the union of all things to the vacuum. The sound registers at the frequency of a new form of creation screaming alive.
Their invisible barrier boiled and broken, they melt the space between them as lightning screams down indigoes from the sky.
originally published at 365tomorrows.com
If you've built something from the inside out, then you won't have any difficulty in penetrating
from the outside in. --D. Ash
8
Years of fate and fervor, foundering fury, occluding fever, and occasional fortune;
8
Years lurking under the middle of the radar, thumping out an indefatigable, sporadic beat;
8
Years cutting hair/here, growing hair/here, dying hair/here, losing hair/here;
8
Years of aliens trying to blow out the tires (they didn't know they were trick tires and would keep reigniting);
8
Years of slitch and switch and slish and slither and slipt smiles and lips;
8
Years of butterflies in the belfry;
8
Years of worldly wander and earthly wonder amidst endless winter's corporeal quiver, slashing dashes of shiver;
8
Years of this bun baking brown in brainbook's oven;
8
Years gone, growing immune to forgotten;
8
Years
down --
--only one way to go.
I am not seeing my breath. I am seeing miles as vapor, and each puff of white is another border, another city, another state. Each buffeting gust of the arctic airs that stunned me for the past three years was another room where I'd lay with unworthy after unworthy, forced by circumstance to sully the trinity of my soul, my Self, and my purest skin.
Now I feel the rising echo of my name again, my name you murmur as you bite into the blood that fills your lips while they use you. You long to be clean and warm and strong, as I long to be clean and warm and strong again, cleansed by light, by true love, by the sheer motivation to believe in faith, at last.
My departure was my own will, brought about by the beasts that coiled their dirty claws around my synapses and loins, drawing me away from my home by the sea. It destroyed me to orchestrate my own abduction. My unconsciousness could not come soon enough, even as it was at the behest of this endless self-beating.
I have been tied down many times. And I have always risen again.
In the skin of another I raised the blackjack above my face again, and again, asking myself one question; and as the thuds echoed flatly from the dampening of my flesh - and I sealed the fate of my blood one day filling my throat - I replied:
"I am not yet a man."
Things have changed. My tendons once locked as by azoturia have titanium strength and flex and bend, and my muscles have steeled even as my body atrophied under the burden of my brain.
I can feel the heat in my blood as I tear from the radiator bars that have kept me safe and screeching. I am healing as I rise, leaving my poor rendition of a man in a pulp of red wet that I spit upon as he begins to decay and slough from me, a death shell coruscating in a mist of red.
In my past I would defecate and wait for death, sleep, breathe and eat. I have recolonized, rising from my slow suicide to burn white, to decide life/death for galaxies, and to ignite, to warm and warn, to become solace, respite, strategy.
I am a recreation, god-complicated and driven, fueled to run these torn and deranged paved streets, eyes unbloodied and non-blinking, peering through molecules to catch the signature of human heat, silencing every-one and every-thing that prevents the possibility of a whisper from reaching my ear, driven headlong across mad America.
I am courtesan and chauffeur, carriage and armored car; I am a tank and I am driven.
I am in facet a mastermind.
I am driven.
Sopping up the blood of ghosts we tore through spiders awake,
it's only the next dream.
For a tithe of this time we were tethered to a tilde, until the tide turned toward today's lepidopteric locale and we lightly landed amidst this blizzard, two brothers, contrasted beings, betrothen to brute tenacity, linked by a love for throttling cyclones from the Amazonian undulations of butterflies and their brethren.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Tearing apart like death rides in on the gasping breath of Santa Claus, stitched to somewholeness with the shred and thrak of a Stonedriver, the cycle blurs and blends Yin Yang into a Bloodwhirl as these cells return to my folds in a suppuration of callous disenchantment with all things normal, and once again become the germination of this endless Brainstrain cycle, ramping up again.
I unearth berries
I whiteface blackberries
I hold my breath with blueberries
I French kiss raspberries
I kiss the girls and boysenberries
I voted democrat with Al Frankenberries
I made a new plan, cranberries
I dangle dingleberries
I cheat on cherries
But I eat apple pie
On ferries.
Chapter 01: He wore the red shirt out that morning. It was strange, because he also left eleven minutes, thirteen seconds earlier than usual. Feeling strange that he left so early he ran to the train station, bolting down the stairs to the terminal when he arrived there.
Chapter 02: She sped up to make the turn on the yellow. Just as she twisted the wheel and stepped on the gas, she noticed a flash of red out of the corner of her eye. Her head twitched to the left just a hair, but it was enough. The explosion took out half the city block. Fourteen died.
Chapter 03: He had ham and cheese for lunch. Ever since the small earthquake this morning he was in the mood for something smoked, though he wasn't sure why. He was disappointed that he got mustard on the left cuff of his nice red shirt.
The End
I made a splash at the event with Fright in a bucket, I found that a bucket of anything can make a splash but Fright really sticks to people.
No one considers the grave danger of carrots declaring war on peas, but both breeds are marshaling their forces.
When this comes to pass, it will be a sad, orangey-greeny day in hell.
I've slogged down my path from wrath to wreckage Now
I can practice being subtle Unless
Breathing other than air to exist Means
Sucking the life from this bubble
Pounding temples with fingerweights Quelch
The quickness of quieter thoughts Since
Queazies that climb from bowel to brain Thicken
Thinking in the Temple of Ought I
oughta
shoulda
woulda
coulda
Given the right dose of shock Shocked
I'd ever couple back around to this This
Scheme in the Temple of Ought