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.