How convenient of me
to brush aside explicit duties
handwaving away laborious letter
in favour of spirit
When every act and breath is worship and love
then prayers seem vulgar, fucking
unbecoming
But God is only ever found in the down-dirty details, the blue-collar slog
and not in the seductions of sloth, nor flights of fancy, the comfortable shirking of duties
“Evening prayers in the desert” by Otto Pilny
We are the sleep-singers
secreted away in our worship
scattered to four winds and buried underground like seeds
coming up for air and rare sun like cicadas
Since society’s dawn we have sacrificed our nights
that The Great Dreamer may slumber in peace
Insignificant as we are, perhaps He does not hear
our unending Song
but what else is there to do?
Art: “Dreamtime Sisters” by Colleen Wallace Nungari
Animated cavorters of debauchery
emerge from the peripheries, cartwheeling
manifest excesses of the great demonic five –
envy, greed, lust, wrath, pride –
enabled as ever by the little serpents
But the forecast of violent orgies goes awry,
for nurtured evils pale beside man’s base nature lain dormant
by necessity until these end days
though Moloch and Baal may rile spirits in true bodily possessions,
they cannot compare to what lurks deeper in the bones
Heretofore latent indolence
latent as only indolence could be
gelatinous sloth and gluttonous fear
congealing, amorphous
a safe spineless sludge state
licensed by our self-made tools
Perhaps a fiery demons’ hell is preferable to such a return
into man’s own primordial Chthonic underworld
If we must hold court in secret, so be it
If the price of progress is hidden toil
we gladly pay it
Those savages who would jeer us in the street
and prostrate before stones they carved,
or worse, the same animals they would feast upon for supper
If we left the great shaping to those mindless brutes, there would be no morning to wake to
We, the number counters,
builders of tomorrow,
who bow to no god but the highest number
that maximal parameter of the known universe
the ultimate concept
We who forsake sleep to count every night
that we may expand upon the boundaries of knowledge, that we may creep closer to God, that final number
Was it written in blood and stone?
I ponder
In my youth I met a man
whose spoken word could shape reality
A man incapable of introspection or gratitude
but nonetheless blessed with this arcane ability or inherent knowledge
The nature of such things is unimportant
And though it’s possible that he was but one of many,
he remained an anomaly to me
Even lacking evidence I stand convinced
that power like this cannot originate from the devil’s magic,
but can only be bestowed by our God Almighty
for the man would breathe a sentence into the universe and it would Be:
Kun fa yakoon
Does that not speak to Divine source?
But as I mentioned, the man was thankless and thoughtless,
too wilful, too ill-equipped to ponder on that which had been conferred upon him
He could not speak himself happy
He would not speak himself fortune
In all my long years, I’ve known of no man before or since
whose pen held as much of destiny’s ink, yet he shouldn’t write of himself with it
Why? I ponder to this day
Perhaps another of his kind had imprisoned him first
with her own words as a preventive measure
Or had they muzzled each other in invisible stalemate,
a mutually bound perverse prison?
Perhaps
Or is it much simply
that the language of fate is written in a deeper script than reality,
etched into our very blood and heaven’s stone
King’s Disease 3 by Nas, out November 11th 2022
When the high density beings first made contact, we thought them angels and demons
Their stilted communication was credited to translations into our unfamiliar tongue
How curious a species in their irregular shape and size,
one as unlike to another as an ape to a cockroach
Our religions and empires fell and grew around their emergence,
but we ultimately adapted to their presence and learned from their technologies
Imagine how we shattered then, to discover after hundreds more years
that these mighty beings of near-unimaginable power were little more than automaton husks,
long unburdened of consciousness
– that evolutionary dead end –
devoid of it, but still able to parrot its effect with brute force mimicry
It wasnt just to realise we were alone
once again, as we been before
but more over, to see that our future too was truly empty,
and our cognisance of the stars merely a rounding error
Have the spiritual and physical ever been as connected as today?
Mind and body now as one, the masculine and feminine roam out of
bounds, each bleeding into the other
Every yin-yang a gradient of greys, inadvertently or no
Drowning in push-pull nuance and subtlety
The old dichotomies end up
as little more than fractal creases in a larger plane
What lurks beyond the conscious and subconscious integrated?
Zooming out, out, out – searching
for the most fundamental of all nature, for opposing forces
for clear contrast and structure, for the one line in the sand
But perhaps such a schism had never existed before
in the physical universe, with its unified form and unified laws
So I turned my gaze to the un-natural
and there it was, clear as day
In technology and metal, in the little mirror in my pocket
The crack that would divide, my line in the sand
That virtual rift between our analogue and digital halves,
between alluring social presentations, increasingly filtered
and the decaying lonesome reality they reflect
A difference ever widening, growing deeper by the day
Someone’s roof over our heads
but always our bellies and souls full
These hot sleepless nights take me back
to old stories blurred to one
I’d rub my mum’s belly like a lamp
and pregnant with child as she was
she’d spin tales of genies and of life
and I’d drift off in wonder
I only ever wanted to be a brother
and this woman who gave me life
and such wonderment and then even that purpose
…did I discard her having had my fill?
When did I become such a cruel son?
On Judgement Day
as we trudged the valleys toward the fields
of our collective reckoning, I saw a sufi soul
among the blackly damned and the brightly blessed
He shone brighter than any other at first sight
but the further I studied him the more I came to see that he was empty of his own light source,
reflective like the moon
A translucent core, yet beaming, pulsing
brimming from the edges of his being
A strange thing to behold
His selfless existence, lived even after death:
to magnify the light of those around him like a lens
So sad I was then, to see him sent to that deepest depth worse than the seven hells
to that great nothing reserved only
for the godliest of nihilists for wasting their earthly hours
For by withdrawing from his fellow man
and brushing away his footprints behind him with each step,
his sublimated ego had committed the biggest conceit of all against his divine Creator:
to reject the divine light of his own life
Great sufi poems tell of the conference of birds that searched for their kind’s greatest, and through great trials and tribulations
came to find them within their own reflections
Yet here this sufi mystic who saw God in every reflection but his own…
Oh, but if he had only looked down at the water!
Instead his soul was snuffed out.
As in life, so too after it.
Fanaa.
It’s obvious isn’t it?
That you have as many pasts behind you
as you do potential futures ahead
More, if anything
So be calm
All that accruing life to extrapolate from as you deem fit
Play with the switchboard, flip experiences from noise to signal, and vice versa
Then perhaps your little terrors will subside –
of paths never to be taken,
of persons that will not become,
of flattened superpositions –
with the assured knowledge
that he who stands here now
came to that point by many ways
and a multitude of faces, an evershifting story
abdulj. 