Chapter 7.

one.

Begin at the mad hatter. Then go on to the
dark matter, then stop. Proceed all the way
to Knossos, past the Pompei explosion, find
a path back to Gesundheit (whate’er the spell
ing). Now the margin on this page is so very

smug. The eternal seed feeds all the 11 dimen
sions, and the duality is measured by wave
disequilibrium and relativistic increase (or
was it decrease?). Sean C is stationed on
Planet Vashisht, a snowy-mountainy place

two.

where there is a cold monastery, and only
a couple of people attendants (and no monks)
and there is food aplenty (soup with pasta).
there is, of course (de corsa) a dark mirror.

and in the mirror (which Sean C is encouraged
to explore), the secrets of days past and future
may be met with Arjuna-like courage. All this
myth is unsavoury, say the heathen romatics.

three.

therefore, more myth. At the gate in Babylon,
we said (we the author, not the characters),
there was a statue of Venus (persian one)
and lots of lions. There, einstein talked about
only being able to see the tail of the lion.

for this reason (once more), we (the authors)
encourage you (the reader(s)) to explore the
concept of the buddha-like elephant, which cannot
be fathomed, but man can touch man, say Robin.

Four.

It is late. It is the middle of the night.
No fingers pointing to satellites, and I am
sure (I the present state) that there is Brahman
out there that oversees all. In the meantime,
since we do have a little atman to share, let

us consider the following. On Vashisht, there is
a cat (still replicating) and there is a man
(an info-man). Also, on Uranus (ah no they moved
to planet Fear), we’ve got Ariadne with the Never
Ender crew. what a coincidence.

Five.

Ariadne came to Knossos, near the source of this
spring water, a while back, and was looking for
her hair. The architect had a son, who also had
pissed on Helios’s dignity. For this reason, kids

I would like to make the following pronounce
ment. Please, please please. If you can avoid
it, do not piss off Helios, we’ve had enough
comet showers, and earth quakes, and volcano

Six.

eruptions. Well, this night, dearReader. I
think I myself shall not have any eruption.
the writing is pretty much done. The story
can take off if we start peering into dark

mirrors. Sean C is rather tired, the journey
from titan was so very long (approximately
three ages and some middle-way side-tracks).
So finally, the cat and the poem may rest.

Seven.

For now. My pen was at the bottom of a Beppo
page, but no more. If the X trusted mother
Theresa, then the X must trust us all. Con
sidering Brahman, a perishable word for an
unperishable concept. “The ship under sail
has surely passed the cape of Wada, driven
as it is by the mountain winds of Muko.”

Hokusai-san, share the secret of the wave
and the sacred mountain.

Eight.

On planet Fear, Ariadne reviews the troops.
Surely, chief strategist Zhuge Liang would
agree, one needs a little wind in one’s sails.
The NeverEnder harbours at port Labyrinth, a
place where the double axe marks the takeoff

spot. The wind is in the East, and all is
quiet on the Western front, or was it southern.
Duality, the horns of the dilemma, of course
that is why we are here. So Ariadne, black

Nine.

sails and all, sets sail (repetition, excuse
moi) toward Urania (mother goddess of the
snake, sky, earth and earth2). Back to Uranus,
then, but with a vengeance. On the way, we’d
like to stop over at the Water Planet, where

The Peak Civilization is having a bit of a
croissant, and the Veal civilization is definite
ly looking to put together the broken pieces
of his lions. Then the other, very significant

Ten.

civilization, stationed on planet Griffin, is
the 1206 merchant city-planet of another most
serene water-bound thing of the public. Res
publica superiorem non recognoscens, they say.

The also say, kill the dogs, especially if
they come from the south with ships laden
with black sails. This, of course, reminds me
that the Griffinese flag has been borrowed by

Eleven.

Some silly race of the north, one whose planet
has a capital built on a muddy river (of course)
and that uses a red cross on a white banner
to remind themselves of their allegiance to
the Griffinese.

So now that we’ve got the old alliances in place
the Griffinese with the Veal, the Peak and the
bastard race of the north (dicit a certain poet
whose book about a Crusoe shipwreck survivor

Twelve

endures in pockets of Post-prandia), we can
have ourselves a war. On the other hand the
forces opposing this alliance (famously spear
headed by Ariadne and the NeverEnder) are
rather scattered on the plain of Kurukshetra.

So first things first. Urania claims holy
water purification in the skylight water
basin. Then Ariadne, famously itching for

Thirteen

freedom, has a look at Planet Dionysus.
The black flags are still fluttering in
the wind, the Muko mountains breathe.

There once was a king, seated toward the
Helios the Titan, whose son travelled
to the Athenian school, and had his balls
cut off by the local version of Cretan

Forteen

games. Now these were not international
in kind, and the locals were rather un
fair in their unsportmanlikeness. So,
the bull-headed king had a rather bad

day, and declared war on the petty
Athenian school. But that was before
the Yamato Cave Academy, and much much
before the establishment of the Borovoe

Fifteen

earth station. Sean C and the cat are
still trouble-making by peering in the
dark mirror. The mountains loom and the
snow is thick. Ariadne is treading her
pace in search of the exit from the

local king’s harbour-bar. the place
of the double-axe is where the NeverEnder,
on its course toward Uranus has docked
in search of a little water, and a little

Sixteen

lamia. That is the one word that we
should avoid, considering how pissed
off the winds are when we head toward
the west, NeverEnder and all, with all

the cannons blazing, and the desire to
confront some issues that have been
(so to speak) hanging in mid-cosmos
for a few millennia (or was it billennia).

Seventeen

Fear, wonder, love. Onto the virgin lands
the NeverEnders (the officers and the cadets)
disembark. The Urania Goddess welcomes them
to the sky. Fortune Lobo tooks his Rabdoman

Call Junior (his Y-chromosome Wing) and
(I mean his personal spaceship, eh) flew
over to planet Poseidon (Roman name, Neptune).

Eighteen

there, he found a very sick planet, still
mourning for the loss of his people, the
people of the island of the Atlas.

On planet Vashisht, many years into the
space-bent future (or was it the past),
the dark mirror reflects monstruous echoes
of burning tigers in the candle light.

Nineteen

Ripples of the enemy and of fingers of
assiduous ravenousness. The ghost is to
be busted and the slithering voices are
to be ignored. The memory of early defeat

needs to be replaced by the advancing
perfection of the flow and the anger is
to be contained.

20.

The neverEnder sets sail for Titan, 2500
years from now the Buddha, the awakened one
died (but before that, he lived, and spun
wheels). 1500 years years into the future

(give or take), Sean C is peering into
the dark mirror. 1613 years before the
birth of the other prophet, whose name
now appears to escape me, Ariadne was born.

21.

She grew up, daughter of Minos, king of
Crete, and then she was snatched by Dyonisius.
She was immortalized, like Artemis.
i ariadni i lisi. women think up the strategy,
the solution of the problem. Ariadne, vritometis.
Artemis, vritometis.

So Ariadne directs the NeverEnder to Titan,
now abandoned. The probe Cassini once
travelled the oceans, and watched the waves.
It stopped at the mysterious island and

22.

fathomed the full many a gems in the depths
of ethane and methane seas. On Titan, the
probe found evidence of alien life, a sort
of loch ness creature in the depths of the

methane ocean. Now, feeding on hydrocarbons,
who in this world would ever think of that, eh?

23.

From the Labrys Harbour on Uranus, bade farewell
to Urania, the snake-Goddess of the south,
flew to Knossos station on Titan, and onto
the ocean sailing journey over the Kraken Mare

The sea there is deep, but there are no Korean
squids, just tiny hands of love that touch you
in all the right places during the restnight.

24.

Ariadne is still upset about her father, lost
a long time ago, and though he bequeathed a
sword to her, she’s only been practising behind
close doors, afraid of herself (rightly so)

unfortunately, she has never confronted a foe.
Ariadne, Immortalized Goddess, now captain of
the NeverEnder, is in the present incarnation
a speaker of the Peak language, but also loves

25.

bastard race of the north (west). Once at Knossos
station, she goes down to the basement
and performs a religious purification (with
methane, or was it methanol). the mysterious

island on Titan has been visited by the Vea race,
much before the demise of the Memorians, and
the rise of the oblivians. They named it (God
bless them) “the island of many saints”, though

26.

not much is left after a volcano and a tsunami
destroyed it (and the civilization on it).

The original name of the island (it was a
place where the race of Alexander must have
been, or said to have been) has been lost
though Ariadne is on it, doing research and

27.

Desert Storm (now back with the NeverEnder)
is helping her. All the crew are back together;
Tierra Madre has found the path to Zuracornia,
Gesunheit has found a plausible solution to
God’s algorithm (or was it g.o.d.’s).

Now they sail on the ocean deep, proud prow
remembering the siege and the burning of the
Yamato Hollow Cave, and mourning on the shores
of lybia. Memorians themselves, and found so.

28.

Sailing toward the mysterious island, now
discovered to be named after Thera, and they
probe the seas for carbon fiber. There is
something on the ocean floor. A mirror-like

shape, a liquid carbon phase. It speaks!
Yet it says nothing. “What of that, its
eye discourses”. The mirror eye sees every
thing, much like Odin in the well (or was

29.

up-side down hanging from a tree. What
ever). Ariadne, sub-methaned and all geared
she talkes to the eye-mirror, and she
laughs. it is time for john c to exit

the vashisht hide out, and for Cicciotta
to have dinner. The war is over, for now.

30.

Ariadne is mourning, and her love is strong.
Sean C is still in the making, Cicciotta
spider-weaves a traning suit. Zeus is not
dead, he is only sleeping. The Milky Way

is still pulsating, and the Philae Comet
is being ridden. Comet-riding is an ancient
activity (Monkey is good at it) and so is
comet-gazing (rabbit is very well versed).
31.

now the poem (not very well versed) is almost
done. I just have to find a way back,
cos John C is still stuck in the mud.

Ariadne is still lost to Dyonisius,
and the long, melanchololy withdrawing
roar of the Sea of Faith is still echoing
stronger and stronger every day.

32.

What will Fortune Lobo find of Poseidon’s
planet? What destiny awaits Gawain, now
asundered from Monkey? Will the NeverEnder
find the core of Titan, and will the dark

mirror on Planet Vashisht spew out more
lamias and demons? Will the eye-mirror
on Thera tell the truer truth, or not at
all? Will la belle dame sans merci

33.

(transiently stationed at a bank) ever
send a message to the the cold hill side?
All these questions, and more, will have
to be addressed.

But as Michael Ende once told Bastian,
these tales shall be told, but they
shall be told another time.

Chapter VI

I.

Fight. Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.
Palpitating, alive – still. Down in the pendulum
the entanglement of particle and wave, where
the duality is boson-glued, and anger is speeding

down the universal rabbit golf course. Per
turbation of Neptune and Saturn, is where Titan
comes in. In the Murakamian well, once the cat
is gone, and the lady is also gone, the biologi
cal quanta are at once light and darkness

II.

Objects existing onto two places at once.
In the grid, existence is frequency-hopped.
The chirp modulation is rf-oscillated

the spectrum of the chirp corpse is where
John C comes in, all digitalized and shit
and so he moves to fourier-transform the
hell out of every living and non-living

moment and mode of vibration. The great
exo-comets, the exons and the meteror
showers, they all come into the gigantic
analougue cytoplasm where they are con
verted into single apparition comets, and

their vintages are fully formed, so that
anger boards the NeverEnder, and the potential
is attempting the realization, once again.

III.

Dead brides. The Zen teaching of Huang Po
and some such adapter trimming are the
food of today’s digitalized enter-prize.

We’re all mad here. But it’s ok. The
Heisenberg-Rashomon effect indetermines
what’s what and what’s not. Or really,
we can’t really measure the Jabberwock.

“We don’t see these weird states because
they collapse whenever we try to measure
them”. Hence the Jabber-wacky.

What is time? The ever-rolling grin
is behind me, John C is in wonder
land. Nothing puzzles me further.

Stop retreating, scorpion! The
verdict of the wise is that birds
are mocking, duality in the X
is phatomable. Full many a swan
is white, the summer is ever
ending, and the lovers squeak

IV.

and quibble. What have we learnt?
Desert Storm is starting to know
and Fortune Lobo is exploring the
ubi-verse. The Gawain-Monkey is
lost in a sea of bullshiviousness

it’s ok. keep going forward on
the relativity ladder, and the
pelt and bog and pendulum will
suddenly make sense.

the theory survives the test
hardly innocent. never make
a sound. vulnerable karma is
not for me, my friend. lesson
learnt well, not? One cannot

curve space without time as
well. Time has a shape. Is
it one-directional? Or does
it just appear to be so?

V.

Gilles, the friend from Canada
sold his house for a dream.
the safety of the murakamian
well is not reached easily

it is safer not to write, not
to share. Bubble up, forbidden
memories or some else will ride
you. The replicant sheep, the
android goats, the robot, the
worker learns his lesson well.

VI.

Or not. Duck, you sucker. The
Mocking Bird or the Potter the
Rotter, or the Picture of Dorian
pendulum under the laburnum tree.

Just write. At this point it
does not matter anymore. John,
John. Or was it Sean? Juan and
John. No baptisms here, but Salome
indeed does cut across the cheese.

VII.

The Neutral Kimura Theory and the Select
ionist Haldanism, as well as the Great
Crested Grebeism, and the final epigenomic
solution, are all the ingredients to the
soup which John C is cooking. The grid
may be small now, but there is room
for aggressive Joker-clerical expansion.

VIII.

Chubby the cat is reading the book
which I am writing, as I go along.
Down in the pit, the inquisitive mind
is alone with Carl Jung Syncronicity,
a little bit of plum pudding and the
flow and its power. That’s all we need,
yo.

Now, induced synchronicity, low in the
pit-grid, is what John C is osculating.
His digitalized oneiric human form is
opinion-changing, charged and dynamic
and also oscillatory, and dual.

XI.

The grid as a Maxwell field, a power
ful wave-to-particle reticulum, endo-less
plasmatic-less, but all the shebang way
to the speed of light. Mr Biological
Kammener’s seriality is what Cicciotta
the cat is having for pudding (obviously
while reading the book that I am writing).

Long velocity, short position.
The Rashomon-Heisenberg effect is dual
enough for breakfast. John C’s last
stand before cooking the charge of
gnostic neutrinos mixed with boson-glue
and all the byronostromical complaints
you might voice, DearReader.

X.

A rose by another stench would sunflare
as sweet. Grave electro-magnetic mistakes
gravitational fingers upyoursing the moon
doubts and fears, all the arsenal of the
grid warfare. Wander-land is the earth
(and Titan) outside the Murakamian Well.

Digitalized John C finds it very diffi
cult to focus on mind-not-matter.
“and then it jumped on me”, quotes the
inner Cheshire Cat. Beata Giovinezza.

XI.

‘Gee. All this grid-talk is un-bear-able.’
Gawain says this. While Monkey is having
a wank. ‘But the string of synchronicities…’
is the unfinished arguments put forward
by gentle Desert Storm. The latter, while
having a test drive

on Titan, found the
lost forgotten disks of time-space travel
describing the trip of eleven-years from
now, down the golf field, all the way up
the himmel-laya to meet the lamas and camels
and the numerous children of the maha country.

XII.

Fortune lobo, instead, now warrior-like,
exits downstage toward BruceLee Planet,
full of water and fire, all unfettered
and shit, though still doubt-wary, he’s
a peachy lucky Ulysses on a day trip.

Or a year. Or you-know-what. The un-bear
able heaviness of youth-stars.

‘I got the message, bellezza’, is what
the upcoming warrior blabbers while fight
ing his own personal war with the ubi-
verse divisive asynchronism.

XIII.

But then Gawain asunders Monkey
the latter continues to pillage
and rape the planets and platelets
he joyrides the figures and the figura
tive speeches of all georgian fabulousness
all the desires of romantic amour-rouseness.
all the concentrical fractals fractured.

XIV.

‘Love-making is what we chiefly need,
Chubby’, John C de-oscillates just to
pee out of the web-grid-Max-Well-flow-
thinge.

‘Asynchronous pissing, is all you need’
Chubby is increasingly weary, replicantly
petulant. ‘To the point of being redundant
you need to rhein-in your heterogeneity,
for fuckety fuck’s sake.

XV.

But John C is determined, impersonating
the empty non-existent white Calvino Knight
and perhaps also the happy-go-lucky Bramante

XVI.

‘I was very sick, dear Cat.
The first being on the flow-grid is to be
formed as “poenas in the snowstorm”.
You like that?’

‘Yeah’, Cicciotta says. ‘A little to the
right’.

XVII.

Handsome Monkey not yet King, out of cave
and into doomsday. Saturn’s rings-counting.
Uranus above Kandahar, Ladakh over Cassiopea.
Double-agent monkey head, constellation by
proxy. Evaporating peaks on Monkey Head Nebula.
Down at the library, the ghost-in-mind
all being being busted. Something strange,
in this galaxy. Who is being called?
Monkey is not afraid. The first being on
the Max-Well-Web is a spider at the centre

XVIII.

of the grid. Still, observant. Waiting for
the blade runner unit orange eggs to hatch.
Spider-Monkey is very hairy, spawned by the
sickly woven mind of Sean C, down the pit,
out of your real horizon, what a double-star.

the rain on the web is interspaced with empty
ness. from orion, a new star is growing.
cappella is golden-hued. artemis was not
pleased with either orion or with the ursa
major. luckily for us, there is more than

XIX.

satellite to charge up the shingle. On
Titan, Sean C is slowly building the
digital girth. the sick thoughts of plate
lets are spinning, after all, 15 centuries
have past since the last argument about

the missing prophet and the interpretation
of the words has gone semantically berserk.
Decelerating, Uranus’s genitials gave birth
to Aphrodite. Sky being what it is, there
is little evidence of anything other than
the eternal cum.

XX.

Gaia and Uranus, also, of course, produced
the satellite creatures on which Sean C lives,
and among which there is a certain Cronos,
the castrator, friend to man, not to woman.
But to the matter, the Titanic task at hand,

on the saturnine globe, encircled by Maxwell
and Huygens gaps, is the description of the
molecular cloud, the interstellar gas, and
the brain games now serving on this week’s

XXI.

satellite dish. Once again, as at the start
of the molecular pathway, Mozart’s notes are
resounding across the westward hubble bobbles.
The magic spells of Shakespeare touch upon
winter’s discontent, linger on the house of

York, and move on to distilled honey-dews,
while the plague is raging outside, we may
cozy up and huddle and cuddle, and tea-drink
(of course, potion-less, opossum-less).

XXII.

As at the start, in medias res, of this
never-ending story, Ariadne is sitting,
listening to music, while thinking about
the deep field, the majestical fires fretted

with golden glues and some music resounds.
rain pours down the soul-drain, oscar wilde
voices raise from reading gaol, dorian gray
imaging brings about more vernacular, and
on the grid, the second being is in the pro

XXII.

cess of gestation. Water, ammonia and methane
are what we need from Uranus and Neptune.
Ariadne is leading the NeverEnder toward these
blue planets, the gravitational pull is pretty

intense. The crew of the NeverEnder is jubilant.
The summer triangle is now sinking very low in
to the west, and at the gray havens, all the
talk is about which direction to take toward the
lands ever blest. Linguistically, though, we

XXIII.

might say that we lack advancement, and lack the
skill to steer the mightly NeverEnder toward safe
shores. The thing is, one must admit at some
point, is that the milky way is way too short
a day trip (pun intended) for just about any

kafka-reading, intensity-riding heterogeneous
Sean C, or Monkey cub, or even angry ape. So,
Ariadne leads the way, and the NeverEnder follows.
November is home to Perseus and Cassiopea.
The sky is clear, and the night is deep.

XXIV.

So many things to say, and so little time.
Cronos! You’re such a biatch. More to the
purpose, there once was a girl, John C.

Shit! The second being on the grid’s gotta
have a vagina? Please, please, please no!
A persian high, a hebrew exhalted, a turkic
shadow across the Borovoe mother land.

XXV.

Mother to Persia, sun of the east, and
westward-honed. But of course, John C
lost the tracks, and of course the hills
are high, and the lions and the tigers
and all the lynxes of this world are

populating the dark forest. so, then.
And so it happens, Ariadne, Uranus-bound,
is in tune with her sexuality. Her love,
perhaps only love is the sword, and also

XXVI.

perhaps there is something more. The
other being, the third, on the grid,
is the infinite vastuosity of cloud
space; so while we are on the cloud,

we may have a look at the ubi-versal
criterion of divine distinction. So
here there is all the material for spi
ritual congestion, and all the rest

XXVII.

of it. On Neptune, the wave-particle
reader of the NeverEnder is going ball
hooney. Cappella looks perfectly white
to the naked eye. Star-gazing, comet-gazing
God-willing. There is so much to see.

In this incarnation, Monkey-Gawain has
a duty to star-gaze, cytoplasm-riddle
and rob all the words of their mendacity.

XXIX.

Weeks of attention, days of discovery.
Paul said it, we’ll all be fine! Now
if Paul said it, then lah-dee-dah. But
there is always a head-butt. So one then

needs to find something to collide with.
the NeverEnder is manned for interstellar
exploration. Monkey-Gawain is womanned
for interstellar copulation, and the rest

of the spiri-tooual crude is too power
hungry to be even considered.

XXX.

Odd, quite obviously. The bottom edge
of discourse lacks mobility. The Never
Ender is not equipped for fighting. The
god-mobile is everywhere, and the tech
nological dis-ease is rising, and the

voices of poison-deep are multiple.
so Sean C considers his options. In
the grid, the spider web is growing.
Wait, linger, let the enemy nibble.

XXXI.

In the ubi-verse, granted there is much
to tron about, and much to discuss about
the character-descriptions, but all the
Desert Storms of this world, the Tierra
Madres, the Fortune Lobos, the Flexas,
the Ariadnes, the Sean Cs, and all the
other characters of this story cannot
even begin to phatom the relentless

XXXII.

wheel of the engine, sinking deep
into the flesh of my spirit. Oh
dearReader, have mercy, I lack advance
ment. Tame, I am not. There is much
to tell, but no words can describe
the narrative threads coming loose,
the ubi-versal explosions on the shores
of orion, and all the rest of the
stories all happening at once in the
oceanus of great belief and dis-belief.

XXXIII.

Sir, I lack advancement. Here is to the
matter, every thing is very much like a
camel or a cloud, depending on how you
look at it. The rains of Londinium tran
scend the rains on Titan. The methane
is drinkable, the Murakamian third, forth
wall come down.

XXXIV.

So Ali and Nino, or Ninah and Aliya. The
forth being on the grid is the eternal
force of duality, the chaos-eros theorem.
God’s algorithm has impeding priorities.

Following the flow of the mind-matter
is one synchronous bitch. Meditation,
not copulation, the wise men said. Though
some Dyonisian elysiacs also discuss
the nature of love, and the mystic

XXXV.

Capacity of third and forth wall crumbling.
Begin at the beginning. The grid.

XXXVI.

Spider (web), exhalted-one, cloud, duality.
What shall it be?
Oscillations and greater fragmentations.
Unity and discourse. NeverEnder journey-ing.

XXXVII.

I, no longer I. There once was a book, writ
ten in the age of space travel, when humans
were discussing Laputa, and other missions.

‘Island’, it was. The mystical writer led
charge on the notion of literature-science
on the virtues of ecological sustained society,
of peace, and tolerance, and acceptance of

destiny.

XXXVIII.

Now, destiny is where the NeverEnder comes
in. Unexplored territory, the mystic mountain
a bright cross in the Carina Nebula. The
top of it, an archer’s hand. Could it be
the spirit of Artemis, reaching all the way
in the vast star-forming foaming regions of
the way-galaxy, hungry for milk, breast
feeding from the ubi-versal galactic tit?

XXXIX.

But the Milky way and Andromeda are headed
for a colossal head-butt. In about four
billion years we shall meet the unfractured
voice of God. A single elliptical galaxy
will be formed in about 6 billion years.

We shall all pay dearly for Cassiopea’s
arrogance and hubris. That figures. Pin
it down to one beautiful and vain lady.

XL.

So, the Carl Jung permitting, Perseus
will find his Pegasus. Allow access to
spiritual energy, and access the realm
of the Gods on mount Olympus. But not yet.

The shaman mount, the water, the solar
myth, the siren-charger. The spring, the
well, the thunder and the lightning.
Pegasus, born from okeanos, well of the
cilicians, and from the distance of this
one very humble murakamian well, it is

XLI.

one computer simulation away. Once
Andromeda will come crashing through,
the lights will come on, and the storm
will have more than one poena, and the
light of the gaseous vertebrate will
shine beautifully.

XLII.

Crash of the Titans, well.
From the simulation on Titan’s night
the desire for future is almost as
hungry as for the desire for Pegasus
riding. Look out onto the night sky.
Andromeda may be so far away, but
Perseus-Monkey may just have to wait
long enough for a head-on collision.

XLIII.

In the depth of night fall,
when time is bounty, and scarce
is the horror, where the dead souls
rise and talk, the living creatures
sleep, the trees wave and tremble.
Willows calmly weep,
Ash-trees hide sulking uber-squirrels,
foxes, in families, come out foraging.

the beauty of the serene city,
surrounded by walls of sadness.

XLIV.

during this long, protected hour
before the sun again spins toward
the head of our life, in the shadows
all souls can find solitude and rest.

on the horizons of the ocean,
the last remnants of sea life
in the deep well, the fountain of
former lives, please go to sleep.

XLV.

I am sure this conversation already
happened. The fragile path, the smell
of the night. The White Plague on the
rampage, the moonlit mountains re-mind
of me.

The chorus from within the volcano,
the long procession of amends, the
delicate hands of the night’s shades.

XLVI.

Clutched by the still of the night,
all sorrow moves toward the love of you.
Brief candles cast in the ocean-sky.
Pontus and Uranus in the dark cloak of
night. On this day and night of all souls

the prayers and thoughts linger, galaxies
drum and beetles crawl, the wind is rising,
the breath of the eternal in full sweep.

XLVII.

Per aspera, ad astra. Tradunt.
Hence the nocturnal majestical roof
is fretted with hundred thousand, a hundred
million souls, all dancing and pulsing

well until the dawn churns out another spin.

XLVIII.

On the NeverEnder’s road, the bells are
ringing, well within the echo of MayFair’s
lovely streets. The tower in darkness is mute,
the twinkle and sprinkle of water and of light
descends onto former lovers, and onto the land.

Earth is still living, the giant trees of the
green park are witnessing a still echo of astro
logical clouded dream.

XLIX.

There, the heart of the writer is fooled,
folly is the love of You. Crimson path ahead,
the absolute solitude at the centre of the
grid, even eternal distances, boundless time
feels so narrow.

The crescent moon, the dolphin call,
there the heart is beating, calling, calling
calling at the equinox of stillness.

L.

Multiple voices on all souls night, all
clustering in the alhambra. the pearls
in the emerald darkness, bonfires dot the
pulsating himmel, lying stretched like a poem.

LI.

God-mobile declares the invasion of Titan.
Sudden bombardment takes Sean C unawares
It hurts to be set free. Never follow him,
it seems. Soft lies, being destroyed.

We tried to love, and hence the End approaches.

LII.

War!

So swordplay swishes on the whale’s way,
Shield shuck fighters with ships play
With sheer shoregunners ashore.
Sea-paths, seacliffs and the shingled shore
Are the place of the dead for ever more.

Sea-faring ships shell the land
With flames striking sea and sand
On the shores of Titan showdown comes
With sheepshank fighters and the world’s done.

LIII.

From foamy-necked floaters come waders on shoals
They swim to shallows to crawl ashore.
Welding their souls with marshes, mires and dunes
They cry their war-cry, finely attuned.

But the weaponed men are gunned down shoring
Bullets pelt them down boring
Cracking bones and head, soaring.
Sea-stormed, limb-naked, swung
Men are on awaiting sheer cliffs flung.

LIV.

Sherrying off under shells,
Shilly-shallying as gunfire shills
Shrill shrieks and shright shrieks,
Thrilling.

Shill blasts blunder shifting men
Shilpit are now the swifter men,
For a shim of life remains,
As the world-candle shimmers.

LV.

The shock of death on a shoestring,
Waders are shot, the shots sting.
The sheen of the sun glistens,
And the quiet beach listens.

Groaning men in shiver:
Blood
Is the shed of the river.

Ships in swirls, swishing, sink.
Silence comes in a wave’s blink.

LVI.

Walk-on part in the war, all the
way. Bermondsey, Borovoe and Titan
all under under V2 bombardment.

All the way, in the 21st century,
Baghdad and Kobane are being sieged.
What have found? The same old mistakes.

the old adage, the night is darkest…

LVII.

The wind may rise and fall again,
we are like leaves… you know.

LVIII.

So on his death-bed, Mr Mescaline
wrote about Shakespeare and Religion,
a new voyage is due for the NeverEnder.
Planet Compton may soon see the blue-red
prow of the NeverEnder rise up the Ascalot

road. The process of spider-weaving may
be long, and of course the lady of the
castle may still have a little issue
with freedom. So then, in the Murakamian
well, all needs to be digitalized carefully.

LIX.

So therefore, we come now to the publishing
of the archive. Sean C escapes down the hatch
with Chubby onto the safe(r) location of
planet Vashisht. There, he regroups and plans
the strategy for the NeverEnder, since after

all, Monkey and Ariane are under his command.
The Auryn has been traced all the way to
Ariane’s command. Monkey is a loose cannon,
and the brigade may or may not come along.

LX.

The NeverEnder is now stationed on Planet
Fear, where some Byron-Wildean cannons are
being fitted. Also, other guns. Shelleyan
missiles, Shakespearean mines, Miltonian
guilt-riders. Even an Huxleyian Reason blazer
is being fitted in this last, desperate
attempt for self-defence.

But the last, perhaps unreasoned fit
is the subtle particle gun shooting
tiny picogold fragments into the source
dna code. the bullets, perhaps made of
an ancient mould, smithereen-like.

LXI.

The alloy is made of several compounds
which we may or may not care to enumerate.
In the mean time, a very very mean time,
Mr Cronos is scheming and whining
all the more reason to hide Uranus’s balls.

Which brings us to Ariadne, which having
foraged at Uranus moved the self-aware
ship toward Planet Fear to reflect on
the nature of Shiva, and the reason for
all the war-drumming in the ubi-verse.

LXII.

In a pause between slices of war, and the
echo of silence, all the insignificance
of anger. So back to the source of civi
lization. And that’s not a certain Syd.

Let us say that, the north gate of Babylon
was built in honour of Ishgat, and she was
one mean lady. Let us also say that, if
one decides to go ballistic, one may start
to build Palazzo Ducale with quantum gravity.

LXIII.

Roasted cashew nuts on Arolithos, Crete.
The moon is a disk seen from the reflection
of the earth. On another planet, the reflection
of the moon of Titan is one of relative war.

In the journal of Astrophysics, it was recent
ly reported that Helios (the titan) was very
very cross. The statues at Rhodes has collapsed,
the thieves and the raiders got to it (usual
God-mobile people, and the like).

LXIV.

for this reason, the argument on Planet
Vashisht is the following. A) can one
stick everything into a dark mirror B)
can one read from the dark mirror C) can
space/time be bent/transcended/essentially
can we travel through time from one of those
wormholes or dark mirrors and stuff.

LXV.

In answer to A) we get the NeverEnder (the
poem, that is, and one work of (c)art is
never abandoned, only unfinished). Follow
ing B) yes one can, but one can’t understand
shit (hence Teesan can only understand if
Sean C starts to hum subtitles. on the subject
let us be clear. No fucking subtitles).

LXVI.

In answer to C) yes of course, yo. That is
the whole point of this sheenanigan. the point
is, ladies and roughmen, that all of the
ball honey (and all of it) happens at once in
some M-theory Mystical Revelation (collapsed

gravitational pull) and the super and little
stringlets of this shmuck can be best described
by the following statement: follow the dark
horse, read the story in the dark mirror. chew
bubblegum and kick butt. Now that was cheap…

Chapter 5

1.

light perpetually ultra, passencore
tumult of sparkles, humanoid crowd
fireworks for wedding poisons and vows
an indoctrinated mafioso and an astonished

face. Fortune Lobo can’t believe his
luck as he is tripping onto opossum tea
while being logged on to the X. Death
by future, memory of the day of wrath

2.

g.o.d.’s algorithm is merciless, testing
the resolve of a faultering cadet. The
planet of Swappistan is closing in around
him. On the second day of his sojourn,
he met the most peaceful sight in all

the uni-verse. fallen into Murakamian
colour, he has. Before the throne of
love he has laid down his emotions. The
ugly head of resurrected doubt stares

3.

at him from a deeper, wider, more
judgemental ubi-verse. The object of
his adoration is a non-object. A myst
ical mirage has befuddled his reason,
clouded his mind, addled his drugs.

the thin air around the rarefied
temple, painted in colossal red, spectre
of a pool of water, overlooked by
an eagle. Time, which must have stopped

4.

calls him back from the grave of idealists
the violins and the thiolins pull him
back toward reality (John C knows that
there is no salvation from alzheimer)

he wishes to find more of himself in
the vessel of unknown circumstances,
while spinning high on opossumite, the
young cadet paints dreams with scarlet

5.

the throb quality of his sexual focus
points toward the girl who said she’d
swing by. All else has stopped, the party
continues upstairs, the cerebrative

union of Arsehallah and his migrainfriend.
Fortune Wolf, sheepish in devotion, frees
a sigh in search of more call of the wild.
he begs the algorithm for another escape.

6.

All virtue and all sin on Swappistan is
tightly regimented, so all lovers must
die of thirst, or become alcoholics. Hence,
Arsehallah has found peace between mast

urbation and little-water drinking, tucked
away, all his dark thoughts simmer inside
a smothered soul, a rag of a beast. Desert
Storm has gone missing, probably in search

7.

of Swappistan’s highest peak. A wisteria
of feeling descends upon the west-ward
brigade, everything they believe is wrapped
in doubt, for a moment they whisper love

to each other’s ears. Rabbit does the atom
justice, all that’s left of Billow-vehicle.
Holding it up like a mirror, Rabbit
compares the atom to the force of the

8.

star. The sun, now far and away, yet
growing so strong as to swallow the
tail of earth and menace the system
with one wistful gulp. the day of tears

has come. the uncontainable solar
plexus has eaten up cake and corona
John C and the cat are saved; a sinister
warning to their future status on Titan.

9.

John C is aware of a growing disease,
which is eating away at his mental state.
Chubby the cat is witnessing the withering
of his intellect. Free from judgement, yet

memory comes and goes, and the upload-down
load continues, so long as the finger can
click, and the mind can blank out for a sec.
The ipse opossum trickery can be accused

10.

but the truth is that John C’s meta dynamics
and due to dysregulation of his chromatin,
the TET-hungry enzymatic climax chews on his
stability, while the weather does the rest.

Salome, the migrainfriend whom we’d like to
adore, is just around the corner, ready to
spring forth with maternal caninity. Ready
to fold, is Fortune Wolf, while Desert Storm

11.

on the peak of the country, idle and free
looks down at the fly-infected horizon,
and delicious memories of future past are
settled like an earthwake on the now

so that her magical beret on her head
points skyward, the green sky reflects
her metaphysical state, so ornamental,
and yet so sublime. She knows that in order

12.

to discover more she needs to sit atop
all trouble and look inside, while the cat
languishes in her heart, and the wave of
feeling comes close to being an intrusion

but it is actually a wall, something to
be circumvented. spring the wall, young
Desert Storm, for the love of God! you
have a chance to take jack butler yeats
13.

from the collar and splash through
all those painted limits, let the water
colour of artistic illusion be the
lightning rod that it is, and transcend

all boundary toward another dimension,
far from Swappistan and Borovoe, altogether
another world with far other shadows.
We’d like to have another interview, so

14.

Let us approach our unwanted heroes. Desert
Storm, dear, let me ask you a question:
why suddenly so autumnal? The fall on
Gawain-Monkey’s head is a master-stroke.

Guilt hangs like a canterville painting
stabbed through the chest and behind the
screen, and all other emotion is hidden
from sight because the Monkey is crying

15.

inside, while dining on buffetteries
at the air-station while gizillion
swappistanis cerebrate the union of
sloth with wealth, and the smoke is

thick, and the cream of sex is buttery,
gunfights are in order, and the slaves
in the kitchen labour away, because they
should be grateful, we are told. They

16.

are lesser beings, Arsehallah assures,
theretofore outside the mansion, the
villas and the folkloristic arrangements
child slaves offer wuthering roses to

strangers in stages of paedophilia,
while the kindest of prophets, his
mother beside him, offers a paraphenalia
of justification. Such is the life on the

17.

alien planet. Yet would you not say,
it somewhat resembles the rattles
and battles of the solar stumble,
the terrestrial tinge where all is

fine as long as it is swept under the
carpet-table-bed-destiny-famine. So,
Fortune Lobo in love, Desert Storm in
incantation, Rabbit in food depression

18.

Vehicle cursed and crushed into a green
atom, while the rider, Gawain-Monkey
remembering another life of his, decides
that it would be time to look for a

beheaded friend, and scrambles for the
attention of his companions, though
apathy has had the better of them, and
the teachings-in-a-bead lie scattered

19.

all throughout the uni-verse. Since all
is silent, the dead planet Zhuangzang
echoes his woes from behind the subatomic
grave, and the ripples of cosmic feuds

spread like bouncing lights off the recoiling
surfaces of multiple planetoids and stars,
everything in the ubi-verse stare at us,
with biting intensity and shattering rhythm.

20.

In the Jurassic era, poetry was written on
polished stones, rudimentary lichen sketches
traced aesthetics onto algal relationships.
The NeverEnder has long sailed past Titan.

Chubby wishes to remember the valiant dead,
friends of other times, and Marvell-ous places.
Gawain-Monkey unleashed monomania, starring
across the dim-witted uni-verse. Scattered,
unfriendly, all the thoughts of unity are

21.

Left behind. Long ago, there was friend in
need. Gawain’s mentor recruited him through
an Argentinian mussel. The Green Knight, a
headless chicken with amphibian desire had

landed from across the Colombian water on
to the shores of planet MineEnd, where Gawain
had shipwrecked on his way to the outer borders
of the ubiquitous uni-verse, and chocolate mixes.

22.

The Green Knight had long been split into two
halves. A head without a heart, and a body
without a mind. The endless battle between the
two had raged since day one of decapitation.

John C is downloading his own memory from
the hub of gits and of bloody course, tis been
tampered with. Rashomon effect, all over the
squeaking ball, a dreamer must learn how to chew.

23.

Long before being sent on Titan by the authority,
John C had applied for a supplementary dreamer
post at the Borovoe Academy. The commander in chief
of the institution decided to let the cat out

of the bag, and allow Gawain Monkey to take place
amongst the serendipitous sublimes who ruled the
Boccherini choices and steered the NeverEnder
well clear of lethargy and morular decisions.

24.

The Green knight offered monumental relief to
Gawain Monkey, inviting him into his rose garden
and sharing manna-dew over the derriere of queen
flowery-arse the secondette.

Now the flowery-butt girl did not first announce
derelection and woeful eye-to-give, but as the
summer peaked on the Borovoe steppe, the bogs let
out the final fart, and the swine reality came

25.

forth. The melody of the summer is always the
delight of the birdies, and the sound of water.
Gawain Monkey was but a teenee weenee liberatus,
seeking counsel in the great and glorious Green
knight, master of cloud summer-sault, and holder

of the twice-beat golden key to secret riches.
The sky was clear, the moon was dark during the
day, zombic clouds hovered over moonstruck trees.
The multiple incarnations of loves over the golf
course streamed out of the woods onto the lawn.

26.

Gawain-Monkey was assaulted by an army of dead
lovers, and mister hob-knob, Green Knight of Caledonia
Hibernia and the needle’s silver coin led the
charge onto the dark summer wintry air. Streams

of lovely kisses came showering from all over
Borovoe, and the grandeur of the event was remarked
in the local papers. “Zombie army assaults Monkey”.
The delights of juvenalia. Another moment, and

27.

We might have remembered, en passent, that Monkey
was orphaned out of a rock, shat onto the mountain
top, stumbled across the abyss, streaked a momentary
bliss, drunk the honey-dew of knowledge, past the

cave of watershed, onto many adventures which we
may or may not venture to discuss, and crashed on
to the gate of Dr Green Knight, esteemed coll-ague.

28.

In autumn, all the mussels came ashore, and the steppe
was bathed in cold nippy dusty sledge-hammer snow.
Adagio for Tron, and its legacy.

It seems that Dr Green Knight did not envisage
fighting for the users after all. His moustache
was wet, and his feet were webbed.

He came into being onto a desert planet, while
a hermit was pissing from on high.

29.

Dr Green Knight has lost his way. In the
shades of fall, the stellar decadence
those ripe moments of novembral cadence
when all comets shower and crumble

and the meaning of existence shatters
because perception is stabbed by hallo
weenish pretensions.

At that time, when the cycles of one
planet reflect the string cycles of
multiple white guelfi comedies

30.

That’s the time in which we are speak
ing now, you and me, dearReader. There
is much to be said. Of the NeverEnder,
its spectangular destiny unspoken, we
shall not pass.

Of the detriment of clonal cats, and
of distinguished memory loss routines,
of that, we shall say a little.
31.

In the digital frontier, where the
decline of roman and etruscan mollusks
is catalysed by aspera-astra oscillations

there on the tronic grid, there we shall
meet to discuss on whether or not you have
a clu of what the hell I am talking about.

32.

joke. caught ya. I was being serious.
On the byronic shore of a Greek island,
we may discuss of juan and haydee, or
whatever her name was.

the point being, should John C retrieve
his memory or not. And here is where you
can get to cast your vote, dearReader.
Let’s make this a democratic process. or

33.

not. In the Murakamian well, John C
switches on the discoursive waters.
he then starts to home in onto the lagoon
of solitary confinement. the blue colours

remind him of his long lost pond.
the bog where he grew up near Borovoe.
the advancing retreat of shizo-frenzy
is capitalizing on his doubt.

34.

On the other hand, the immortal anger
of Gawain-Monkey needs to be looked at
more in particular. On the distant fireball
planet, the one too close to the star

to be particularly habitable, there Mr
Gawain-Monkey decided to take his holiday
after a short training with Green Knight.

35.

Other teachers were available, but Green
Knight was convincing, and his sirenic voice
was very imposing. Gawain was lost in the woods,
in search of a missing jigsaw, and Monkey was
riding the horses to sexual hec-stasey.

Now, I am not going to sleep. And I would
like a little attention. Are you busy, super
busy?

36.

Going back to the adventurers, Gawain-Monkey
is being tortured by remni-sce, and looks out
at the impending globe of fire that is grinning
with ominous fortitude at the merry brigade.

Rabbit is holding the atom-vehicle spirit,
in digitalized attention toward meditation,
but only realizing half a medallion and a pig.

37.

Fortune Lobo has his eyes fixed on the green gases
the swine-blue hues of delirious joy, the time
of peace of senses, the space of empty glasses.

as they travel throughout the galazies, the platelets
whirl and buzz like cosmetic cosmi, and the stars
look like fortnum and mason china-aware.

The uni-verse is throbbing with elegance and
anger, and the rightful space is the vanaglorious
ego, where the void ends, and the time begins.

38.

In the well, John C is indulging in sexual thoughts.
Then, the waters rise, and the realization that
time is short or eternal make it difficult to sieze
the night. The clonal cat has finally come to the
realization that its ancestor was murdered.

Cicciotta was murdered by a jealous bitch.
Dogs will be gods, though, so it seems.

Chubby, rest in peace.

39.

Dr Green Knight escaped the uni-verse to hide
in mountain and into very schemious wife, producing
two off-springs. From hence, all patience holds.

John C stirs the pot of his insidious St Theresa
ex-stasy, and the desire to come together with
his own falsitude and his depreviousness.

Krishna, the old fellow, seems to have come
down the galactic staff to remind Gawain-Monkey
that the indulgitude on this battle is not accept

40.

able at all. Dr Green Knight is coming to the party.
It seems that they are travelling on voidy space
and that the Desert Storm girl is driving. Oh woe
is me! The physicists in the hall, please raise

your hand at the idea of Desert Storm driving.
Scream! She’s just a peach, though please do not
eat. East is east. They are travelling fast on the
galactose belt, the vomit of former godditudes.

41.

And so finally we come to the start of the story.
Artemis, Goddess of the hunt, bless this narrative
with your archery and your anger.

Apollo, God of the poesy, bless this story
with the waters of your wasted love.

Eros may be chaotic, or some son-in-law
but all of scheming eternity cannot prevent
us from hailing other voices from out there.

42.

Out here. In the beginning, when ‘Ar var alda’,
then skopun heimsins, and so behold the cow.

There was a gap, and what an abyss.

Fire on one hand, poison-ice on the other.
And then the trickle. Fuckety fuck.

43.

Krishna, Krishna!
I see the mantis talking to itself,
and such omens of evil!

How can this obliviousness be real?
Well, Krishna might say. It is obvious.

But not to me! What is this hologram?
Why does dance-zheimer catch up avec moi?
Why does Job have no job these days?
Why the anger and the fall?
Why death, and the end of hope?
Why did that friend of yours die on you?

44.

Krishna, Krishna!
As I stand on the plain of kurukshetra,
I see no voice in the mirror, no silence in
the void.

I see no end to suffering. The NeverEnder
may cycle and blasts its way around the spring,
all the way to the interwoven string, but
theory or practice, all seems to fail us.

45.

“You and I, Arjuna,
Have lived many lives.
I remember them all:
You do not remember.

I am the birthless, the deathless
Lord of all that breathes
I seem to be born:
It is only seeming,
Only my body.
I am still master
Of my mind.

When goodness grows weak,
When evil increases,
I make myself a body.

In every age I come back
To deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner,
To establish righteousness.

He who knows the nature
Of my task and my holy birth
Is not reborn
When he leaves this body:
He comes to me.

Flying from fear,
From lust and anger,
He hides in me
His refuge, his safety:
Burnt clean in the blaze of my being,
In me many find home.

Whatever wish humans bring me in worship,
That wish I grant them.
Whatever path humans travel
Is my path:
No matter where they walk
It leads to me.”

46.

Suddenly the brigade is at the end
of the uni-verse. The frog-bead has been
retrieved. All one needed to do is to go
to Swappinstan and avoid falling in lust.

And yet, there is more. There is a lot more.
What is the NeverEnder about, and where is
it headed?

The teachings of the swapped thru-true-truths
may have been revealed, but the incarnation
of John C in Gawain-Monkey is not yet through.

47.

It is time now to enter the grid. From the
Murakamian well, John C carefully selects
the memories and the characters of this story
to digitalize and to punch through the

oscillations and the fragmentations of
this obnubilating story. The karmic load
is such that the void empties the space
and the opening is for all the bodies to

48.

fall through like the stateroom scene
of Groucho’s night at the opera.

49.

So bear with us, dearReader. If you can
extend your patience a little longer,
you might see a thread in this tale of
cloudatlassness.

CHAPTER IV.

I.

There is a red-hot lava planet that’s Coruscant-leaning,
and with a thin silver lining, a rather disturbing place
to which the tale must be directed to, at this point of
the stream. The planet’s chief emotional force, source
of emotional growth and the centre of electro-magneto-
gravitational balance is the nibbling off the fears and

anxieties of cis and trans beings across the galactic
deeper field. The feeding in cis is easy, the planet’s
living off its inhabitants, while the proxy sucking off
is rather tricky, that’s done via rabbit holes, and
other gala-lactic tricksy cheats.

II.

Planet Fear (a.k.a. Saliaris) was originally discovered
in 1789 by a French phallosopher-astronomer whose name
I quite forgot, while he was on a drinking trip to Moskva.
On this planet, the two cadets that we have come to
appreciate and like and even love but sometimes hate

are doing some experiments, listening in to the large globe’s
emotional field, a bit like doctors with a spectoscope
(I never know how to spell that). The giant rotational
orbit is listening back, tracing their cellular lives
to the nanometer.

III.

The Don Quixote trope is there too, chiefly to disturb
them, so he goes and chat to them (which they find annoying).
He has a small squedgy ball which she bounces off
the volcano in the foreground. Mousier MortLock and his
sidekick Mephisto, meanwhile, are also playing scientists,

so they are trying to dig out the jewels of the anger runes
(ruins?) and carry them back to the laboratory, for
further analysis. The rubbing volcano’s not at all happy
about that, let me tell you. Planet Fear is rather pissed
off; ‘you’ve ruined me now’, it thinks.

IV.

The thinking planet does not like being mined one bit,
especially by these semi-human intrusions which appear
to feel little and think less. In retaliation, planet
Fear feeds off their fears and hungers, making them
more afraid and ever more hungry. So will they ever be able
to leave this planet or will they do an Artax right here?

Don Quixotette knows that bringing balance back to the
blithering blasted balloon of the bounce… I have run
out of b’s I am afraid; well I meant to say that Don
Quixotette knows that the score is high and the time

V.

is little and the gods are angry and the Greeks stink
at making destiny user-friendly. So there is the inter
invention of the nemesis, a rather cheap device to make
sure that at the end, things are rather out of balance.
Anyway time is short so I will be brief; emotionally
disturbed planets are very difficult to cure. So my

friends, the younglings linger (the cadets and all else),
and the wicked thrive. What shall it be? The red
button or the waiting game? The Buddha gaya of all reli
gions shines in heaven, and meditation game is on;
the X watches still, and to the spirit-ally aware, the
gap is not to be filled. At least that’s a decent way
to start Chapter Four, goddamit.

VI.

Deep in the recesses of gaseous, empty space
echoing pulses of far-away life; stories fallen
into oblivion. On a remote dot in the universe,
a star system with multiple planets. On a not too
distant orb from that throbbing flare, a land

which is beautiful and full of memories.
The birth place of some characters, let
me just say. But where sky met ocean, this
land, this planet is now abandoned. Empty
shells in an emptier shell. Roaming across

VII.

the universe, the people of Ithaca carry
with them the images of that once happy
place. Perhaps, captain, X, or anybody
out there, you would care to grant them

a new home? What happened to this little
planetlet, and what happened to Borovoe
earth station? Why are we wandering,
fading, shining across thin layers of skin?

VIII.

In a dream that came upon Ithacans,
all at once, a monkey king was travelling
the universe in search of lost scripture,
or was it a planet. The curtains rose,
and a turreted, meandering city was found
clambering all over a high hill, up higher
and higher, nearly a mountain now.

And rising with this kafkian-breathing
castle city, all the Ithacans found a home
overlooking an ancient valley, the sky
brooding with darker clouds, as black as
the angry deep field. If one leaves, one
carries on leaving, and never, ever arrives.

IX.

War! The theatre was filled with a
compassionate crowd, but the battle
was lost, and the city was swept away,
and the Ithacans woke all at once
from their Trojan dream.

But even now, as the illusion has
vanished in the mind, even now,
if you close your eyes, you can still
see the towers and the smoking hills,
and the burning land.

X.

‘There must have been a mix-up
with the download’, thinks John C.
His ear is bursting with pain,
all parties on Titan end in usb
drinking, and dodgy downloads.

Not to mention the dodgy uploads,
though John C has hardly anything
else to dump into the solar system
wide web. From his window, he can
see a desolation of gases, and
long silences, as long as imaginable.

XI.

In the Zabriskie desert, John C uploads
his cloudy thoughts; reflections of the
sick thoughts of planets shimmer across
the cosmic cytoplasm. In a dark moon day,
sailing across an unfettered sky, a poem –
like an albatross flittering through the long

curtains. Energy, sinister and bending,
permeates the empty night and the bright
sun. Day after day, we sit and wonder,
when is THE CRUNCH going to come. This is
being stuck between the will to escape,
and the ability to accept. Acceptance and

XII.

escapism being the two torn tussore-silk
layers of a cocoon universe. The title
of a story popular with the marketeers
is ‘Escape to Planet Greed’. The common
origin of all the ways of the twisted is
the manipulative lie. If one prospers by
lying, one is a sickly bastard. Hence,

planets are ailing, and the White Plague
is on a rampage. ‘I have everything,’
cries the first marketeer, ‘and yet I
want, indeed I need more’. ‘I have
everything’, cries the second,’and yet
I am deeply unhappy.’

XIII.

The X that can be told, is not the true X.
Nevertheless I am trying to describe it.
The nature of folly is to be a predator,
all else is just escaping judgement. At the
interchange between rainbow and fox, there
is a deep underground canyon; the X lives
there, unknown, unbroken, a fallen source
and water-falling in perpetuity. So nothing

is more manifest than the hidden. Fortune
Lobo can sit at leisure, waxing and waning
over his navel, and yet his journey never
started, and the NeverEnder never sailed
east, and the West has never seen a Monkey
King come larger or smaller, asking for a

XIV.

sure cure for sick planets. The shape-shifting
space ship is sailing high and wide across
the galactic seas, and yet it has never seen
a sight more beautiful than the peace that
resides inside of you, dearReader. You may

observe the phases of the X, and record them
in a little white book, and we (John C and the
narrative brigade) may never know about it.
Hence the need for an end to these means.

XV.

While on Planet Fear, the cadets made a new
friend; so finally after years in training,
waiting to be short-listed for the not-so-clever
Borovoe Academy, Don Quixotette comes aboard.

More data analysis is needed, but she-he is
really and truly a tranny, and therefore a
true wise meter of both ends. She/He sits at
Desert Storm’s bed side, for the hapless cadet
has caught a bug on Planet Fear. The echoes

XVI.

of past are catching up to haunt the NeverEnder,
and squid-like ink is covering all consciousness.
Rains on Titan regain intensity. An ocean of stars
gurgles from the deep of the night, the Pleiades
witness the spaceship’s prow sinking deeper into
blueish space. Blackened thoughts gather, and
Desert Storm is having an outlandish cuppa tea.

It is always three in the morning when times are
dark, and so the little white book you are writing
must occasionally be burnt, or else we all go bonkers.

XVII.

The NeverEnder has come to a halt, stationed high
above a mortal planet, suffocating and in panic,
wondering what little creatures will descend upon
it. The valleys and the hills of the ecological
system vibrate with expectation, as the people of

the ship disembark and look around in wonder. It
is the time of the night, the suns are around the
corner. The mountains are climbing higher, while
Desert Storm looks at the light coming through
nocturnal clouds, blinking with stars and void.

XVIII

The planet speaks!
‘Welcome, pilgrims. Will there ever be a morning?’
Amid the amazement of the NeverEnder crew, the air
vibrates with the voice of a precious stone, and
like an emerald, everthing glows green, and the sound
of a mysterious voice echoes in the steppes of the
imagination. It is time for looking inside.

‘I am a sick old planet, and my name is Xuanzang.
I have been looking in the direction of the Wing within
the Small Magellanic Cloud for far too long. I have
been waiting for you, my closest galactic neighbours.’

XIX

‘There is sickness in my planet core. In my youth,
I was a conscious, and mobile being, able to perambulate
like yourselves. With age, I have grown stationary.
I understand that your own planet Earth, my old
friend, is also sickly woven. If you wish to heal

this crooked uni-verse, you must travel westward
to the outer reaches of fantasy-driven space/time.
You must find a small iconic frog-bead, containing
the healing teachings which can liberate all beings.

XX

‘I once travelled to this spiritual place myself,
but I learned next to nothing from the bead. It
radiated wisdom, and I had become quite convinced
that the temporary widsom it had bestowed upon me
was my own.

Alas, as I have come to realize in times of despair,
it was just echoes of energy in the empty space,
and once the master bead was hidden from me,
the blessing light waned until it completely
disappeared and I was left alone in the dark.’

XXI

‘Now this distant blessing is what keeps me stable,
but a crack in my planetary balance is deep, and
the rift in my spiritual mould is growing. The
rocky surface on which you are standing hides
a profound chasm which is expanding.

Once the crack will reach the surface I will be
destroyed. The same pathology affects Earth.
If you chose to, you can save all the sick
planets in this rigged, swamp-like uni-verse.’

XXII.

So tell me, will you help? My disciple went
off in one of his stunts, and has not returned.
He is cheeky, and unruly, and silly. But I trust
him. His name is Gawain-Monkey. He will help you
in this spiritual quest to retrieve the lost frog-bead
of wisdom. You must first rescue him from the bind
in which he has fallen. He is being held prisoner
by ravenous demons on a nearby system.

Borovoe earthlings, believe me. There is such
a thing as order in this uni-verse. The is no
solution to g.o.d.’s algorithm, but there is
source of eternal light. I have seen it, briefly.’

XXIII.

The first to speak is the spaceship NeverEnder.
‘I am not going anywhere! I need repairs, I am
oil-hungry, and this isn’t really my fight. I
am a machine, and I don’t believe in ghost stories
of any kind. Your bead is an invention, at best.’

Desert Storm is moved to a certain extent. She
was wary, but curious. The old planet has spoken
wisely, and something is echoing in her mind.
Her gut feeling is to speak, and so she comes forth.

XXIV.

‘I don’t know if I believe, but I will go. I will
try to help you, strange planet. I want to see
the confines of all space and time, see if there
is a border, a sense to all this.’

Fortune Lobo is feeling heroic. ‘And I will go
with you,’ he adds, with a certain emphasis.
Everyone one else shrugs, and moves on to re-embark
upon the NeverEnder, who has become very moody.

XXV.

Don Quixotette, in a typical show of character,
has deviously shapeshifted into a white rabbit,
and is quietly grazing away at the sick planet’s
remaining patches of grass. ‘Carrot-go’ is her
body language. But then again you can’t trust a
rabbit. Especially a hungry one, or a sexy one.

Exploring the vastness of space, the NeverEnder
and its crew leave on their middle-class journey
toward empty space maps, hidden treasures, and
more goodies. Cadets aboard begin their daily
ratio of dark matter. Clouds inside their mind
burst with you at the thought of a new leather bag.

XXV.

The sick planet speaks again, with great difficulty.
‘I shall give you a craft to fly into the unknown.’
At that point multiple volcanoes on its surface
erupt in a flurry of cosmic directions about which
way to go.

‘That way, my kind earthlings. Find the Gawan-Monkey,
and bring balance to this bloated uni-verse.’ While
it speaks, basalt lava crawls near assembling a
gorgeous spaceship, not unlike the interstellar craft
that once trekked to the source of light. But that
was another time and space. ‘Here is your vehicle.

XXVI.

It is made of rare elements. I’ve dug down and deep
in my core to provide you with the best possible
ride, as light as a feather, and as hard as the ego.
Now, please leave and do try to catch that cosmic
Hubble train, moving outwards. Remember, you must
find the bead, but then again it may find you.
I really can’t tell you where it is, I have forgotten.’

XXVII.

‘It is like a frog at the bottom of a well hidden
in an inverted ocean away from a big bang galaxy,
who has become nebulous at dusk. A Pleiades shot
in the dark. Perhaps you will find it on the banks

of the Aragva. Its blue colour may show you peace.
Now I am sad, and my feeling is weightless. My
sadness is sweet. My core is burning still, though
its combustion may not claim to be made of love.
The infinite is near. Save your planet, save all
planets.’

XXVIII.

The Xuanzang planet groans, it cracks open
and divides in half. A last few pulpitating
pumps of heart-core energy, and then a rasp.

It is dead.

XXIX.

‘Greetings. So sad the passing of my creator.
But planets come and go. My name is Snowflake
Billow (I’ve just self-baptised). I am a merry
go round space ship and will take you to the
outer edges of space/time. Or do you want to go
to centre, the inner core of your plasticity?

Bear with me, I am programming myself, being
just born has its drawbacks. I fly, therefore
I am. My senses are all out! I feel so good,
being alive, well I am a machine, you know what
I mean. My problems are materialistic. Are you
materialistic people at all?’

XXX.

The Rabbit (formerly Don Quixotette) speaks first:
This creature of space craft is from the world
below, it was born of the essence of Xuanzang,
it needs not surprise us.

So Desert Storm groans, Fortune Lobo weeps, into
the dangerous uni-verse they leap (so to speak).

XXXI.

‘So let me get this’ quotes a miffed John C.
They left earth cos it was broiling, they went
to a watery planet, they left and went to planet
Fear. Then they explored space a bit more and
stumbled upon another conscious planet which
gave them an impossible task. And now they are
on a spiritual quest. Is that right?’

‘Pretty much,’ Chubby is not interested in the
exploits of long dead people. ‘Would you quit
day-download-dreaming and help me with the dishes.

Give us a totally liberated sink, and will yield
you a cupful of nirvanic bliss.’ And so she pushes
the dishwashing liquid toward him. Gently, her
paw pushes for decisive argumentation.

XXXII.

Paralytic. Fly, like Ariel onto a dark planet
a mountain, one where the air is syrup glass
and pressure builds on. You may stay in doubt,
we shall not discuss the habits of the cadets.

Amble to and fro, the Rabbit munches
and meditates on the colour yellow.

Tip-toe, shark to mouth, they navigate deep waters,
sub-atomic shacks, colonial towers, forbidden
planets. They are out-casts. A storm of colour
is glowing in the distance, a star-set fandango.

Flutes and percussions in my head, if you wish.
Timid mediation, something is about to happen.
Desert Storm and Fortune Lobo, Rabbit and Vehicle
are alert to the Seasons of Now.

XXXIII.

They landed on the planet of compassionate dragonflies,
hosting a wild-gaoler, an ugly and deformed she-monkey.
Lying, cheating, and stealing; she bought her ticket to
insanity. She has burgled the dragonflies, tinkered
with their good will, swept away with their emeralds,
dared eat an immortal peach.

The Immortals reside under-ground in caves beyond the
waterfall. The flies, their faces large with complex
eyes replete with Friedrich sunset brothers, are shaking
with fear and perplexed anger. Where is their compassion?

Now going about his business on the Old Kent Road,
Gawain is schizophrenic, the she-monkey resides in him.
He left his master plan(et) to escape toward harvesting
galaxies, wishing to retrieve wisdom and materialism.

However, he’s been delayed.
Caught read-handed, he left a darling buck dead, up in
the mountain toward the sky, and he’s been imprisoned
for poaching on the peaches, illegal hunting, peach-
formulating, eating cookies and other immoral echoes.

XXXIV.

‘My mind, a rock’, my friend John C is frozen into
a terror. Night-mares follow his trails. Quantifying
his delay, his worry has taken him outside the tower
where he used to reside. Titan is hostile. Methane
breathes his fear. Wrapped, unagitated liquids about.

XXXV.

The dragonflies are friendly. They have Byronocular vision.
I love the fact that they sing to themselves while they
stew their dinner. Their soul dances without theatrical
preferences. They issue exam entries to all newcomers.

Into the desert the four riders come now, light of my eyes.
A mirage, way above the blue skies. Desert Storm trembles,
Rabbit Tranny is adamant. A slow kiss of God, this Arabesque
sun shine where the edge is narrow and the zenit is hot.

Fortune wolf desires freedom, lo – all kinds of warnings.
The monkey is hidden from sight, dreaming his life away.
A black box appears, the shape of a cube. They are lost
in confusion. The vehicle space-craft reads the papers
from yesterday, flicking the pages through its wings.

XXXVI.

This desert is a lost place in time. The sky is high.
Ten million friendly dragonflies swarm in the distance,
a cloud of black judgement, and an easy conversation. So
far-away, and yet so close. The three riders plus the AI
scrap
metal
are stuck under a torrential sun, and stare at the black box.

They are invited to enter. Could this be a dragonfly trick?

XXXVII.

Logic and proportion are changed, inside the colourful
cube, a shower of rain. Desert Storm is alone in it.
The space is little, the mind expands. Cloud-bursting,
inside his motley soul (not for sharing) Monkey is
talking to Gawain, that is, talking to his other self.

Cloudy and overcast. Cloud-clawing, a vicious and dange-
-rous occupation. In the dragonfly prison, a place full
of wooden planks and ikea products, a legoland of lakes
and mild sensations, the passionate monkey person is
very upset. His cell is his melancholy enclosure, a
blue moment in time.

Like the rabbit, monkey’s not very sure about his
sex. Sometimes he feels very mad-world. The conversation
inside his head goes like this (Monkey-side says):

XXXVIII.

‘I wish to harvest galaxies. I wanted to explore the ubi-
verse. Now I am greedy.’ Gawain opens up the soul, and
lets the verse rip. ‘Big mind is slow, sweet and bitter.’
‘What am I doing in gaol?’
‘I went flying across the mountains to the cave beyond
the waterfall. I found refuge there.’
‘I must get out of jail, not matter what the cost.’

‘Say Cicciotta’ John C remarks ‘this monkey individual
is one hell of a troubled person. The cat whatevers him.
‘I want more life’. Chubby reads on the screen. ‘I can
relate to that’, goes the poetastric cat.

39.

Fuck it. Roman numerals distract. John C
is up an running, the window of attention
short-circuits. Cats speak the truth, or
not at all. So Chubby once more points out:

‘Your memory download has become a memory
upload, I don’t know if you realize. You
are downloading your own memory, only it’s
been tampered with. Obviously, you don’t
know who did it.’ John C shrugs. ‘Recently

40.

I have received a seed-mail from a dead
source. We used to be like this [vagina
fingers]. She’s sick to the core, much
like this Monkey character that, as it

now seems, I used to know. I feel sorry
for her, because she has lost her karmic
identity, and gone full blast vitriolic.’
Chubby purrs, and sits in his lap. ‘Let

41.

the dead bury their dead.’ And that’s that.
Gawain-Monkey is sprung from jail, and
leaps around like a mad dog. He wants to
become a she, and settles for an ‘it’.

‘I am so in love with the universe’, it says
‘that I want to fuck it.’ Chubby snores.
‘Make more money, yo. There’s dough to
be made’. Fortune Lobo and Desert Storm

42.

Stare at it in amazement. ‘Is this what
we risked our lives for [ the cherry-linger ]?’
The Dragonflies arrive in scores, and buzz
in, straight onto the conversation like
emotional-retorsion butter.

‘Shit, man’, goes dragonfly #1 ‘I have learnt
so much from Nil by mouth. I just want to cry.’
In the mean time, Gawain-Monkey is leaping
around like a mad elephant, poisoned by life.

43.

‘Dude. I am totally into her. Holly the girl
from David Mitchell, she’s the real deal. In
case the other compassionate dragonflies ask
what shall we do about this wild bunch?’

Dragonfly #2 is hesitant. It looks in love,
and full of opinion, and full of sperm.

44.

Gaway-Monkey is defiant. ‘Glargh. Fuck you!
I am free now, to purse my own dirty mindless
interests! Fuck the universe, and everyone
in it.’ Dragonfly #1 and #2 shake their heads.

‘That’s not a good start, eh?’, goes #1.
Desert Storm intervenes. ‘Kind dragonflies,
it is an honour to tread your planet, and
meet you in arthropod. We’d like to negotiate.’

45.

#2 looks at #1 and squints (you know dragonfly
eyes). Desert Porcelain quotes her Sylvia Plath.
Fortune Lobo is looking on with increased
interest. He’s learning the ways of the magneto-

hesitancy. ‘I dare say we are pilgrims onto
this uni-verse, tracing the outer rims of the
galactose axis, looking for the truer truth.’

46.

Desert Storm is in full bullshitting mode.
Fortune Lobo is starting to have a hard-on.
‘To quote my not dead friend, the old wise
woman Tierra Madre, we are here to solve

your problem. We’d like to shoplift your
trouble, and carry this Monkey with us.
#1 now looks at #3, who just landed, and
is looking like the ranking officer.

47.

#3: ‘You are mistaken. There is no rank
amongst us. We are one.’ Fortune Lobo comes.
Desert Storm is digusted: ‘Do you mind?’
‘Sorry,’ the lad’s on fire ‘it’s just that

I am young, so full of energy.’ Desert
Storm scowls. ‘Now’s really not the time!’

48.

‘Bonjour, je m’appelle Candide’, dragonfly #4
chips in. Dragonfly #5 decides it’s time to
settle the score. ‘Ok, let’s all take a deep
breath, and do a Wes Anderson flyover, shall we?’

‘I hate to interrupt,’ quotes the transexual
Rabbit, ‘but we are on a schedule to save the
uni-verse’. Desert Storm looks pleased.

49.

Gawain-Monkey cracks the head of Dragonfly #5
with a clean axe-cut, and looks pleased with
itself. At this point the Billow vehicle
rescues the living lotus-blossom out of them,

and everything is nice and peachy. Except,
of course… the dragonflies are not happy.
They have to start a Herman Hesse flower-
celebration, looking toward the star of the

50.

Planet where the wars have ended as an example.
Dragonfly #1 takes a deep breath and goes all
Panglossian about this. Dragonfly #2 accepts
the truth. Dragonfly #6 decides to chase

the vehicle, ridden by these idiots, and
possibly intern them all in Dragonfly planet’s
rottnestest prison cell.

51.

Fortune Lobo wipes his cockerel, Desert Storm
looks away, at the galatic skies whizzing
past, Rabbit counts the number of stars, and
is doing a good job ‘three billion million,
six hundred million, thirty-two, and half and a

blip… does this one qualify?’ ‘It’s totally
a planet, say Gawain-Monkey, who has now settled
onto a more friendly mode ‘by and by, thanks
for springing me’. ‘Pleasure’, says the vehicle.

52.

‘Call me Billow, I am the leader of this outfit.’

53.

‘Hi! My name is Goofoh Soofoh Arsehallah, and
I’m splendid. Rabbit and I go waaay back. I
just happened to bump into your expedition
while looking for temporary gas formations

for the adornment and supersizification of my
big-ass wedding. Now, Rabbit dear, would you
remind me which one of you is the leader of this
rickety contrapunctual figurative enter-prize?’

54.

Rabbit shifts in his (her) seat. Times abound,
and mistresses linger, and so do famously
poisonous friendships. John C gets up to get
himself a sandwich. Ticino bread, yum yum!

Chub gets cozy with the lap, and on top of that,
the electric storm outside chirrups and stirrups.
Rabbit was born out of moss, long before the
existence of a path, and a trajectory toward

55.

the end. Along the road, Rabbit met Arsehallah,
joyful the day they sealed their awesomeness
deal while the sunset strips of Veal city skies
expanded, with a mega-galactic significance

into a global and permanent alliance between
a Jim Morrison incarnation and an increasingly
deranged Don Quixote contained in the body of
a rabbit, henceforth known as “the Rabbit”.

56.

Why oh why do bad coins pop up? Rabbit scowls,
Desert Storm decides that it’s time for tea.
She offers the ritual like a medium-size opossum
tree, all velvety-green with touches of my-God

’tis-good-shit. Don’t drink opossum tea, kids…
unless you are going all the blistering way. Be
warned. Are you ready to be skullfucked by a
horde of invading barbarians all singing from

57.

within you? Granted, you may find a glimpse of
oceanic boundlessness, or marvel on the magic
powders of Dover beach. But since we are, and
have been in tremendously advanced retreat, I

suggest you poppets of future high-sky, be
cool with your opossum tea. If you do an Aldous,
be reminded that there are consequences.
‘Consequences, schmonsequences!’, quotes

58.

Arsehallah, given his infinite erudition
in late twentieth century video-piracy.
Speaking of monkeys, Gawain-Monkey is being
unusually quiet oh-shore-dwee. ‘What’s on

your mind?’ asks a very concerned Fortune
Lobo. ‘You’re all invited to my badass
cerebration, we are gathering all of
Swappingstan to honour the Gods (many
of them, innit).

59.

May I remind all the clientele that my
views on reli-john are contained in a
book called “Space Epic Poem”, which may
be consulted for random specification.

Debookeries apart, the alegre brigade
enter the Swappingsteinish space since
you can’t really turn down an offer to
drink opossum tea, attack a few concepts

60.

and so bloody on. ‘J’adore!’, quotes
Gawain-Monkey, suddenly exilarated at
meeting fellow thieves. At the landing
platform, Fortune Lobo is searched and

his assets are siezed (he had a diamond).
Tut tut! Up to no good are these young
cadets. Desert Storm is instead shipped
across toward a room where a group of

61.

Some twenty-three randoms are preparing
to gangrene-rape her. Swifty, Rabbit
intervenes and Arsehallah pulls out his
tremendous bullshiviousness and talks

his way out yet another shit-a-la-creme.
So they reach the safer indoors of the ‘haves’,
in the mystical planet of Swappistan, where
most of the derelict population is in the

62.

‘have-nots’ category. Wilkommen, and
remember, arbeit macht frei. So Fortune
Lobo is stationed onto Arsehallah’s best
friend’s gigantic lobster-bed within

the house of the Nazis. No, don’t think
skinheads, think of plump mater familias,
going on about the gorgeousness of super
literary prizes dished out to the absentee

63.

golden boy son, while the uncle a la table
dissembulates on the wonders of making
monkey with expat nazional-fasciter, who
just happen to be hiding in Swappistan

for their money reserves in banking land
are infinite, and the opportunities for
enslaving the uni-verse are wunderbar.
Fortune Lobo listens, but his mind is

64.

Elsewhere. He has fallen in Murakamian
colour. ‘Screw this.’ John C abandons
the memory upload-download and throws
himself in the Murakamian Well. Oh the

days of glorious past! Memory’s gone,
but the bass-guitar backbone of one’s
existence insists on harping back on
the basset-hounds of sound and sea.

65.

The time is for a pause and a reflection.
Desert Storm is meditating on the painting
ovulating on the wall, a kind of Don Quixote
ascending from an angelical egg, while

the background is sort Yggdrasill stump,
merging with diahoerrea colours typical
of ancenstral artists, those that made
the womb the best place to get out of.

66.

The last breath of vehicle, before it
is crushed into a single atom, is devoted
to the obliquity Goddess, an ancient
cult which focuses on the ambivalence

of non-committophobes. Desert Storm
sighs, she alone has a hunch that the
journey ahead is so terribly long,
and that many of us may not survive.

Chapter III
I.

skyless (skypeless?), old Caravaggio
translates violence into action,
piercing perspective with shadow and
beefy angels. Downfallen apples linger.

The cat talks to me from the dead. So does grand-ma.
When in fear, in doubt, I walk the hades-crystalline,
so daylight nightly creates illusions. Burnout, desire.
Featherless, stalking nostalgia.

II.

Memory of past bliss is sorrow of to-day. Feline wrath
cast an alliance with water-dwelling iron bars.
At first, a dazzle. The porcelain girl eats yogurt on the
asteroid. The NeverEnder exploded when flirting with a
super nova sinister light. The crew’s dead. Disconnected, the
Johnny and the other computer lads have been found
shredded to mincemeat. Lucky, you – monster reader.

III.

The Siberian cat lives on, alone, somewhere. No more on cats.
How ice! The Edda flows, Ginnunga spans. Fire on one side, frost on the other.
On the asteroid we find the porcelain girl (an incarnation of Desert Storm).

The asteroid has fat breath, fire on one end, and golden fire falling
into the abyss, a river of spewing milk, poisonous to life.
Glassblown experiments over the mountain meadow (on the asteroid).
The ga-lactic enter-prize has open gates for survivors and dead people
coming back from the dead because I want to remember them.

IV.

Free verse haunts the chimera,
a soul wiped out by history,
moments away from doom.
The Berdmonsey street is sweet, swept by yellow shirt
men, the church shut is riveting with skylight wordship.
Only elderly people inside, awaiting execution.

Askew sun, splayed over potato soup
this is offered to survivors on asteroid Loki.
Bmv sky reflecting sunk concave dreams
pink smart choices await execution too.
Trapezoid humans crawl out of the gutter
coughing up glued-over conscience;

V.

sensing purpose, eschewing it, circling around it
shark-like, taking small bites, choking.
Strategically placed, I intern-fero UV light.
Playing with the spectra, harmonicawise.
Hints, here and there.

‘I don’t wanna go’, sways the porcelain girl.
Neither do I. God plays too much evasive
action; unpaid bills, horizon gulls bumming
ciggies off each other. Do not forget the dead,
who smoked their vouchers and led the life
of dogs, sometimes acting up to be Actaeon.

VI.

‘Catching Diana with her pants down, that’s my ambition’
this is the internal creed of porcelain girl. She is not alone.
Now, pyrimidine memories survive the crash
of the NeverEnder. Seeking new sources of memory:
John Ashbery, poet.
Richard Firn, botanist.
Silvano Onda, art historian.
All of this is delta-like, or invano.

The accumulation of the Edda-Aeneid
whirls about the X, pointing to the power
and the slide of the Uni-verse. Deal now with ‘the keep us
from going’. No cats left, no Titans, only mani.
Hung on compassion, cheaply Renaissant, I virgil-crawl
toward my master ‘Button and Unbutton’.
I prithee, Lord Byron, lead the way, along with Mr Merisi.

VII.

Zomboy (Fortune Lobo reloaded) and Porcelain
are Adam and Eve on the water – excuse moi –
the water-bourne asteroid. They’re there for
a rendez-vous avec la X.

Yes, the asteroid is quite from another world,
another universe. The speechless couple, land mark
in this space of ocean waves over a falling rock
in the empty space, they’re bound, forgive me
to rise in love. Zomboy would like to eat her head out,

Porcelain is careful not to crack her nails. Two souls
in empty space, they leap into the void, head, belly down.
So the X is there, logging in to ask de questions.
Zomboy begins. ‘I should like to ask’ he interrupts,
the divine terminal buffering. Belle Porcelain has her
head spinning in a clueless crescendo. The dominating
question is: ‘Why’ … ”’ why do I have to
fall in love with Bete-Tomboy here’.

VIII.

If you, reader, should ever meet the X, what question
would you pose? Always travelling back to your past,
you would interrogate the whys and wherefores of
all those clipped moments, now long-gone?

Or would you dare query about the eternal? Per-
Haps only about tomorrow’s luncheon, or the identity
of the X’s true core?

IX.

‘I would like to go astray’, Tomboy launches.
Across the aisle, Porcelain digresses in poly
morphisms avec God’ internal processor.
Time off, Crossbone cemetery, memory-slingshot,
outcast graveyard. The X shows glimpses of old

earth to the celestial couple. Here, landless
people were cast into the jord, back into Ginnunga.
When there was no sky, no waves, no earth,
there gigantic emptiness stood before us,
and attempted to load a reminder of suffering.

X.

At Churchill’s tomb, Byron said farewell to
two months a year of sunshine, and the piazza.
Enemies to imagine, Orson Wells at Chartres.
Art and fiction as fake of fakes.

On occasion, gentle conversation makes us
digress, so Porcelain daydreamed while staring
into the X. Her lover of new light, free of death,
was hungry. He did not ask a single question.

XI.

The X retreated into the universe’s vulva.

XII.

Three ghosts came along, their names above,
were friends to man, and to the vision.
‘I shall pose a question’, the first one said.
‘Motley morality is for finders keepers, is it not?’
‘That’s a thought’, remembered the second.
‘If you’ve never dug up a potato, then perhaps
you’ve missed on much in life.’
‘I wept when first at Venice’, said the third.
‘We’re friends to you, we are fictional spectres.

XII.

If you want to return to Borovoe, or if you wish
to assume your ancestral shape once again,
or if you simply wish to continue exploring
the Byronic way… you must retreat.

Turn back and swim that wide black ocean
behind you, life lessons are fish and coral.
Belle, you’re very fragile.
Bete, surely you should have a hat on the “e”,
somewhere.

XIII.

Born, abandoned, astray, in search of atom
a book, a story, a science, a soul, an ex. The
X incumbent upon us. Pourings of sunlight.
Not mysterious, travelling. Swimming on the
asteroid’s waters. Porcelain wishes to come back.

She wants to be fictitious. She has not found her
self. Tomboy is yet alive, and drinks saltwater
to quench his thirst. His hunger is his blood.
Should he ever chew on his arm, would the
reader turn away?

XIV.

What creatures dwell in the large body of asteroid
water? How does one ever cease to get wet,
the current bears one away, bobbing, flushing,
sinking, floating, soaring, air-lifted by strange
tunes in the vitreous air.

Shall they ever swim to an island? Shall Porcelain
find her mirror in Haidee? Or to be precise,
does Zomboy’s soul dwell at Walden Pond?

XV.

Porcelain, cast your mind aside; even as you
cannot find focus. Beowulf might have outswam
his monster fear, while Thor sank his teeth
into the Worm, but you cannot afford to lose
faith. Young Juan, formerly known as Fortune
Lobo, frog-flies downwards into more ocean.

He swims after a sinking Grecian Urn.
Porcelain decided to shapeshift. She’s so
empty, tumbling into fathom five.
So full of fear, we all are. Young Juan

XVI.

endures. Urn-girl is freefalling toward
a hashtag #rocky# ocean floor. Her painted
porcelain body flickers with fleeting images.

On the level of sands, lost consciousness.
Nothing is left of who once was Desert Storm.
A pearl among the soaked ashes. The silent
contains a voice.

XVII.

The ghost of Mr N.S. , tanner of this parish,
appears to Juan and the Urn, as they reach out
in the ocean darkness. The pearl-voice from
an earlier age follows them. They listen, on
the current of remembrance.

‘There once was a monastery at Veremundsei’
Juan’s buoyant lungs bring him upwards,
Urn, ash, pearl in hand, seeking the light.

XVIII.

On shore, his mind drifts toward thoughts
on the shipwreck upon shipwreck. Waiting,
drying, shuddering. The pearl turns on,
radio-like, and goes through a thousand
and one stories worth telling, worth

remembering. Stacks of dice, echoes of
colour, lines on the water. Ripples in
time. The void-filled Urn tunes in.

XIX.

The NeverEnder is restored! The self-
aware spaceship, delighting in your company,
flows back from unity with the heart of star;
de-stryxed, majestic, unburied, like Carthago.
Inside of it, a world of ideas. Books, flying.

Monads, believing. The characters of the
spaceship consciousness are tales to be told.

The great Space Ship sits, reads poetry,
the very Ariadne story, Flexa and Chubby,
and invites Fortune Juan and Desert Urn
to come back to mother, and resume the
journey.

XX.

Is it not time for us to encounter an
antagonist? The NeverEnder is our hero,
the Borovoe Cadets, armoured with piety,
are terror-driven, sharp edges cutting
through all negative feeling.

Who would dear reader choose as an
enemy? The marketing forces (definitely),
a Titan-sized mechanoid, a seedless cherry?

XXI.

Such decisions should never be left to
the word-cobbler. What shall it be?
Spiritual captivity, I am told. Control,
of the mind. Hence, the antagonist,

born onto a distant nook of universe
shit, flies out toward our noble space
ship, seeking to divide it and rule it.
Its friends, other destructive forces in
the spinning painted uni-verse, stem

XXII.

from split white dwarves. One of them,
taking the shape of empty space,
hovers in a room, third floor on the right,
at the David Museum in Shoppen-haben.

The city itself, now free of slavery, bears
the name of those evil marketeers that
seek to control our minds. Pirates of the
mind, they are cross-bred with the religious
fervour of neatly arranged wooden-panels.

XXIII.

Inside the stormy consciousness of the space
ship a flurry of violins, voices, vices.
Sheherazade comes in with her hands full,
Ariel, Narcissus, Aeneas merge into a pond
of music. The water cresses oscillating.

Evil comes alive elsewhere in the ethereum,
the X unknowing. When enough negative feeling
has streamed out of the Mordred corners of the
uni-verse, a great big belly-faced mobile phone
appears, masquerading, fashionista stryx-style.

XXIV.

To Hel with it! Odinn has come to claim the
broken verse, Huginn and Muginn accompanying
the NeverEnder for a period or two.

Stanza upon stanza of mediterranean vomit
piles on the ligurian mountain-side, battered
by Tramontana lies, whispered much before
the fall of the Republic of Amalfi. Under

XXV.

the Yggdrasil, Hel decides the fate of unborn
creatures; there, the runes in the well are hidden,
an explosion of self-awareness inside the Never
Ender gut creates cramps and stomach-pains;

Desert Storm is awake and she is bored. To her,
listening to the Sheherazade tales of destructive
forces and talking crows and music for tea, is just
as tedious as tuning in to John C’s conversations
with Chubby, or delusions about the X.

XXVI.

Thetis decided to give up, Achilles was born.
John C’s mind-eye mulls over the contradiction.
Chubby’s desire for dinner leads to the sin
of wanting more. Unsatisfied, the two travel in

time and in memory to shunt anxiety and harbour
illusion, a welcome break from dreary reality.
So the struggle is not just between Memorians
and Oblivians; but also between the Knowers
and the Unknowers.

XXVII.

Those that, grounded in the present, might want
to enquire (or not) about their past. Those we call
the Past-Timers. John C is a past-timer. Now,
what of those that are grounded in the past, present,

future, and want to enquire forward, discover whatnot
(or not). Those we call the Present-Dwellers. Now
Fortune Lobo Tomboie Tromboy Tomboy Juan is indeedy
one of those. And his sister-cum-lover Desertia Stormia.

XXVIII.

All their friends are dead, at least in their present
(which is somewhere in the uni-verse), in the gut
of the NeverEnder, enquiring forwards, onwards
to far other lands and other seas. So to speak.
Now then, this is where it becomes (un-)interesting.

What if their friends, having crash-burnt along
the first NeverEnder, actually existed (alive or not)
somewhere else in the Uni-Verse, perhaps down
and under, through the X, or some such dimensional
gateway? So if Tierra Madre’s consciousness (and perhaps
her body is somewhere somewhen somedimension else,
where in the flickiest flick is that?

XXIX.

And by the way, who is Dr Fortune Lobo, and everyone
else mentioned in this story? Where do they come from,
what is their purpose, motivation and guilt history?
I see Memorians and Oblivians everyday, they happen to be

Knowers and Unknowers at the same time. Could one be
a Memorian and and Unknower simultaneously? ‘I want to remember,
that is, but I do not want to discover. I want to retreat in my
body and mind, and forget everything else.’ The Memorian-Knower
combination is hard core, these people actually want it all.

XXX.

So Fortune Lobo is one of those, he wants the whole shebang,
while Tierra Madre only want(ed) to be a Memorian-Unknower.
A certain woman I know is a Oblivian-Unknower. That’s a bit

like saying, I don’t want to live, not even in dreams.
That’s why plugging in the history or the cosmos-net is
probably the way forward (backward) for her. Enough of
that.

XXXI.

So that bring us back to John C’s original intention:
download unwanted memories. He wants them, otherwise,
he would not bother. While his unwanted memories drift
somewhere on the cosmo-net. He pauses the Borovoe download.

A cup of tea. Titan is empty of titans. Giants are nowhere
to be seen. The window sill is devoid of cats or any
mammalian. Perhaps a few dandruff scabs. He looks straight
into the camera and says: ‘let’s watch a few rolls of
that discarded movie which I have uploaded, containing
my drop-dead virtualia cast into the unknown. I am ready.’

XXXII.

John C: ‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum. Always a good mood-setter.
Longevity, that’s the question. When I first joined the
personal dna corporation, I was introduced to the resident
man’o’science. He was a man of many words, enthusiastic,
xtatic about every thing around the cosmos, except, perhaps,

the X. My good friend Gluteus Maximus warned me that if
I continued to be a believer in the X, I might find myself
deproteinized. Gluteus was a heathen himself, a smoother
of crypto-analyses. He never did join the corporation.
He got married in stead, and produced off-spring.’

XXXIII.

‘So anyway, the lord of nucleo-tides told me to sit back,
and enjoy the sequencing. We might find a huff of the X,
down in the grooves of neuro-genomo-science, he said.
Resident chief told me how since we could, we would grind
the frontiers of ultra-science, and do more, grep more.
We do this, just because we can, said I. He just shrugged.

XXXIV.

So.
John C’s first job at the Corporation was
to deprive-sequence IDENTITY.

Other quest-yonders would later be
PURPOSE, LONGEVITY, CONFLICT-INNER,
CONFLICT-OUTER, CREED, CONCLICT-COSMIC.

He was banished onto Titan following
an incident which at the time, you know,
caused such public excitement, giving rise
to strange Wildean conjectures. But more on
that in the supplementary data. This page
margin is too narrow for my mind to fill [chuckle]

XXXV.

John C was a rookie seqHenceR. IDENTITY,
no mean feat, was the TARGET. IDENTITY,
when sequenced, would be tweakable, twittable,
chopped up into snippets and fed to the
ever-hungry marketeers (whore-shippers of
God-Mobile), the very same people who
suckle the out-puts of the Corporation.

Now if you, dearReader, could decipher the
nucleo-oceanwaves of gnoscomics, take a
peek at the glimmering soul image scan (scam)
now, really, would you publish it?

doriangray imaging allows a certain degree
of manipulation (if you happen to be an
identity-manipulator). Upload your sample,
get a picture. Simple!

XXXVI.

So John C fed his own flesh and blood
to the Corp D Well reader and writer,
The output, I am afraid to note, wasn’t
pretty. He stuck his query into the Seq,
namely –> ‘biscuit’. The learned-machine
algo-dances squeaked and gibbered, he also
got data about the characters of this story,
incidentally.

XXXVII.

But first, the get-well readout yielded
a laburnum deep-pression, and lots of
expero-memorian data on his IDENTITY.
LOGIN: ‘JohnC’
INPUT_QUERY: ‘biscuit’
GET_WELL_OUTPUT (decoded): ‘get a life’
DORIANGRAY_IMAGING: link_to_download (random?)
NARRATION_POEM_ATTACHMENT: file_open(‘
Back to the Fossil Shale, echoes in the clay,
a cromoflower balooniana against the darkblue sky
sunrise at Rohtang La,
Vashisht termal baths, Himalayan Time-Travel
Vol|poem_truncated
\\ get-well error \\
line[too long to write] sentimental attachment not uploaded
[data missing] \\ probable [guilt] error
ENTER INPUT_DATA_TYPE: {1} identity_seeker
{2} identity_manipulator
{3} not_sure
$ 3 —-> you chose {3}
|machine_learned_rest_of_story:’

white sky, heavy rain, throttle-guilt
a solitary fugitive finds refuge
in a mountain hut, up into the silent
snows.

a retired vampire at a lake resort
reminisces, meanwhile, about ‘feeding’.

XXXVII.

Guess what, he enquired about random people,
and he got the identitomes of Fortune TZBJ Lobo,
and Desert ‘Porcelain’ Storm. But more on that
later in the day, s’il te plait.

Meditating on the random oath,
wandering on the apparently random
path, the Djikstra’s algo-dance lets
us hope for shorter ways to God.

XXXVIII.

There is much angst, much anger
found in any one breast. The mind
supplements the oath, and the lie.
The anger is directed at one self,

and the self is angry at the anger.
The angry is anger at the rest of
the soul, and the less is wondering
about the more.

XXXIX.

The more is too large to be accepted,
so the less takes charge and erupts,
vibrations of i-deas resound in the
abyss of the mind. I want more, fucker…

More life? More blades? More
torture? More villains?
Mr Lobo is a shorter man, a happier man.
He is aboard the NeverEnder, showering.

XL.

The NeverEnder goes about its deep field,
all the more star-wiser, echoing music
of the Titans, who sang about
the largest dumplings that ever ‘lived’
Stars as dumplings in the sky, forbidden

walking grounds for Spirits such as
Mountain Snake, and her Arch-Enemy,
Oblomster, the artist from former Russkia.

XLI.

Mountain Shake is a handy sprite, up and down
the valleys of the sour dough galaxy. She’s quite
a non-thinker, a very light-footed bare-ballerina,
chasing treefoils among the cosmic debris, and

finding some, like it or not, in the most unlikely
places. Her Arch-Enemy, likewise confined on the
outer pasta constellation, draws atomic colour
from all gaseous conformations around him.

XLII.

Chagall-like, he blasts infinity with metallic
sound, making art out of no thing. He’s very
charming. When they do not fight, the two
form a dancing vector across the single, nonmulti-

dimensional space which coats the
NeverEnder when travelling at slow speed.
The two permeate lifelessness, and constantly
argue about the meaning of art in the void-X.

XLIII.

A long time ago, when he was a bi-sequencer,
driven by despondent deprivation and scientific
hunger, John C carelessly downloaded the
future identitomes of some of the Borovoe
academy usual suspects. Fortune, now slaving

away as a concavity developer, was at that time
nothing more than tiny bundle of cellular happiness.
The singular decomposed clichee-free Desertia
Storma was already labelling sounds of infinity,
way back in the nine ages before candour.

XLIII.

So when he sequenced their files, he did not heed
the premonitory dream attached to in such hybris;
acted as though danger did not exist, and pinched
time’s ass, deciding that it was time to dig some

identities, and these worked just fine.
Now, retracting such actions is not legal, his
banishment on Titan testifies. The core dump file
he’s now trying to analyze does not contain any hint.

XLIV.

His dissertation on the Sick Thoughts of Planets
has not been finished yet. He initiated the literary
count-down several years ago. The then-Chubby
unclone was giddy and alive. The Athenian school,

from which he had graduated, had spewed out
similarly poisoned power-dreamers, and his talents
were devoted to sinking into virtual dreams and
feeding number-crunches to artlessfictionalintelligences.

XLV.

Fortune Lobo’s identitome showed his desire
to create simple data visions to formulate
subversive narratives, gallipulating dogma!
From his soul-obstractle, negative emotions
were mostly absent; while from a walking
shadow horizon, his shakespeare meter was

leaking epinephrenetic compassion by the bucket.
Desertia Stormia single deductomics style
archive hinted at her drill toward poetically
enhancing understanding, her mind-motion as
circular as the cell-cycle::washing-machine analogy.

XLVI.

Both were (are) bent on understanding what
sticks. Playful, young lovers on the plane of
non-emotion. Not really loving each other,
but rather loving the cosmos at large. Their
reading and writing echoing the lesser and the

greater beauty of infinite jestology. So, John C
decided to burn their record and disband his
associated memory, their beauty was much too
much to be tampered by the marketeers.

XLVII.

Upon first reading a certain book with
a broken feedback loop, I had a feeling
born in the mud-pool of poetry, deserts,
cubes, oceans would henceforth be the
bread and butter of my existence. But
the single melting point of this ever-

revolving small dystopical booklet
was the temptation to infer on meta
physics, the circle and district of
evil being at one point or another
identified with a black wolf (why oh why)
Now, is there such a thing as absolute

XLVIII.

evil? Now recently, upon strolling
in a university centre, I came upon the
very definition that the fantastic book
had always been lacking. So, on the
God-mobile planet, where marketeers
are spawned, along with other inverted
brats, I hereby design (primum movens)

the prophet of brightly-coloured ends
as opposed to means, a creature by the
name of MortLock. That which you call
corruption, he calls it leverage.

XLIX.

Roundabout the time in which the
NeverEnder first took off from Borovoe,
Mr Mortlock had a meet with God-mobile;
together they agreed to locate the
longevity discretion variable in the
uni-verse, other wise known as
the fountain of eternal youth.

‘ESSE QUAM VIDERI’, reads the prow
of the NeverEnder, in its erratic
search for the epic narrative thread,
the truer truth, and other clouds.

L.

‘The deep field yields perspective’,
quotes ghost number one, now
following the two surviving space
cadets (Desert S and Fortune L).
Nathaniel (Bermondsey tanner),
friend, reveal to us a cure for
the sick thoughts of planets!

Now the most distinguished among
the three (four) readers of this
epic might cringe at the thought
of a truer truth. Wishing to init
iate a certain discussion, John C

LI.

throws digits in the empty binary
chest, the deep computational gorge
echoes with with unstable algo-dances.

So Mr MortLock sets out from the dark
lying sense of incestuous greed; on
the planet of his origin, green thoughts
in a green shade ooze out memoriam poetry

LII.

the treasury of God-mobile has approved
water-boarding of emotional planets. Other
missions to psycho-somatic heavenly balls
has been decreed. Dr Mephisto is an inside
trader in the ministry of marketeering, on

the shores of the horizon he awaits the
ship’s call. Ship his ship, he seeks the west,
and fields of barley ever blest. Actually,
he is waiting to sail out with Mr MortLock,
they are assessing the possibility of genotyping
eternal youth, with ensuing recipes for aging.

LIII.

A private project, not shared with the agency
of marketeering, he is developing a cure for
the sick thoughts of planets. The first stop
over for MortLock and Mephisto is on planet
guilt.

Mephisto is working on ancestral allele
determination using archotepteral data.
Former DorianGray images from a bygone age.
There’s a picture of a clarinet, a voice
of a broken dandy lately on his serious monies,

LIV.

and more music-sucking by a demon-following
concertista, something straight out of archeo
logos, something ready for a planet fear feast.
Mortlock is tracing the story of a doomed kesterlman,
who tried to seek redemption from a dragging demon,
hellbent and very pissed off. This narrative thread

has been been spooled so many times, yet
marketeers, financiers, insurers, etheral youth
seekers, destiny agents and all the mongrel species
of planet greed or planet God-mobile have
an endless craving for this feat, which is
LV.

always featuring a finale of prosecco and sparkle,
belladonna concertinos, and introductions to reli
gious 101 hunger right before the end of tragedy
and the start of boredom. Deserts are not big enough
and thirst is not dry enough for this gentle folk,

So John MortLock seeks more, and Mephisto
apres lui. Any way, while we are at it, let’s
talk about the randomization of poetric processes,
I believe a little script has been scribbled not
so long ago, just to twist and bend the story,
and introduce spiritual elements, parallel universe
openings and likable or dislikable cross-roads.

LVI.

Now this spoof of a story has been blown out,
John C’s busy revving the poetical mind-moment
and the Borovoe download keeps fading, perhaps
flailing, perhaps failing, certainly not falling

prey to enjambement pyrotechnology, NeverEnding
devices and rabbit-holes to parallel dimensions.
God (!.?,!) save us from such hyper-speak, and
spiritual chorus liners of eternal jokes. The

LVII.

itinerant knight-monk is a click ahead, he holds
the cliche trope, she holds the wisdom of a hamletic
gravedigger. He confronts John C from beyond the
screen about his final Chubby digging, and at the
same time he entertains the two cadets, fresh out
of their respective dimensional supposories and
investigating past versions of presently sick planets.

The younglings have been sent for observation,
recovery, and symptomatic discovery. The mission’s a
bitch.

LIX.

Hallelujah! The gravedigger beeps from a green-keyed
terminal shell. The sick planet is being diagnosed
with the white plague; Fortune Lobo and Desert Storm
are out of their supposory and are investigating
the mental state of planet Fear (actually Mr Lobo

looks through the microscope and out into the galaxy,
peeking descending paths onto planet Anxiety) (in all
honesty, he’s already bored with the mission). Any

LX.

way, that’s the past. The two cadets have found,
among the rubble of an apparently ancient civitas,
a strange-looking sharp object, a once-adored sky
scrapper, covered in ashes (volcanoes abound) and
snow, because, as usual, it’s freaking cold.

The two work tirelessly and retrieve ghost-in-a-shell
scattered data. The snow’s thick, and the evidence is
skimpy. However, from a preliminary analysis, it
appears that this object of object-worship was once

LXI.

called ‘the shard’. The phallic phenomenon, now an
archived lesson at the Athenian school, is one of the
finest examples of latter-age lethargy, and pre-thing,
pre-apocalypse religious objectry, thing-adoration,

and other variations of idolatry and spiritualessness.
This thing is covered in motile snow, all fingery and
wet like the chassis of a turgid vaginal cry. The deaf
sound of cold snows and hot ashes mixes in the staggered
air, the composition of the atmosphere is rather ecletic.

LXII.

The identity of the new breed, the shard-spawned
marketeers, the infected with the white plague is
tightly linked to cloudy origami-galaxies, and black
holes (the size of a small cat). Now then, John C

is stuck in a terminator download-loop, his avatar
kids are stuck (california-like), snowed under; and
a new character is added to the rubber band of the
story (sorry). An af-ghann knight-rider comes forth
bursting through the narrative, carrier of the Don

LXIII.

Quixote trope blended with some Calvino coffee.
He comes and sits in front of the audience for
scrutiny, cross-legged, diamond-begging, and all
buddhistological. He’s got the experience, they say.

From a Q and A with the X, he can go on for hours
about ‘being in the X’, ‘at one with the X’, etc
etc; he’s also being writing an essay on the finest
measures of how to use the X for apps, resource
allocation and thermal dreaming. Obviously, ladies

LXIV.

and gentlemen, he’s been focussing on CONFLICT-INNER,
being a survivor of the India experience, and a believer
in the Himmel-laya. His name is here left unsaid, also
because he is really a lady, under neath that pink
medallion (gorgeous stuff) and that white shaded armour.

She-he’d loved to be hollow on the inside, in a friendly
nudge to Agilulph, let’s just say that they are related
(not by blood, but by emptiness??). She’s really full on,
ready to fire, and all that. He comes forth, brandish
ing the X momentum, and she goes ‘you’re going to be
famous’, that’s his line. It can mean various different
things according to the moment.

LXV.

The two cadets are bewildered, who’s this trans-atlantic
sage? A plant for feeding? A detective? A ticket
inspector? ‘He’s really annoying,’ says Desert Storm,
‘showing up like this.’ And Fortune Lobo adds: ‘He’s
totally out of it (in of it), being in love with the
‘moment’.

Now the story has topsy-turvied, and the reader’s
more than usually tired, and I am gonna get some tea.

LXVI.

The next part of the story tells how a few cadets
became heroes of a spirital quest. It would be nice
to have them for dinner.

Wisdomous young people will change the uni-verse,
if you care to wait, you will find flecks of melancholy.

Chapter II
I.

When the volcano erupted, we could
not turn back – it was late to change
the course of our sail boat. A cloud of
ash rising, moving across the ocean,
blocking the path of sun: the Gods
awakened and disturbed in their sleep.

So I said good-bye to Herculaneum,
farewell to my free man’s villa, and
welcomed the eclipse, the explosion
and the end of summer. The dark azure
intensity of Mare Nostrum called us
away from the coast. It was time to live.

II.

‘Chubby! Do you think I ought to switch
on the Murakamian well?’ The poetess
is making coffee. Early morning on Titan.
‘First put some clothes on, John C.’
Chubby is stating the obvious, with gentle
care. The light of distant galaxies comes

in the living room, soon the Tarantula
Nebula is fully visible on the Dedalus
screen, and the joys of remote living
are met with a bit of Mozart, and a touch
of coffee. John C begins ‘Today I want to
again-explore the Borovoe memory download’.

III.

‘I wonder if they actually left Earth in the end.’
It seems that `the readers` did not appreciate
the choice of names for the Space cadets.
I do apologize for the two-dimensional feel
to them. Tierra Madre is hyperconnected,
but Gesundheit so far only appears briefly.

When one tells a story, one must make do
with whatever poverty one has in one’s path.
It seems that the sea murmurs, the deep rises,
and the songs swing back and forth. The
albatross of inspiration comes bound over
the ship of the epic poem. Everything is

IV.

woven into the fabric of the narrative.
Distant memories float up and rescue
themselves on the shores of Titan, and
John C welcomes them on the screen,
in the mind, and the Murakamian well.
It hurts to set these half digested dreams

on paper, but one must let go of illusions.
Chubby only wishes for happiness to ensue
for the writer, and for the reader too, even
the most demanding, and uninterested reader.
I care for you, too – reader of my dreams.
Love has been lost, and regained: eyes of ash.

V.

The ship has not sailed, moist-bulky as it is.
It is too gray, too dark, too cemetery-bound.
Switching on the Murakamian well. John C
cannot listen to his own voice. Deep in the
well, the storm cannot be heard, and the voice
cannot be uttered. Screams can be landlocked

inside the hills of the mind, and the pain
itself cannot be rendered well enough by the
surgical operation of de-contaminating the
Soul by the sheer force of creative impulses;
so why try… the characters in the story have
collapsed to kites in the sky with paper histories.

VI.

Everything is connected. Let us start with that.
John C cannot really distinguish anything
in the shadows of the technological well
where his visions, neurowaves and emo-rises
are laid bare in a liquid phase, and like a
caterpillar weaving itself to madness, a magic

cocoon made of wires is wrapped around him
in search of the lost connection. Complete
silence. Complete darkness. Chemo-therapies.
Chubby is lost to him. The clone is dead,
because it never existed. Waking up in the
Murakamian well is anguish itself. A purple

VII.

nightmare of all proportions. A shifting shape
pyra-mind appears to him, disguised as an ice
cube. The Titan upload has failed. Feathers and
bullocks. The brain is shrinking, the voice is
sinking. The air has been sucked out of the
informing wire. The tubiscular wood around

his body is defaulting in this time of crisis.
The memory of Chubby has been erased.
Gentle reader, forget that you ever existed.
This book will now be discontinued.
This legend has no meaning. There, in the
voice, a sound, a unique, throbbing rhythm

VIII.

dot dot dot dot. Experimenting with the mind can
lead to salvation as well as damnation. In the
ocean, diamonds are found. Music may be
streaming through this intermittent connection.
It is August 12th, and all is well. Coffee is spilled;
over the mountain-top, an aria is rising with

momentum. The story is suffering, caught between
the fabric of emotion. John C is down in the drown
room, soaking in all the forgotten insomniac garbage
stored in the cellular luggage hold facility. Bang!
Compressed graphic material about the start of
consciousness. Snow, leaves, winter chill.

IX.

there is an objective reality, a truth with capital t
in order to access that, the filter must be stopped;
fiction and fantasy are fragmented half-truths,
regurgitations of a confused mind, whose vision
is dimmed by a myriad insectoid sensory loadings.
form must re-discover faith, and its koan voice

the Never-ender is set to discover the Cosmos
a heavy spacecraft, a Colossus of Rhodes, ready
to leap across emptiness with idealistic daring;
a motley feathered phoenix, rising of the dead land
rain over the North Yorkshire heather-hued moors
assembly of these fragments joins by suggestive

X.

chance within John C finneganic dream, for
he must sleep a dreadful lot; deep in the Murakamian
well, echoes of memory bubble up, though
we cannot infer with certainty whose experiences
those may really be, the electric impulses have
profound emotional impact on the visionary

John C is burdened by excessive Lockian freedom;
successive, aggressive revolutions in his life
history determined exile on Titan; but how does
the waking mind selectively uptake figments
of the real to formulate a credible dream, or vice
versa? It takes many a day to wake from slumber

XI.

for such wind argonauts as our less than Titanic hero,
vicious recirculation by circadian rhythm murders
any hint of achieved knowledge of what is what,
and each day, when dawn rises from the fog,
the fearful and broken mind finds itself in a pool
of naked sentiment, unable to escape the inevitable.

Chubby day-dreams of the satellite closest to earth,
whose orbit determines the lunatic phases of the sea
and the tilled fields, and the summer-weary swan
She’s busy writing poetry, shaping word-dough
while John C is in liquid phase. The Murakamian
well is a consciousness-extraction device whereby

XII.

the subject is inserted into a cylinder of red solution
to explore the most inaccessible memories residing
in the fathom five of the ocean of the unconscious,
regardless of what happens in Croydon, that is.
Alone with the dark blue bottle, the mind wanders
Harks back to the time when Chubby was a little kitty

Happy times when the sky clears and the cloud
lets out a deep breath. The street hurts. Echoes.
The cosmic space, word of a wonder-wanderer,
Happens when light dazzles from above and below
A mirror scheme, the bottomless ocean, the skyful
Skillful blue, pattern after pattern, a sad dream.

XIII.

June nine teen ninety eight. Morning air,
nippy. I am worried, I just had the most
frightening premonitory dream. The world
will awaken from slumber on a day not
distant, and everything will be undone

We shall all wake up from this illusion
of light, Beethoven will want to drown.
Skies shall crack open, mountains shall
crumble; people with their mouths open
will eat each other, along with daffodils.

XIV.

Cicciotta is dead, the iridescent phoenix
roams over the Russian waste land, inter
poenas et tormenta vivit anima contenta,
casti amoris sola spe. Norah Jones is so
cool. I am trying to pick up the pieces,
I never have to see Eastern Germany again.

Pick up the gun, set up the story. Just let
dreams be, just let the haunted ghosts be.
How does it feel to be dead, grand mother?
It feels like exactly like being frozen to death.
The Neverender is a space craft designed to
leave faster than the speed of ‘face the music’.

XV.

Down in the well, all planets are equally
distant. The emotional log makes a record
of the electrical soul inklings . Sugar
manufacturers will deal with the rest.

A Ginnunga gap, a main stream of present
past and (possibly) future offers opportunities,
gawp with their jaws all shilly shally. For
the eternal light, everything is really fuzzy.

XVI.

Now the Neverender has been tripping for
ever seven months now. Softly, the sunny
stars eclipse the day dreamers and voicelessly
murmur slavishly angry thoughts. The clouds
will never reappear, but Titan is outta kink.

Sheltered in the ship’s claustrophobic gut,
Officer G is counting twilight breathes
with his meditating swing. Out side, the
head light of the star ship endlessly searches
the uni verse for meaning purpose etc

XVII.

‘What’s the temperature? Straight jacket
cold, you might say.’ The hull echoes with
a voice and two heartbeats. Tierra Madre
is tapping on her musical box, reading
her soul history out loud. Gesundheit is
studying the exterior through the deep space

lens. ‘So my Roman self life history was
intense. My soul record mentions a volcano
eruption, a nomadic journey and something
called a memory download. The meaning of that
escapes me. Do you remember any of your
previous lives?’ Gesundheit continues with her

XVIII.

focal activities, then pauses, resumes and then
suddenly turns irritated ‘Why are you interrupting
me with your soul garbage? I’m looking into
infinity.’ ‘Scuse me, miss phallosophy. Didn’t know
you were so deeep.’ Tierra Madre squirms back.

Suddenly, Gesundheit hollers, then whistles, then
sibilates in the most insecure voice ‘Land ahoy, yo!
Or water ahoy, really’. ‘Whatever’ Tierra’s smoky skin
lights up as she speaks in a sing-song tone, all but
excited, she is not partaking in the marvel of the
discovery. ‘I was telling you about my soul history, girl.
You see, I had to leave a Roman fishing village first.

XIX.

These freaky parallels! Now we had to leave earth
because of the solar system was being engulfed by
our star. A volcano, the sun… don’t you see everything
happens in fractals, patterns, circles? Are you listening?
Blondie? Bitch? Crestfallen?’ Gesundheit is not aware
of her words. She keeps her head down above the lens
and looks into deeply questionable space. ‘Why should

there be other living creatures in the cold empty void?’
Tierra Madre explains herself the meaning of all that
while the ship veers starboard toward a bubbly thing,
a planet, it seems . ‘Ladies and Gentlemen this is the
Captain speaking.’ Ariadne clears her voice ‘I hope

XX.

you have been enjoying yourselves on this short-ish
trip to a new home. It appears that we have found
a large quantity of wo’er, H 2 O, a great big heap
of life sustaining liquid. Forgive my French, but
putain! Fuck me! This is an historic moment! Now,
where’s my hat? Who took my hat? What are these

flowers for? Where’s the champagne? Bring me my
vice-empress Flexa. Where’s everybody gone to?
Mr G, have you seen my hat?’ Tierra Madre, piqued
by her friend’s lack of interest, retreated to her cabin
with her music box on, so she missed all the fuss.
Gesundheit is in a state of shock, her heart all racing.

XXI.

Two months later, all the novelty has worn off.
The planet is just water, water and water. A bubble
castle against water events, wavy and squally like
that. The inhabitants of the planet are human-like
except for a fin here and there, and the absence
of a sense of humour. Philosophers on both sides

collide in epic discussions, Laputa-like, on the
possibilities of convergent evolution. DNA stringers
are busy phylogenetising all impermanence and
all living things, but it’s gonna take a while for
that neighbour-joining algorithm to fit this one.
The main occupation of the indigenous humans

XXII.

Is war. Surprise! I thought it would be poetry.
There are two empires clashing their claws like
cats. The main ethic-territorial-religious dispute
is between Memorians (composed of Veas and Peaks)
and Oblivians (who used to be called Wallyees).
Tierra Madre gets dispatched to the Vea capital,

while her friend Gesundheit stays on board,
monitoring the activities of Wallyees from afar.
Way better assignment, at least you can work
in a pajama. John C walks out of the well, and
looks for his friend, the clone cat. But she’s gone.
Will you side with the Oblivians or the Memorians?

XXIII.

Desert Storm is unsure with whom to side;
She has chosen, after some consideration, an
assignment to the Peak Capital, the decaying
city of Light and Dark. It is her conviction
that one cannot fight darkness. It is a slow,
inevitable wave, like a requiem played when

making love. King of Heaven, we implore at
night, suddenly awake, save me, save my soul.
Desert Storm is a troubled cadet, but she’ll
have to take sides in the end, and her decisions
will affect the rest of her life. Light becomes
light, a hermit once said, but that hypothesis

XXIV.

Has not been substantiated. The city of Light
and Dark, a strange land sprawl on a planet
confounded by waters, has shadows and shades.
Its moribund mystery has long been claimed,
And the treasures it holds are but a series of
Memories. The Memorian city does not want

To forget. This idea appeals to Desert Storm.
She has long fantasized about discovering a
civilization with a history to sell, a myth to
dig from the grave. Water-planet humans revere
the achievements of the Peak people, the city
reflects moments of their history. Buildings

XXV.

breathe with pride, the moon is high, and the
night is white, and memories are from
underground. Aboard the Neverender, Desert
Storm bids temporary farewell to her cadet
friends. Stars outside the ship’s panels, a
chasm of slippery light and forgetful silence.

The azure glow of the water planet dims
her eyes. Tierra Madre is sad. “So bright”,
she says. “I’ve been experimenting with
mind-altering teas. I will soon bring the Placebo Wing
to the other Memorian capital, and my
carcass with it. A city, they say, protected
XXVI.

By walls of water.” Desert Storm sits still,
staring into her X. John C is fretting over
the memory download. There is something
odd about the experiment he is undertaking.
There’s something off about this one. “ I do
not like this one bit. There’s something wrong

with it. Or with me.” And yet he is inexorably
attracted to it. “So much of life” he tells Chubby
“is composed of sifting through other people’s
mental garbage, desperately seeking something
resembling our own experience. Copy after copy,
paste after paste. We live parallel lives. On the
screen, on the touchpad, on our bed.” Chubby

XXVII.

Writes notes of all of this, intermittently licking
her paws. It is going to rain on Titan, a wreathe
of gaseous whorls lifts up, carried upwards by
winds unknown. “We’ll have methane for supper, dear”
That’s all she says. John C opens a can of cat food.
He eats from the can, Chubby stares down.
The drop is some hundred meters.

XXVIII.

In the city of Peak winds, it is a cold
Sun day morning, except, as in any good
sci-fi story, there are more stars in the sky
than one, not to mention the moons. How
many would you like, dear reader? Myself

I always liked a sunset with at least three
Suns and a dozen satellites. Go figure it.
The warm season is yet to come. The water
planet is slowing awakening, the gaia feeling
it has is a feeling of sickened remorse.

XXIX.

Desert Storm is full of childish thoughts.
She has just landed near the Peak memorial,
her eyes are welling up with emotion.
Long has she dreamt of visiting the home

of a creative writer, and this V. H. is
an etcher of moving stories. She’s finally
here, face to face with unknown myths.
The history is both familiar and remote,
such a frightful headache.

XXX.

On Monday, she wakes up in jail, her face
pressed up against the glass. Ariadne is with her,
her hands resting in her laps. “We’ll have to
negotiate with the local authorities. Tell me what
happened.”

In the ocean of the water planet, there exists a
creature with many eyes, a ball of flesh, a gourmet
sinuous bottom-dwelling monster. It can see
every thing on the planet. “I’ve had a good time”
it says “other times, I’ve had a good time”.

XXXI.

The creature lives alone in the wake of waves,
and never rests. Its hunger, Grendel-like, is only
satisfied when feasting on forbidden land creatures.
In the dungeons of the Peak capital, there lives

another creature, roaming the underground restlessly.
It can touch, but cannot see. Its pod-feet wander about
in search of light and knowledge, but blindness and
darkness is all they have as choice.

XXXIII.

“I don’t feel happy”, begins Desert Storm. I went into
a sexual frenzy. I mutilated a Peak statue, I tried
to seduce a Peak citizen. There’s something in the
air of this planet that stimulates my libido. I know
it’s me, and yet there is something else, speaking to me.

As I was masturbating with the fingers I cut off
from the statue, memories of this planet flooded through me.
I’ve had visions of a sea-dwelling creature, a sort of
disgusting, many-eyed whale. And under this city,
I saw a crawling thing, stirring in the morning time.

XXXIV.

The clouds dim my mind, the days roll by, and I find
in myself a sort of nostalgia for our old planet, for the
old days. Help me, Ariadne.” Dreamer and Lightluck,
the two archivists, walk in and motion to Ariadne.
“You’ve always been my flower-student, I have to go now”

And so she goes. A night in Napoli, a long time ago.
Memories come as visions to Desert Storm. She plays with
the broken statue. In the peak prison, she only finds
comfort when playing with her sex. “These memories,
they belong to someone else.”

XXXV.

“Why have I been arrested? Why did
I decided to insult this alien nation by tampering with
their historical heritage? Why do I feel such erotic love
for the skin and convulsions of this planet?”
Meanwhile, Fortune Lobo is among the Oblivians.

They are such lovers of good food. They eat without
shame, and continuously. He is meticulously scribbling
away, recording every small observation, a good biologist
on his Galapagos journey.

XXXVI.

And Tierra Madre is feeling ill. Somehow, she knows
there is something wrong with her. She looks outside
of the window. This is the Veal city, a city surrounded
by walls of water. Gesundheit is with her. She is learning
the Citoo language. It’s a culture whose origin no-one

really knows about. Yet, one day, a new section of the human
archive just appeared, and there it was, carefully described.
Gesundheit wants to be able to tell the future, so she
studies all that that pertains the unknown, the bizarre,
the unconscious, the time-relevant and the timelessly
mysterious.

XXXVII.

“Master Goya once said, the sleep of reason…”
John C disconnects the download, and looks down.
There is a choice of other downloads. There must be
other things to do in this cosmos than replaying

old downloads, or uploading discarded files.
“Do you miss me, my darling?” One of many
unforgiven downloads
speaks to him, as he closes his eyes.

XXXVIII.

Tierra Madre is sickly-woven. There is a slow hades-feeling
creeping over her. She’s caught the grey-area bacterium.
It causes a sort of mystical dizziness at first, and then,
a peculiarity of the Veal city, a kind of major hopelessness.

The city is beautiful, yet abandoned, and yet somehow
still living. The Peak and Oblivian tourists populate
its cobbled streets, boats slowly slither away on magic
waterways, and the light of the multiple satellites
calls pockets of silent musicians to play dead songs
to the nomadic lovers of yester-year.

XXXIX.

Yes, it’s you – you fear being found out, reader. I am
speaking of you. Creme-caramel, a Peak inhabitant,
has as a day job the ungrateful task of keeping the
prisoners happy by telling them stories. Not about

insurance salesmen or slumbering numb-waves,
or sailing decorations of plates through the kitchen
void, or anything to do with marriage, or deceit.
Creme-caramel, strange and fair-headed, mindlessly
considerate finds it interesting to escape her duty
and interrogate the prisoners.

XL.

“So, tell me, Desert Storm, how is life on earth?
Or should I say, how was life on earth? I’d like to be
sadistic with you. I’d like to get all the juice out of
you, and find out all your deep undiscovered biscuits.
I am sure you – human – have a lot to tell. Do tell.

I am bored with my job. I need a break. I need a life.
Do tell. I need to slumber, I need to fly. I like Kafka,
but not on any beach. There are too many cats in this
story.”

XLI.

“If you want to understand humans, my alien Caramel,
read Clarel, by Herman Melville”, said DS.
“’Scuse me, silly Desert Stormette, you are the alien
here. This is my planet, yo.
Who the hell is Fortune Lobo? Why is Desert Storm called
with such a Titanicky name? Why is Creme Caramel

not married? These, and such other crucial matters
to the telling of these stories shall be recounted after
the advertisement suggestions for you, wondrous audience.
Please buy “Let me get by”, a new product by Chop-Gunn,
the air-teasist from Dusseldaft.

XLII.

The Neverender has been trippin’ for several months, now.
We got that. The stars soffly mur-mur and ciao-ciao
while voicelessly angry thoughts are being down-loaded
by John C. Sheltered in the gut of the ship, Officer G.

interrogates his navel. Who is Fortune Lobo? He is
a cadet. He’s got locks of hairdo. He’s kind. He wants
to be a scientist. His trousers are long and his smile is steady.
What kind of a wimpy-ass character description do we
have here?

XLIII.

The head light of the Neverender searches the uni verse
for sherry and gin and tonic and for meaning and for Aldous
and Chop-Gunn. I am a graduate from York, from Brun-Hell.
Desert Storm has a choice. Recount the story of life
on earth or die tryin’. She has been sentenced to death.
Orgasmical Creme Caramel visits her regularly to milk
her of the absolute hidden Truth, the truer Truth, the one

with the capital mis-understatement. After all, fox,
being alive is not all that worth it. Don’t hide, reader.
The choice, oh my dear Tierra Madre in Veal city,
is not between selling out and being strong.
A boat floats by while The Neverender awaits
instructions. Chubby writes them down, and John C
interrogates himself on why Officer G reminds him
of spontaneous miraculous.

XCIV.

The Never-ender is a self-aware ship. It knows all about
its cadets and officers. It remembers earth, and the way
back, much like a stray dog. Can you imagine a star-ship
much like a basset hound? Well, you know.

Chubby is picking her nose with cat claws. Don’t
recommend it. Gesundheit is also in prison. She tried
to spring Desert Storm free with one of her spiritual
séance freedom sessions but all she managed to do

XLV.

Is get herself noticed, and arrested. Her boy-friend,
an artist that shall remain unknown, should take note
that he ought to take better care of his very smart girl.

If all men knew what heroes they have as partners…
we wouldn’t be here to try to confound and better
the uni-verse.

XLVI.

The verses are getting narrower, the Placebo Wing
is roaming among the canals while Tierra Madre is
playing with her mystical-musical pod license.
I wish I was a musician, she interjects.

She loves to fly her craft above the water, the
still water of the Veal lagoon.
Gesundheit got busted trying to free her friend.
Desert Storm, a very beautiful young woman,
very intelligent and everything, is not impressed.

XLVII.

The eroticism of death does not appeal to her.
Her days refuse numbering. We’re all dying,
she keeps telling her blond, crestfallen friend.
Desert Storm draws pictures of mythical birds

which are cluttering her mint mind. She feels
her youth growing inside of her. Water is still.
It sparkles. The planet where she has landed
is very interesting but she misses home.

XLVIII.

“Why am I in prison, goddamit. Want to smoke.
Want sex. Want some new wants. Bullet train
to oblivion. We left the earth to be outta kink.
Outta time, the Romans came from Troy.

The Trojans faced the seas and one of them
got killed by Neptunian snakes. Gesundheit
is convinced of being a reincarnated Roman.
A freed slave.

XLIX.

There she is, thinks Desert Storm. Gesundheit
sleeps like a miniature warrior, peacefully.
“We left a burning planet, much like the city
of Troy. The planet was full of infested weddings.
The water-main had broken. Free rein to the
consumerist virus. The biology of the virus
is that it consumes you from within.

L.

At dinner, Fortune Lobo observes Oblivian
lore. Large groups of people gather and
draw pictures in the air, with cloud brushes.
Yet they are consumed by a hookworm,
a verme-solitaire, a solitary worm.
They eat, and laugh and spit and pig out.

They love life. They love food. They love
being together. Being loud, together.
They smile a lot, even without meaning
to do so, Fortune Lobo notes. He is happy
among them. But they are hungry.
They continue to eat, and eat, and eat.

LI.

Tierra Madre, flying, reflects on the
nature of the Veal city: abandoned,
semi-flooded. Its civilization destroyed
by Peak invaders. An old poem,
remembered by the few survivors,
narrates the last days of the city.

She (the cadet, not the city) is ill,
with a feeling that something wicked
this way has been coming for a while.
Fortune Lobo, stuck between youth
and diplomacy, enjoys the company
of Oblivian women. He is entertaining

LII.

the idea of sailing across the Sword
Ocean to explore this planet for the
human story to include slightly richer
chapters. Desert Storm, in her cell,
etches little fables onto a luminous

slab, in order to fight depression.
She recalls her childhood. Dreamer
has swapped seats with Lightluck,
they are about to begin a game of
relationship speed chess. Officer G
has met Ariadne and Flexa. They have

LIII.

Decided to fly to the Veal city and
study the development of a strange
disease, which apparently has infected
Tierra Madre. According to the DNA
literate men, the story that this virus
is fond of telling is a story analogous

to that of a known terrestrial pathogen,
which wiped out, among others, frogs,
bees, horses and a large number of
humans, mostly before the Thing. Land
ahoy! Dreams Fortune Lobo, while
he eyes the breast of an Oblivian athlete.

LV.

Dreamer and Lightluck are old friends.
Dreamer is ginger soft woman, with
delicate hands and artistic inclinations.
She has a hard core of plastics inside
her, and she listens to old records, and
she does not eat chocolate. Lightluck
is athletic, pathetic and strong. She has

a strong sense of enthusiasm for flowers,
derivatives and timelessness. Neither of
them is innocent, and yet they are angry
and annoyed at an increasingly corporate
universe, and they cherish childish dreams
of light and luck. They are so fond of each

other that they hate each other, and not so
secretely. They are in love with one another,
if anything, to defy loneliness and the cliff
hanger of marriage and devotional duties
to the Neverender, humanity and their Borovoe
dictator.

LVI.

To be honest, I resent them, and so does
John C, who is currently entertaining the
thought of throwing the damn cat from the
window. Methane is a good pool for naughty
cats, he thinks. I happen to think that Titan
is crowded these days.

Now you know, dear reader, that Creme
Caramel has naughty dreams, and she is
trying to tease out from an increasingly
depressed Desert Storm the story of her life,
of life on earth, and the secret of the universe.

LVII.

Everything is rolled into one, according to
Irish story-tellers. I woke up from a falling
dream and I saw Lightluck and Dreamer
playing their favourite game, just to defy
their sense of time and of meaning. Fortune
Lobo is making love to Oblivian goddesses,
two at a time, while they try to understand
the nature of men, women, the chemistry,

the life of a single person in search of a
committed relationship (both in an urban
setting as well as in the country).
For this reason, dear reader, they play the
world famous gimmick of relationship
speed chess.

LVIII.

Huff! Puff! Fortune Lobo is labouring away
well into the humble digs of an oblivian
dweller, and he performes above the
average for a friday evening at any of your
writer’s clubs lovelies.

In the meaning time, Dreamer opens
with a rather daring gambit. “A funeral
pyre as the starting point for love and duty”.
“A flick of the wrist, and a dazzle in the eyes”,
replies Lightluck, always trying to defy Dreamer
in her territory.

LIX.

There’s always a moment in life
when the unexpected happens,
time comes to a stop, and God
comes fingering you in the most
unholy of places, a thing that
the Japanese call satori. Those
moments, known as moments of

clarity reconnect living beings to
the universal plug-in. But, one may
notice, these moments are sometimes
seen as holy, and thus revered, put
in a showcase, gilded. The most
unpleasant motions of revisionism
then sap their energy, and the mind-body
regains control of the material and the
spiritual.

So, what life once taught us becomes
a myth, and this story is concerned with
such myths, thus deconstructed and
revisited. Brides’ head turned on its ass.

LX.

Those moments of gilded horns
of dilemma and digestion are the
sub-ject of this space epic thing,
and I am afraid to say that those myths
are re-narrations and evocations
of earlier insights that I have largely
forgotten. Ladies and gentlemen,
I have forgotten.

LXI.

Tierra Madre observes the bacterium
that has infected her down the picoscope.
What a large father mucker, she thinks.
So it turns out, according to the DNA
addicts, that she also carries the consumerist
virus in her blood. Pot bellies and empty
look? Luiz Vittonz on the horizon?

Fat chance, Tierra has crocodile
skin, and she is putting up a fight.
She goes flying with her Ballerina Wing
on the lagoon, observing the tiny
Veal fishers and clammers labouring
in the water.

LXII.

Senior officers are concerned, given
that the consumerist virus wiped out
large parts of the human population
on earth.

Dogs bark, lemons are being squeezed,
and Fortune Lobo lies in bed, victor
in battle. His next project is to stand
inside a sail boat across the ocean
and sing schoolboy songs.

LXIII.

Desert Storm weeps silently in jail, her painted
techno-nails discuss options with each other,
while Creme-Caramel sips tea and Gesundheit
still sleeps sleepful dreams about Frankenstein.
‘It’s not my problem’, mutters the many-eyed
whale as it attacks a Peak settlement,
humming ‘là ci darem la mano’.

LXIV.

“Check!”, Dreamer parades her cat grin.
Officer G, Flexa, Ariadne watch the skies
in search of hope. The Neverender sleeps.
RostRya, inspired cadet, is daydreaming,
the light of the multiple (local) stars in her eyes.

LXV.

‘Sometimes I love you’, Chubby sings,
John C is panting a picture about a picture
with a damned gentle-man, and all the
nanolepidopterans are flying at the sound
of music.

LVI.

There. The Coelacanth genome has just been
published, the transition on land ought to be
mapped between an eye toward the sky
and a fish for starters.

John Ashbery, Jonathan Prynne and Dr Full-ton
discuss versions of a screenplay about
Laputa, Jurassic eggs and the postmodern
Egyptian poetry. Did you know that Emperor
Augustus was born in Nola?

LVII.

Tierra Madre traces a little de-tour,
While listening to Bach, she thinks of love.
There’s more light to this world than
The old mistakes would lead us to believe.
Fortune Lobo, sailing across the water,
singing of unknown mountains, still
following the code of the good man.
He shipwrecked, then married an icicle girl
in the steppe, following the yellow ribbon
of narration.

LVIII.

Much like Aeneas with Dido, he spurned her,
beautiful martyr, he sailed across more water.
Desert Storm, in a prison cell, recalls
abandonment in the rain. Dreamer and Lightluck
have forgotten the secret they were meant to keep.

Desert Storm opens up a case, and with a fine
needle, she injects pure self-esteem into her vein.
Fortune Lobo is still sailing, sailing on the fire
of filtered water, across unknown straits, quotas
of land, of rejected beliefs.

LIX.

And then suddenly, they are all beamed up
aboard the NeverEnder. The self-aware spaceship
decided on a question of style that the machine-written
laws of the universe would lead us to far other seas,
and other planets.

Fortune Lobo marvels at his wedding band. RostRya
sits and observes Zeus’s vomit outside the window.
“I’ve gone out the window”, an echo in John C’s mind.
Tierra Madre is semi-cured, and Desert Storm is semi-sexual.

LX.

What will happen to our sexuality, once we are fully human?
So the ship drifts toward more space, more hubble-bubbles.
It’s been a while since anyone on the ship visited the X.

Cicadas in the wind. Up in the twisted inverted relative cold,
the far-away word and music location of the NeverEnder,
space is lots, and the wave-chopping vessel rows across the photons,
swinging in the ecstasy of lots of satellite garbage memories,

LXI.

unbound, forgotten, drifting, where each human and non human
moment walks across the universe in the form of a memory pod,
grab one of these, reader-thing, and chew it. Millions of sentient
monkeys have spent their money just to be something, someone
at the mall down the alley.

Our cadets and ship, and officers and staff are stuffed down
the gorge of limit opening space, almost a transition to being
some thing else. They are limited by the objective of the narrative,
and the capacity of John C to re-live enacted memories, and the
interest of dearReader to keep on going in a waste of dead roots.

NeverEnder

A Space Epic Poem

BOOK I

The Journey to the West

written by asynonymous
style associative
ethos post-modernist
readers welcome but warned:
material is uber-literature

II.

Let it be thy earnest and incessant
care as a Roman and a man to perform
whatsoever it is that thou art about,
with true and unfeigned gravity,

natural affection, freedom and justice:
and as for all other cares, and
imaginations, how thou mayest ease
thy mind of them. Which thou shalt do;

if thou shalt go about every action
as thy last action, free from all vanity,
all passionate and wilful aberration from
reason, and from all hypocrisy, and self-love,

and dislike of those things, which by the fates
or appointment of God have happened unto thee.
Thou seest that those things, which for a man
to hold on in a prosperous course, and to live

a divine life, are requisite and necessary, are
not many, for the gods will require no more of
any man, that shall but keep and observe these things.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Chapter I

I.

segment one of the veil nebula
echoes with Zauberflote being sung;
rainbow-hued gas densities shift and
haunt her heart, but Ariadne laughs:
the sick thoughts of planets are
not discussed by the Athenian school.

That’s a clique of thought. Ariadne
is a teacher at the Borovoe space
academy. She is at a concert, and
feels as though she is surrounded
by stars, while Mozart’s acrobatics

fill the hall. Her neighbour starts
humming, her fantasy sublimes into a
state of light – a student kicks the
back of her chair, a trillion meta-
morphoses whet her mind. A memory.

II.

John C. is setting up his computer,
wired into consciousness and memory,
which enables his terminal to log on
the solar system’s server, uploading
cellular activity to the digital frame;
his foolish idea is to delete the past.

memories on the solar-system-wide-web
are available for download, exploration
manipulation and absorption into the X.
People are soulsharing but he wishes
only to seed (share his files), so he
blocks derivative unwanted memories

III.

Now Ariadne reclines her head
zoning out, imagining strips
of sunset vanishing in mid-air.
Memories of a delirious sky of wine,
laid to rest long ago, come alive.
Lights are awakened to the east
and the whole city stands silent.

A cloud, flower-like, curiously
advances while the clock races,
a rose fades, and Ariadne smiles.
The night is quiet, it is time
for poets to decipher existence
while the moon waltzes above our hive

IV.

This is a time in the future when the
egalitarian plateaux has been reached.
The world by people has become perfect.
Mystic music captures this pinnacle epoch.

Ariadne, would you read a book blessed with
Shakespeare’s verses? Cryptic poetry haunts,
shifts into musical variations, hooks the
mind, violin and clarinet give way to
motions coming in and out, like sea waves.

Stumbling on the divine notes,
the noise of philosophers murmurs
in the regimented academy – such
sadness is pouring forth as Mozart’s
dying genius is unravelling through
swells, flutters, cherub songs.

V.

At the same time, in a still future
dimension, the cursor blinks on
John C’s black terminal window, the
shell of computer science’s disputes.

Log in to exist, log out to stay dead.
Children out of the window scream and
laugh, their post-modernist howls
haunt the CPU’s processing night.

The unwanted hero lives in the shell bash.
In TS Eliot’s unwanted time dimension,
disrupted voices walk via markov chains
the shortest path to hyperbolic realities:
all of existence’s permanent possibilities
are computed by g.o.d.’s algorithm. Here

VI.

everything is material. The math of it
escapes us, but the fact remains, all
is well in this time of beauty. Or is it?

John C lives in a time after perfection,
an imperfect time, where he has been
banished on a moon of Saturn, in the company
of a cat. His life is spent at a computer.

The screen vision on John C’s cursor life
scans the characters of the improvised play.
He has been downloading Ariadne’s story,
a mere diversion from the dreariness of his

existence. Ariadne has finished daydreaming
in the academy hall – the music is over –
the guests are queueing in the hall, much
like a spaceship landed in a wistful steppe.

Here, improvised learning is achieved by
golden age sergeant majors and deconvoluted
agents of governmental control who wear
make-up around their scarred lizard eyes.

Here is cadet Tierra Madre, a cynical young
student clad in black velvet, her eyes red,
soaked in boredom. Her windowless mind
whiplashes toward her only friend.

VII.

As the audience walks off, the space poetess
comes forth, she is the hidden treasure
of the academy – and a bad officer too –
her name is junior officer Desert Storm.

She walks in drunkenness with fantasies in mind,
her earthly friend shooting sideway glances to
those male officers who will not make it to the
outer galaxy, they will remain stranded
in the Yamato’s golden cave (that’s where the

academy is based). The two women share a
magnetic poetry kit, and talk only in silence.
Their friend is time – the future holds them for
interplanetary travel, Jupiter and beyond!

VIII.

But they ask too many questions. The
system is skewed. Routinely, their restless
minds are monitored by the Agitation’s
central control computer, overseeing all.
The perfect future has a glitch. The music

is over, because the Sun is getting too hot.
The human species must relocate. Youths shall
be dispatched in search of another habitable
planet. John C is vividly imagining himself
on a beach right now as his cat walks in and
speaks with commanding skill. ‘In this winter,

IX.

I shall die – this is an unacceptable
liberty taken by those who dream’.
The music hall is empty, only one senior
officer sits, her hands resting in her
lap. Flexa is in the process of studying
human cerebral networking with the sun’s

magnetic field. She has failed, so far,
to retrieve the nickel core of the fiery
formula, discovering her dissent, and
pragmatically accepting the failures
of the political system, and her body’s
degenerating fluidity. Her emotional core

X.

is still as a snowy mountain, the white
leopard is tuned to the radio’s most
violent musical, but the intellectual in her
will enthuse the heart and separate the star
from the magnet, and restore harmony
in her soul’s totipotent stare resting

at the moment in an undefined stage
of the washing-machine-like cell cycle.
This will happen before the galaxy bursts
down and out, and the solar system implodes
to a state of non-existential, unbiolitical
silence. Please listen for further announcements.

XI.

‘Kubrick’s hope’, ‘The Journey to the West’,
‘The incredible tide’, ‘A known memory’:
John C stares at the dusty books on shelf.
On Titan the weather is harsh – methane
showers, freezing temperatures and on

top of that, solitude in the high tower
of the apartment block where he resides.
His sole companion is a replicant cat,
genomed to suit the needs of a stranded
infotechnician on the shores of lake
Distress, aptly named geographical feature
on the shiny surface of Titan. Believe

XII.

it or not, but the only discussions
he entertains are with his sophisticated
replicant pet – no match for him in the
noble art of japanese Go, or poetry
writing; Chubby’s feline touch has a
much more poignant feel to it. No

matter how much he tries, John C
cannot compare with the cat’s ingenious
thinking. His memory download has been
interrupted. The uploaded memories
of Ariadne have been frozen in mid-space
somewhere between Creation and Time,
all the way before Chinese civilization

XIII.

constructed myths and abstruse philosophies:
the way of the tao and the ‘chan buddhist
nihilistic sect’, as a Hare Khrishna
commentator once quipped. Ariadne is a
character in a story that was never
developed, a story that never happened;

all the way before Mr Johnson studied
the effects of double entries on
spiritual life, back when the Buddha
sat under the Bodhi tree, the serpent
rose from the pond and stroke the notes
of the Zhuangzi song, and Arjuna designed

XIV.

the just war, the right treason, and
entered the state of Californian light
and magic – well before Soviet discrepancies
and European failed colonial states.
Ariadne does not exist at this present
moment. Her friend Flexa does not hold

her hand, the other members of the Academy
are not fretting about the Yamato hollow
cave, they do not worry about their
galactic future, Tierra Madre does not
hold debates between one side of her
mind and the other about the nature of

XV.

boys and girls, Jesus and consumerism.
Desert Storm does not devour chunks of text
in frantic night sessions searching
the lost icon of Hollywood, Bombay, London,
Beethoven, and all beings toward humanity.
This happens not, because Chubby has

pulled the plug on John C’s computer: now
he is Masukele-cursing, Turner-ing light
and darkness inside his 2001 soul-optimism
and thundering about the ineptitude of
programmers stationed on Pluto, Mercury
and Alpha Centauri’s forbidden planet.

XVI.

Can you hear the silence? It is Jim
Morrison’s swan song of The End – lurking
in the Tierra Madre’s musical bead on air;
In Paris, before the snakes, and the nuclear
hurricanes, there was an underground
burial ground. The young cadet is drawing

a stalactite fragment depicting 21st
century Parisian skulls while studying
for midterm ‘Sky or Die’ module, her
facial features are jade-reminiscent;
she is concentrated on perfect shaping
the 3D stone etches, her eyes hurt.

XVII.

Gesundheit walks in and storms the castle:
‘Cippirimerlo! Tierra! Wake up! We must
make art – the sea is beautiful today:
just log in on the Hawaii platform!
I want to escape this hollow cave. I
want to be president of the Academy.

Tierra Madre looks up, slightly annoyed.
‘Can’t you let me study and make art?
I am well aware of your condition –
it’s not my fault if the planet is
melting, and your arse is burning.’
Desert Storm walks in. ‘I am so happy,

XVIII.

I have discovered the Byronic path to
mathematical oblivion – it took James
Read ten years to solve it when he was
a student on Zuracornia long ago’.
‘Oh that’s impressive’, Tierra madre is
not over-awed. She wants to continue

her gridlock-carving, and these two
‘friends’ block her mind, and off-load
their insane issues on her unburden
able lap. ‘Not my problem’, is her
motto. She is not a favourite any
Academy master, as she has the habit of
being so highly

XIX.

critical as to hand-grill any simulated
soul just with her fiery red-turned eyes.
Meanwhile, two archivists are discussing
love in the Yamato Cave’s Archive lobby.
Lightluck argues for enlightenment, witch

hunting, and decomposable relationships.
Her friend, Dreamer – discusses love in
the framework of survival, and her thoughts
are dark. The smell of the sea mixes in her
landlocked memory while she talks about
the ideal boy-friend. In the future they
have not solved the issue of reproduction.

XX.

Nor do they see it in a strictly Darwinian
sense, since the old hag’s theory was
completely discredited in the 25th century
(30th century according to Buddhists).
It appears that Lamarck, French hoodie, had
not been too far off the mark. Apparently

in pockets of post-nuclear Prandia (formerly
known as the UINAITE STE OF EI, or something
like it, according to fragments) they still
believe in the age-old story of Mister Bister,
the Gaseous Vertebrate. But I digress – ‘Hail
Muse! Et cetera’, quotes a certain poet. Now
the two friends, secretly lovers, design

XXI.

the best spider trap to fool their latest
experiment, ‘a beddu meu’ – Sardinian for
beautiful one. They wish their heart to be
wild-woven, they wish their love to be steady.
Who wouldn’t, I wish them luck. Wish me luck,
too. I live in the 21st century, but my mind

is in the 30th, and I do desire some rest.
Too much time-travelling! Being a narrator
entails not really existing, but existing.
But Ovid would have dined, and Virgil would
have discovered, I only digress. Bless them.
That’s all I can say for now. ‘Love is great’,
argues Lightluck while she issues a text bead

XXII.

to Flexa, who’s really pissed off with the
management. ‘Love is an entanglement’ replies
the dark one, (Dreamer)’and there is no exit’.
Let us leave with Flexa. She is really something,
her cortical discoveries are unparalleled,
she walks with great determination, but the

world is hardly apt to change under her feet,
which is a fact that creates great frustration.
As she walks down the panelled lanes of the
great cave, she looks up to the Sigm, the
symbol of the interplanetary human Nation.
‘What nationalist bollocks!’ she thinks.

XXIII.

Things never change, and they do. Now she
walks out to the air, planet earth in not
yet a hamletian tomb, despite nuclear holo
cast-gram facts. She hums ‘I Pini di Roma’,
thinking of Donald Duck, and we love her for it.

But Lissabona is her home, or not. We could
ask her for a discussion on replicant rights,
but right now she is busy. The sky looks too
radiant. The colour of a difficult sunset blames
the clouds, and all her thoughts about the
Nation disappear in union with the spiritual
level, they’ve got that in the future.

XXIV.

The epic music of the migrant spirit
echoes across the sea, the ocean,
the open space – one unifying sorrow:
Passacalle, down the sun-stricken
streets, in variations of violin,
crescendo, pizzicato , peaking –

the wave splashes, the surfer gulps
up water, the melody streams into
universal space, the mind expands
until all the relocated souls ignite
in unison with military marches, Figaro
suits, primadonna perfumes, and cannon calls.

XXV.

Feel the wars on the tip of the tongue,
on top of the mountain, at the bottom
of dark seas, while cannonades cross the
universe, seventeenth century dames curtsey,
tracing the way back to a Monday morning
in Piazza Banchi, Genoa – where we are all

stabbed to death, Stradella-like, in Madrid,
in unknown lands. Somewhere across the
hitching universe, poets, composers, writers,
thinkers, artists are thrown in a communal
grave alongside those Jungian Things.
Meanwhile Kenya is ablaze, the elephants

XXVI.

are slaughtered; and Queen Mary is being
honoured for her services to her Country!
Bless the sell-outs, they compose the
human race, their rat indigestion clogs
all trespasser’s technology. The mind
does not rest, the dictator does not rest

The crocodile does not laugh, not even
in Carroll’s doubtful feminist manifesto.
But! When Venus and Adonis first made love
they knew nothing of Zhuge Liang – the
mastery of their war had not interrupted the
king’s slumber, nor had it moved in the air

XXVII.

subtle as a feather mind. They simply
were waiting for Black Death to
end its journey through Europe,
and then the world changed forever.
At the time of Shakespeare’s death
mandarins were still learning the

Confucian way – and now nine hundred
years into the future the ancestor-
descendants are tackling similar issues:
should we make love or not? should we
make war or not? is love a war? is
war a form of love? and somesuch

XXVIII.

Polonius-type nonsense. There is little
point in the sexual intercourse, it
just comes as natural as death, as war.
Such are the thoughts in which Tierra Madre
is indulging, but the time is not for
cynicism, the rise of volcanic arpeggios

must be met with increasing concentration
no distraction is possible, the Placebo-Wing
is skydiving in the narrow band of existence
atmosphere, stratosphere, nose down to meet
the earth, the rocketing vortex of jungle
trees, technical musical beads on air but

XXIX.

there is nothing like zoning out, speeding up,
the need for adrenaline, velocity, acceleration
kettledrums, violins, violoncello, anger
thrown back at the neck of the throat
until the air breaks on the windscreen, the fire
in the eyes burns, all the aching of unacceptable

emotions swells up, why all the deceit –
Borovoe Earth Station calls – ‘Tierra Madre
call in – your epicentrics are off the chart ‘
‘Where are you going?’ Desert Storm calls her
friend, inside the cockpit of her own personal
spaceship, the Vivian-Wing. ‘Why are you

XXX.

not responding?’ The level of sensed danger
is so much lower when inside the Jet Space
Charades, otherwise known as Ballerinas –
each has its own peculiar name, Tierra Madre’s
is called Placebo Wing, while Desert Storm
called hers in the name of a certain actress.

Fortune Lobo, able spaceman, calls his vehicle
Rabdoman Call Junior – don’t ask me why.
The squadron of six cadets, plus three senior
officers is navigating the atmo-strato-junglo sphere
Tierra Madre (as usual) has gone off on a tangent
While the more observant Fortune Lobo is following

XXXI.

orders to the letter, and today’s menu of to-do-things
include a range of philosophical discussions with
the earth’s remaining pristine ecological formations
a survey of the aquatic life forms, a monitoring of
green energy gases within the atmosphere – gee –
we don’t want to be polluting the future air, at least
a bit of decency is required from these young lobsters

playing ecological star wars inside their own atmo;
they are well away from completing their training.
Senior officer Flexa (last seen meditating on the sunset)
is having a fabulous day (I believe those are her very
words), Malthusian calculations permitting, naturally.

XXXII.

On golden shores, in a dark November day,
there comes a breeze reeking of old love;
the General Theory of Relativity permits
Time Travel, so we indulge in the good
old days while the Placebo Wing rests
silent, a grey shadow in a cedar cover.
Ariadne sits on a junglo mossy shore,

by a blue solitary pond, thinking that
when we die, we die alone. The
common exercise of a judicious
master being mindful of transience.
But that’s not enough, because the
mind is hampered by festering ivy woes…

XXXIII.

Her eyes are full of sorrow, she is
forever mourning the loss of a dear one
and tries to carry the message across;
it is The Message to a Student, to a Multitude
but the carnivorous plants are just too
gaudy, and the pond may be too still

paying attention to it all may be impAssible;
tonight will be a night for love, perhaps
somewhere, far off, two lovers will bend
time and come together in a fire ball.
Tierra Madre has walked away from the
mission, her beautiful Ballerina Wing

XXXIV.

is being guarded by her understanding
senior officer. Her suicidal tendencies
may not be acceptable for the Academy,
but Ariadne, as unfettered observer, accepts
the freshness of raw emotion, the disturbed
mind is genuinely appealing. Tierra Madre

is Ariadne’s protégée for today, then; and
the poor thing is trying to distract herself from
the sorrow of unrequited love by cataloguing
wild beasts, products of evolution on speed.
There are far too many of those, even
augmented intelligences fail to grasp the

XXXV.

scope of belligerent evolutionary processes.
Tierra Madre observes azure sinuous
rills, and grazing mind-bending creatures
products of evo-devolution; after the Big
Thing, aneuploidy permits hybrid vigour;
the junglosphere is gorgeous with lusty

novel life forms, a middle age bestiary
would not be enough to describe the
grace and the horror of the elephant
caterpillar, a vertical achievement of
invertebrate joy; what flattering bread
and butter fly would come from it?

XXXVI.

And what about post-freudian limp-chimps?
Or hyperio-galactic bacterial Monod
formations, shouldering their way
in towering clusters, feeding on encysted
vertebrates, alongside half-decayed
metamorphosing macroautotrophs,

those beautiful leafy eyes of the
junglosphere; the richness of one square
meter after another of ecological diversity
is glorious, now John C marvels at the
memory download, for a moment
he is in ecstasy, and he forgets

XXXVI.

himself; Chubby sits at the window
and stares at the methane showers
such a solitary existence, stranded
on Titan while, in another time,
in another location, certain pioneers
of postThing world could re-discover

Earth and be terrestrial at the same
time, but not for long, because the
atmosphere definitely changed,
and because the joy of the sun
became the fear of the globe, and
all those moments of eclectic nucleic

XXXVII.

acid mutation would have to come to
a stop, denaturation by grilling is
going to happen in that past that
John C is exploring, Tierra Madre
was living, and Ariadne was sharing
while all those Ballerinas were still

hanging in mid air with intact design
aerodynamics, with all the flutter wave
energonics allowing such acrobatics
that nanoleopardlepidopterans would just
dream of. Flexa is rather fond of nano-
that-big-long-word thing I just wrote
XXXVIII.

While she flies, she casts a wide net
for neuronological analyses of her
favourite variants, and sequence phylogenies,
(that’s just for the fun of it) routines
running parallel to those more stamp-collecting
tasks that the cadets are out there trying to

perform. She is such an enthusiastic
entomologistic feature-artist that her
kafkian mathematical representations
were exhibited last year (according to this
present junglo-time) in the Academy
Gallery, but only shortly, because

XXXIX.

they became argument of hot political
debate: people asked ‘should we make naturalistic
analyses focussed on light only?’ Now how can
the creative portrayal of invertebrate species
be so insulting for the Nation establishment?

What was in her work that was so
reminiscent of some King-infested
maggot? I don’t know – I understand
nothing about Art, and so does Chubby
who really cares not about it. John C
is tired of all the visual glare, his eyes

XL.

are overloaded with superb variety
of sky-high flying Wings, jutted against
the ozone layer, the solar system,
and then his cortical nexus is also
plugged into Flexa’s ecological artistry,
and Tierra Madre’s meditation on sorrow

and on speciation, and also he can feel
Ariadne’s Touch of Zen High-Pitch Waiting
Too much stuff for a lowly Titan infotechnician
And his bored replicant cat, (who follows
everything carefully and happens to be sulking).
The time has come for Ariadne to act. So

XLI.

she sets her depth search onto Tierra’s
ontological distress, and finds her marvelling
at natural variations colonizing the silver
lining of the manta-shaped Ballerina space
ship. ‘Tell me about your feelings, student;
open the channel onto fragility pathways,

I need to understand your heart’s content’
‘You wish to access my soul drawing, the
content of my maiden burning, at your will’
Tierra Madre having none of it. She recoils
from the senior officer’s intrusion in her
privacy. ‘Since when the older generation

XLII.

finds harvest in the young uncoupling of
the Soul? Can’t you just access the X with
your own password?’ John C pauses the
memory download. The night is dark out of
his screen. He watches iridescent cloud
formations, the hydrocarbon lake in the

distance is completely still. Chubby purrs
and snugs close, surface temperature
is a chilly -180 C. ‘I remember when
I was your age, Tierra Madre’. Clouds
drift through the haze and rain falls.
John C is pervaded by a deep sadness.
Chubby is silent, the unicorn of our
own memory may come to overwhelm us

XLIII.

when least expected. Parallel thinking
is possible. From the corner of the
divan of Titanic saddle bags, Chubby
observes the falling thiolins, and
the echo of a paused memory has set
music in John C’s mind. His identity

may have been put at risk by soul erosion,
disk erasion – it’s really not easy
to just do a format C: of who you are,
what you have been, and the things
you have shared with those who have
been loved ones. Just as every season

XLIV.

monumental life renews, and yet lingers,
so our memory lingers, and life, like
art is never finished, just abandoned.
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow’ Chubby
comments non-committally ‘ I might have
to do the laundry. Brief candles burn

in a brief night – and you are still here,
asking yourself who the hell you are,
and why you are stranded on Titan. So
let me get this straight. You are looking
for your identity, but you want to delete
your past. Even by human standards, you
are pretty daft, Jonny. With all your

XLV.

music and your memory uploads, and down
loads and your screen savers, and your life
erasers, what happened to you? I am tired
of making coffee for you, and of watching
the decay of cyanide compounds to measure

my days, my minutes, afternoons without end.’
John C watches through the glass, the empty
glass, the water, and the decay. ‘Christiaan
Huygens would have very much liked to be in
your place, Chubby.’ His melancholy is only
growing. You have been genomed to be my
companion, but your clonal ancestor is expired

XLVI.

be good and love me for who I am.’ ‘Who are you?’
asks Chubby. ‘That’s what it is all about,
isn’t? That’s why we are here, that’s why
you are messing with other people’s memories,
and you are digging the empty shell of your
own dishevelled consciousness. ‘Where is the

answer, Chubby? There must be more to
existence than just all these days on end, beads
on a string.’ The replicant cat is really annoyed.
‘You watch too many virtuo-feelies, you read
far too many science-fictional beads, and
string or no string, there are no worm-holes

XLVII.

here to give you answers, no eminent artists
or scientists can come back from the dead
to tell you to embrace your present, to sketch
your days on a drawing book, to paint your
moments as if they were falling water drops
individual tears in a gigantic waterfall.

Dead is dead. Let the dead bury their
germplasms, as the old adage goes. My clonal
sister is gone, and so your past, and so
my patience. Can we please find a reason
to be happy?’ John C is recoiling, his mind
wants to find peace, but his vertical ego,

XLVIII.

on a picnic on Titan, grows like daisies
in summer time, and he is clinging on to
undefined identities, and unconscious events
and supernatural fears, and sublime bygone
moments where he met the light at the source,

he talked to the X, and he loved deeply.
‘I cannot find any peace, Chubby, please
explore these new memories with me, and
allow me to upload some of my own, and
look with my eyes, dear feline companion,
my Shakespearian replicant, my sole muse.’
‘You are really pushing it, silly.’ Chubby

XLIX.

finally smiles. She is very sensible to
flattery. She loves and wants to be loved
like a furry glutton, and a dream chase.
‘I am a cat that likes space missions,
wind and waves, and iterative poetry.’
In a second, her eye lids start to drop

and then she is fast asleep. John C
unfreezes Ariadne in mid-speech. ‘Let
us play this game, Tierra Madre. You close
your eyes, and allow yourself to soulshare;
perhaps a little energy transfusion will
help. Please lie down.”Tierra Madre

L.

looks at the senior officer with suspicion,
it is not uncommon for seniors to take
advantage of their rank, and it is so
easy to be afraid, so easy not to trust.
‘What the hell’, she goes. And the lies

down and closes her eyes. Ariadne allows
the tears to swell up, but they do not
fall. Her pain is far too swollen, far
too clogged. She wishes to help this
juvenile, she wishes to share what
she knows. But it is all so difficult.

LI.

‘I have watched unfamiliar materials
expand and whisper in the broken space,
and ghosts of depth-galaxies shiver in
the unbroken silence, I have witnessed
the rise of multiple stars, their
unparalleled brilliance a billion billion

light years away reminded me of my cosmic
irrelevance, and the relevance of storms
on the move. ‘Der gror ikke mos paa en
sten som ruller’, it is an old saying
from a dead language. Hyugens lander
knows (John C is surprised at these words),

LII.

the meaning of these words. There grows
no moss on a rolling stone. Tierra
Madre is fast asleep. The river words
have fallen in the path of her waves,
and she is allowing herself to trust.
A few minutes later, she wakes, and

finds Ariadne watching over her, looking
in the distance. The Placebo Wing is
shining in the glory of the day, and
the birds are in flight, and so their
companions. ‘The digital frontier,
that was the original sea – Tierra.

LIII.

One day, I listened to my feelings,
and allowed unconsciousness to come
to surface – I began to take a record
of my soul. Now we can explore it,
and we can explore the ever-growing
variations within the grid. Now the

emotional fractals grow on their own,
plants in a fertile terrain. I owe much
to the digital dreams of other beings,
and to the intergalactic messages,
bottles in a maelnetwork of spring
equinox, of Shelleyian heroism,

LIV.

Laoocoon desire, Grecian Urn fragility,
lips that never open, Aprils that
never blossom. Tierra, I wish for us
to understand each other. Is that possible?’
Silence ensues. ‘Imagine a desert.’
Tierra Madre lies on mutant grass

and desires to live. She daydreams,
her eyes closed, about a desert, far
off in the real realm of her beating mind.
Meanwhile, Desert Storm, her friend
and companion-in-flight, is calibrating
the trajectory of her idealistic

LV.

cannon-ballistic pirouettes in air
she is pushing her musical Vivian Wing
to the very limit of gravity, and
unspecified forces of magneto-hesitancy.
Flexa is busy measuring the existence

and bellicosity of nano-ringed creatures
in the earth’s atmosphere. She smiles,
because some progress is being made.
‘Orange skies darken, dunes redden, rocks
shelter, methane streams and I lie alone’
Chubby writes while John C has dozed off.

LVI.

Arranged in a mid-air circle,
cadets float up in the empty sky,
side to side among the clouds.
The time is for discussion, an
open session of soul-searching.
The engines are silent, night

ensues, the young pilots light
brief candles in memory of
Othello and turn their eyes
toward their sole conqueror
and leader, Senior Officer Flexa.
She is very quiet today, her

LVII.

anger is not quite under control;
she would like to solve matters:
take the world in her wet hands
and mould it to shape; but the
beast in the mirror won’t stop;
while the earth is broiling, the

swan song of the human species
is heard, grass is turning into
butter, the sun is growing hotter
and we’d all like to find more
amusing entertainment along
pleasanter sea-side resorts

LVIII.

‘What are the forces of magneto-
hesitancy?’ Who is your special
friend, Doctor Flexa? She asks a
question on which students ponder.
Fortune Lobo smiles and answers it.
‘The energy that calls us brief,

and makes the earth fall round,
and while we shine, it grows.’
Flexa’s eyes flicker. Next question.
‘Why did the Thing happen?’ RostRya
jumps in with her melodic voice.
This kind of falls flat on the

LIX.

meditating circle. Flexa opens
her mouth, then shuts it, for
lack of a better option. She
is unusually upset, observing
the waves of circumnavigating
emotions closing in on her,

an apocalyptic heart of darkness
is felt in her chest, the
scream of butterfly witness
feelings grows inside of her.
‘Hello!’ Chubby cuts in, ‘would
you care for a coffee, dear JC?’

LX.

‘I don’t mind if I do, Chub.’
‘I am trying to solve g.o.d.’s
algorithm, just for the fun of
it. Do you think we could fit
this whole download on a USB-
umbrella? I think Rubik’s cube

is a fun way to solve existential
issues. I reckon the whole
download that you are absorbing
is about 17 sborabytes. Be warned
some of its content has been
labelled ‘Love Street’. You may

LXI.

have trouble in de-identifying
after the absorption. Are you sure
you don’t want to log onto the X,
and access your true self?’
‘There is no true path, Chub;
I want to trim the fat, find

the garden of Love and weed it
out, briar after briar. My deadpan
mind in love has weird patterns’
‘Lala-la, la la laaa’ – Chubby purrs,
starts running with her replicant
singing; so shadows of Titan, purple

LXII.

with prurience and desire, rise
and haunt the two loner souls
(do replicants have souls?) and
then the whole universe splits its
sides over, and the USB-umbrella
bends over and over again;

wormholes shake and gibber,
Mr Shakespeare squeals, and
Blade Runner Units wake up
frozen in hospital wards alongside
certain Momo-spectres till
the whole hard-disk is in

LXIII.

overdrive, the memory download
within the memory download
vibrates at the reality of
parallel dimensions that co-
exist under the parameters of
string theory; run run run,
alternative histories co-adapt

shadows of trees, souls trimmed
to the rock; run with us, run
with the story, hypocritical
reader, feel the breath of the
Byronic horse, get inside, get

LXIV.

the drama course of the Academy,
the fate of the cadets, all in the
hands of a replicant cat, all of which
existed at some point, and yet
co-exist in multiple universes.
What if we were to wake up

duplicated humans, folded out
into 22 dimensions, and the
songs of the nineteen seventies
exploded out of our skulls,
creating an echo whereby all the
negative emotions and lingering

LXV.

duodecimal desires would be
obliterated? Ok. Everything
is almost done. John C argues
with Chubby over the size of
the memory download, and he
is quite unaware that he will

meet himself, when summer’s gone.
Where will he be? Where is the
Endeian Space Mission destined?
The Yamato Cave Academy, its
crew based at Borovoe Earth
Station, is not ready to take off.

LXVI.

But the world has almost come to
its end. The Never-ender Caravel
is about to take her maiden
voyage. Selected cadets and
officers will travel the galaxy
to select a suitable blue planet

for human colonization. But
which alien life forms will
welcome them? Out of this world,
will we be able to breathe air?
Will there ever be a morning,
for the human decaying mould?