“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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Everyone (at a certain moment) was sound in mind and body.
Repeat this 30 times.

– Tristan Tzara

10/03/2088

Todd said, “One of them knows where she was.

Cherenkov-something. Near ground control.

Makes sense. Blokes like that don’t work on jobs.

Not these blokes.”

This time she’s keeping her thought reasonable again:

Todd is an adult. She can look after herself.

And, more than a little crazy, she can taxi in in a few minutes.

Simply that, & a few words. But not Bierce!

She’s counting the days now. Todd unhinged her.

But here was a case of the pins on. Or was it?

The Man wouldn’t like Martians & Todd was one.

What do you care?

But why did The Man upsmile to herself?

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Peter Bies © 2010

***

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. – Kurt Vonnegut

08/03/2088

“A pageant of asteroids, see, growing there, silent,

rolling sheethingness it was. I caught a sight

of a violent sputnik - three hammocks thrashed

into craters, were savaged, ions and gamma rain -

some giant had gas. I tried to imagine white confetti,

white confetti had been in the slopes, nesting

mollminds bogged down. I knew their names,

any one of them. The moons of Mars mauled us fast,

& the mist us a whole. It was a weird mountain

heaving, growing out of space. It was strewn 

with fantastic fissures as though shapers had scoured

it with a particle beam, sculptured by vac to sprinkle

its sleet and hailyhawk, I guess. How many lightyears

this one? Chiselling, by & by. They were in all savage

enough to hit out on a tee like c-speed in the dark of space.”

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Peter Bies © 2010

***

“Nothing is always absolutely so.”

– Theodore Sturgeon

the fire you create, Elaine,

your shadow flux of  words

shall flee our hearts/

the shallow lust you moonlight:

a glaze of seeping slime/

the dusk I smell fell blue

no more translucent

&

I enjoy the late light

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Peter Bies © 2010

***

“A life which is amorphous, plastic and crystalline. What am I talking about? Copula Maritalis? Or from alcohol to alkahest. Can you tell me?…”

– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

fireflies

 green ghosts

 & cold fusion:

the shadows I absorb

 ignite the limbic heat

of dream state serendipity:

flying bugs on the flowers

 hot faces near the light

 & memories of water -

 undoing my past

 the pleasure

 never

ends

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Peter Bies © 2010

***

Latent structure is master of obvious structure. – Heraclitus

trying to recall

a broken promise
trying to remember

the lost metaphor

cold clouds

dull whorls

my fingertips

growing old

in time lapse

while the rain fell

on empty hands

& into brackish water

(walking out of this world:
a phone ringing somewhere)

“Go without luggage!”

& the night will come

glowing in the trees

& I’m talking to empty graves

before the shadows enter

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trying to recall
memories of water

opaque

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Words: Peter Bies © 2010

Photography: Peter Carstens (peckmaster) © 2010

***

 Insane people - psychologically defined, not legally defined - are not in touch with reality.

– Philip K. Dick, Valis

big leeches near the sea & quiet hooks on the flock/

& clouded grieving brilliant brains away from home:

no way out of this opaque & intangible b/w dream/

where I know no-one/ life is fleeing sinister & low/

quaking against a huge sky & meaning/ old shiva!

find the road back glowing rats below the towers!

& icons in the fire battle tiny globes/ draw peaceful

eye before the sky stone dream-like hands among

the clouds dry stroke the sirens/ over reek of dank

demons dark & tiny in the slime/ lustful eruptions

of electric animals/ crying eyeless/ & I forgot to go

home & listened to the whisper of a dry steady wind - 

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Peter Bies © 2010

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“It was, as if I had been shaking all my life, from a chronic undercurrent of fear.”

– Philip K. Dick, Valis

Frozen beneath the sheets

I reach out for fading stars -

& our love is patiently dying.

Love, mildewed flower -

you’re bright delusions

& a stir of unease!

We are strangers, Elaine,

you & I - losing our way

while the worlds change.

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Peter Bies © 2010

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Photo © Peckmaster

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 Little details, and no plot.

– Philip K. Dick, VALIS

watching black figures/ backlit by
headbeams and pale streetlights/

my belly brain’s breeding

emotions toxic to my system/

watching black rain beading/

on the windshields

love’s target

imploded

in another

mind

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Peter Bies © 2010

***

The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

– Marcel Proust

voices in the fire

& signs in the fog

& there’s a phone ringing
somewhere
fading slowly

so go without luggage

& so numb within

you stop for a while
where you know no-one/

(fluorescent fears of madness:

a hard lump
dark and glowing inside my brain)

my likeness my brain:
growing old

open-eyed & fighting back

electric icons/
& fears drip
from my

 empty

lips

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Peter Bies © 2010

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