Last Radioed Transmission

"Pippi! LaLa! M'Lady! Come!

These dogs and this wind is enough-- and then blowing along in it we have the ravages of the soil taken to air to scold us and our faces. Farmers sell water, and the cement goes dry. Babies breathe like miners. The lotion just makes a sludge on your skin. The water leaves a paste. The dogs are having seizures in here. Where is the Western Union? Navy Air? What? Wait... No!"

COLUMN OF LIFE

Column of new pauses, thinking you are sumptuous.
Column of days, tight petals unfolding and turning under
Column of lines, connected only for the reason paper clips fuse in drawers.

Column, murderer, holding hostage villagers in your shadow.
Column is a forced march, dragging them by the upper arms.
Column splashing and spilling over, terrorizing with its cracks.

Column of workers, column of ants, column of monarchs.
Column raising the ante one dimension and all that was flat must fold.
Column free in the air despising reason.

Column against phallocentricism, column so old.
Column to hang around and lean on, carve, tap, be chained to.
Column to, thrashing and writhing, "pull down," as if stone.

Column of bees and nettles, a solid ring, stack of coin.
Column a tornado of fire, fever rising, spiraling tide.
Column as plinth, down under, with the relics.

Column of earth where I stand. Is a marvel of stagnation
Column of patience that non-life has. Abomination. Only
Column of Life has stations of deceasing and appearing again.

Undergrounded

Tom dreamt that he stooped over and did a somersault in the air and kept tumbling upward until he was flying flat out over the clouds looking down at what one of us might see looking out the window of a modern airliner even though neither he nor anyone else had yet been in that spot and lived. He looked at the bumps and smears and veins and trails and hanging mists and cracks and wrinkles suspended in the complicated vapor scape and decided that, as a part of nature, as he, as well as his language were a part of nature that it, as much as anything else that he could speak or otherwise create, must have meaning.

If he strained his neck, much as if one of us, a taller one of us, would have to do to see out the window of a modern airliner all the way to the horizon, he could see the line between the cloud cover and the sky and this too spoke to him; it meant that there was indeed a line, a limit. He had been drinking a little bit that night and feeling still emotional, like someone slammed back into the world after they thought they were already dead, so a high sound came out from the back of his throat as he slept, like a teakettle, and burning water squirted from Pink Squishy pads in the corners of his eyes.

The concept was since he was a natural animal and the clouds that hung in the sky below him or the air that he breathed were also natural, just as natural was the language which grew out of him, that he spit and spewed, as Real as Phlegm, and it would be arrogant to think there was no meaning in any of it.

When Tom woke up, it turned out he actually was on a plane. He sighed and saw his breath on the glass of the little oval window. He realized that some of his previous breaths might even be contained in the broken-up Chunks of Orange and brown clouds he was flying over now. There were veins of snow on the Brown Dirt that covered the planet west of the Chanks. The White Veins seemed to follow the water runoff. He could probably see millions of trees from that vantage point. When snow became general, water running was marked with the absence of snow. He had not yet seen an animal, but as far as he could see there was only terrain with trees and rocks and snow, and then no rocks, which seemed like a place where animals would want to go.

Warm Green Monolith

Tom was walking down a wide empty Dhubbabera windy boulevard, his pants flapping. It was disorienting not to have to go anywhere in particular except what one had planned out for oneself, and that type was the most breakable of oaths.

So his thoughts took over. Only when he forced himself to admire the towering desert chank, blurred with a haze of spring olive verdance, did he feel that he existed as himself in that place, and in any case, that was not a pleasant thing. His mind operated as a spring this way, snapping back almost audibly after an intensive moment of pessimistic concentration before the sharply pending withdrawal. A whip. You wouldn't always want to be the object of that studied, cringing fronting off with reality.

So when a young German widow, furtive, herself disoriented, chilled by the wind in the shadow of the warm green mountain, blurted out, "Are you familiar here?" he saw the look of fright on her face and didn't want to be the cause of something like that, so he deliberately brightened up his mood, from within, allowing her innocence and vulnerability to spur on a sympathetic view of life, a view of life's delicateness, which ended up showing in his face and reassuring her.

It's back that way, he pointed. See the golden building? She'd asked him for the casino.

Then his walk continued and he did not snap immediately back into internal patter. He was crossing the shadow line on the sidewalk. Wind seemed to buffet him from all directions. There was brightness and bright color, magenta blue pink green yellow blossoms and their fragrance. As water sprang into his eyes stingingly, he imagined all of the dead who loved him standing in chorus and encouragement. But also in envy.

He felt responsible to use all of his senses, just for their sake, for a few moments longer.

10. Time is a Liar

Reptily sat on a footstool before a fire she'd made. Her specialty was burls, but she could also read the heat spots and Burnt Issue of cones, ashes and legumes. This oak burl had burned through the eve of and into the first morning of the new W.D. It was disturbingly reminiscent of a six-hour vision of hell she had experienced using wood from the same river bed the winter before. It's sandy, but it's cured. Miss Sprint just must not have been hosing them down. But fire's eye knows all. It can still carve its message.

She poked at the chunk of glowing wood and lifted it trepidatiously, as if she expected ugliness. "Yes, it's all written there." Reptily let the sandy, helmet-like shell of bark fall back on its tortoise legs of cinder. "Now it must burn up from the bottom. There will be a mark in the sand."

"All year, I do nothing good. I am a samurai against all best choices. I want this WD to break, and in her last flame, for the Mhuthya to roil up and bring home her bad daughter. Bad hunger to good. Vol-vol. God is pleased."

"All year in my pain I treat others bad. The world is my suffer. I am your food Mhthyuh, is me to take to your bowel. Vol-vol.

"All the days I eat I say I have something bad. Vol-vol. Vol-vol.

"I am only so sweet to get birds in the trap, and they rot. Because I have too am too much Mhuthya. Vol-vol.

"My children are lost. I have no children. Take my children. You are their path. But eat them last. Vol. Vol.

"Even temple mascots chew their own bones for me to complain vol. Even my babies have crawled away.

"I put my hair in fire to feed you, vol, I am gorged with lush diseases of lust and mimesis, horror and disgust, fear, misrepresentation, betray, go over, don't listen, TV all time, wastebag, simpleton, hypocrit, make death.

"I am fresh and livid and salt regret, vol. This day. Last day. You ate them all. Vol. Vol."

Reptily's spiny forehead rested on her knees now. There were more items, but why.

"The sloth, the fool, the reaper. I can only see myself, but I cannot see..."

It would be soon now. If she got the 2-spear sign, she could fight and run ahead. Trapped at home was a murder to her.