XLIII.

Non-commissioned officer McCalandrh
debates the pros and cons of kicking
the crap out of the Pink-siders, a whole
bunch of aliens from the other part of

the galaxy. “We don’t want them. They
smell, and they eat funny shit.” The
discourse is held over a game of rotary
soccer; a feat in which the new recruits

XLIV.

test their military skills with more senior
staff. Aboard the “Thoughtful Massacre”,
premium ship in the war business of the
Spartan Navy, another day at the office.

“Those stinking Pinkers with pointy ears,
always smart-assing about everything,
all-knowing with their muttering sub-speak,
I can’t stand the light in their psychoirises.”

XLV.

“I beg to differ”, intervenes the Spartan,
aka Ἀτρεύς, tantalised by the idea of
mock-suck-upping to the NCO. “Pinkies
are people, or less than people but still

creatures of the X, and therefore they
deserve the respect of all citizens,
Artemis willing. Even if by eugenics
standards they are inferior, and should”

XLVI.

“probably be cleaned from the multi-
verse because of their looks and their
unfunny ideas, their worship of foreign
deities and they desire to invade our

space, or galaxy, or multi-verse, or
mid-mind. The X is merciful, and so
Artemis is powerful, and their Gods
are small and insignificant. Scum.”

XXXIX.

“Oh friend! Time holds me green
or dying, this very day.” Reunited
with Tierra Madre, Desert Storm
flashes in the dark, scowling at

the murdering cloud-wake of gas,
the jungle of bodies, the beaming
starships, the riding whale-slavers.
The two moon-blooming women,

XL.

Adam and maiden, are singingales:
ever-rising swallows, spinning people.
They intone their mournful songs
full of long-lost grace, fist into the

darkness, head into the expanding
black hole, where the gravitational
lens reflects symphones of waves.
“Ohm, friend! The human stables!”

XXXVIII.

Turbans on the slave-galley, Damascus steel
blazing; Desert Storm invokes mellifluous
Sappho, tempting her Fortune-Muse.

A captive in the fray, she’s amidst shadow
faces; out there space-giants gorge on
whole planets’ worth of seas, vomiting
cosmic waste; nine times, they fuck.

XXXI.

Ariadne ponders on the mean
ing of each tessera. Nuffink, a
capital nothing. Timeless age,
age unknown; in the beginning.

These mosaics I have shored
against the entropic waves.
A giant leap of fire, a frozen poison
stream. “This gap, forever falling

XXXII.

was born as the proto-Titan Chaos.
Our great-grandfather, via his son
Eros.” Ariadne mixes the tesserae,
looking for a recognizable pattern.

XXXIII.

“Earth existed not. Nor heaven above.
Or should I say, the sky? The abyss
had a name, and it was very big, it was
eternal. And there was no grass, it

eked out, it was barely there. No it
won’t do. It was all bare, skinless, grass
less. The cold waves of the sea, the sand;
nuffink was there at all. There was Chaos;
Chaos was the abyss, He was Ginnunga.

XXXIV.

And from this chasm, with ceaseless
turmoil seething… no, that’s another
fragment. And a voice comes to mind:
“Take your place in the cosmos, Ariadne.

be a star that shines. Give up your
mortal enterprise, reprise your role
in heaven. Once Dionysus’s bride…”
Another image floats in mid-air. It

XXXV.

is the usual voice in the mind and
the incubus of a shadow in the soul.
Yet the image seems different, but
the voice is all too familiar. The image

is that of a titan, brawn and bone
bound to a large rock; his liver is
food for an ever-thirsty bald eagle.
Another image, another tessera.

XXXVI.

Iob after this opens his moth, and
butterflies curse his day. The voice
continues: “Ariadne. Let go of this
human illusion, be the star that you

are.” Ariadne closes her eyes and
sees the persecuting shadow on
the fourth wall, laughing its invi
sible head off. Mockery and persu

XXXVII.

ation, perversion and idol-dance
farcical, frenzetical, fanatical. The
worst is but the self, but worse.
half a head of Renoir’s favourite.

Caravaggio’s broken, flapping
black wings. Gauguin in his hide
out in the blue. Ariadne tries to
stop the flurry of images thrown
in her face by the faceless shadow.

XXX.

AGE waz old; ‘twaz nuffink der.
’twere nor sandz nor seazz; nor
cold wavezz. Earff eczisted not,
nor upp-hymn. De abyss waz,
waz gappeterna. & grass eke-ly.

XV.

Gods hand on some of their responsibilities
to their children. The androgynous Goddess
speaks, with mock-sourness, closed lips
of distaste. “The passing of immortals appeals

to the best of us. Do not speak to me of Love.
Master your sense of exploration, renew your
interest in biological entities, John C. You may
have a shorter life, this time. Wake up from”

XVI.

“Your recurring delusions. Your imagination-deity
spins stories ever-more, or desires, spiders’ nests.
You’re a miniature figure in her story, the grand
old story of the childless, godless dream. Wakey.

Wakey. The mutated NeverEnder burns in the
background, the memories are incense for more
navel-grazing, and you cherish the prison of your
thoughts, much like your diseased mother.”

XVII.

“She dies every day in a labyrinth of sleuth-pity.
You can imagine the world as a cascade of Gods.
Your mother, d’haughter of Gaia, became wed to
Oceanus, and hence a thousand nymphs were born

in your spirits. The shape-shifting family man,
Prontus populated the alcoves of the world
with deep and dangerous Nereids, friends of
dolphins, and of humans. Your offspring will”

XVIII.

“be wind to the seasons, if ever should you
write your grotto-dryads and grove-nymphs
down. Your acts of creativity are displays
of theathrical sexuality, you may find your

semen spread all over a white page, or else.
You’re playing with your borrowed time,
observing these rolling planets and dancing
stars, and the very love of your existence”

XIX.

“your chance of redemption is lost in this
game of theology, and the people whose
spirits you may have touched, have gone
away.”

After a while, John C began his practice
of walkabouts and thoughtabouts. He met
a fellow sportsman, exercising this side of
Mount Doom. “I am a Spartan”, he said

XX.

briefly. John C challenged him in various
feats of physical prowess, the art of zero
rotation, the sphynx-poetry exercise, and
of course, a game of sexual javelins ensued.

Being equal in every feat, they began
discussing philosophy, like friends in
adolescence may do. Life stories, as
well. “I am full of potential”, began

XXI.

the Spartan. “I’ve picked slices of the
silver moon, ate the cavity of my mind.
My flash-suit is trained to fly ever closer
to the Sun’s golden flares.” John C replied

with a boast of his own. “I cast two shadows,
and know how to haemorrage feelings. The
worlds of Goddess unknown haunt me,
and yet I am fully awake while the delusion

XXII.

rolls on. My soul is hardened, but my
prayers are endless. I am a fool of high-
flying methane, a storm in the flowering.
I am yet to love the end of a story, and

so I practice oblivion with firm hands.”
The Spartan was digusted. “And I thought
you were a noble creature, you are the
very same individual who has given up”

X.

The pale fire of remote stars flickers, John C is
immersed in a vision of past rewound, reviled.
He dies with crap in hand, survives as an idea.
The Titian painting of choice has lost is focus.

The horizon is blackstar-lit, an out-of-body Goddess
stares from mid-distance, once more he has forgotten
the words of Artemis, and an old Etruscan promise
has once more been forsaken, at least for this life.

XI.

His eyes come back to seeing, there is a light
tremor in them, the tremor of desperate choices.
Up above, the limit-blue sky is oppressed by
multiple swarms of hookah-starved mantis-stars.

“the ship burns, and the vision ends.
Now I am utterly alone. This is Titan’s Sotra Facula
region. On my left, the Doom Mons peak rises,
the image of the sacred montain of a Goddess.”

XII.

“On my right, a giant pit. Radio waves through
the hydrocarbon haze picked up by my lilting
soul spacesuit. Terrestrians merry-making at the
year’s festival of love, bidding good-bye to the

flesh with masks and armies of glass beads.
The sacred mountain siren-calls, the methane
whispers, I must be losing my plot. I’m running
a nitrogen-fueled fever, I close my eyes and”

XIII.

“I see the shadow of Artemis, I open my eyes
and burst! rising with a smile to love me; it’s
a fantasy of my own making. I have imagined
myself out of this world on multiple occasions.

Close your mind, the nightmare will melt.
On this mountain, I have buried my father.
In this pit, the bones of all the people I once
knew. In the snow, a distant memory. A cat.”

XIV.

“There is a Goddess in the sky, and she is
calling my name, holding the cat in her arms.
I do not know my name, yet I know she is
harking me. I do not know who she is, and

yet I am familiar with this purple sense of
time and space. I am well-acquainted with
this dream, though I can’t see its colours,
nor hear a sound in this cubical silence.”