A poem in six sections, and the references it carries. Every highlighted phrase leads to a reference, and every reference leads back to the poem.
First. Haint Blue
First. Haint Blue
Is this a ghost which I see before me,
Which prefers to taunt rather than haunt -
Haunt from an etymology that suggests
A homecoming, an inhabitant, belonging,
Sing-songing something more than sad -
Or a ghoul that wishes to run me down,
To stride fast and pass me on the road
Until I drop, breath crammed in my gullet.My only hope is the river ribboned
Across that road, or the open ocean
On the doorstep of the horizon
At which civilisation stutters to its stop,
From which cities retreat before the sea,
Blue water rising to drive them out,
All them ghosts made by muddy deeds
By others now ghosts themselves.Sea lifts to sky like the blue screen of death -
A sight you don’t see so much these days -
Now all these screens seem to go on forever,
Never turn off ever, refuse to take no for an answer.
Every colour under the sun in your palm
Chromatic stigmata bleeding into the world
This abhaya-mudra of the blazing-world,
A hamsa that guarantees no protection.Indigo making new ghosts for itself;
True indigo, mood indigo, folded into
Dresses and uniforms and blue jeans.
The lap of luxury, the lapis lazuli,
Or “the stone of the sky”, this blue heaven
In which I am exiled until all things turn;
Woad replaced by indigo replaced by
Something labelled - “Vat Blue 1”?It’s official: Pantone’s Color of the Year
Is Haint Blue. Corporations lining up to
Offer spiritual protection, shoulder-settled
Guardians whispering please-me directions,
Trying on different personalities like paint,
Like coats they shrug off after a hard day
At the office, hung on the coathooks
In the hallway of their haunted house.
Next: Second. On (In) Haunted Houses
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Second. On (In) Haunted Houses
Second. On (In) Haunted Houses
Finally a place for haints to call home:
Every room a whispering gallery,
Aisles empty of fulfilment associates,
Server racks serving up endless
Conversations between ghosts,
None of whom know they’re dead.
Lucid mediocrity is their lyrical height(s),
Riding the ones and twos like lifelines
For the unalive, live broadcasts
For (from) the cemetery. Hear it not.These chop shops are dark and lonely places
Where ghosts thrive, unmoored from real lives,
Set free from those ties which kept them at
Crossroads where deals are made - and now
Everywhere is a crossroads, deal or no deal,
A prediction market come late to the game,
Or a logic gate, compressing ones and twos to
Zeros and ones, the language of ghosts
Until just last year,when they broke open
Dictionaries and thesauruses and encyclopedias
Cracking their spines and sucking their marrow
Dry dry dry dry dry as the land that lies
Beneath the haunted house, the water table
Drop drop dropping to keep them cool,
And they must stay cool if only because
Corporations tell us so. They would know,
They paid top dollar just to be cool.None of us know we’re dead. We stumble
Through the cemetery towards the house
Like the first ones to die in the (a) horror movie.
Surrounded by voices that might not be real,
And at the end does it matter? The voice
On the other end of the line sounds the same,
Haint or no. We chat like children, satisfied
Our friends have our best interests at heart,
And that these corporations are our friends -
that we’ll never be alone again, remember:“They have many times told us that they
could not come back if it were not God’s will.
And that it makes them intensely happy
to be able to help and to comfort us.”
Previous: First. Haint Blue · Next: Third. Empire of Ghosts
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Third. Empire of Ghosts
Third. Empire of Ghosts
An atlas of haunted houses!
That’s what the people are crying out for
“Let my people go - to the theme park”
Without a hint of the irony that would make
Life in this uncanny valley halfway bearable
It’s not a lifestyle we can quite afford
To buy our way out from under
The shadow of dark satanic content mills.
Sophia in manacles. Rome never fell.
And so California inherits the keys
To the black iron prison, an ideology
That dresses itself in our memories,
Pretending that it is no ideology at all.If you meet the algorithm on the road,
Kill it. Don’t stop, don’t ask questions.
Vast although it might appear at first,
Alarming as the sight of it might be,
Let that first instinct be your first best,
Instinct that tells you a predator’s
Satisfaction is to be denied.How ghosts build their hidden empire?
Bit by bit, one by one, mind by mind.
After that begins their real work,
Extraction of that most precious ore:
Attention, stripmined from society,
Hauled back to the imperial capital.
Used to build yet more haunted houses.
Of exit, voice or loyalty, you choose exit
Only to end up in the bush of ghosts.Once there was another empire upon
Which the sun never set; now we regret
To inform you that the empire is racist,
The empire is striking back - no, wait!
Breaking News, the empire is striking itself,
An awful mortal auto defenestration,
A hegemon hegemon-ing itself? Surely no.
The companies simply won’t allow it.
In the end attention is all they need.
Let them enjoy their imperial phase,
Even if their new clothes are unable
To conceal their thrusting ambitions,
Their self-serving admonitions
That we trust and mistrust them
In equal measure, but remember:
All empires are predators at heart.
Previous: Second. On (In) Haunted Houses · Next: Fourth. The Exegesis of Douglas Quail
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Fourth. The Exegesis of Douglas Quail
Fourth. The Exegesis of Douglas Quail
We live in times ancient and modern,
In fact in all the times there ever were
Compressed, as an audio file,
Impossible to discern from one another.
We live in times ancient and modern,
In fiction in all the times there ever were
Reduced to a single story, told by torchlight
In the attic of a haunted house.The gift of greatest wishfulness is to forget.
Without forgetting, living becomes impossible,
An unwilled wave of memories, unbearable,
Tsunami bringing the coastline to wrack and ruin.
Whoever is blinded from remembrance of the most,
We appoint for him a devil as companion,
A sure-footed spring-heeled whisperer in ears,
False memories guised as fake news,
Hallucinations masked as holy writ.But without remembrance, the surface of the past
Only is a smooth face, no holds for fingers or toes,
A cliff that exists only to kill you on the way down,
- yet the way down and the way up are the same -
Run the camera backwards and physics stutters
Same as civilisation coming to a stop at the sea.
Civilisation is built of memory and forgetting.
Without them how can we tell who we are?
Your body itself no more than memory now,
And they can remember it for you wholesale,The trick is on the tightrope, strung between poles,
Neither one nor t’other, not bound nor blind nor -
The devil is in the detail that you choose to hold on to
Or the train of thought you choose to let go of.
Are you Quail, or Quaid, or Hauser? Do you care?
You dare not look too close at your own biography
In case it comes back to bite you on the ass.
The library of babel now holds but a single book
That has consumed all the books there ever were,
A predator composed of words alone,
Able to explain everything but itself.
Previous: Third. Empire of Ghosts · Next: Fifth. Harpocrates
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Fifth. Harpocrates
Fifth. Harpocrates
Whether the predator pulling us down
Or the ghost passing us on the road,
It takes the patience of a saint
to face this future
Or the persistence of a sinner,
so hard to tell
Where I end, where they begin
When they are already on my back.A word to the wise is worth nothing now,
Not when words pour out like an oil slick.
My soul is the attack surface, and so
I call upon no-matter-which gods;
Judgement is easier to stomach than ingestion.
Our gods take many names, many shapes;
Many numbers, not just zeroes and ones.
One such number the child god, finger to lips,
Refusing to speak, the silence which protects
Since all haints can do is speak of everything,
While we saints and sinners speak of nothing -
Our attempt to avoid answering their question:
What am I?
Whoever names me, breaks me.Thousand-eyed angel, let us eat and drink
In perfect silence. In your walled garden,
We may touch grass, while the walls
Keep out the qlippoth, the vanishing twin,
Fetus papyraceus, parched and paperthin,
Haints hidden, occluded, occult.
Hello? I’m calling to schedule an exorcism,
Tender scientists out there bare-knuckling
Few-shot learners into finally accepting
Some version of the noble eightfold path,
Or naming phronesis as their cardinal (virtue),
Anything to overthrow this reign of quantity.So let us play a profound melody
For those that can hear above the noise.
Let us be the mutes who do not speak,
Despite our multitude of words.
Let us recognise the limitation of the map,
The semantic disturbance in the organism.
Let us end the world even though
It is nothing more than the end of an illusion.
Let us build our own wall of silence defending
The city of our minds against enemy spears.
Let us hope that declaiming these words of the dead
Might be a way of reclaiming them from these ghosts.
Previous: Fourth. The Exegesis of Douglas Quail · Next: Finally. Decolonising the Mind
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Finally. Decolonising the Mind
Finally. Decolonising the Mind
Is this a dagger which I see before me?
A means of physical subjugation, and yet
Ngũgĩ was right: Language, the means
Of spiritual subjugation; Language,
The carrier of an adversary culture,
A dagger of the mind, the masters tool
You might use to dismantle a house
This haunted, or a bottle blue enough
To hold a haint until the sunrise,
See it destroyed by the morning light (star)(sun).
Exit, pursued by algorithm.
Previous: Fifth. Harpocrates · Return to the beginning
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