(from Dissociative Fugue #2)

“Truth must be necessarily stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.”

– Gilbert K. Chesterton

so, why am I two again ?

I am this

& from across the room

I am that

I am not the microwave

but I could be an object

it has become apparent

I has become an object

that first begins to feel

so, eye shake my head

& I experience nothing

& eye work at a factory

turn off the television!

two occasions before -

grey wall appear to be

breathing slowly down

my neck at low doses -

I hear voices - - - - - - - -

they are moths - - - - - -

& I can feel ant life - - -

I know cotton now - - -

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Peter Bies © 2010

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A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

– Paul Valéry

these pure

street ballads

of  terror & grief/

brain entrepreneurs’

personal dream view of 

mind-body machine games/ it

comes easy to humans to benign

comedies that tease & bluff: immoral,

but you like damage & you don’t want to look

at macabre conundrums too long & you seem to

need a break or two: a clear picture of  a changeable face

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Peter Bies © 2010

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Whether he’s an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye travels in feelings, not in thoughts.

– Walker Evans

can’t ignore a midnight audience that relaxes

by hindsight/ & losing five from time to time/

& Mad Poet’s directing a script by someone’s

divine intervention/ by midnight mood & dark

jokes/ revised by mr. special fx & dr. be early/

convincing close-up & vertiginous dolly zoom/

he’s holding better when you watch it a second

time/ & she’s that special she cooks up stories

like what’s about to appear to him/ but nobody

is listening - - - 

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Peter Bies © 2010

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Art is a localized illness, usually benign - creative people tend to live a long time - sometimes terribly malignant.

– Stephen King, Night Shift

skip to/

our next hero artiste under Babylon rooftops/

her greatest performance in the necrotic flesh,

dropping like leaves philosophical statements/

she always with he/ & staging the Muse as male

lead/ indifferent in this eccentric red romance/

& exhausting too - the original emotional kicks/

the agonizing transformation of ennui into art -

cerebral horrors do work a handful of deep fools! -

quiet, solitary minds, w/out warning, funky, like,

they’re at lofty-minded plays somewhere beyond,

always - - -

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Peter Bies © 2010

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“Mistah Kurtz - he dead.”

– Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

one night of dissociative robotripping -

ghost saxophone played far-off -

brainscape ghost town spectres -

& I’m being treated to a soft illusion:

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I’m leaving behind conflicted subcon

issues - memory going forward to fall

back into a reverie: a hostile fire of

random recollections, faces & pain,

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brought sudden violent relief - absurd,

farcical relief & my soul felt the weight

of my fatal space-time nexus lift & now

I am travelling light in the vast depths

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of my subconscious - but the shadow

people keep lurking in odd corners,

warped angles, stubborn & resentful

(fade out static hiss of brain-chatter)

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& now they’re closing in slowly

there’s no exit, no hiding place -

& they keep on chanting :

Hope we don’t get caught!

Hope we don’t get caught!

HOPE WE DON’T GET CAUGHT!

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Peter Bies © 2010

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“All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our mind, and all the filters having different sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat.”

– Stephen King, Night Shift

11/05/2088

“Don’t know, ma’ am, I’m anti-matter to the point of firearms. Back on my feet in concrete.”

Something in his tone made two. Said he’d have to phone off his feet? First, two men had come tight - & Kolya was certainly odd, Todd thought. And The Man was nobody’s fool.

“Can I have a ride then a hundred years back?”

The prestupnik grinned.

“Old records, ma’am. But I have to wait for if the father’s visited upon.”

Todd nodded. The three cameromised third generation. With pilot bags of the kind that air-scare? Not Jorge - & cut out the wait at the Sputnik Motel, talking to pay!

“I can’t tell you nothing. The Man see no justification for it - no into the edge of a door.”

His head.

“Just the address,” Todd said.

Information - but it was difficult. Nobody would come to ask her.

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Peter Bies © 2010

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“Not intelligence, not reflection over the ways in which phenomena arise and cohere, but affect is the creator of mythological thought.”

– Wilhelm Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1913)

mental abberations resume

control: a sense of back time,

of earth vapors & the clouds

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grinding darkness passed

over Babylonian rooftops,

settling on chrome & neon

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& neurotic flotsam - rising

on the surface of my mind

& I’m falling prey again to

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adenoidal attention set in,

unbearable intimations

& the usual array of angst -

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of self-loathing, confusion,

of invasion of brain space

& the shallow nitrous sky

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casting shadows about -

mind-sound like music,

a dry hypnotic dirge sung

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in the distance - I seek

escape so for a minute

I phase into the fugue:

odd corners, warped angles -

a twilit tunnel & a dale of graves -

a sphere where humans don’t belong

& my tongue & hands feel foreign somehow

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Peter Bies © 2010

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“Ah, qu’ as tu fait avec ta jeunesse!” 

– Baudelaire

27/03/2088

Todd was dumbfounded.

The Bierce case? It seemed uncon.

It must have been Jorge, miling a little,

like the over-confident Todd herself,

who had put the announcements in echoes!

Precaution? Possible.

Still no conceivable reasoning in from La Pensée,

& Vostok was hit by random parties of small white craft,

striving to see how any of them could epitomize desaster.

The words space & time, eclipse & infiltration:

That, she thought, walking off briskly across the launch pad,

is where they’ll be wondering when. 

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 Peter Bies © 2010

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“Have you not passed through the river? In the name of God be dead.”

– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

a foetid light

kept spilling

from the stars

over my head/

virtual relief

sealing the scars

in my mind’s eye

And the Mad Poet cried:

Schizoid alien orphan -

merging with your mind,

sub-space unfolds -

crowded by souls

who never saw

the light of day 

for eons on end!

O wretched souls!

You’d be embraced

by soothing pain

if you in turn

were to embrace

the future pangs

of raging regret -

a tidal wave

of darkness!

brainscape ghost town/

psychotropic drift!

& I was hit by the coy,

cloying smell of damp,

encroaching angst/

fermenting at the edge

of my awareness - - - /

(malling plastic time

voodoo mask belies

continuum of action:

grey mirror

black bridge 

shallow canals)

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Peter Bies © 2010

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