Even the sun gives in to thirst out here

Poor kid hanging up there all alone

No-one ever offered him a drink to smack his flaming chops on

Not a peanut in his own home

Guess no-one visits much in that rancid acid blue

Had a fight with moon mistress so now his burning conscience moans

 

Uh oh uh oh I cannot atone

 

Unglue gritted eyes to dawn intimate in cactus arms

A one night stand that pierced my soul

Unwinding scarf like hessian from my chip chopped lips

Peanut grind, I stagger start in jagged spirals hoping to fall in a hole

But failing that I’ll obey my dizzy dying head and

Commando faint in the rank Regime’s assassin roll

 

Quick quick don’t let the silicone rifle take the toll

 

Fat lot of good a bendy rubber gun does with no bullets

In the ex-postmodern age of self-replicating fabrics

You’d think capitalist money-bathing geeks could figure out

Everlasting ammunition for us desert-wandering pricks 

But idiot clairvoyants with Queen’s English hoverbikes don’t do much anymore

Their electrolytes aren’t high enough, I remember giving one a lick

 

Alas alas I remember that but not much more I think my brain is sick

​

I saw it, mate

 I saw all hate dressed up like fate

ha let me tell you, it was great to see the terraforming of the weaker species

 

now peanuts in my pocket are my sole propulsion pious to my destiny

I will always be hungry 

and they will always be crunchy

 

The sun is on the other side steaming malevolent regret

I start to think the sands are yeast

They’ll rise up with a lighter’s flick and I’ll rise up with a stranger’s kick

Just a hiss more spark to resurrect the beast

Damn soles of my feet are salivating and there’s no more sweat to give

Bread needs water but mirages are just phantom feasts

 

Haha haha I could hallucinate liquid at least

 

Could I do that? After waking up full body blistered in the middle of this wasteland

Am I telekinetically altered? Could I do it? Maybe make water actually appear?

Bet I’d drown in it, heart rate through the sky

Who knows what those science fuckers did to me that got me lost out here

It’s blimmin’ hard to shake up internal disks enough for files to reboot

But I’ll sit here for forever glaring at the horizon until it wets itself in fear

 

Maybe maybe now I’m übermensch

 

But the way she looks at me makes me think mebbe not

Spider-lash woman blinks at me from shimmering shade

Not like I have a hot-ass halo but like I’m more than a hoverbike short of rad

Blink, you prick, wink at her, let her know you’re really made

Gun toting swagger through haggard dusts is more than a bit hot even with a walking stick

What what she’s actually in the shade, what god-like thing could persuade the sun to fade?

 

Up up look fool it’s a messed up railway stop, a retro neon glade

 

Look down, okay, she’s breathing, right?

Plop your soiled butt down right there, hope her nose is lifeless as her looks

Try convulsing them guttural muscles, see if they remember

There’s meant to be a noise that means stuff like in books

Like them paper things of yore

Throat strings shredded but thread back up through desiccations I cluck but all I say is ook

 

Rah rah all the freak can say is ook

 

Übermensch aside, her unforgiving eyes stab me through the gut

Where’d she get her makeup from, her lips are bloody hell alright

Nah mate that’s actual blood and it’s still wet

Nothing better to do than pummel fists into the only face present?

Nah there’s something off about this frozen simmer spot where a cog hasn’t turned in centuries

Not since we got personalised pocket-sized air-powered flight

 

Okay okay to dally here would mean only some sullen form of spite

 

But I proffer up a peanut to the bloody girl, the Adam’s apple to Eve’s askance

She stabs me again for that with eyelashes, draws up scrawny knees

So what, a human is a human, I leave a peanut on the concrete and turn away

Plodding the line of the shade with my feet on signs like these

 #wearen’tlivinganymore  #arewegivinganymore

Like or follow please!

 

Ha ha graffiti sure gets weird, like them guys in chryo freeze

 

I met one once when I was 10 or 12 or something

Dunno what the hell he got woke up for

That must have been a long while before the Regime cranked up

The greens were green back then and no-one pulverised their neighbour’s door

There wasn’t even any blood, people didn’t have it

But this chryo kid was the maddest skid, all ranting on with lores of yore

 

“My friends, my blends, the life is in the blood my dears, in mine, in mine and yours”

 

Footprints in the desert get blown away real fast

But blood makes for a real good marker

Chromosomes and genes for leanness and the oozing red kind too

Sizzling on the sand behind you makes you walk a little faster

Makes me think a little harder

Bitch! She actually stabbed me! I must have somersaulted mental gaga

 

Bloody, bloody hell this place is red and ochre now and what the fuck I’m starkers
 

Turn heel and hobble back to Stabby Stabby Chick

Not out for vengeance blood but more for clothes and some fibrous thing to staunch the flow

But as you know, footprints in the desert get blown away real fast 

I wander lost for a few blistered days until I find the heartless bloodied ho

But now I see the railway stop I stop and question everything

Coz the platform, right, it’s jammed a 45 angle in the sand and that’s not just from shifting breezy blows

 

I dunno dunno how that works and I dunno why I only see it now and I don’ wanna know

 

I know I came here on a boat with some shadowy companions

Water streamed in through the hull but we landed quite pristine

So I don’t know how I got here to this desert

I remember landing in some golden paradise with perky plant-life teeming

Sheaves of satin grasses crisply blackly echoed on the rolling hills behind them

I ached to take a photo but we forgot to bring a camera from the apocalypse like shoddily packed teens

 

I remember I remember we wore white in those days and it was Auto-Cleaning

 

hostile alien hosts 

were buzzed in our fortified front door by our very treacherous very dead commanders

white armoured mole insiders ushering a rank Regime

before then we had knighted them with white capes and in-chipped sceptres

for their sacred services 

to our inter-continental terror wars

 

 But even for those bastard treacher kings with constant sun exposure 

Even their white mantles would sully splat and shatter

Like this scattered hull I’m passing by, a watercraft chuckling in the driest part

But these are not the golden lands, I’m just a madly hatless hatter

Now to Stabby Stabby Chick, yeah the only thing worse than being alone is having a companion who is

Dead in everything but respiration but then stabs you in the gut for inadequate chatter

 

I shake I shake in front of her with my body blood encrusted, somehow the staunching didn’t matter

 

Adam’s apple to Eve’s fevered glance

I drop my stick, she leaps on me with claws unsheathed

I stagger back with fever’s rise as all dry heated things within me writhe

Face to face with snarling retribution lust in hazy narrow iris vision wreathed

Flesh to flesh like sandpaper til fever snaps and slumps and life is limp

I might need a splint to prop up my manhood now unteethed

 

Wordless, trothless, words have never been so unbreathed

 

Panting pantless on the edge of anywhere

Hang on now, what? She sleeps away from me and I am fully clothed

Deja vu clicks in like a digi surround film, the scratchy sands, the spiky grass, not one peanut, but a pile

I’m shock-shamed of such a nightmare of accostment, of wanting what I’ve loathed

Conscientiousness subconsciously rubbed itself in viscous blood and sweat

It wasn’t me, I wasn’t free, I was the lowest of the low

 

Oh no oh no, tell me this has not been done beneath this accidental sundial

 

Up you get you scurvy cur, your clothes are on, the bleeding’s stopped or was not there

And she is sleeping soundly. Do I know her? Should I stay?

Did she really stab me- shit yeah she did, or someone did

But I hope we kept our clothes on, I hope we had some human things to say

Blood is crusted on my knuckles, is it mine or is it hers? How many times have I been here?

How many peanuts have I proffered to this dark eyed stranger’s nay?

 

Up up and away there must be something more than thirsty circle days

 

Water water well my tan says I’ve been out here a while and I can’t live without the wet stuff

So I must have found it somewhere on multiple occasions

Wandering with a dusty staff and rags pulled tight against the winds

My wounded gut itches with biting ants emblazoned

There were ants on the dogs I woke up with when I ripped out the syringes

Mangiest curs I ever saw with rusted robotic legs of outdated calibrations

 

They they if I can find them might be amenable to some liquid-goaled persuasions

 

There’s something shining up ahead, some vertical mirage oh

It doesn’t shudder as much as me as I put on salivating speed

Do you remember the white towers that would shimmer silver in and out of ether?

I lived in one with a brightly gloried view, no wait that was a movie lead

The sands heave without breathing up and down, mammoth frozen waterless waves

From the top I look around and a torrent of ice slams down on me

 

Good god 

good gods above 

I know this place 

this is the sum of all misdeeds

 

Radial circumferences stretch round and round forever all about

They pile up atop each other in their haste to get away from the obliterating drop in the earthly bucket

I know now what this flatness is 

These are the golden lands in which we laid

The cracked up waterfloat was mine and my companions 

Before green earth was smashed

I’m afire

 I will burst

Boiling over from the hollow

Like nevermore before this day

 

But I die, die down to embers and am totally dismembered for still is something unremembered before this day

 

At the base of the wavy hill is a partly buried shiny thing

Just clean enough to see myself, an Egyptian mummer spliced with a dirty yeti

And suddenly I realise that what I wear once was white and now is cracked with long lost crispy chinks

That’s fine and good but actually it is a cape like treachers wore when they’d set us free

Where did I get it? Did Stabby Stabby set me up?

These golden sands were golden lands and somehow now I wear the garb of them who made it so unpretty

 

My country, my people, how have I come to sport this cape of treachery?

 

Treacher treasure oh yeah yeah, the shiny thing, a hoverbike, 2nd Gen, clunky talking bot

This one’s a prattler, but the face is real cute as I stroke the head to wake it

It blinks and looks on my yeti face but must recognise my human eyes

It revs and raves and hops right up with sands rasping off its kit

Oh sir oh sir I said it raves I haven’t seen a Master in three hundred thousand thousand–

Alright– the mummer speaks! I speak– alright, shut up you nitwit

 

Matey mate, my feral fate, can you tell me what’s over there all vertical and sunlit?

 

Oh sir oh sir you don’t want that, that there is a yucky place

Is there water there? Oh yes oh yes for a nice price

A price? Well you’ll do smartly, polished up a bit. Can you get me there?

Why yes sir the sun soars me Well thank the green earth for solar device,

Let’s go, we’re burnin’ daylight– shit you’re hot, can’t you cool yourself?

No no, I very love the sun, I lap it up and soar away so Masters never exercise

 

You bloody bot. You try walking on stalks of meat and bone round and round the desert blight!

 

Levitating miles congeal sunlit upright structures at the centrepoint of the radius separating to reveal

A heaving swelter of ambulators between giant metal hulks– organic people!

Mate, I’m going in and this is a ganz schlechte aber das Beste Idee

I reserve Germanic for all my worst ideas– but um what– how did I learn such words as Spiegel?

The son of a scungy low tech fixer doesn’t learn the ancient Sprachen

What did those science fuckers do to me that made me such a wanky weasel?

 

Chug chug slow into the swirling dust on my clanky chatty bot and hope the fabled water isn’t fecal

 

I leave the hoverbike to sulk and step into a steaming building that surely harbours water

Shivering, anticipating some cool and calm precipitation

Dark interiors swim with sticky globs of sweat flinging from bopping bodies

Auroras bright bewilder from night black flashing in this crowded wasteland faction

Piercing light to puncture any senses I retain, I really want to lick someone

But as my sandpaper tongue lolls out I look about and know it’s too much like flirtation

 

Room after room I find the same, just starved sensations clawing myth temptations and no hydration

 

Drag dessicated dying flesh, create momentum with pointless biologic signals

Forget Gen 2 or any generation whatsoever, momentum is slurped and done

Eyes can’t sustain their looking any longer but sedate swinging chiming tunes leak out

From a nearby shed with shining Vittles sign beaming steadily as the dazed sun

I hope I dream a bath city of sparkling fresh water with a watermelon or twenty

And pricking meet a dazzling display of disks weighed down with glossy potatoes chicken apples melons

 

Waiters wait then pompous deadpan traipse about concerting care to swap up plates for no one

 

Slow motion stepping circles draw me into orbit seated in a dusty chair

Heedless waiters step on, and set on the table next to me purely by chance

Is a stiff plate of gleaming salivacious sustenance stiffened into place which my grimy finger pokes

It clicks on hardened plastic and automated waiting bodies dance

Mechanical movements meditating, I suspect they are android folk until one sneezes

So I yell hey!, they stop and look and with one glance

 

Piff piff plates zoom duck gun run savages emerge from trance

 

Now bloodied woozy head crusted empty gut legs threaten to snap

WHACK an arm across my chest there is a man here shouting! my stick jumps up and tries to whack him back he yells nice stick nice stick nice stick what whack kind of whack idiot whack yells at a stick? Whack! he yells nice to have you back again he grabs the stick have you recalled yourself again? I snarl, but I can’t whack him now because my stick is flick flack scrapping into bits 

that halt 

and glow

 and fail to land

 not wood but dust masked metal made of chips 

that rebound, 

reform 

and cling into a throbbing staff 

white and Auto-cleaning

 the sceptre of the rank regime

 

in my shaking hating hand this white rod of dissolution

what does it mean?

what have I seen?

 

Oh I remember I remember life in an ivory tower above gleaming streets of adoration

Oh I remember I remember landing in some golden paradise with perky plant-life teeming

I remember alien handshakes

No

 

You fuck, you’re with those science fuckers, you reckon I’m a sucker

I’ve got a gun lacking bullet, a water-lacking gullet

But a pocket of peanuts I’d give

If you’d lead me to some water I would drink and live

 

Water’s never done you good, says the shouty man

You drank and drank and still were dead

You tried to run back then

You’ll try to run again

Sailing in a leaking hull

Slumping through sandpaper lulls

I don’t know any science fuckers except for you and me

Our knighted arms too long and strong for us to flee

The nuke ticker cannot be turned back

We white-caped kings turned proudly black

And now we chase our tails

 

–

2017-2020

© Nichola Tatyana

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