Last Known Sighting

Highsummer golden light and we are caught
Between shadowed forest and brilliant tidestruck beach
Memory carries hallucinatory clarity
But it's not good enough for proof

Which amounts to a skittering muted recording
(That could be anything)
And a grainy pixellated photo of
You stumbling towards the shuttered trees
And me with a handful of scrambled magnetic wails

Through the Rust and Gasoline (dreamtime rehash)

It's raining, and it could very well have been a solid forty days and nights for all the difference the passage of time makes here.  Time is marked by the starting of fires and the slow rise of greasy black smoke into the slightly paler clouds.  It's marked by the slow change of steel to reddish powder and by the transmutation of bright copper wire to burnt verdigris.  Occasionally, it's marked by the sudden collapse of dysfunctional machinery into a tangle of useless scrap.

There are marks on the ground as well.  Muddy prints of boots tracked through the mud, filling up slowly with iridescent-skinned water.  It smells like oil and burning jet fuel with a faint hint of contraband and cordite. Sometimes it smells like rotting garbage or burning meat.

It's still raining.  You're shivering in the crumpled husk of a Lear jet, waiting for the pilot and not seeming to realize that he's slowly liquefying in the cabin up front.

Somewhere half a mile up, a vulture angel with steel wings circles lazily.

Sideways to the Sun (dreamtime)

Just dreamed about our old place in Saskatoon - S. and I were driving down the street, and as we passed the seniors' residence I noticed that it was covered in ice. It looked like someone had dropped a full payload from a water bomber on it, then flash-frozen it as the water hit. Which would have been weird enough, but it was summertime, so really the ice should have melted / be melting. We parked in our old spot and got out, and it looked like all three of the old buildings were in the process of being renovated - lots of scaffolding and plastic sheeting flapping around in the hot, dusty wind. It was the weekend though, so none of the workers were around.

When we went into the building to have a look around, it looked strange - all the walls facing onto the hallway had been knocked out, and the floors had been raised nearly half a metre, but there were clearly people living in the apartments even though an entire wall was missing and they had no privacy or security as a result. Our old place was even worse - parts of the roof had also been removed and the wind was blowing the plastic sheeting around. I also noticed that there was a gap between the outer brick wall and the inner wall. I pushed aside a loose panel of drywall and climbed into the gap. There was a narrow staircase (more of a ladder, really) going up to the attic. S. followed me up, and as he blocked the light from below, the air shuddered slightly and the dust seemed to glitter in the darkness.

The attic was bigger than you'd expect, looking at it from the outside. Better lit, too - a sort of golden late afternoon light filtering through the vents at either end and cracks in the brickwork and roof. It looked like there were a bunch of homeless kids squatting in the space, except after looking around some more the place looked more like a pub / arcade than a living space, and the kids looked... fey, for lack of a better term. Delicate, angular features, strangely coloured eyes, slightly pointed ears - the whole nine yards. The older guy behind the bar was, rather stereotypically, a troll - huge and craggy and distinctly blue-tinged. I noticed that there was a massive stone hammer on a rack above the bar. Good security. I didn't order anything (I think I meant to ask him some questions about what the deal was with the building), but he just handed me a mug full of something. It turned out to be wine - specifically this ludicrously expensive Chateau d'Yquem that a friend of my dad's brought over one evening for no particular reason. It was ice-cold and tasted like sunlight and apricots and orange blossom honey.

"You can't stay here," he said. "Go back to the world and stop them before we're driven out forever."

I was swaying slightly and turned around to tell S. what they wanted, and then I realized that he couldn't see any of this. I saw through his eyes and the attic was cramped and dusty and stuffy, and there was nothing up there except some construction supplies. He hadn't seen the ice on the other building either. I had no idea what to do next. I tried to give him the cup, but it turned into an old bird's nest in my hand.

Coming Down Like

Thunder calls to thunder, sometimes

This salt-stained and wine-dark storm in stuttering motion
Quickens at the warning of rolling lead-grey shifting 

To swirling absinthe halflight
The elms outside trembling and swaying 

Into one another like lovers
As the hail rips through
We watch from behind guttering candles

Shivering glass

One eye on the stairs to the boiler room
One eye on the sky

Hiding Out Inbetween (dreamtime)

It started out at a party - someone I tangentially knew through T. The place reminded me of an apartment I looked at in Ottawa years ago. The floors were visibly slanted, the walls were painted a rather hideous shade of hospital green, and the neighbourhood was one of those grim colourbled areas waiting for gentrification. The kitchen was nice and big though, and the general desolation of the area and lack of any neighbours meant that people could be as loud as they wanted and nobody was going to complain about it. Someone had brought a pretty kick-ass stereo system, which was blasting early 90s techno. I was in the kitchen, looking for a glass, and for some reason I started compulsively organizing the cupboards, because stuff was just thrown haphazardly into drawers and cabinets with no sort of underlying logic. As a result, I missed most of the lead up to whatever was going on out in the main room until someone started screaming.

It was all over by the time I came out. There were a couple of people on the floor - a guy in a leather jacket with patches all over it and a somewhat wilted mohawk and a tall, pale blonde woman in a bright blue minidress. Several candles had been knocked over and one of the sofas was on fire. There was a sigil painted rather sloppily on the wall in blood. I took off down the stairs and ran out into the street, but there was no one in sight and no sign of a car. Went back upstairs and stayed with the two people until EMS arrived (a lot of people left because they didn't want to talk to the cops), then copied the sigil onto a scrap of paper and went home to do some research.

The next bit was on a double-decker bus - I was sitting next to the blonde girl, who was looking nervously out the window. We were the last passengers on board, and we'd paid the driver a pretty hefty bribe to deviate from his route to take us straight to [the meetup location]. There was a van coming up fast behind us that looked straight out of The Road Warrior, including the horde of freaky neo-barbarians hanging all over it waving nasty spiky instruments of mayhem. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handful of old-fashioned jacks, blew on them, and chucked them out the back window. Two of the van's tires blew out and it swerved off the road, knocking off most of the guys on the outside.

Next place was an abandoned building, possibly an old school made of cinderblocks with security bars over broken glass in the windows and peeling paint and crumbled ceiling tiles all over the floor. People squatted here on a regular basis, if the ratty mattresses and camp stoves were anything to go by, but there was something *wrong* about the place. The people I was with (nobody I know awake) were sniping at each other, pacing, looking out the windows. There was a sort of hum in the air just below the threshold of hearing that set my teeth on edge, and the smell of hot metal. The alley outside was... it looked like a reflection of something in a window. I realized that it didn't exist in the real world, or more accurately that the location was superimposed on another like two images on a photograph. The people looking for us couldn't find us, but the longer we stayed the more likely we were to be stuck in the superimposed state. Like being on the wrong side of a quantum waveform collapse, if that makes any sense.

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.