The Cracked Pane

The uneven plane was marred by a latticework of scars, cracks in the glass delineating demarcations of existence. Green smoke curled upward through the gaps between each cell, its origins occluded by the darkness below. A host of figures stand amongst the fumes, their uniform comprised of stickers, badges and tokens. Each other one attempting to secure a better place for themselves, liberally throwing around slaps and shouts to get their way; an insane game of hopscotch played amongst the gas. In and around the host stand figures clad in suits and smiles, making rulings and declarations from conspicuously empty books. The game reconfigures and refactors around them arbitrarily, any order possible ever disrupted by an errant umbrella or elbow. There are even those who lie on the glass with their noses to the cracks, huffing the fumes that rise, and staring into the black depths below. Clad in nothing but their madness, they blow smoke-rings with the green gas, chattering excitedly about blowing cities and people with enough practice. Amongst it all, a small number walk purposefully from cell to cell, dressed in orange overalls, and wielding tanks of super-glue. Slowly they make their work fixing what breaks they can, finding what shards are missing and gluing them back in place. Some figures seem unable to stand the fumes for long, the air filled with the sounds of wheezing and choking. A solitary figure makes time to each in turn with cups of tea, the sufferers' pale complexion turning coloured once more. A perilously high spire rises haphazardly in the distance, each of its pieces drawn from the rubble of it's predecessor. From the depths below rise the lights of countless eyes, searching, scanning and waiting for something. They can see you.

Clockwork Horror

Can you hear the ticking? Do you even care? Grandad's on Speed and you don't even notice. He's grinding, clicking, whining and humming; each tick blending with the next in a fevered orgy of sound. But truth, Grandad can be overlooked; it's the rest of them that worry me. Their incessant warble a deafening drone, and not a single source, but each, a hive of them; their sonorous screams swarming madly in my head. Each day the keys are turned, and the springs wound, a constant tension keeping the simulacrum     set in their semblence of life. Their spiral hearts don't last forever though, the metal wears, warps and snaps all too frequently. There is no manufacturer guaruntee. The greatest flaw in these machines of course,     is that they don't realise they're fake. The lie is an easy one to swallow, as no-one would admit to being a difference engine,     however complicated or ingenious its construction. And that's just it, the root of my fear. Because when I'm sitting deafened in a silent room, I realise; the ticking hasn't stopped. And when the freqency inverts, I'm terrified I'll go with it. I wish I could have another turn, but I've lost my keys.

The Search

He circled the square. Figures milled around with concerted purpose, each deriving their actions from all others adjacent. A world driven by sprockets! Self-contained within glassy domes, and droning with activity. Each day he performed this ritual, and while he looked, and searched, the purpose now, was to facilitate a distillation of the soul, rather than a futile routine of masochistic disappointment. Alabaster orbs streamed this way and that, their glistening exteriors masking an infinitus of shadow; yet somewhere in that dark, a singularity of sun, its quantum light guiding lost vessels of meaning, safe, over abyssal seas of multitudinous malady. Eyes (so they say) are windows to the soul, their glass an improvised (if not ideal) tool, its purpose part of the slow process of observational alteration, the milky cataracts of ignorance enhancing its reflective properties. Yet in this morning mirror, peering at his face, his perceptions lie fractured by the dissonant din of moving meat. The precision task of peering through the prison bars     (only infinitesimally widened by the passing of years), spinning madly in a maelstrom of discognition. The very tool that made change possible, broken by the chaotic flux of its own output.

The Fragments

What I have are only fragments, words strewn haphazardly across the page, spidery script barely legible even to my own eye. A tentative meaning can be inferred from an     iterative recursion from goal to result, leaves raked and reraked, packaged and emptied, genetic swarms stalled in their search for meaning. Their only goal? Avoiding self-absorbed masturbation. Lines cross and crisscross the page, stark strokes striking out error, the ugly, misplaced, un-beautiful. Does it really need to be beautiful? Can't they find their place with the grotesque? The words are torn between imitation without replication     and the search for a new idea, a new style born of insight and life, unique (like everything else), ultimately infantile, a premature exposition staining the page, spraying the audience with its substance. The solution? Feel! Throw caution to the wind, for those who hear what you say- and turn away; let them sway. The words aren't jumbled because they're wrong, so many threads in the snarl, it's hard finding the tapestry to which they belong. Stop living a life so linear, run your operations in parallel.