Jumping cake through the seeded grass stalks tufted towards the sullen skies. The rim of viper neon green encircles every clear outline: moon, sun, road sign, road, the face of that bare rock, the shop beyond. Trawling this glare through the township air is the fisherman, the washer at the ford, washing the clothes of the dead, soap and salt and ash.

Blended lay the charged feral husks, as the shaven ankles above the heavy hooves prove sinewed. The gaping sun falls back below the stage when yellow turns to amber, and thence to sackcloth, and the aforementioned ashes. While the fisher fans the measuring vessels in one hand, the other is lost in gloom – yet we will find it, with comb and laser and glass, we will, if our sandals slip not from the narrow, tufted rope.

2023/02/17 #DailyWrittenOOM

Newlot’s thin fingers pecked and darted precisely, assembling arrangements of intricate magicks on his desk, or work table. His eye holes were puckered and sewn shut; the several eyes in his jagged metal crown blinked, searched, and focussed independently. His forked tongue flickered through his clicking beak. With the faraway hisses and varying susurrations there came from the intricacies before and around him the smells of rose and ashes, thorns, vinegar, summer, deep stone, and the stars of Orion’s belt.

Newlethe, his mate, stood in the rigid doorway, bearing his supper on a cold tray.

“Newlot, my friend, your supper is prepared.”

The supper moved and cried.

2023/02/16 #DailyWrittenOOM

Behind the curly fringe of dust vapour rimming the basin, there was disclosed the supermassive industrial dragon, plated in Richter scales, fitted with an injection coil infernal gorge from grinding gizzard to double-hinged maw. Its seven and a half swivelling eyes travel along the curving ridges, their scrutiny kicking up ever greater clouds of obscuring dust.

Tasmanian devil bloom undersea, of carmine cumulonimbus murk, unfolding its manifold dread to none, to the deserted fields of flat stacked fluid. The pylons penetrated, threading through the holes left in the substance by their solid material. Down into the unresisting and shapeless arms of the bloom is plunged the whole complex and entire operation of the industrial dragon, all of which is quenched to a burning chill. The bloom is smeared and blurred with dust brown under the sea, destroyed with its destroyer, but above the sea all is better now.

2023/02/15 #DailyWrittenOOM

The splayed trident was found slantwise in the alley, over the pitch black between the bars of the grating. Fields of worn green carpet shifted with a sound, remembering the days of the straight tines, barbed, cunning, and virulent.

Trading petals between flower and flower, often the labelled lapels rhymed the frying vibrance; found never, fraught severe, glasseous billet steeped in the near. When there was the town chain flail, jumped the stiles, and when they threaded it through the grain, they wove it through the pointed metal, splaying the tines. This was what they forgot, but why?

2023/02/13 #DailyWrittenOOM

“Clipsus” was the name of a feathered horse; it raced through the waters, through the rivers to the seas, and preened itself with a camel’s neck. On a Monday in 1980 it fell from the showerhead of a frightened boy, and there it was whispered of a shadow that pirouetted on the four walls. The source of the light casting the shadow: over a score of mail drop boxes clothed in amber flames, strung like the washing on traffic light wires high in the atmosphere, between the horizons and the satellites.

The face that needled around into this context, the snout with the many locked teeth, snapped by newspaper and driven away again into the backwaters of gypsum mud pots and etcetera. On the way the girders laid by the frightened boy hummed with distant trains, the zero-electric phone wires that tied wheels to wheels between the worlds in war or peace, in all the liquid pathways where Clipsus goes.

2023/02/12 #DailyWrittenOOM

Many actions depend on the individual case for their morality – there is a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace, a time for every purpose under heaven.

There are some things which refer to an action not done in its time: there is a time to kill, and a time not to kill, never a time to murder, which is killing not in its time. One such thing is lack of self-control – in fact one could say this refers to any and every action not done in its time. There is never a time to relinquish self-control.

Punishment, as an example, must be deliberate and with judgement and discernment, otherwise it is injustice. If not administered in self-control, it is not the punishment God places such a high significance on.

One must be careful not to judge the justice of a judge by how often he condemns or acquits – a judge could accomplish that kind of “justice” by flipping a coin: heads for “guilty”, tails for “not guilty”. He would then be completely balanced, his verdicts equally likely to be positive as negative – but he would be completely unjust. If only guilty people were brought before a judge, his just verdict must always be “guilty”, and if only innocent people were brought before a judge, his just verdict must always be “not guilty”.

We should try to be just, not to fill up a “quota” of punishing or of not punishing. If we are blessed with a charge who never does what would merit punishment, we should rejoice. If we have to punish our God-given charge every day, we must not be slack in our duty to punish, which would be just as much encouraging sin and being a bad example as punishing the innocent.

“He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to Yahweh.” Pr 17

There is no erring on the safe side in morality. The law of God is written on every heart, leaving no excuse.

“Enter in at the strait gate: for it is the wide gate, and broad way that leadeth to destruction: and many there be which go in thereat. Because the gate is strait, and the way narrow that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Mt 7

2023/02/11 #SabbathPosts

Junks mode name above the throughway, read by the hawk’s eyes of the mate through the scratched windscreen. An Egyptian Honda, he swerved it branching three ways, triangulated the vanishing point of the long perspective. The scope of his direction rocked the pilasters of petrified rage.

Make the dot, oh John, keep the cure, bray the spangled path with parti-shod treading, churned flat in the pocked and plastered trough engorged. Through the ranks of flickering fires into the night between all creation and sound, he went in the Honda of Egypt’s roads. Ready the master, spread the masterpiece, we have pictures for this extremity, and the name above the roads is read by the back of the same eyes forever.

2023/02/10 #DailyWrittenOOM