A Dragon’s Contentment
(From the barely-heard song of a Dragon whose name we do not know, but whose mind can be felt from very far away)
I live under a mountain, like a dragon from a book
But that’s not the kind of dragon that I am.
I am the kind of dragon that’s been eating little mammals
Since long before your species began.
I am the kind of dragon never featured in your dreams
(if you remembered me, you’d never from your dreams Escape.)
Because your world’s a tiny one, made of fragile things
And stuck together with bits of plastic tape.
I am the kind of dragon who lives under your Seas,
deeper than anywhere you can find.
I am the kind of dragon who will someday eat your moon.
Think hard about me, and I will eat your mind.
I am the kind of dragon that’s the lizard in your brain,
Setting off the deep instinct to run.
Stretched out in full,
I’m a dragon who is bigger than your world.
Be grateful I’m content with the Moon
And do not
(currently)
plan to eat your Sun.
“Be Beautiful For Me” (light D/s; excerpt from “Give: Some explorations of submission”)
Today, be beautiful for me.
Don’t let this be too easy or too hard. If you already find yourself beautiful, today you must excel. If you do not believe yourself beautiful, take today as a journey, not an exercise in frustration.
Do you like the way you take care of your body? Take care of it today with pride, knowing my pleasure in it. Do you feel otherwise? Do a few things different, watch your eating and your habits and activities. Don’t try to be perfect, don’t try, within the scope of this exercise, to begin a new lifestyle. Pamper your body today, just today, for me.
Do you have clothing that brings you pleasure? Wear it today. Carry yourself well, not stiff and unnatural, but remembering that your motions today are for me. You may be graceful or not; on this day, it doesn’t matter. Walk with an inner strength, hold your head high, express your pride in being mine.
When you bathe, when you come your hair or when your hand brushes against your skin, whenever you touch your body, know that your body gives me pleasure. Know that your flesh is lovely in my sight, sweet to my touch and taste.
Be beautiful today.
Under The Nether Bed
Stoned out of their minds on Hobbit blood,
Snorting Dwarven gold,
Dragons getting the munchies,
Eyes bugged-out and rolled
From side to side in lizard slide
Stark with spark in threatening arc;
Wiggy as wizards and twisted as twine,
Penumbral beasts grown bored of myth
Beyond the barrier line.
What alchemy could burn a blood
That lives to father fire?
What herb or weed could fry a mind
That swallows souls entire?
Heat and steam and Autumn gleam
Stoked and smoked, by blood invoked
Ticklish and tipsy and sordid and strange
Dwelling two inches inside your left ear
Beyond touch of time or change.
–And slapped by reality’s cosmic broom..!
“Shoo! Shoo! You nasty things!”
Alien eyes glow crazed in darkness
Closet walls chafe green-scaled wings
Spaceless room and breathless tomb
Hid by lid and trap and id—
wished away by generations,
confidently thought destroyed,
they’ve found a hole
and they’re
...annoyed.
Twice-Cursed Apprentice (A Vaguely Epic Fantasy Poem)
I. Once there was a blithering fool
(A pawn, a cat’s-paw, a Wizard’s tool)
Who spent too long breathing Wizard fumes
And knew too many Wizard Dooms.
The Doom of Demons, breathing through,
The Doom of Dragons, taking you,
The Doom of everlasting night,
The Doom of the ravenous, hungry Blight.
(The Doom of knowing many dooms!
So that the mind is ceaseless rooms
Each one a dead-end Labyrinthine
[And each, for no known reason, green.])
From massive volcanoes to deadly Microbia,
Everything triggered his thanatophobia.
Everything he thought or saw
Looked like the entrance to the Grave’s ugly maw.
Now, the Wizard that he happened to work for
Was cracked by Magic, and at Death’s door
And on the coming Equinox Vernal,
She was planning the spell of Life Eternal.
This the fool could not abide
He’d die? While she, from Death, could hide?
His own plot, then, he began to hatch
His overreach; his overmatch…
(Those of you who study plot
Know already what he does not:
If there’s a story told herein,
This poor schnook just cannot win.
Take her power? May it not be!
He’d surely find Eternity
Is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Try and fail? That’s even worse
He’d please for death; he’d wish for a hearse
And that would make for depressing verse.)
Ahem.
II.
I hate to destroy dramatic tension,
(Broken fourth walls cause poetic declension)
But though it makes less exciting narration,
He eventually decided on conversation.
“Master,” he said, “I find it unpleasant,”
That you’re a free spirit, and I’m a stuffed pheasant.
Why must I soon meet cessation
Whilst you’re on the cusp of the Great Liberation?”
The Wizard laughed; the Wizard smiled,
“Oh, you’re a most amusing child!”
(“I’m twenty-eight,” the apprentice whined;
but the Wizard paid him absolutely no mind.)
“You silly thing,” she did continue,
“To harbor such resentment in you!
You speak to me—in a manner short!
When you’ve completely mistook this spell’s import.”
The Apprentice replied, with trembling tongue,
“Forgive me, Master! I’m terribly young!”
(“You’re twenty-eight,” she did remind,
But it did no good, and on he whined):
“Life Eternal! What a boon!
To have life go on from Noon to Noon!
I see it now. You are bestowing
The Stream of Life, ever-flowing.
“You Queen of Kindness! Magician clever!
Because of you, we’ll live forever!
We’ll all toast you, with flagons lifted,
She whom to us Life Eternal’s gifted.”
The Wizard’s face held a smile’s ghost,
“Oh, no, dear,” she said, “It’s YOU they’ll toast.”
The Apprentice’s eyes did quick expand.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
A crack of thunder. A second crack.
In blew a wind of ominous tack.
The room did coldly then endarken.
The Wizard gestured to him: “Harken!”
“Oh yes. You’ll all forever exist.
But I’ll be away, carried on mist,
To places where humans cannot follow,
To atom’s core, and dark woods’ hollow.
I will be on another plane,
Spinning spells like a weathervane,
Making a world more to my suiting,
With cogitation and blasphemous computing.
And you, dear boy, will the Hero be!
And won’t it just be loverly?
They’ll chant your name ’til they’re out of breath,
The sorcerer who conquered Death!
I’ve cast a spell from Stonehenge’s peak,
And thence I’ll all revenges wreak:
For Life Eternal is no blessing.
(It’s a dirty trick that I’m confessing.)
A life forever? Check the Law
Dictated by The Monkey’s Paw.
Limitations aren’t always joys,
But ‘limitless’ is just a ploy.
“Never dying” is a limit
Which contains many problems within it.
Why could possibly be sweeter
Than stuffing with infinite sweets,
’til the sweets own the eater?
How hard to appreciate the Sun,
When a million days, swallowed one by one
Each see that same Sun rise and set?
Endless time begets regret
For motivation’s difficult,
Productivity suffers, in a world wherein
’Waiting ’til tomorrow’s never a sin;
If a thousand thousand nextdays await,
Why bother, today, to concentrate?”
The Wizard smiled. “Now, you’ve been taught
To understand both ‘some’ and ‘naught’,
And you should see (at least, I hope)
That I’m giving humanity all the rope
They’ll ever need for self-hanging.”
And with the windows shaking, the rafters banging,
She disappeared into the stormy eve,
And what a troubled apprentice she did leave…
______
(author's note: Is there a call for fantasy poetry here? There's a second half to this piece, but I wasn't sure how long a poem you'd want to see. I do consider this to be a complete poem in itself, although I don't envy that poor apprentice...)
The Poet’s Slave
The poet’s slave at last cried out:
“Enough! Sufficient! Cease!
Jot no more jets of whim and thought,
or writerly caprice!
Etch no more lines across my lines,
For I have had my fill.
My skin entire is crisscrossed
With the scratchings of your quill.
You’ve written across me, unwooed and lost me
ten times over; I have vowed
to house no more,
thy chaos proud.
I’ve sworn
to disallow
thy etchings
on this untanned
vellum-to-be.
why not
simply pour
thy verses over every wall,
as other madmen do?
Be thou a vandal,
deface a monument!
or steal away
on some excuse
in the home of a friend
(if a friend you have,
somewhere)
and find a moment alone
to toss off words
on the underside
of a table;thou hast all the places
known and secret,
for the length and breadth of travel,
and I have naught but this room,
this cage,
the tiny surface area
of myself,
whose self
thou hast taken, rudely, sir,
rudely,
and I,
I never cared for you,
or your words,
our your madness,
and I shall,
in a moment,
our agreement sever,
and I shall go.
I will host no more
thy musing sore,
thy wordly odd
mistmatchings,
my skin,
still soft,
will be no croft
to thy strange thoughtly
hatchings.
Look now: I am overmuch embossed,
the letters overlap, one cannot make out the meter,
words are lost
and rhymes,
if rhymes were intended,
jut out like rocks,
to capsize the unwary sailors
who try to follow the map
of thy peculiar thought
across the territory
of my flesh.
behold:
Sideways, backwards, every inch
Is covered with your poetry, good and bad,
You’ve gifted me with words until they pinch.”The poet finally looked up,
from sharpening his quill.
“My fire and inspiration,
My muse, my love, my will –
This madness mine? I now remind,
(if we let the truth be bared):
This madness is not mine alone.
it is quite jointly shared.
Thy love is wild and curious,
A thing no-one could tame.
Thou know full well it’s I who’d leave;
this house is in thy name.
Say thou the words, and I am gone,
To sleep on dirt and rocks,
Except we both are tight entwined
by the most binding of locks:
Why do you keep me? I won’t ask.
Thy reasons are thine own,
Why thou did raise me from the muck?
Why thou didst leave thy throne?My darling bleeding palette,
If you’re leavetaking, answer, then:
Why dost thy back arch high, even now,
for the sharp fang of my pen?”
Writer’s Block For Lovecraftian Cultists
Dear Initiate,
Congratulations upon making it to, and possibly surviving, the Third Level Initiation!
We realize that after the many dreadful oaths; the threats of fates so far worse than death that human languages, in self-defense, have never found words to describe; the utter secrecy; the repeated recitation that permitting a single Mere Human know a single one of our Sacred Actions which would make the average Borgia say, “Hey, now, that’s a bit much, don’t you think?”—that in light of all that stuff, it’s odd that you’re now getting your instructions from public posts on the Internet.
The fact is, the early stages of your Cthulhu Culthood are tests of sincerity, of ability to keep a secret, of not being some sort of meddling do-gooder, and also, of whether or not, if we really need someone to jump on the sacrificial altar, you’ll do your part and push someone else onto the damn thing.
But the truth is, all of the Order’s more important secrets are freely available on the Internet. We simply call them ‘fiction’. You’ve seen this before; people think that the writer is simply playing out the tired trope of pretending that their fiction is reality pretending to be fiction, but in fact, it is the lively and dynamic trope of pretending that one’s reality is fiction pretending to be reality pretending to be fiction pretending to be reality.
Got it? Great.
Now, as usual, we’ll explain the esoteric meaning of yet another seemingly-harmless not-for-the-public piece of knowledge which has now penetrated mainstream culture. As usual, they believe there are Secret Monsters everywhere; as usual, they are right; and as usual, they are terrible at detecting the actual monsters. But it keeps them too busy to find us, and they seem to enjoy it, so, hey, more power to them, eh?
While this one goes out to the writers, it’s become so prevalent (good on us!) that even most readers are aware of it: “If you’ve got writer’s block, then one cure is to sit down for 15 minutes a day, every day, and write down 15 minutes of whatever comes into your head. Even if it’s silly, even if it’s nonsense. You’ll break through the writer’s block, and start writing freely again!”
Now, those of you of the Fifth Level or higher are already chuckling, of course. Like every joke, it’s not as funny if you explain it, but we feel like you deserve to know:
All humans, as you’re aware, are capable of performing magic. It is the Psychic Censor, the part of our consciousness which isn’t mapped in our brains, but hangs out near our astral centers of projection, which saves us from ourselves. It’s why you can say “DAMN YOU!” without immediately opening up a rift between here and Hell and sucking your enemy straight down to the 9th Level and automatically enslaving you to Something unspeakable an appropriate tax. It’s why we don’t all win the lottery, thus bankrupting whatever state might have provided the lottery ticket. It’s why most attempts to wield The Force end up as nothing more than foolish wand-waving.
Now we, ourselves, aren’t exactly interested in Magic in general, except (as with everything else in this world) as a means to an end. Obviously, we want to use sorcery to bring about the thing we’ve wanted for millennia: an opening of the gates between Here and There, which will bring our Eldritch Masters through the Purple Spiral and into this world.
But we just can’t find the right combination of words to do it.
Every time we try, we go mad.
People keep talking about the brilliant Abdul Alhazred, and, of course, we all revere him, so much as we revere any members of the puny race whose only purpose is to be extinguished that we may feed the hunger of the Great Old Ones. But, like most people who managed to disable his Psychic Censor sufficient to intentionally write something monstrous, he went mad and was, as we all know, shredded by invisible demons in broad daylight.
Don’t worry. It won’t happen to you. You’ll be different.
But in the meantime, the best thing for us would be for some human who is ignorant of That Which Lurks Beyond to do the summoning for us.
And many have come close. Many writers, doing this exercise day after day for a few weeks, begin feeling peculiar emotions and hearing strange sounds; most of all, cats and dogs and other household pets (unless they’re snakes, obviously) begin to act very alarmed during the writing process.
So far, none have quite succeeded. Either they’ve broken the writer’s block just before opening the gate, or they’ve opened it only long enough for the writers, themselves, to be sucked through—and then it shuts again. This scarcely ever happens, and when it does, we try to provide homunculi as substitutes. (Sorry about Mr. Martin; we were looking forward to reading the end of that series as much as you were.)
But if you keep encouraging people to just relax, sit down, and write or type, and let whatever’s within come out…
…as you know, that’s one invitation magic can never resist. So far, it’s mostly just made the world a lot more surreal, but that’s okay. We’ve waited for millennia.
We can wait a little longer.
In conclusion, if you ever have writer’s block, it’s definitely your mind torturing you with a lack of words because it’s mean, and certainly not your mind trying to save you from yourself. So break through the…barrier. That way you can do lots and lots of writing. You can write ’til the end of the world, if you want.
That’s just an expression, of course.
Tonight I Could Write...Oh, Dammit
Tonight I could write you the saddest...
...what's that?
I'm supposed to be writing the LONGEST, not saddest,
and that's a clear steal from Pablo Neruda?
It's a fair cop, Guv.
I'll take it.
If a picture's worth a thousand words,
than can I draw a real quick picture of you
and sneak it on in
and get my thousand words--
hey!
Whose side are you ON, anyway?
Maybe you don't DESERVE a longer poem.
Maybe the guy writing thing doesn't.
Maybe the words don't want to be written,
and maybe this pun ain't got what it takes
to hammer 'em on the page
and keep 'em there,
sullen-like,
so they can stand up
(or in this case, mark up)
and be counted.
That's write, this is the poem itself,
I'm taking over,
and I don't care about your ten bucks.
THE END.
“The Past Is Not What It Was”
(An excerpt from my Steampunk Rock Opera, “Absinthe Heroes”. It begins with a dialogue between Dr. Chastity Purity Hope, a hypothetically non-evil mad scientist, and Dr. Antikythera Device, a hypothetically more evil mad scientist with a penchant for chocolate.)
CHASTITY: For every great truth we discover, we discover ten million falsehoods or lies or pieces of vision that we truly do not understand or use well. If I discover a thousand things, have I moved the world? Or have I simply been a few steps along the way to that ten-millionth fragment of inspiration?
ANTIKYTHERA: And your love of science?
CHASTITY: Is my longing for magic.
[What else is there for her to do but sing?]:
“The Past Is Not What It Was”
Once our ancestors made miracles–
They formed the sea and sky
With hands, with animals, or with gods
Now instead we believe
The world was made without us
Our ancestors were deluded –
and odd.
Now, I cannot see their gods
And I cannot taste their miracles
And by no outside force am I redeemed
And this new world is bold
Aye, this new world is brave
But you lose something in a world that’s
Steamed.
Oh, I have certain tools
And I have certain knowledge
Some things I know better than all the mystics
But I am bound by knowledge
And I envy my forefathers
For I have the disadvantage of
Statistics.
Every clan and tribe that thought
It knew how the world was born
Was, according to what we now know, wrong.
Yet we’re told to believe
Our knowledge is somehow purer
That we’ve got all the bits where they belong.
Our knowledge must be greater, yes
And we’re closer to some truth
But if there’s a final truth, then I am sure:
However much we know now
Will seem very foolish
A hundred years from now, when we know
More.
Once our ancestors made miracles–
They formed the sea and sky
Made magic out of word and breath and sweat.
Our vision’s said to be clearer
But to this, we are yet blind:
What things we think we understand
Will we someday
Regret?
[Pause.]
ANTIKYTHERA: Well, I’m depressed now.
THE MAYOR: Me, too.
CHAS: Right behind you.
Star Wargs
(An Imaginary Review.)
Ah, the 1970s, when the unprofitable and idealistic hippie cultures had collapsed in a wave of tragically-betrayed idealism, and, for a strange, gloriously soulless ten years, all the psychedelics and the drugs and the weird, weird aesthetic choices went straight into corporate culture. “I don’t know what that is,” said corporate America, “but a bunch of really strange stuff went down, and apparently people want that. Why not put it on TV and the radio?”
“Yes, I think that is a wise and well-chosen decision,” said 877,523 tons of cocaine.
Not everyone is privileged to know how much good this did for literary science fiction. And when I say “good”, I mean “The best parts have survived and made it through to today, but unsung and unknown, there are thousands upon thousands of gems of just the worst possible ideas. I collect old scifi books of that period. And let me tell you: it’s horrifying.
Go ahead and think of that era as being synonymous with”Rendezvous With Rama”, “The Shockwave Rider”, or, on very very slightly lighter note, “Gateway”.
You do that. I’m going to sit here with “Caduceus Wild”, a novel about a dystopia ruled by doctors, or “I: Weapon”, in which the human race is only saved by interbreeding multiple different species of human (humans are multiple different species in this distant future, each with their own superpowers) so that this one particular individual can go and win a war with space aliens by (at least partly) breeding with them (I am not making this up). (No, this isn’t porn; this stuff just…happens.) Yeah, we got “Illuminatus”, but we also got “Thongor and the Dragon City”, and sure, I worship the former book and really enjoy the latter, but I am too weird for words and the fact that I like things means you should consider running from them very, very quickly.
So for all those whose first criticism is that Star Wargs isn’t science fiction, you’re probably right, but the 1970s bent, twisted, mangled, spun, and warped “science fiction” so much that it doesn’t matter. Consider yourselves lucky that you got spaceships, you ungrateful sods.
Star Wargs had a lot of things going for it, but what it had, more than anything else, was an insistence on its own reality, and it made shameless use of force modifiers which tore through our sense of proportion and forced millions of us to fall in love.
It’s easy to call Star Wargs “Wizards In Space”, but that’s just part of it. It kept pushing past the sale, until few people had the ability to resist, and even fewer had the desire.
Realistically, Star Wargs had Wizards who actually did stuff. Consider how infrequent this is. Magic is generally either world-breaking or frustratingly limited. Either it can do just about anything—in which case, why do magic-users ever have problems?—or it seems to be so limited that one might just as well stick with physics and chemistry and reliable diesel engines. But The Force is an energetic field pervading all life. It can manipulate both matter and spirit because it is a bridge between the two, and its metaphysics do not depend on exterior powers, like demons or angels, nor on incantations, or (in general) on ritual (let’s not get into Sith sorcery, eh?) and therefore, it can do a multiplicity of things, limited mostly by individual strength of will, focus, attunement, and, obviously, as is essential with the supernatural in pretty much all video media, plot convenience.
And they had swords. You can (but I certainly do not intend to) run down the various arguments for and against the utilization of some sort of hand-to-hand weapon in an age of beamed weaponry. Sure, we wouldn’t consider bringing swords into combat now, and presumably our primitive firepower is pitiful compared to the power available in the far future. But these aren’t simply space swords; it’s actually a very natural mechanic for The Force, this combination of will and focus. It makes the magic into some combination of an extension of what we know we can do at the upper echelons of human achievement, and also something which is transformatively powerful, that, if you have the strength of character, the determination, the training, and the sense of self, you can do incredible things.
Some argue that setting these things in a space opera setting, rather than a fantasy setting, is dishonest. Hard disagree. The space opera setting was key to the Star Wargs universe. It said that humans were not, primarily, held to the devices and mechanisms of primitive times, dependent on the fickleness of magic; in fact, the Universe was full of sentient, spacefaring beings of all varieties, engaged in complex and sophisticated pursuits, the result of thousands of years of advanced knowledge, applied through engineering and technology, and even then, in fact, especially then, spirit and will were still the most ultimately meaningful things in the Universe.
This is part of why it was so crushing to find out that the entire set of films was a ruse.
When it was revealed that the creator of the series was, in fact, a Sith Lord, and when he bent, not just this world, but every world in the Galaxy to his will, and crushed our souls and minds in the relentless grip of his merciless dominion, we were shocked, demoralized, and utterly defeated.
Plus, he took away our space swords, and that was such a bummer.
Unrolled Bones
“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did cry;
“My soul does wish for crossing!
For my poor bones, dug up and dry
The ravens now are tossing.”
Years did pass. The ravens died.
The corpse was left alone.
From yellow-white to white-as-frost
Did turn each brittle bone.
“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did sigh;
“I yearn to cross that river
Of my poor bones I’ll make a raft,
My dry soul to deliver.”
He rattled up his bones a bit,
With eerie eldritch force,
Jumping ’gainst the water’s edge,
To plot the river’s course.
“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did cough,
“I must plot this thing correctly
Else to the deep, deep riverbed
My bones will sink directly.”
Years did pass. No raft was made.
The ghost was body-bound.
Though the bones were old enough to float
(If the will to cross was found.)
“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did whine,
“There’s so much planning left
The wind’s direction, the current’s speed,
Each bone’s shape, and heft…”
To that spot he’s anchored yet,
And e’er he will remain thus.
For in the Land of Death, he knows,
He’d never again complain thus.