Migration

is sometimes a necessity of change.

If you're out there, and I hope you are....

come and find me at http://hemeolic.livejournal.com/

Dipsosomnia

The pain of sleep is not like any other hurt. It is a pain of you, yourself, an ache that's consuming, whole and undefined. A woman in a chaste night rail once asked me: You know when you're lying in bed, trying to fall asleep and you pull up short with a jerk like you're falling?  Except you're not falling, you're just falling asleep?  The pain of sleep is like that.  Except you never fall.  Wanting to fall you scrabble on your hands and knees and your belly to a cliff's edge, turn around and let your body slide over, feet, calves, thighs.   But you grip tightly, tightly with your hands to a tree root near the precipice.  Then you close your eyes and prepare to release, to fall, only to discover, to your horror, your hands have grown into the root stock.  They are no longer yours.  The processes by which your body works become disconnected and arcane, telegraphs with flesh wires, mechanical clocks buried in the sea, and you are are stuck and hung immobile.

The need for sleep is a discomfort that presses into your neck and abdomen, but mostly into your head where it swirls, inexorable and dangerous.  You don't know which you want more: for it to leave you empty or take you over altogether. This is what dying feels like, you think and then think that can't be true, and then know that it is.

 The pain of sleep is divided into two varieties: its lack and its threat of inconvenient arrival.  One is a pillory, the other a room made of everything soft and pillowy: floor length drapes, the rumps of cats, banks of ferns, Turkish Delight (the Narnian kind), the thighs of voluptuous women, piles of un-spun wool.  Your entrance is inevitable. For though you shut the door firmly during Shakespeare, Schoenberg, and stoichiometry, you'll find yourself a-bed inside as if there were never any door after all.

insupportable ephemera

Upholstery porn.  Wingtiped motorcars and backed chairs.  Hot wave: hair, emotion both.

Innuendos accepted by e-mail.  Fur tippets however, last practically forever, especially when Hollanderized.

The taste of frisson. Licking at a smear of strawberry, only to find it blood.

Defeat.

 more?

Homes

Empty houses are the best ones, or the ones built to resemble houses but filled with trains instead, or quaking puddings, or irate tortoiseshell cats, you don't know, do you, unless there's a peep hole for peeping inside.  Also good are the houses that are too small to inhabit and filled with paste hams and forks with two tines or the ones that are too large and full of the dead.  Also acceptable are those houses full of gloomth, locked doors, innuendos, taffeta, slow lakes and rattlings as well as the houses built in rib cages and filled with breath and dust and very soft couches of human flesh.  Intriguing are those houses that are composed of nothing at all but are only spaces defined around a place where a house might exist or might be formed by the dueling reflection of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors, or merely someone sighing on the lintel, at last, at last, at last.  In short an inhabitable house is best, more refined and elegant, just as fripperies are better uncosseted, marzipan uneaten, depths unplumbed.

Taking shape

Yesterday you were turning bolts, building a bed for your lover to sleep in, plying pressboard into roses, into oak trees, into the tree house where Penelope and Odysseus, I'm sure, laid their heads between blackberry thickets and dusty silver olive leaves.

A black squirrel shocked me awake just now. It stood upright. You don't know what precariousness feels like until you stand on two feet.

There was nothing more hopeless somehow then a bottle dropped on the street. Laboriously filled with air (into bottle shape) and then water (into water shape), then abandoned with a thunk and a chug. A bottle filled now half with air and a spreading pool of water flattened into two dimensions, left to evaporate, shapeless now, into pools of air.

Penelope and Odysseus, they weren't afraid for their lives, and neither will you be when you hold that girl close in the indentation you pressed out especially for her. You will be satisfied and warm now with the hole that you have made, and then filled.

SF Novel of the Week: Winterize

There's a new household convenience in town, inter-dimensional energy. Established 50 years ago, inter-dimensional energy is both safe and cheap. Many different dimensions exist at a single point in space thereby solving the basic problems of environmental control. An inter-dimensional fan creates a small hole to an area of eternal winter: boom! Instant cooling. Create a hole into some radiating geothermal tomb and you never have to pay another heating bill. Portals to wells of inexhaustible energy generate electricity. And small windowshade-like contraptions shines beams of sun into your room, evening during the deep chills of winter.

Enter our hero, a shlub of a junior vice president of marketing, whose job it is to sell these plastic appliances to consumers.
One day, while flicking on a switch, a voice speaks out of his "Extreme Winterizer X359." It's a scientist from one of those alternate dimensions warning him of the grave consequences of tampering with the folds of reality. They converse over several days forming a strange (and possibly sexual connection through the whirring stream of cold air). At last he is convinced of the danger to his planet. Faced with convincing the public that the products he once promoted will likely destroy both the known and unknown universe, will he take refuge in denial? Or will this middle manager embark on a crusade to save humanity?

Laws of Thermodynamics: III

There Is No Zero

You cannot stop it. The city is there, full green in its many branches, hung bending and swaying with eagles, angles and headless knights. The river speaks in insalubrious innuendos. The stonemasons are laboring even now. After 300 years their hammers bang out persistence, gold spreading like a pestilence over the ogives, spilling onto alter cloths already heavy with dust. There is a place but it does not exist, a garden, with few doors but you may still reach it. Hidden behind bankers, retail junkies and sausage carts, you may find, yes you may try. It is a place of stillness where apples remain ungathered and old men sit upon the benches in checks while others mate in quiet corners without the aid of boards. And when one leaves, uncertain of her reception in the worlds of elsewhere, one may gather up a bit in her hand and put it in her pocket for a Wednesday. But that bit does not go with you, though you file it carefully away, For all flowers fade when plucked and become something altogether different, a remainder of what always was insubstantial, imperfect and gone.