Four Corner End Times

  • How Much More Like Ted Kaczynski Have You Become Since 2010

    Select one answer only, with 1 indicating that you are only a bit more like Ted Kaczynski and 5 indicating that you are Ted Kaczynski.

    1. Almost Everyone Will Agree That We Live in a Deeply Troubled Society. (A Bit More Like Ted Kaczynski)

    2. The security of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or too large for him to be able personally to influence them. (Somewhat More Like Ted Kaczynski)

    3. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. (Significantly More Like Ted Kaczynski)

    4. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. (Becoming Ted Kaczynski)

    5. The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences Have Been a Disaster for the Human Race. (Ted Kaczynski)

  • Prophet of Doom (Unfinished)

    I sought you in hubristic stations
    Of our own devoured dimension
    Halls condemned with blood and flame
    Man’s marvels ruptured and oozing
    I felt along the steely walls and
    Sat beneath infernal obelisks of
    Human ambition and shame
    I thought I smelled your wake
    As I shrank with fear in the dark
    But only I was there. You were not.

    I sought you in a forgotten fane
    Where demons hung in a violet sky
    And slithered through a fetid moat
    While Cephas wailed forever on the walls
    Deep therein I found an angry weapon
    Carved and charred on an altar of pain
    It rose red from its quivering theca
    Birthing stars that fell like hammers
    It spoke to me of things I won’t recall
    Were you there? Not at all.

    I sought you in a nighted citadel
    Whelmed in the dim cascade of space
    There the beasts were frozen through
    The gaping walls spat rusted barbs
    And pillared rooms hid tomes and death
    In its starlit atheneum I read of
    Carnage in a thousand sordid futures
    And learned the hated truths of existence
    My vision white, my crimson gun alight
    Ice and iron alike were a mane flowing
    Deeper into the brazen fires of Hell
    But hide nor hair. You were not there.

    I sought you in a storm’s blue eye
    A place of repose where tortured minds
    Wander in vain on spidery legs or
    Waft in skulls crowned with noxious fire
    I found another weapon there immured
    A cannon made by men for Armageddon
    God’s open eye, blinking and rolling
    A worthy prize of war despoiled twice
    My burden now. Mine by bloody right.
    It brought the quietus the spirits sought
    But you weren’t in peace. All for naught.

    I sought you in a theater of lies
    Where the air was a fecund haze and
    The floors were slick with spilled seed
    As I crept, guns bared, the wind swelled and
    Birthed scores of Hell’s cloven nobles to
    Fire the Great Tresspasser in their arena
    Under the dread of my twin furies
    They fell screaming on their ample guts and
    Crawled back to the miasmatic womb
    To fetch their father, the Lord Golem
    Whose chest I pulped and wrathful arm I siezed
    But you? Like the empty breeze.

    I sought you in a broken place
    The churning atrium of Hell’s inmost dens
    Where the static crosstalk of hopes lost
    Were flies that buzzed in the shifting walls
    Digesting mortal clarity with vomit and
    Burying the last secret beneath their shit
    Long I walked their halls, wrathful arm aloft
    My shadow long and sharp, my lips twisted tight
    My eyes bright and darting, demons fleeing my sight
    I knocked on those walls until Hell turned tail
    Revealing a final door in its calcified folds
    The walls broke. Beelzebub’s legions coiled skyward
    But you weren’t there. I knocked twice.

    I sought you in Dis, the Cathedral of Doors
    The last bastion of inhuman wickedness
    Where absolution is sintered with brimstone
    And twisted traitors circle the Hellmother backwards
    Bemoaning losses they no longer remember
    They died again as I arrived, the nave fell silent
    Hell above became a crypt, dry and dark and quiet
    As the Hellmother rose from her throne of tears
    I wrapped my blackened hands around her throat
    To squeeze you free from her rancid bosom
    She croaked havoc and the doors flew open
    All of Hell was bared like her empty breasts
    But no god or ghost or demon came to aid her
    We were alone, my hands her only dying company
    When she went limp I cast her down and ground
    Her head against the sulfurous bedrock
    Spilling her brains from her eyes
    As I had thought, you weren’t inside.

  • The Yolks Break (2022)

    I’m watching you watching you fry eggs
    You need help. You’re full of dread.
    Laughter erupts from panicked chambers
    You flail the egg-slide as you cackle
    The yolks break. That’s ok.

  • The Fat Earth (2017)

  • Old World Vulture 5: Amianthus (2015)

    Not writer.
    The death pollen comes.
    Breathe the deep, the friable heap sleep
    Free the ants that haul the fibers
    That hydra heads into labyrinths
    Where all men will lose their way

    Outside the mine and into the fear mind
    For weaving a salamander blanket,
    For bringing night to the sun,
    One day no one will know your name again

  • Old World Vulture 4: Crocidolite (2015)

    Not Writer,

    Gypsum in your nose
    Fishstick roe
    A blow right in the bush
    There’s your cut.

    Teetering atop stacked wishes
    Wheezing high, above the dust
    Your boots white stuffed stones
    Your hands cracked sinks

    Should man’s hooks become
    Secrets you keep and don’t know
    Concealed under stiff sheets
    Cough.
    Be still and wait.

  • Old World Vulture 3: Chrysotile (2015)

    Not Writer…

    What’s a rattlesnake?
    The snake I know
    Is deathly quiet.

    Sleeping in your sheets, riding shotgun,
    The sex eau of a misstress on your clothes
    Clawing underdown your chesty flesh
    Posturous playing a cat on a curtain
    Flicking its hook tongue in the wool wind.

    The infidel secret betrayed in a scoring of years
    A rattling cough from underneath the bed

  • Old World Vulture 2: Amosite (2015)

    Not Writer,

    What threadt hides here in the walls?
    An ibis-white dwell

    In exhausted slumber you’ll
    Dream to tap plaster
    With a ha ha ha mer

    Sweating with lathor,
    Crawling to the shower
    Gliding over
    Aught but the hours

    A nightmare had thorough
    A needle eye
    Done like a camel,
    Binder hair coarse and black
    Pleural fear, knotted back
    Tumorous lungs, a heart attack

  • Old World Vulture 1: Serpentine (2015)

    Not Writer

    A cage is mostly empty space

    Wobbly mule adder on
    Your warp ladder on
    Yanking your
    Pitied ance from each
    joist   joist   joist   joist

    A cage is mostly empty

    Ceiling panic dusting your skin
    Brain gray shit from a sinus century
    Scraped off with a dead bird foot

    A cage is mostly

    The unwatched masses procession
    Their gritty eyes long fangs away
    Buying your anxious pinewood

    Black brain cud
    With your sweat
    Sick in your pores
    An unwhite elephant

  • The Coke of Aquarius (2008)

    Abundant aluminum filed in malleable members through the eviscerated Earthly equator.
    Corralled between Cancer and Capricorn,
    It conquered its constrictions,
    Collected corner to corner,
    Crafted a cylinder,
    Locked its arms,
    And lashed with little loquacity at its less encumbered creator.
    The sweltering synergy of the center and sun welded it well.
    The murdered moon marauded as meteors
    And hammered it into a kola completion.

    Fizzling, frothing, forgotten of fault,
    Carbon, concerned, panicked and popped.
    Hydrogen halted high at the heavens,
    Blocked by the barricade of beaten bauxite.
    Phosphorus found it footed by seven,
    But by its own journey was too weak to catch it.
    Nitrogen never knew of its nuance,
    As oxygen offered to operate organized.
    Every element, these exclusive, eradicated.
    Completely conducive to kola completion…

    Lime and lemon (partners of plumage)
    Eyed an orange as it interloped.
    Alcohol attacked with awry agitation.
    Cinnamon clubs came as cold litigation.
    Calming coriander catered a cease,
    But nutmeg naturally negated his notion.
    Molded were they, a medical malady,
    And marble to carve toward kola completion.

    The motley mixture met midway
    And was wrangled through water with ropes of rust.
    Reacting with rigor and rambling refinements,
    Nefarious nuclear nothings served something,
    And augmented each other, preparing its platform.
    The Coke of Aquarius was primed on its haunches
    As a tin of trade secrets and celebrity sponsors.
    It was launched like a lie into kola completion.

    A canister catapulted to kola completion;
    Exploding, elaborate, effervescent, and effluent.
    It accentuates aptly the arm of astrology:
    The fantastic font of its foundry’s phalanges.

    Now it depletes, attractive and ferrous
    Flattening fast as The Coke of Aquarius

  • Smoke 5: The Gap (2020)

    Sandbar bar
    I can’t speak Greek
    I’m down in the narrow
    Trust fall for your feet
    Blackbar bar
    It’s hard to see
    I’m down in the ochre
    Becoming the skink
    Crowbar bar
    Forget about me
    Signal the train
    Leave me to dream

  • Smoke 4: Horse Silence (2020)

    Five in the afternoon
    The Cairns trip ends like workdays do
    Bodies piled high on the airport line
    Little bottles of wine glassing glassy eyes
    I’m feeling rendered.
    My hangover headache whinnies
    I look at my luggage

    Conspiring silent, deeply alone
    Old Mate’s in the Daintree
    Hot soaked to his bones
    Punching in numbers on the dirty guide phone
    He’s prospecting for gold
    He’s prodding for cassowaries
    He’s a little disappointed. He’s ready to leave.

    Five in the afternoon
    No longer a traveller, again a commuter
    In my mind’s eye I pile stones high
    The train lurches with lazy violence
    Time only moves when you don’t want it to
    I’m feeling forgetful.
    Blue light stains what little I remember
    I look at my luggage

  • Smoke 3: Comedy Is Hard (2020)

    It’s smoko but nobody knows.
    I’m busy sowing chicken salt
    So nothing will grow when I’m gone
    I’ve got my glass eyes in so
    Leave me alone.

    The middle distance is best for stress
    Third eye theater for the meme pandemic
    In that space between there’s not much to see
    Unfinite sea.
    Empty relief.

    Trauma shits on your desk where it eats
    Then hides in the bush for secret sleep
    Perched so close you can see its sunpores
    Snoring over the crankum earth
    Dreaming erosion, believably distant

    You’re sitting alone because comedy’s hard
    When Old Mate calls on the big black phone
    He’s chewing on leather, he’s all of out boots
    He shot all his cattle, his cancer is terminal
    Two months he’s been waiting for you
    He’s over the moon. It’s dry there too.

  • Smoke 2: A Window and You (2020)

    Old Mate’s out at Clyde
    Treed upside down in the daylight
    Hanging over the shadowy valley
    Fanning his stones in the smoky summertime

    His pieces fall into the dark when they’re ripe
    River trollies roll them to Auburn and onward
    They swell unseen in the stock of unsealed Sydney
    A secret guarded by the sleeping water

    That’s them and a window and you
    Your breath fogs the glass and the train moves
    People cough because they ate forbidden fruit
    They’ll cough in the office soon
    So will you.

  • Smoke 1: Sodden Chance (2020)

    Everybody at Glenfield is a doppleganger
    Maybe you see them standing around a couple of times
    Sleepy evils replacing themselves
    Alone in the morning, bereaved of their lives
    Toeing the braille-yellow line and
    Contemplating the empty corridor as the floodwaters fall
    Bad omens.
    Then you die.

    And you wait because
    Old Mate’s stuck on a train
    Between Wynyard and Circular Quay
    Watching replacement ferries prod their darlings
    He’s shoulder-to-shoulder and all elbows
    His grain scythe is a bicycle
    He’s blocking the stairs and blasting trap music
    He smells like a century egg and he can’t get to work
    Because today someone tapped off for the final time
    $6.78. And you wait.

  • Silver Bullet (2012)

    The End of August hammered rocks in the night
    It rattled chains and moaned and wore a sheet
    It crept closer until it thumped on my foyer at dawn
    I rose from the bed and feigned fear
    As Autumn ground against the glass of my door

    The silver thermos loomed tall on the counter
    A warning monument to big stick diplomacy
    Something inside sloshed as I raised it
    A time capsule thick with ancient stimulants
    Cracked open punctually, way too god damn early

    It took clenched teeth and Eastwood eyes
    To scare the stopper into twisting out
    So I might behold the life inside
    Evolving in this sealed coffee ecosystem
    I feared for a vengeful, pestilent jungle

    After a masked hour of scrubbing and scouring
    With bleach and steel and lye and violent instinct
    I destroyed the final stains with a blast from the garden hose
    The thermos was purged and ready
    To fill with the burning hair of the dog that bit me
    As Autumn ground against the glass of my door

  • Sealed Door (2019)

    The sorcerer vanishes out the back door
    Everyone looks. He chants spells as he goes.
    Don’t do dumb shit and keep the damn screen closed!
    The sorcerer vanishes flop-step down the path
    Eye choosing weeds to later feed poison
    Stubbing his toes on the corners of bricks
    The sorcerer vanishes past the Crankum Gate
    Into the Sheet Sanctum, a placid dark bright place
    Where old Sun keeps his sweatiest grudges and
    Sorcerer’s stroke signs point to peacement

    Sorcerer’s spiders descend to menace the Gate
    Custodial men without fathers or scruples
    No one dares to twist the lock inside or out
    For spindles and needles and netting and nod
    He within hides under work’s nose, the sorcerer vanishes
    Those without descend from order and love loudly
    He within hides in the Sun’s black eye, the sorcerer vanishes
    Those without knock-knock-knock for a powerful man
    Everyone looks. The sorcerer vanishes.

  • Blue Water Stranger (2020)

    In my dream Todd Howard was a huge
    Golem made of discorporate fat mothers
    Them and their hands on their pearls
    They mewled and bubbled under his mortarskin like
    Traitors frozen in Cocytus
    Just working despite

    West Virginia got flatter as Howard devoured
    Ancient, inadequate Appalachia
    Hanging down from almost heaven he
    Hooked mountaintops into his mountaindew mouth

    Lucky nobody was there but me and
    I was just having a dream

  • Lost Shotgun (2020)

    You left yourself between the wall and the bed
    Wedged in the dark so the kids wouldn’t find you
    Filled with lead, quiet and fire-primed
    Your choked black smile was peace
    Or was it a threat?
    I do not remember
    I cannot forget

  • Veil Burner (2022)

    I imagine us on a boat of muggy weather
    You tell me your mother was a feathered mariner
    A good omen over the suncurve, she died giving birth
    So all up the seaboard, that’s your comefrom
    You’re a veil burner, a pink evening sun

    I imagine myself dry ice clouding the deck
    I’m unseen with feet in the water, crypsislike
    For my father was a painted snipe and
    I’m in the reeds no matter where I seem
    Toes dipped, wings tense, ready to leap

    That’s not even it.

    Outside of me we’re raking leaves
    In an autumn crisp and ancient
    When we have a big pile we jump in
    I don’t think we’re children
    I can’t be sure

    Fall must fills our crowsfeet
    We meet the most charming scorpions
    You are pure and high and smooth
    The speckleblue Egg-See
    I am your heathentooth

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