R'lyeh Sutra (3 page)

"Gawd! I'm sooo horny! Gonna fuck that thing into oblivion, see if I don't!" she hoots, as I toggle a switch that evaporates the roof of the cab. Like that it's gone. Blast furnace of endless desert heat momentarily dries her moist pussy before her internal systems compensate. The rush of sparkling fluid that results is phenomenal, a real testament to the wonders of bionic augmentation. The seat is soaked beneath her. She fingers herself, dipping between the feathers, and coos.

"What if it's female?" I ask, panting.

Astrid opens a storage compartment in the dash, extracts a fearsome strap-on dildo, slips it over her legs, fits it to her waist. Servos in the mechanism whine and the dildo snaps open at the base, swings upward, tucks its steel head into the depression of her navel, pressing hard. She sighs with pleasure. She turns around, puts her feet against the dash, legs flexing, coiled, hands clawing the back of the seat, she winks at me.

"Kam-pai!" she shrieks and launches herself out of the cab into the flatbed.

In the rearview I have a brief impression of a giggling Astrid pinning herself onto or into a writhing phosphorescent cloud before light bleeds in from all directions erasing my sight. There is only sound now: hum and crackle of hovercraft engines, scream of hot air passing at speed, Astrid and the stowaway howling, the disembodied voice of Alex from the speakers, aching with pride.

"Attagirl, Agent Stargrave. Attagirl."

attention
all writers / poets / scribes / scribblers

we regret to inform you that the viral infection known as LANGUAGE has fully colonized your frontal lobes, your community and in fact, your entire world

the virus is aggressive, territorial, and comes complete with a variety of defensive measures, the most effective being a time-tested mechanism of symbiotic ego-complex re-inforcement, which causes the host to believe that the semiotic spew that serves as an infection vector for LANGUAGE is in fact the result of the hosts own creative process, and not the random linguistic spasm that it is

if the result is sometimes beautiful
or wanders, crippled, towards the significant
this is only a happy accident
and should not be taken
as evidence of worth
only the side effect
of a full-blown
LANGUAGE
infection

should you find yourself producing poetry in public
or constructing tortured prose sculptures
in your basement
muttering
“it means something!”
to worried family and friends

should you come to consciousness on a stage,
behind a microphone, halfway through
some slammed piece of
sorry spoken word

put your head between your knees

breathe deeply

check your heart rate

and then

burn all papers and notebooks
bury all pens pencils and crayons
render all keyboards useless
with the liberal application of honey or semen
put a rock through your computer screen
and most importantly

shut up

immediately

here in the Silence, we are aware of the irony in transmitting this bulletin to you through the viral pathway itself, but we are limited by your own perceptual boundaries

we would like to assure you that we are devoting all of our considerable resources to the development of a cure for LANGUAGE and relief for your lamentable condition

currently it comes in spray form
cherry, grape, or lemon flavor
and renders the hosts tongue and throat tissues
into a stringy mass of inert, weakened fibres
fit only for shallow breathing and perhaps
the passage of pre-chewed food

beta testing continues

in the meantime
consider yourself under QUARANTINE
until further notice

When we moved about on the rank floors of the ocean, we were better. Wiser under the pressure. A thousand thousand atmospheres bearing down on our bodies, our armoured shells, left no room for any thought that was not perfect. All our desires made iron, our glories inviolate, our movements full of slow grace.

Back then we knew things, things we cannot know now. The deep things of the Deep Ones. Sacred and lugubrious, the conch shells sounding in the benthic zone, each chamber a league across, blown by what unthinkable lips, what improbably brine-choked lungs? A sound that rivaled the death rattle of suns, sending the sweetest thrill across our photophore-studded leather skins. We glowed like afterthoughts discarded on the silty carpet.

Our eyes were black and shining. We were savage, but our savagery played itself out over millennia, our violence knew patience. Miles deep, we could hear the planet turning on its axis, hear it grumble straight down to its incandescent core. In this way, by eavesdropping, we learned of revolutions.

We were better. There was terror there and we knew it for what it was, which is wisdom most ancient. Our eyes were black and shining and flinched at nothing. Gods routinely drifted from above, first this way, then that, toys of the long-suffering current, finally settling in the muck, long dead. Nothing was wasted there, we were always fed. Our bodies shifted and slid across each other like quantities of molten granite.

We were better then. We were the keepers. Keepers of secrets, of codes, of forgotten speech. Words that were keys, that are keys still. Words stored away in a spinal lattice nine miles long, our ribs like girders singing in the flux.

Now we are constructed of foolish liquids, our lungs flap like injured sparrows at each easy intake of air. Slender pipes and crusts of bone support us, our teeth are bits of chalk. Our thoughts, once solid and ever-lasting, are as dust, debris. They sift through minds that cannot grasp and hold with certainty a single notion. We fumble at the locks, dimly recalling that once we were masters, that once we held the keys. Our missteps, when they are not completely banal, are catastrophic.

The sunken trenches wail for all that has been lost

the resolution is necessarily poor

but the results are in

even so

no webbing between the toes

no horns sprouting from the head

no quivering dorsal spines

dripping with potent neurotoxins

no prehensile tail

no dew claws

no claws at all

the third eye is right where it should be

hidden, lodged securely between

only two hemispheres

and not, amazingly, flailing about on a stalk

thrust obscenely into the world

I wonder at its secret activity

no bony plates

no gill flaps

no tightly folded wings

all membrane and cartilage

no tentacles

no hyper-chakras

just seven regular chakras

my first born

I slide this portrait

into my wallet

the feeling is not exactly relief

but not quite disappointment either

and somewhere in there is a resolution

necessarily poor

to have a chat

with my gods

about those papers I signed

About the Author

skawt chonzz is a Plutonian crime lord, a profession that corresponds to Poet/Spoken Word Artist here on Earth, where he is currently hiding under a witness protection program. skawt misses Pluto, particularly the summer time, when the weather gets slightly warmer, and the super-conductive algae fields glow in the feeble starlight. Someday, he’ll go back. In the meantime, he continues to engage in heinous poetry crime and is amazed that this continues to be popular on this planet. He hopes that someday we’ll learn. skawt has been a member of the 2009 Victoria Slam Team and the Artistic Director of Tongues of Fire, a poetry collective/crime syndicate in Victoria BC from 2009 through 2011.