It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.
What we formerly cast down as tyranny we resurrect, even exalt, out of a sort of cheap nostalgia for the blandness of safety. The flag of surrender is the flag of your banality.
Even the voice of heaven would not move you, nor the chants of the free nations moving under clean skies, never cursing life as you are bound to do.
Slaves, they dared to call us.

Your principles are a hollow bell struck without feeling.
We who adhere to a total revolution, a rebellion of the spirit, the affirmation of the third millennium, need no justifications.

Side effects

From a tenement flat dancing mardi gras girls out on the corner. As seen in times square. It's a corner installation, to tempt the passers-by into the show, hand out flyers. More often it puts the pedestrians off, alienates them, they look confused. An enforced feeling of festivity in the mardi gras girl who takes up her stance on the corner, her shift commencing. The Burlesque Dance. Arching her back she flings out her arms the glitter like sweat on her bare skin, her smallish breasts pushed out.
Unable to come. The drain that comes from the cock, from the base of the balls, from the bladder, the liquid waste products dispensed with; the small relief, exquisite and spreading like an opium haze, relaxes the muscles. So when you are unable to come you are unable to relax.
Meanwhile the hoped-for orgasm relief becomes an impossible-to-reach pinnacle, a spice that has lost its appeal; the relief lasts a second, the point at which the peak is reached is no longer sharp but has become dulled through over-familiarity, and the cum is followed by a white noise opium numbness, a void flooded by a vast metaphysical question without an answer.

The Flat

I have taken ownership of a flat in some distant part of town.
I visit there at dusk expecting to find the place empty. No place I have ever seen before. It's up a flight of steps, large, white, cubish walls, floor-plan is vaguely L-shaped. A feeling of repose or desolation. Reminds me of a bunker or an Arab sort of house. Worse, it has an atmosphere of Oakley.
Inside the rooms are dark. I come to a room at the back, to my left. In here is a bedroom which I want to enter, if only to walk around it, get the feel of it, have the pleasure of solitude in a backroom in a distant flat. The feeling being: No-one knows I'm here, repose, reflection...
Inside are a few beds with piles of cheap unruly blankets thrown carelessly over them. Again, the Oakley atmosphere of bareness and desolation. I see though that in the shadows a figure is lying asleep, at full stretch under the ragged blankets. It's Joe, who it seems has beaten me to it, come hours earlier with a similar intent and stolen my refuge of reflection, repose, and thought...
I close the door softly and head for the adjoining back door. I press the handle softly and the latch gives way. Door is of light white-painted wood. A flimsy back door and there are no keys to lock it.
I emerge onto the back green, strangely soft and reflective. Nearby a dank closemouth. I see, very realistic, the opposite end of the stairwell, choked with litter, the neglected grass. My breath comes out in smoke.
The feeling is merely of reflection, not sadness or hope. I reflect that now I can go to mum's but soon all that may be over... My place may as well be here. No particular bad feelings associated with this. Contemplative, philosophic. No despair.
The painful feeling though is one of distance, an empty space between me and the centre. And then, the crumbling blank-white interior walls.

Florida 2

O Florida! You are florid indeed, but I want no swamps, no humidity, no poison flowers. I only want green lawns and golf clubs in summer, sun-slanted hills clad in endless green scarcely different from old Eire. Great tropics, slants and the drip-drop of plants, another Antipodes.
The green lawns, the smooth hills. Pastoral golf-courses where old men play, in clean polo shirts and grim gopher expression.
O Florida, naked peninsula, sorrow of Spaniards, hothouse of the world, bottleneck, human-ruined Paradise! Who dares slant its sun across you from on high, marking the linebacks, punishing alligators, in a mild and commonplace day? And I wish I could escape into the hills, the swamps, the trees, go forth there and make great loves in the fenlands and forest, the surf and sunshine.

I was attached to a suburban golf club. It was a reputable place, mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so I felt rather out of place, being neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant, and only incidentally caucasoid. Perhaps I should explain myself: I am a hipster, a college boy, a gen x phantom of cigarettes and T-shirts. I like sneakers, fagpackets, and am lackadaisical about my hairdos. I frequently have a goatee in the style of Butch Vig, and a comparable expression of boredom. My hair at times grows scraggily long, at which times I push it behind my ears. I am the "slacker" but am too cool to call myself any such thing. I only mumble cursewords in answer to any queries about my job description. I am far too postmodern to have subcultural affiliations. But I have a nice line in ironic nostalgia.

How then did I come to be in this golf course cum park, this Flordia concourse, sun-splashed and genteel? I'm not gonna tell you. It's not important to the fundamentals of the story. Perhaps you may perceive, dear readers, gentlemen and ladies, that I myself do not know the reason.

Cemetery Nightmare

Nightmare: In the oldest part of the cemetery reading the stones. I notice, as in real life, many of them refer directly to resurrection ("When I Rise" etc.). In the ivy'd stone wall marking off the old section is a large gap of "window". I puzzle about the function of this.
Peering inside I notice naive statuettes placed in a sort of shrine, but very neglected and decayed. One seems to represent the conventional Death the Reaper, cloaked, with a skeletal jury of his peers. It seems I am indicted and condemned and must give an account of myself to this court.
Now I am half-conscious and become aware of the darkness and silence of my room, in which I can see the skull face of Death as a hanging judge. How Do I Plead?
Wake up with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and fear.

Seasonal Acrostics

So is come the signal of the year;
Proper is our aestival repose-
Round the tow'ring minarets we hear
In the silent bowers of the rose,
Now and then, quite gladly, without fear,
Glowing notes of birdsong in the boughs.

Soon is reached the apex of the day-
Unknown to those who dwell in northern cold,
Memorie'd, significant, honourable, and gay,
Most reverent, ephemeral, and bold,
E'er fragrant, clearing brazen clouds away:
Resplendent weather, florid to behold.

Ah, me! That lion days should pass away
Undreamt of by a crueller age,
Till drifts of dreaming crops betray
Unlooked for signs of silent rage:
Meant in the coming struggle of the day,
Not frowned on by the cunning sage.

When, o, at last, the perfidition comes,
In cruel-bound climes, enamel-cast,
No pow'r stern can beat its brazen drums,
To stem the grimy vengeance of the blast:
Even the joyful fowls are waxen dumb,
Roughly the fulsome branches are downcast.

Lucky is he that sees the beast

Lucky is he that sees the beast
Unknown to most of them that feel-
Celestial rapprochements cease;
Yearly the triumphal arches wheel,
Round vernal chimes the spirits climb
Obversely glooming in retreat;
Bearing overland proud approaching time
Born in oppressive aestival heat-
I dream of love, a commonweal
Emerging like a sensuous feast.

"Done is a battle on the dragon black":
Every schoolboy knows the score:
At noontide the shadowy dragon draws back,
Till dawn comes he prevails no more-
Hatred in every breath he will not lack.
Love, breath'd in response, becomes a trigger
Or motivates responses still obscure-
Verily, the promised spring set to transfigure,
Eternally renewing each renewer.