In Accordance With Prophecy

Wait in the desert of forgetting
Blind yourself with a silver key
When you dream of coelacanths
And the hunger of wolves
This is the unmaking
This is the flood

Haven't Learned the Lines You'd Like to Hear

There's a wine stain on the carpet
And your bourbon-broken voice
Says - this isn't me through a Marlboro haze
Crawling up the fire escape
With blood in your hair
Nothing fast or smooth about this little trip
So you murdered your youth late last night
With the Waterford lamp
And a shelf full of trophies
Escaped in a limousine
Where to? the driver said
And really that's the question
Where to now
When it's your mother in the mirror
And you're knocking over chairs
Is this what you wanted?
A bloody smear of greasepaint
Tearing through the backdrop
Do you know what time it is?

Bitter Twisting

As the polaroids from last night
Bleed colour into the receding tide
I can't understand what my own voice
Is whispering unreadable transcriptions
Secret codes written and promptly and best forgotten
Etched into the frozen window
And the lightbulb at the back of my eyes
Is fading green, guttering cold phosphorescent
I would not, for the world
Have you go where I've been all night
Watching yourself breathe into the mirror
Left amnesiac save for the name of someone
You never knew who reminds you of someone
You hate who said they wished you were someone
Else

Undying

There were only the
Stark prints of your boots
In the late snow leading
To the broken ring of stones
On the hill behind my house
But not beyond

That was six weeks ago.  Tonight
I found you
Collapsed outside my door
Shivering emaciated
With razorice eyes of predator
Lips parted on a fevered, feral scream
Fingers spread wide in
Preparation for flight

Madchild Time

Whispering to the pale green walls which
Still smell of disinfectant and

Kerosene
She rocks mumbling rhyming charms to coax
The things behind the glass to come
Murder sleeping guardians
(Later Raggedy Ann lying all

Deceitful in the corner
Would take the fall)
And she gives you an alchemical look

Gold turned to lead
But if you stay too long you never know what
Might wrench open the crack in the wall or if it's
Hungry

Hangmarket / Web of Babel (dreamtime)

There is a valley, or more accurately a gorge, cutting through the City.  It's not completely untraversable, but the roads in and out of the gorge are narrow and zigzag up the steep walls, so naturally there have been several bridges built over the City's long history.  Suspension bridges, ziplines, cable cars, rope bridges... over time, the various crossings have intersected with and reinforced each other.  There are knots now - places where you can move from one bridge to another, and at some points people have built small shops to take advantage of the traffic.  The densest areas at the centre of the gorge are permanently inhabited, and the people there have developed a certain sense of insularity.

Of course, I end up in this neighbourhood, looking for someone or something.  The guy I'm talking to is trying to make me uncomfortable, deliberately leading me across the flimsiest and least stable paths he can find.  I grit my teeth and avoid looking down.  I've got a nasty suspicion that someone's picked my pocket, but luckily most of my money and other essentials (including my knife if things get really hairy) are in my bag under my cloak.  Which is, admittedly, flapping around rather a lot in the wind and is not doing anything for my balance as a result.

"So can you help me or not?  I've got money and information, but not a hell of a lot of time, so how about you quit dicking me around and we negotiate like civilized people, arright?"

There follows a lengthy period of muttered conversations between my guide and various other, equally shady, characters in this weird bridge creole that I'm clearly not expected to understand.  I don't, much, but I can decipher enough to know that someone was here earlier, poisoning the well.  Explains a lot, really.

There's a tense standoff that feels like several minutes, then the guy nods and does the universal hand sign for money.  I slowly reach for my bag and pull out my main bargaining chip, and the situation immediately turns into a complete Mongolian clusterfuck when the stock "twitchy little weasel-faced guy" mistakes a data crystal for a weapon and knocks it out of my hand, over the edge of the bridge.  Yelling ensues.  The interesting thing was the device itself.  I was probably only holding it for about 30 seconds, tops, but dream-me knew that the crystal was some manner of data-storage device - optical, like a DVD or CD, but instead of the data being stored in a spiral, two-dimensional pattern, it was stored in short segments in a lattice structure within the crystal.  Basically, the thing looked like a polished chunk of rutilated quartz, with the internal striations indicating data clusters.