A city viewed from a jet liner is eerily indistinguishable from a vast, sprawling anthill. Both are industrious mounds riddled with innumerable burrows and endless trails, which endlessly crawl with toiling creatures, all bound from one mysterious errand to another. Amid the daily crush, a hapless drone occasionally awakens to question the drudgery of its existence. Within the hive, none can help him differentiate himself, man from ant.
He's the proverbial grumpy old man and he ruthlessly keeps his hit-lists. You had better hope he never jots your name down in his notebook, because he'll make you the object of his obsessive ire and his dissatisfaction is notoriously relentless. Unfortunately, today is his last day on Earth... and god just made the list
He is the most prolific sniper in a long, deadly war. In fact, he succeeds to the point that his own comrades have learned to shun him. Not even this form of isolation can prevent him from compiling a frightful tally of numbers though. Behind each number, a face and a name. It's his job. He's good at it. Too damned good.
He has perfected the necessary skills, collected the requisite equipment, and buried the resultant bodies. Like a grotesque human hermit crab, he periodically sheds one shell for another, gutting the original to make it his own, and no regard whatever for previous ownership. Fluid and untouchable, he stalks the nation, forever in pursuit of his next lifetime, and nobody knows his name. A ruthless master of disguises, he lives many lives. Maybe one of them will be yours.
On the verge of a bloody and catastrophic defeat, a lone surviving robot tech risks life and limb to maneuver to the frontlines and activate an army of machines. Though these metallic monsters have failed in the past, this time their success would be utter and complete. Too complete. These machines are harbingers of global apocalypse and genocide. Be careful what you wish for, because not all is fair in love and war.
It's Halloween in Pecan Groves, Texas and much mischief is afoot. In the midst of the morbid celebration manifests an otherworldly invasion. How could the citizens of that sleepy bedroom community separate costumes from the genuine horror that has come among them? When the smoke clears, few will be able to explain resultant mass disappearances among the population. Fewer still will believe. Introducing Pecan Groves, Texas. Oh, the mischief that transpires in that sleepy little town
Somebody has to do it, and his mind is sufficiently perverse to qualify for the job. It's the age-old conundrum of time travel. It's the ultimate experiment. He packs a handgun before he steps into the time machine. What happens when a young man travels into the past to kill his own parents? Hello, father. Hello, mother. Good-bye, Thaddeus.
To be certain, there are bad men in the world, but for every fistful of male villains there exists a shrewd woman to corrupt and torment them. She is the spider at the center of a web, and they have come to struggle violently in her traps. He's as loving and caring as a Gaboon viper. She's as gracious and hospitable as a bristling spider. Choose your friends carefully.
Facing the hangman's noose, why not confess everything? If you've lived a notoriously colorful life, most of your stories cannot be believed Read this confession, and make your own decisions about the veracity and implications of it all. You'll get your chance to make a final statement. Make it count.
Deep within in the guts of the world, men and women struggle daily to deliver fuel to feed ravenous industry. It is dangerous work. Indeed, this is a story about fire catching in a coal seam buried deep underground, where a dozen lives hang, choking, in the balance. Regardless of color, creed or religion, hard-rock miners work together as one to avoid perishing individually and alone down in the dark where the devil dwells.
A former pro-footballer fallen from grace and bitter with his eventual fate, Johnny Bullet commits a horrible crime in the name of revenge. Running from his demons through a foreboding countryside, he hopes to escape his future, only to find it at the very far away ends of it all. He did a bad thing and then he wished himself away. Be careful what you wish for.
On a lonely plot of land in the middle of a desolate night, a forlorn man sits drinking and smoking on his porch as he watches a sinister shadow slowly, intrepidly crossing the abandoned rows of a forgotten farm. While a damaged siphon pump works rhythmically in the distance, he ponders the nature of destiny and fate. Will he survive the evening? Something black and terrifying crosses fallow rows, bound for your porch lamp in the darkness. Welcome or no, fate never knocks.
Lucky to survive the circumstances of his birth, he learned to make the most of a life that might have killed a lesser person. In fact, he learned to thrive. Via crime, he improved himself to the point of obtaining a college education, an enormous bank account, and a veritable army of minions. He proves the road to hell is not always paved with the best of intentions. This is the story of his downfall and ultimate fate. Nobody escapes.
Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates... Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated dumbass-of-a-scientist long ago determined the universe would always expand faster than the pace of technological advancement. The result? Every human being on the planet knows nobody will ever, ever, ever (three evers) bust free of this crappy solar system. Combine this discouraging news with an ever-lengthening lifespan, and you get fifty-billion dysfunctional, bored-out-of-their-mind psychotics with nothing better to do than fixate on you as the object of their destruction. Good luck, and have a nice day
And I open my mind, I say what needs to be said, I tell all I am bid tell, omit nothing, for here is your meat, and here your drink; dine in halls with daddy deceit as children seated along a long table, all fidgeting in your chairs, all wishing not to hear what must be heard. And I open my eyes I see what remains to be seen, I relate everything relative, save nothing for myself, I feed you from the cupboards of my mind and grin as you consume, your children's faces all smiles and happy, your eyes wide with wonder. And I open my mouth, I speak of nightfalls to come, warn of depravities yet done, linger over moot points of gesture while your bellies grumble and your anxious wounds fester.Poetry is often at its best when it represents naivety's screed. That is, when we hear it in the wounded howls of inexperienced youth, the indignant cries of misplaced hopelessness, the scolding hisses of childish hypocrisy, or the airy boasting of arrogant fools.
Incongruity, in all its fine, reeking regalia, found a place in my young, fertile heart, so all the while thereafter my struggle was one of difference, for the greater scheme of things is an endeavor to know that which is unknown. On having come to understand a thing previously incomprehensible, luster fades, its draw recedes, and that thing, like a coin in a collection, is put away, to be occasionally admired but mostly forgotten; so, it is named a possession, and is no longer counted among desires.Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or sung. For better or worse, the vast bulk of it is scat, the mere fodder of time, which already piles miles deep beneath our feet. One day, it will inevitably pile high above our rotting bones.
Mad pathos fetish broods while the black brow is creased to contemplate all manner of undoing, lays a thumb to the blade beneath a leering, sanguine eye and yearns unspeakably for a final message from God. Gross pathos fetish seethes to feed upon frustrations and terrors until the mind of a single lunatic is filled with dreams of dark endeavors that become a horror of blood, until pale the gaping face festooned in spider webs of splatters beholds a hand trembling at the wound, and moans out a final message to God. Drear pathos fetish blooms, that from an unwholesome vacuum, that from a fog of unfocused movements, a single buoying thought is borne, which thought becomes a thing of steel and lead and of murders' rich rewards; which thought looses fate's prolific forefinger within the guard to draw down the roughly righteous intent of God. Cruel pathos fetish feeds ever at the salted bonds of sanity as rats' teeth at the hemp, strands snapping, snapping to withstand the vigor of the unbearable load and let it down soft by inches, that each maddening hitch force a quick breath and quicker prayers to God.Poetry knits the fabric of our dreamtime dominions. Both are without substance, and both present the subjective essence of a spinning compass. Embrace such insight, if you must, but do so at your own risk - nothing here will light your darkness.
I have never seen so far into anyone's eyes as I saw into yours that day. Ever green, I had expected to find them. stagnant pools long left to lay, still and tepid. Yet, they were filled to astounding depth with colors I had not hoped to see, and movement that shimmered the deep far beyond my measure, far beyond my reach, lucid as noon shallows, clear as summer seas, verdant in the distance like impossible meadows we never touch but dream to see. Troubled as they were and unfocused, in them, still and crystalline, reflected me... and my own eyes liquid, reflecting you. There in the mysterious grips of your waste, struggles this wretch where he so longs to be, for I could guess where your focus was lost to endless, vacant leagues, as I stood there beside you that day on the shores of your unfathomable seas. Reduced to nothing, I saw you on the far side, staring back at me. Spoken aloud, poetry is the ultimate masochistic mouthwash. Used regularly, it will sponge your brain and fire your breath. So, crack these covers, sip, swish, and rinse. In time, your silly sense of well-being will slip away, and your brain germs will never feel the same way, again.
I heard the call, the tone of it teasing, a broadcast chorus of incessant singing amid devilish choirs of insidious patter, the dry rasping of scales and portentous matter to cast shadows of sounds among us that must listen, beyond maddened distraction, inaudible vision. For I heard the call, the lies of it pleasing, then I followed it blindly where it would lead me. Beyond death and disaster through ranges of never, I learned listening is ruin and blindness is error. I cursed blackness of bruises, I despised the tender of capital expenditures and I as the lender. I heard the call, and I hated its message, for pipedream pursuits earn the wickedest of blessings, and the laziest among us are perhaps the smartest. The happiest of our number is the unhappy artist; they too quickly learned how nothing is of matter - not the singers, not the choir, not the subject of the patter. Often, the most popular modern poetry demonstrates a determined morbidity, and many of our most beloved poets perished by their own hands. Doing so, they left behind countless keepsakes of grief, but I will not label their passage as 'tragic'. I believe a martyr's suffering demands happy witness. Otherwise, why hang upon a cross?
On Friday of Easter weekend in Juglan, Texas, many strange events distract from the festivities. Telephone service is sporadic and failing. Fires burn out of control. Police services are nonexistent. The dead and the dying accumulate on the streets. Before the village's clocktower chimes midnight, many of its citizens will perish and the city itself will lie in flaming ruins.This is the terrible revenge of Nelson Sedgewick. For years preceding this heinous act he has brooded within the ramshackle ruins of his lifelong obsession, his self-styled "Animal Emporium and Family Fun Circus". An unlicensed roadside attraction presenting animal performances during a period of declining support for such displays, the Emporium is emblematic of the pathological disconnect between reality and Sedgewick's mad dreams. Deceived by the grandeur of his visions and his own misplaced self-confidence, the would-be ringmaster invested heavily in his enterprise before it inevitably failed, and now he blames the village for his ruination.Tonight, he will exact retribution with his army of demented circus animals, all of them recently starved, beaten and conditioned to crave human flesh. City parks will crawl with deadly serpents. Its waterways will team with ravenous reptiles. Its alleys will be the haunt of stealthy leopards, and roving packs of enraged hyenas will prowl its streets. Tonight, Nelson Sedgewick and his Animal Emporium will redefine 'family fun'.
