Musings of Gaius Hosidius Geta

I wanted it so much, to be venerated and remembered through the ages. We knew Ozymandius, far beyond his own era, and although people didn’t remember his words or deeds, his name and statue lived on and on.
I commissioned Alessandro Ferrante. I bought a fucking quarry outside Carrara, the best pale pearly marble going. I was the greatest general of my age, fame beyond my country. My name resounded, now. But to be cemented (ha, yes, pun intended) I wanted a statue.
Ferrante showed me the design, my proud chest and embossed shield. Horse maned headdress. Aquiline nose. And yes, twelve times life size.
My fucking statue. Stick that, Petronus.

Prompted by "Rain of Statues" by Sarah Lindsay in Cardiff Bay Writing group meeting.

#awakeaugust 29

I have lived here twenty eight months, and only today noticed the birds at each window. The compact little body dwarfed by the swoop of wing, the jaunty beak and the backwards staring eye. How often have I gripped their mute feathers in my palm and twisted? And how cruel that they are all inside the flat, silently pleading for the wind?

Awake August facebook page here

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies: In July and August, the 100 Days Project gathered story writers, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, and programmers together...

click above to see the BluePrintReview's blog review of my 100 Days project - please!

if

light curtain

revolution

We spin at 

over 1,000 

miles per

hour.

Sliding the

sunset

away

Tokyo rain

sometimes it rains

sometimes it feels bad

sometimes it washes

things clear

housework

I hate it,
I hate being told what
I should do
to fit in as a good
little housewife,
but I know
what's good enough
for me isn't
good enough for other people.
Hoovering up spiders.
The dust bunnies
under my bed are
pre-mammalian,
a grey and fibrous
slime mould rearing its
head and looking
for more salubrious surroundings.
They reach their fingers
into my nose
and creep, creep,
so as not to waken
the sneeze reflex, creep
down my airways as
if seeking their
primordial swamp.
They should have hung
a left, and headed
for my brain.
Who would want to
tackle such a creature?

guinea

She rubs a finger across the lump on the skin of her stomach, it feels like a spot, but she has to twist her neck, and lift up the folds of flesh to see it.  Yup, a spot.  However on squeezing, the white coming out is not a pus-like exudate, one splurge and it's out everywhere, but a different texture, a thick solid tube of suet.  It can be teased and stroked out, massaged out almost; and she is reminded of David Attenborough nature documentaries.  The head of the guinea worm living under the skin, if caught it can be threaded on a stick, and then the whole worm can be carefully wound out of an infected person.  The spot, keyhole liposuction to remove the four stone creature living under her skin?

blog format

Well I can't say as I'm entirely convinced about the new template designer thingy, but it had become more difficult to edit the "old format" blog when you wanted to make tweaks, so here goes, I lose the wave photo at the top, and try to keep a simple grey/blue/sky blue theme.  There are loads of fancy new templates out there which look good in parts, but when you actually want to read them you have to put ugly solid blocks of colour over your beautifully designed background; or it's difficult to read and doesn't really show pictures up well...
And I'm quite excited to add a page of pictures, to have somewhere to showcase my unabashed pilfering of the amazing patterns in nature!
I'll see how long this format takes to grow on me...

Burren

Stone dykes and stone grykes,
soil disappears down the cracks
along with the grey rain.
Plants scramble to get a hold
before the water trickles away;
running deep down the inside of the hills
and reappearing in lakes and turloughs
miles away, palely reflective.

A human sized landscape, it is barren
only from a distance, up close it is rich.
Turf patches, handfuls of sweet earth.
Men have been here a long time,
they take the stone and make stone things,
tombs, dolmens, crosses, walls and forts;
and yes, shelters for contemplative priests.

The seminarian contemplates, up here alone
he can imagine the sloughing off of sin,
an oyster being rinsed by the rain,
gnarled outside, with a wet pearly interior.

Thoughts of disappearing down the cracks; 
a strange fish swimming underground
through the darkened pewter flow
and sudden silvery streams, brief sunlight
on a karst spring, then back down
into a dark sinkhole.

Swimming ahead of the strange salmon
that has eaten the hazelnuts, Father Dermot
had warned them against the burden
of knowledge that the flesh carries.
Oh, flesh, how could he not have tasted it,
tasted hers, ripe and freckled when the sun
danced the lake water to exuberant sparkles?

He swims with sinuous strokes,
racing the salmon, twisting and spiralling,
grey mercurial water and the Atlantic awaits.
He thinks of the water cycle, imagines
himself rising as droplets of moisture
to rain again on the stark hills.

Rain on him, contemplating, contemplating.
Father told him he should be here for weeks,
and that a priest who has never fallen
into temptation is a priest out of touch with the flock.
He thinks he could stay here, forever, thinking
on the bare bones of the world.




This piece was written for The Camel Saloon (click here)

please form an orderly quantum queue...

I can be
all things
to all people
but, please,
one at
a time.
There are too
many worlds
in which
Schrödingers
cat dies.
Life collapses
my probabilities,
and everyone now
knows about my
uncertainty principle.
I can be
all things
to all people,
so which
of them is me?
And I told you of my
measurement problem,
the slit
experiment?
Depending upon
how you decide
to look for me
I will be one
thing or the
other.


Please go and see this & other great stuff over at negative suck here

A model student

The psychiatrist told her that sex should be about intimacy, that she would find this out one day hopefully when it wasn't too late.
"It's just vanity," he said when she told him in their weekly meetings about collecting another boy, another new experience; a perversion previously unknown to her and that particular virginity taken.
"Well even if it is it makes me feel popular, I love being the centre of attention, I didn't have that when I was growing up and now I'm at college and can reinvent myself I don't want to be that shy intellectual wallflower anymore."
"Don't you want to be special to someone, to love and cherish a special someone and be loved in return?" he asked.
"But this way I'm special to lots of guys, you just want me to stop fucking them and start with you so you can be the disreputable lecturer who gets off with his prize-winning pupil and then I'll end up in a semi-detached life wondering which of the neighbours to flirt with at a dinner party."
The psychiatrist shrugged, "Well, I'll keep trying," and went to the bar to get her another double vodka and tonic.

Job security...

"Damn that bloody woman," the demon 53 Eville growled to himself, "who could have expected such a lazy fat lump to be such a tough assignment?  And now I have to go explain myself to the Henchman!"  He shook his head vigorously, ruffling up his fur and flicking his tongue out briefly.  It was gonna be one hell of an interview.  Bloody on-the-job appraisals.

In a infernally bright room 53 Eville's pupils were dialled down to narrow slits, and the Henchman stood in the far corner, cowled and dark, contrasting blackly with the room.  53 Eville though he couldn't have sucked in more light if he'd been a hard up office girl intent on getting the last dregs of the happy hour cocktail outta the bottom of the glass.

"ELUCIDATE," came the dark dude's command.

"Well, where to start?  You know I was assigned to the woman Janice to encourage her to make the usual contributions, and well, on the face of it she looked an easy target.  I mean, she lived alone with that black cat, she could do with losing a few dozen pounds so couldn't have expected a long life anyway.  Well, you know the sort? 
"So I incarnates into this form, you can see I'm a particularly handsome ginger tabby if I do say so myself, I mean, ideal for stealing any lonely old bitch's heart away.  And, you know, it seemed to be working, I'd got an in to the flat and she set out two bowls so it was kinda like she'd made room for me there, so I thought I would have lots of opportunity to start the usual scarification program, yeah?

"YOUR TIME HAS RUN OUT," the Henchman said.  53 Eville had felt like he was burbling a bit, and wiped his white paw across his marmalade cheek.  Sure, the Henchman was supposed to be impassive and weigh up the bads and the goods in the fiendish scale of things, but he wished he didn't feel so bloody nervous around him.  Then it dawned on him, the Henchman was saying that this wasn't an on the job routine check up, it was the reckoning.  He gulped, he had to explain himself as his life now did depend on it .

"Well, I started with the usual, dumping of mutilated mice, mangled birds, you know?  And you know what was kinda weird?  Although I caught and placed dozens of the bloody things around the flat,she only seemed to see them on the odd occasion?  Well, that was when I realised I had to get rid of the other cat, musta been some sort of bloody guardian angel or something...

The Henchman waited, unmoving.  53 Eville flicked his tail nervously. 

"Well, that took alot longer than I expected, ended up having to go for the ground glass in the food trick, takes a while but gets them in the end.  And you know, my guess was right cos when the black cat form was sick enough, the angelic agent left the body pretty damn quick.  The Janice woman was pretty upset by then, so I thought we would have her for sure, got the documents sent up from the Bureau, but she didn't look at them at all, straight into the bin they went.

"YOU HAVE STILL TO EXPLAIN YOUR FAILURE," rasped the Henchman

"I tried, I really tried!" 53 Eville yowled.  "I sat on her hair so she thought she was paralysed to panic her, I shoved hairs into her mouth while she was sleeping to choke her, I sat on her shoulders when she was in the bath sleepy and drunk to get her head under the water; but I couldn't get her to believe!  She doesn't think there is such a thing as hell, and I just couldn't get her to sign up with Infernal Insurance.

"YOU KNOW THE PUNISHMENT," the Henchman stated, "AND SOON BELIEF WILL NOT BE A PROBLEM."

And yes, 53 Eville did know the punishment, the fate that awaited him.  He really had tried his hardest to avoid it, but now he would be transferred inside the body of the woman Janice while she had a free rein back here in Hell, taking over his sales job;  as it seemed fewer and fewer people these days believed in the afterlife, perhaps she would fail also and return back to the hell that was Earth.

March (a winter war)

Marching through the emptied border regions
All is quiet, although I sense hidden watchers
reviewing me, checking I mean no harm as I
cross the battered and bloodied earth.
Here in the Marches the shortest month draws to its close.

Maybe the tendrils of new plant life that I tramp past will stay
above the ground now that the snow is faded and the fighting has stopped?
Remembering my brother who gave up his life in the last battle, blood flowed over this cold and sodden ground.
Crops this year will be lush, giving us Borderers a little something back;
hope though, as March nears will we get hope back?


A play on the three meanings of March:  the month, to walk purposefully; a disputed border region

A torn moment

I lay naked in the water and my blood flowed into it.
He watched me, he saw how the flow diluted to pink and faded away.
He had wounded me and now he watched me, almost with affection, he bent his head to my ear.
I saw now the torn edges of my skin raised, white and bloodless and stinging in the hot water.

I smiled, remembering, as he purred into my ear.  Cats look so comical when they have fallen into the bath, his claws scrambling to get out before he huffily stalked away; not quite able to summon the habitual air of "I meant to do that."

Snapshots

Lisa went to the hairdresser this morning, although she was bright and early for her 8am appointment, the morning was reluctant to leave the dark behind and clasped shreds of mist to itself.  The spire of the abbey was nearly visible, the pale yellow of its walls almost the same whited out colour as the clotted fog behind it.  The market was coming to life, the fruit and veg stalls already set up, stall holders making routine conversations with regulars; the rumbling sound of it entered her consciousness, but the words did not.  The cheese stall already had a queue, although only four people long; waiting for service here was a social event in itself.

When she sat down and saw her mutable reflection in front of her, she wondered at how different she had looked at home, when smoothing down her hair with a wet brush in the bathroom mirror.  She'd decided it made no sense to have a shower that morning, as she would anyway have her hair washed for her.  The rough attempt to tidy it up, smooth it down wasn't in evidence by the time she sat in the chair with the cape around her, back-to-front so her arms lay trapped under it in her lap.  Today, she asked for "the same again", to have the roots redone, and the length trimmed.  It was unusual for her, normally she changed something; lighter or darker, thicker or finer streaks, and every now and then a complete switch of colour.  She wondered if she was afraid of being stuck with a style, of having a recognisable snapshot, so handy in case of police investigations or headline writers, never changing from that picture again.

Parallel mirrors around the salon allowed for discreet people watching.  The woman directly behind her was fully groomed, subtle but noticeable make up, carefully styled hair.  She hadn't been given her cape yet, she wore an ivory coloured blouse with a string of pearls at her throat.  There was an animated conversation about the womans desired new style, it involved two hairdressers and the large sample book, fake strands of hair held up to the womans scalp, much nodding.  
Lisa wondered how early the woman had got up to be so arranged, and why?  How much did her appearance matter to her that she thought it was necessary to have on her public face, even while the artifice of her hair was being renewed.  She would still have to go to the basins to have her hair washed, to have her head pulled back, exposing the old skin of her neck to the world.
"But perhaps it's me that's wrong," Lisa thought.  When her hair was done, it flicked outward pleasingly, giving her a faintly kittenish, tousled look.  It framed her face and the melding shades of colour in her fringe drew attention to her eyes.  She thought she looked a bit more like herself, but still the reflection wasn't really her. 

It was still misty outside as she walked back through the market square, the queue at the cheese stall had grown to its usual proportions, with people meeting and greeting each other, catching up on the gossip of the previous week.  Lisa turned her head as she walked, and suddenly there, a blur refected in the shop window,for a second was the person she was.  Only a glimpse, but the fleeting movement was her, the static images seen so far this morning like a parade of postcards, could only be an approximation. 

So how inadequate am I really?

It was only last year, a fair way through my life that I realised the latest fact about another inadequacy of mine. Admittedly I had this thought while I was already upset at the course recent events had taken; to submerge my sorrows I wanted to drown in the words and stories of others, and so I made my way to the largest bookshop in the second largest city of my home country.  As I gazed at the hundreds of books in the Sci-Fi section (pleasingly, there was a separate section for Fantasy) there were so many authors who were new to me even though I had only been out of the country for 18 months, and I realised that I would never, never be able to read all the books in the world.
And I became intrigued, I do not know how many books there are in the world today, and I wondered how long ago it was, when it was still possible to read all the books in the world, assuming you could read every language, assuming you could access the manuscripts which may have been cherished and jealously guarded, or conversely, illegible through age or use.

So how inadequate should I feel not to be able to read everything? I reckon that if I lived and worked as now, I would get the estimated 3.5 billion books polished off in around 7.5 million years; and even if I devoted every moment to the task, it would still take me over a million years - one instance where my personal bug-bear of "trying harder" is not going to achieve the desired result either - this particular failure is only that as a human I am constrained to live my life on a human scale.

The Crossing

He held the summons for the Crossing; the crystalline tablet that told him the place and time of departure had been delivered to him this night at the Dusk meal.  He would travel there alone using one of the temporary transport pods, the surface conditions were forecast to be a little difficult, but not impassable.  Although it was fashionable these days to be cynical about the Chorus, he believed the information they disseminated was generally pretty accurate, and they had been talking again about how many more people were called for the Crossings nearest the Rotation End.  He guessed that the Gardea would make every effort to ensure that people on the way to Cross would reach their departure points, as it would not look good if the Chorus picked up on procedural or individual Gardemans blunders and sang about them to the populace.

He set out early though, mindful that the conditions were not ideal, and indeed the journey there was slow, a bit slower even than he had anticipated as the pod coped with slipping against and dragging along the surface, intermittently abrasive and ice smooth.  He was soothed on the journey with music provided by the transfer pod, soaring and ascendant, swooping music to fill his thoughts and keep them from drifting to the impending Crossing, although as the journey wore on he began to imagine the others travelling on parallel or converging routes.  The unsettling image popped in his mind; of pliant dexterous tentacles reaching out and pulling pods and people towards a central maw.  "Music, music, lift me away from the scurryings of my under-mind," he prayed.

Go with the flow

During the day, his phone had buzzed, people had come to his desk or caught his arm in passing and murmured "So sorry," or similar as they cancelled coming to the arranged get-together for that evening; the least believable a text saying "Had a prior appointment". 
"Yeah, that you somehow managed to arrange since last week when you said you were free," he sneered to himself.
So that evening, he went out in the frosting dark by himself, no-one to meet, simply to see what might happen on an evening alone in familiar surroundings made unfamiliar by the visitors to the town; both the revellers there for the night only, and those of the travelling fair, there for the duration of the festivities.
The braziers burnt, as did the cookfires for the roasting meats and the bakers ovens; rich wholesome smells wafted, released into the night air; and alongside that the smell of spirits and wine seemed less potent and so he drank more; the liquids both warming and disorientating.
Not that that could excuse what followed, when standing by the spitting coals he'd caught the eye of a woman with twisting red hair, her form shrouded by what looked like a grey hooded cloak; he'd smiled at her and somehow she'd smiled back; somehow they'd separated from the crowd and he'd taken her to a quieter spot under the trees; pressed her against him...
Cold now, when he awoke, or at least when his brain foggily started thinking again, there was no-one to be seen; and his clothes were in disarray; but checking his pockets he realised that each of them had conned the other, his wallet containing a few notes and coins was missing, but in his fist he grasped her purse.