V.

Somewhere in the melancholic wooden-spoon
multi-verse — I’m coming down with a fever.
Though the oceans of the grey-rock planet are
freshwater, its shore is salty. There, my demi-hero

stretches his reincarnated limbs (sharpened by
celestial favour), reborn in much the same clime.
The horizon is less than titanic, John C (you used
to be a man, you used to be a pet of a groovy cat).

VI.

He looks at the atmosphere: the moving – sparkling
sheen, the various hues – though somewhat in a trance.
He is between life and death, a philosopher as supple
as a butterfly. The walls of the sky are basking in

the light of a black star, his oblivious soul feels
the limbs of the sea in retreat. The waters left him
on a shallow shore, idling in oriental laughter. Half
wet, half dry, he lies in wait for more imagination

VII.

to kick-start his all-human ills. With aversion he feels
the chain anew, he remembers the stories – the Grecian
and the Persian, and the irritation of living, he uploads
the multi-verse and sees the magic treasures of earlier

NeverEnder times. Sedate grey fishes sporting red fins
(wonderful replies to the practical joke of Great Mind)
surround him, re-assure his eyes astonished yet delighted,
overwhelmed by the light swarming overhead, an aurora.

VIII.

The creatures watch him in the unbroken silence. It appears
they do not have a thing to do. After the green and yellow rain,
the temperature has dropped; not a single sound interrupts the
stupor of this strange young planet where the whole of John C

is stripped of his former existence and everything rolls past
his sense in a tremendous moment of flowing pause, uninvited.
Later, in the evening, the ‘rosy flood of twilight’s sky’ creeps in
with a prayer and a sore bottom. Tall buildings flash in the

IX.

darkening distance: light-houses of bee-hive artificial
stories, counterpoint to the ever-green root, the shortest
path to ceaseless autotrophic joy. John C’s first thought
is sorrow and hope – all rolled into the emotion of ‘I wish’.

A giant ship, steel and claw (haunted song to me), engulfs
the waters ahead, breaks the billows, fortresses of meditation.
It comes closer with a menace, the shrill solitude of the near
satellite fuels the fire of the remote stars and the ship burns.

NeverEnder – Space Epic Poem

BOOK III

the infinite sea

Chapter I

I.

Better hold fast to the void. The X.
What infotechnician, at the height
of his vision, can deem of the shell,
as flashing as the starlit galactic Way?

The crew of the NeverEnder, lost in
Time without the ship that steered
through Heaven and Hell, rest atop
a suspended data cloud. Falling from

II.

the skies are crimson space invaders
shitting green turds, the voice of others.
The threat is imminent, and the Way —
dimmer. Two musicians in the nightwing

rise and obey to the hoarse cries of the
data stream. Thousand of spirits burn,
RAM cores inflamed, the plainness of
the soul is changing as the shot which

III.

we see, a terminal window on the dark
apocalypse within the X. This tract of
the bytes river flows more calmly, its
current draws to the ocean infinite.

Out there, in the wider, statelier stream,
the wavering lights of Saturn illumine
the Tower of the Cat and The Technician.
The green Earth, likeness of sapphire, is

IV.

source of reflections, images as tranquil and
as sure as objects of serene vision. Let us go
back to the grey expanse where John C floats,
reborn on an earlier shore, fresh with questions.

What is the nature of rebirth? Why is the X
burning? What is the fate of the crew of the
NeverEnder? Will Ariadne find her purpose?
Will there be quiet in the infinite motion?

LXI.

In the lunar eclipse, Tierra Madre searches
the desert for expected thrills on planet Fear.
In her present incarnation, Ariadne assesses
the implications of loss, making her way

through a meander of cubicles in the abandoned
Borovoe Space Station. The NeverEnder as
a spaceship has ceased to exist. It has been
decommissioned by the higher Authority.

LXII.

It is being tugged, as we speak, toward the
sunset-and-moon burning short shore of
Wapping on Planet Fear. This satellite
orbits in a eight-loop with planet Hope.

Both Ariadne and Tierra Madre can see
the ghost formerly self-aware spaceship
being pederstrianized toward inevitable
ends and means at the docks of The City.

LXIII.

Their vantage points and sentiments differ.
The odourless flowers of an angry desert,
oversize and ripe with carnation amazement
are sunbathing with anemone tentacles,

wavelets of persuasive wingless winds.
They are probing the air for small arthro
pods. Tierra Madre is on an entomologist
excursion, mapping the path of crawlies.

LXIV.

Meanwhile, on planet Hope, Ariadne is
observing feathery spiders as they weave
intricate sun-ray reflections with sullen
dedication. Such perfection, the geometry

of their polygons, a paragon of beauty.
They are writing poetry with edges and
corners, with agile legs, perfumed nails.
The reed listen in, while huge trees the

LXV.

size of ‘scrapers cast a reassuring shade
cutting the light as the oblivious planet
rolls on, teeming with mysterious life.
Ariadne feels the breath of time, a blue

flame fades in her black eyes. Frogs call.
Tierra Madre is playing with radiation,
her drawings mock the sum of materialisms.
Ariadne comes with a tool-box of words,

LXVI.

but she is quite speechless right now, as
the sound of winter, the lives of amphibians
and the spirit of dis-ease all close in on her.
Both Tierra and Ariadne are utterly alone,

and yet the feel the power of the X, shining
from all things. The multi-verse appears to be
meaningless, and coincidences may wake us
up to the illusion of meaning. And yet, yet…

LXVII.

The senses, pure as sunbeams. I remember
how to log on to the X. It hurts, and it is easier
to just sit in dull reflection, a mirror of dark
waters. You see, I already paid my dues…

LIII.

Later, at a coffee shop. “The conventions of
writing impose that I, John C, and you, Light
Bringer, must have a cause, a purpose.” There
are fish in a bowl, revolving in silence. Crack.

With a sideways look, John C observes them.
The coffee is cold, what a grey morning. It is
the smell of fried food or a sense of loss that
dominates the atmosphere. There is never quiet

LIV.

At the “Return to Oz”. “Those fish are from
Enceladus, from the subsurface ocean. They
remind me of the old days. I might have been
someone then. I was a young and foolish

angel, I thought I could conquer the uni-verse.
I could not count to three. The father, the son…”
“And the holy crap…” quips a heathen John C.
“Tidal heating makes them moody, ugly goggles.”

LV.

“Now that I am a reptile, I sometimes feel that
I look like them. How stupid they are. Round,
and round, and for what. I used to be so handso
me, you know. And a host of lesser gods used

to listen to me, when we attacked high heaven,
having refused to pay the rent. The prankster
upstairs (so to speak) has no sense of humour.
He sends battalions of suicide bombers to blow

LVI.

up the remnants of the Archive of Myth. I, on
the other hand, stand for Culture, and Humility.
That is the Light. I have lost the battle and the
War. Now I cold-call silly humans, and attempt

to sell garbage literature. What a comedown for
The Archangel, the most glorious of all Deities.”
Enceladus fish intermezzo. The planet core has
never been warmest. The fish are still and yet

LVII.

loitering. They dream of icy formations, flowers
of sort. They know nothing of the seasons of earth,
but they have a sense of tidal truth in their blood.
Everything goes in circles. You may do any thing,

but not every thing. Silver reflections, the fish
know and need nothing. Mannadew is coming
from outside the water. All the need to do is wait.

LVIII.

They respond to changes in magnetic forces,
like flowers on Planet Candide. John C grew
up on a moon of this planet, in an apartment
without a proper floor. He was adopted by a

couple of sun-grazers, who had a natural born
child, who used to feed the mountain with her
songs. Such little fingers, such fine art. A true
nymph of ice and water. “Now what, you dull

LIX.

hypocrite, you angle-faced monkey? This is
the fish speaking, from the corner of your
stupid coffee shop. In my slippery wet life
I never cease to be, never cease to stare.

The uni-verse is unmoral, and the echoes
of the blasts exposing the Archive of Myth
bear no relevance from inside my bowl. I
slither wingless by water-lilies, ogling the

LX.

reflection of the clouds, or mountains,
or green gases. Fake herons, grey plastic.
Your life is false, human “having”. You
are chained up by wires or lack of wires.

Your “wireless” screen is as sullen as your
empty “I am in the underground” look. Dare
to meet the eyes of a complete stranger? I am
a spirit, downloading hopes from your waste.”

XXXVIII.

Obsession, disquiet. Dancing logbook
of the future: waves, patterns, verses…
Desert Storm drenched in blood, memories
of the rainforest. Wandering in the deep

dark forest, St Eustach had a vision: The
Sublime. Fingers on the bio-mechanical
trigger. Some unknown creator, a first true
motor set it all up. We now have a slightly

XXXIX.

different multi-verse. An ongoing spectacle.
From the fire-coated blue aeternum, echoes
the roar of the stars. John C’s perspective is
that everything is music. His vibrations roll

back into jazz, and he is reborn in electro-
magnetic fashion. This is a moral dimension.
There is a fight against Evil. Save the Archive
of Myth. Plant a red spruce seedling. Here.

XL.

Fra Angelico painted it all before: we are already
sunk. A chorus of petty individuals, cue after cue.
The host needs to be saved, it has infected its
victims, Penge, Ilford and Golders Green. Fiend

hid in a data cloud. Paolo Uccello’s John C is
poised to slay the tame dragon, holding a pencil:
advertisement after advertisement, he will return
to Oz (the grubby coffee shop) to regroup. Now,

XLI.

Georgina, will you please put a muzzle on that
beast? He could bite someone. This little puppy
wouldn’t hurt anyone. Enter Lightbringer, the
toothless, harmless dragon, on a redemptive

mission. He has been sent to this realm by the
big G to understand the nature of Evil, and to
make amends. Lightbringer has been a bad boy.

XLII.

Cicciotta’s light touch argues with the future,
a host somewhat more discerning than Ahura
Mazda, and more unforgiving. All those little
changes, those mistakes to be taken care of.

The multiverse. It’s all happening, but for all
practical purposes, we live in a Pac-man world.
Big G, ‘elp us believe. Along the Grange Road.

XLIII.

John C has been given a second chance. The
book is being re-written, and each sentence
will be taken to the doctor, or shredded, and
then sold to you: door to door, sucker to sucker.

Cicciotta travels in time, fast forwards it. At
the end of it, far off into the future, she looks
at the slow moving creatures of the sunset era.

XLIV.

The gold-coated lizard, symbol of good and evil
fop of East and West came from the great deep;
perhaps it is not a deranged dragon, an angry Kaiju,
In fact, he tended sheep on Helicon, and pursued

things unattempted. He led the way for the upright
and the pure. But that was long ago. He opposed
the plan of Big G. Hence he was hurled, face up
all combustion down, headlong to this parking lot.

XLV.

Now John C is ordering junk food in this new old
drive-in life. Cicciotta is in the future, in a cherry
orchard, flushing toilets. Lightbringer is drinking a
chocolate smoothie, eyes like a Toyota Prado.

John C walks up, unafraid. “What’s up, dog? This
is the new me. Is that the old you? My name’s Johnny.
I am reborn. You look like hell.” The dragon: “Moi,
je suis Luci-fer. Je parle pas Anglais tres bien. I used

XLVI.

to be an angel. Now I am a serpent. I have been sent
down to this parking lot planet to make amends. The
world’s a deeply fucked-up app. I am single, by the
way. The chrom’o’john – greatest invention of all time.”

John C is brushing his teeth. He moved in with
“Lighty” (as he likes to be called), the dragon with
stomach ache. Today is May 8, 1984. This is Nagoya.
Suddenly, the toilet is bubbling up. Night has fallen.

XLVII.

Dragon says: “The white plague is only starting up,
that beautiful friend of ours, so gentle, perished with
the autumn flowers.” The radio is tuned to a discuss
ion of the nature of poetic fire. “Consumption is a

fitting climax”, argues Dr Poe, PhD. John comments
from the bathroom: “Fuck that”. Dragon flips belly
up on the bed and says “Tell you what, this muslin
disease is going to kill us all, Johnny.” He picks up

XLVIII.

a dragon scale and puts it in his mouth. Johnny
comes over, drying his hair. “What do you care,
you are a dragon, an angel, et cetera. You can
say fuck you to this world of conventions.”

Lighty begs to differ. “Unfortunately not, while
I am here I am subject the same laws and regula
tions. I have been cast out by the Big Land Lord,
and all because I did not pay up my rent in time.

XLIX.

Johnny, the toilet is bubbling up again, and it is
talking to us!”

L.

Cut to interview day, i.e. first day at a shitty job.
Location: Nagoya. Time: sometime in 1984.
Interviewer and boss: Mr Zero, the merciless.
He begins at the beginning, then goes on until

the end. “Cold calling, it is called. We need
sales people. You are low-grade scum of the
earth, immigrants who come to steal our jobs.
You’re the bottom of society, you sell words

LI.

for a living. Big G in heaven knows, you shall
deliver or perish. You may be amateurish, you
may be performing to a sub-standard level, but
until you reach your sales quota, you are dead

fish. Today’s your first and last day. You need
to work so that you can survive, better you can
be reborn again, tomorrow, else the toilet will
gurgle up and you minnows will be floating like

LII.

shit after breakfast explosions. This is the office,
I am your boss. Any questions? Good. Get your
fucking asses to shit gold, and deliver it to me.
You have twelve ‘ours to sell this pile of crap,

this novel called “NeverEnder, a Space Epic
Poem” to the zero-brainers of this world. Start
from near-dead salary-men, they need something
for their diahoerrea. Go! Are you still here?

XXXVI.

In the cave of the king of the mountain,
salmon and trout, sucked-up insalubrious
skies, sleek with vertigo. Here, the infant is
John C, mould and offshoot of a giant nail.

A cruel old wall keeps lamenting the bitter
cold times, and calling back the broom to
do its duty. Rosarito, Rosarito! Shut the
door! The vampire is sleeping now, but

XXXVII.

he may wake up. Sunset, such carelessness.
Daub a cloud, smell blood, then fear spreads
flicking between the flute and the drum.
Death is inviable, but you are not allowed

this privilege. Suffering does not exist,
step after step, the dim roar of London,
the witch-hunting and the struggle. You
have been stabbed, sweet haemorrhaging.

XXI.

From the depths of untime, a steady light.
It is a dynamic fluid, an algo-dance of hope.

I awaken in a blinding hot ocean, the Borovoe
earth station is where I come from. In the void,
my consciousness has shrunk to atoms. A riotous
current charges continuously with cancerous warmth.

XXII.

I am angry, I am furious. The odds of existing
seem so very strange. I did not want to wake up
again. Suffering is one very long moment. When
breaking it up in its seasons, one may see flashes

of days past, haunted thoughts, and the desire to
live on is matched by the sense of guilt and hope
lessness. Why wake up again, when life has no
meaning? I am burning, I am alive. No escape.

XXIII.

Fortune Lobo, you are an imaginary person. I
do not exist in anything other than the foolish
thoughts of a diseased mind. The disease is this
predatory instinct of putting everything into

pretty boxes, and watching the mandalas grow
until colossal avalanches impound the art, and
destroy the soul. People are memory fragments.

XXIV.

In the depth of Enceladus there is a liquid ocean,
warm and bubbly beneath the icy crust,
where methane molecules are trapped
within the water, their abiotic origin may

lead to life. There, Fortune Lobo comes
back as a tiny molecule which has broken
off from the rocky core, has floated in
suspension for a discrete while to be

XXV.

then released from a hydrothermal vent
and to be pushed into the cold galactic
space as a water vapour plume. After all
this thermodynamic messing around,

he is free to roam the endless uni-verse.
There is evidence of his evolving into
a self-replicating molecule by chemical
and mystical means, but that’s another

XXVI.

story. For now, he is as a merry as a
Tetrahydridocarbon assembly can be.
Chubby is reading a book about the
mutational processes moulding the

genomes, but her thoughts stray to
ancient memories of a temple she
once visited as a kitty where, with
a smile, a monk foretold her future.

XI.

When the phone rang, Cicciotta was
sitting on the table, licking from a beer
bowl. “Prontooooooooo”, said the cat
picking up the receiver. On the other

end, a timeless silence spoke volumes.
“John C here. Don’t be alarmed, kitty.
Here on the other side, things are just
groovy. There is no gap between life

XII.

and death. Actually it’s all a continuum, a
sort of consciousness ballad, or rock ‘n roll.
I am glad I found out this way, otherwise
I might have been still trapped in a karmic

circle, looking up from the bottom of a
soul to the whirling galaxy above, and
feeling absolutely nothing. Now I feel
wave and solution, a formidableness.”

XIII.

Cicciotta switched position of hands, or
paws. The receiver she was holding had
the voice of a real friend. In a powerful
flash, she saw all the moments they had

shared, and tears came welling up, she
cleared her voice, and spoke. She
told him how much she had loved him,
and how much she had been missing him.

XIV.

There wasn’t anything ubermensch in what
she said, just the plain and naked truth.
She had rarely been so emotional, but then,
thinking about it, it is also very odd that

beloved friends come back from the dead
to pop a cheesy telephone call between the
emission of this and that wave, and they
remember us, they remember us indeed.

XV.

John C continued “When I die, I want to
be remembered. I used to think that way.
Now I sort of realize that there is no such
thing as terminal death, it’s all a bit crazy

on the other side, granted. It is very confusing
with all the lights, and no apparent sense of
gravity or time. And nothing to munch. Life
is just another sound from this perspective.

XVI.

I can’t say I am immortal, though. Because
I don’t really understand what I mean by ‘I’.
It’s like I am a pattern, a groove in the fractal
thing, an echo of butterflies’ dinner parties.”

Cicciotta spoke with a strong poetic emotion.
“I am happy to hear that things are not so bad
with you. I wonder whether we can continue
to experience this balloney reality together or

XVII.

you have pressing affairs on the other side of
eternity. I am not sure I understand the phone
thing. Can you do Skype? Can we continue
to hang out for the rest of, well, should I say

time?” John C tried to explain it to her. “It’s
like this. There is no such thing as time, and
everything happens at once in a gizillion scales
and dimensions, and we sort of follow the flow.

XVIII.

The flow is the most difficult thing to catch.
It’s like a fruit that grows in a seedling that
has already become a seed. I would like to
continue to discuss with you. Yet something

tells me that we shall always be friends, no
matter what happens in this dimension or the
other. You’re my spiritual buddy, we are one
in a Pompidou connection. Thanks for that.

XIX.

In the past days, or all eternity, I have been
in my own version of the Murakamian well.
There, I have watched the people of this or
other dimensions sprout and vanish as if they

were fungi. I have become a mould myself.
I have read the book of history, and decided
that it’s really very complicated, and that I
need more time to get my wave around it.

XX.

I’ve also gone back and explored the emotions
of all the people that I have affected when
meeting them. It’s a kind of kaleidoscope
of zapping life intensity. I buzzed from one

touch to the next, and I came to conclude that
largely the influence that I have had on others
in my tweeny life has been positively charged.
I wanted to say thanks for putting up with me.”