Creed Of Core: Write After Eternal

Dear XOX,

Looking forward to your next adventure. Write me after you begin again. Again. This time, hopefully, with Cosmic Eternal, not that slow decay that’s – more or less – impossible to know other than data sputtered from ticklish instruments – absurdly expensive; glamorous; high tech. Thin margins of error noted with numerals of noble birth and breeding.

Clock-tick, omnipresent side-kick, Time Observer lurks subjective: one with all you do. Tell me you’ve changed. That this is not another inquiry partial to “the facts,” framed as they are, “forever time facts…”

Time is NOT forever, NOt objective, nothing but another figment of that 18th century hack “philosophe” Baron von Ridicule. No dreams or experience, but thirteen prime rib stakes in Time Objective and Forever myth-seed of his puerile deity, the “way out there eternal, invisible, unsigned.”

No, no-way, no, not this time, no: raw life from real seed. No time for laws and other fictions born of tyranny at the barren Barony’s round table of benighted square pegs.

Not again. No. No space for anything but real — congenital organic.

And don’t forget to write, once you’re at liberty and completely unsettled and exposed.

Yours,

ASE

Creed of Core: Immortal Fiction

When I read “To Constantia Singing,” I dreamed of Constantia singing. She sang the Summer of 1816, the one they made movies of. I read the Summer of 1816, when I was sixteen, during the Summer of 1981, dreamed future reading past.

Shelley, Byron. Open collars and all that hair. Sex, drugs, guitars and “vintage” psychedelic garb a century and a half before The Beatles.

Summer, 1816 it rained and rained. Mary, Percy, Claire, George and creepy Pollidori entertained each other with horror stories they would leave for goofy posterity to bastardize on big and little screens.

Young poets alive with life. But also ugliness. Accusations. Dead and stillborn children. Claire’s womb infused with madness. Scion of the Lord.

I suppose it was a “youth movement” of sorts – certainly Piccadilly and the Haight inherited their style. But it was all just talk. Conversations in the parlor and on the lake. Julian and Maddolo. White Anglo Atheists. Percy’s pressure to perform, to walk in visions of poesy, out pace the game-legged Superstar.

The boat, the lake, harbingers of – well, one should learn to tread water if drawn to it.

Laudanum, pistols, Greek and Latin chit-chat; aristocratic irony; impassioned bookish banter.

Could they have foreseen Karloff and and American kids in flat-head masks on Halloween, before the monster was a grunting imbecile incapable of polyglot discourse?

I saw a lock of Mary’s hair encased in glass the Summer of 1990 at the New York Public Library, some ghoulish exhibit for the edification of the young. The hair was light-brown, flecked with gold. Honestly, it could have been clipped from any teenage girl “just yesterday.”

But it was old. Older, even, than the rubber mask I’ve kept since I was six.

Note: monster mask, not “Frankenstein Mask,” as the label advertised. Frankenstein was not the monster, but the Muse.

That is, before incorporated, at a later date, into the fiduciary corpus, and brought, legally, to life. Immortal fiction, walking, talking, killing, eating. Miraculous necromancy. Mobilization and manipulation of a million life-less parts. Human once — the pieces, the parts — once infants at the breast.

Creed of Core: Carbon

Indeed it will be “transformed utterly, utterly transformed,” terrible but sure no beauty.

Rocks, trees, grainy amber waves grisly as Mother, six feet under. Momma! Momma! Carbon. I knew her as skin. I remember her as skin.
Like I recall that that car I’d saved pennies (shiny money melts like snowflakes on a stove) to possess; like I remember my high-school sweet-heart’s teenage girls; my sultry wife; the color flash color-bled, counterfeit Suns that (over)exposed it all.
Same old, same old: idiots with matches playing god created all this sudden empty, silent breathless, burnt black Dawn.
The Sun also rises, still, yet, again, concealed by heavy metal clouds, a leaden pall, warped woof of ash.

Hands wove this. Hands of men who have no hands now, none any human eyes might know.
Transformed utterly, utterly transformed to greasy turds of coal; the world a big burnt marshmallow licked by fire.
So, spit on the ashes. Douse your white-hot rocks. Enjoy this after-life of cold, soot, mud.

Creed of Core: Earth Day

Oh thou Guerrilla-hearted , monkey-souled slaves! Recycle – your abortions, more numerous than beer cans, condoms, candy-wrappers like leaves in grass.

Oh asphalt jungle children of nuclear rocket-birds and napalm-spitting insects. Oh top gun predators like razors ripping blue sky, phosphorous bombers who shit poison apples over Snow White’s virgin girl.

Oh believers of knowledge with your puerile faith in “them,” that “they’ll figure out something.”

“They,” of course, already have.

We were all so smart and fashionable. So technical, liberal and “free.” Oh to be dumb again and naked.

The Tree of Knowledge was the first razed by the Land-Lord’s loggers. Great Gob, splattering beast blood, marked Life next for lumber.

Creed of Core: Between Nothing and Forever

Even as a kid it was a question of Death, or action, motion, speed. On the swing-set, flying high, like later, running. Swinging for life, more life, another century of life.

I sang:
“I’m gonna live to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m gonna live be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m gonna live to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!”

But why would a seven-year-old be so terrorized, obsessed to the point of ritualistic thinking?

I was the youngest at the picnic, seven years closer to Nothing than the adult picnickers, all in their twenties and thirties, too far from Beginning-from-Nothing to remember, and even further – most believed – from Forever-After to be awed by the Nothing eternally to come.

I chimed my ditty (prayer?), swinging rhythmically with metronome precision, fifty forward, fifty back:

“I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!”

Pendulous. Hypnotic. Doomed.

Creed of Core: Underground

And yet another dumb protagonist, all inner life, asocial, dwells in tunnels built for trains the City has outgrown, forgotten. In darkest sanctuary, he dreams. Remembers. How long since the sky? Tunnels above him and The City above the tunnels and the sky above the City. Space. Stars and darkness beyond the Sun he hasn’t seen in months. Maledictions of his species and the parasitic others that remain. Rats aloof, big as bears and vicious.

She comes to him with food procured by runners who deal daily with the light and traffic, hands and markets, of Above. He and She will never scavenge among them in the light, among them, in the noise. No, not again.

Better to Live, He and She, than to Survive.