Daniel Y Harris & Rupert M Loydell, Excerpts from "Cthanoiahic Fever: Hunting the Holy Erasure"

Excerpts from "Cthanoiahic Fever: Hunting the Holy Erasure"

Daniel Y Harris & Rupert M Loydell

‘For the irony of an ageing mind is that it opens itself brutally and unflinchingly to the hidden depths of its own past as the eye of a snowy owl to the night’s prey.’

     – Karin Altenberg, Breaking Light

'You were a dream. Then a reality. Now a memory.'

   - Ian Thomas, 'The City Rises and Falls'

‘The world is full of abandoned meanings.’

     – Don DeLillo, White Noise

Rebuild in the aggregate—the bulk

for efficient

filling and variety.

Toss in gravel, copper tubes and aspect ratios

for the ones not displayed

and withheld from used.

Among the properly oriented: run.

Traded off in favor of more.

Plate-shaped. Thrown.

The ideal finished piece serves

this role’s upper

limited low.

Red tile mortar’s strong bond to the other

rough, adds what it lacks

in band

or nano plastic—to be treated,

always. Widespread bulk is less extreme

than the sprayed

pyrolysis of laminar faces.

A less rubbery

new glee. 

 •

Do-it-yourself alchemy

is all the rage.

Just before music,

the silence ends;

just before gold,

shit hits the fan.

You have got

to be willing

to lose it all.

The Devil is a liar.

•

Bundle product—bundle it!

Obtain

size, increasing scales over units: not equal

with fewer, friction

with more.

Higher defect flux decrease rates,

to switch grades—its fix

to fulfill the great

purchase of short-run curves.

Buy, or.

Or, the square-cube law—last one awake

for a latenight “or” binge

of paydirt. Later, the recovery

back to the same

basic,

is sold back

to the converted for less than two. 

Put up the input market.

Put up the ups.

Work the crits.

•

Back to basics;

back to back.

Backs against the wall.

You have nothing to lose

and nothing to save.

Money may be imaginary

but it buys the real

and surreal.

Wounded triumphs

fall to the ground,

frail and broken.

Free markets?

Bring it on!

We are walking on wire

and ready for war.

•

Draw us a gauge

number

as in to refer—voice coils and other

cross-sections from the folded

round.

Seam lines follow anvils, torcs

and fibulae—fall out

of favour,

coded in rope—rebirth of two notched

pokes. They never lived

in Anatolia.

Let’s correct the diameter with a punch

to the kishkas and wake

La sorcière de

Malcombe—she’s decked

in paraffin wax.

She only responds to diodes.

They’re a bit botched. 

•

Let’s convict

the diameter

with a punch.

One to the nose,

another to

the kidneys.

Let’s connect

bone and skin,

skin and bone.

Human candles

surround us;

beeswax is best.

Earplugs are a must

as the screams

flicker and fade.

We only respond

to fear and pain

here in Anatolia.

•

Arsenic candles in the Land of Hatti?

A reified Levant?

Not for these born-again Dorians. 

Their homeland

is a faucet

shaped like an aurochs

mixed with a starved gaur. They savor flickers

            from any source, even if flicked

                        from extinct.

Older still

if tagged by a convo of glam feeds.

How many died at the Battle of Manzikert?

Forget the tag in tagmata.

The answer is a blank stare. 

•

The nowhere child is a shadow

intent upon negative space

and silence.

She may be pulled

toward the light,

but she resists.

For evidence we have

a blurry video of ghosts

and a smudged polaroid.

No light bothers us here

or plagues our eyes.

Bells sound out a blues

as the moon rises

above a sea of longing,

wonk starfall sighs.

Rubble and dead trees

give her shelter,

provide a makeshift hide.

She used to know

how to walk on water,

but now avoids the coast.

Used to be queen,

now she’s the daughter

of not-so-sure days

and tripwire songs:

this and that, this that

and the other.

•

Semantic bad-trap of bad taste? Sure, Ivan.

How did we become offensive?

Well, Horatio, it all came from sarkasmos.

Why always Greek?

Derision of these ride wits.   

How did they spell ‘which’ is 1597? Whych.

To offend one’s interlocutors—now that’s the last

gaffe of plenty.

My people are verbal.

My people used to be queens.

We are good and hostile.

Although,

            not always. Usage

and cortex sobriety of use—this will appease

nothing but sound.

Get the struts Benjamin.

Lenny, I have to, but you?

The acolytes used to sniff airplane glue

without a cue. No one used to lie,

or lie about laying

with the other: influencers.

•

One of these days

the people will be silenced.

One of these days

we’ll wake up to longing,

our children crawling across the wires

and our parents hammering nails

up their nostrils and into their brains.

One of these days

we’ll wake up to music,

aeolian harps of scaffolding

that cannot hold the city up.

The Greeks knew nothing

of any use to us.

My model airplanes never flew,

my model boats sank without trace.

One of these days

Benjamin will strut no more

and Lenny will do as he is told.

I know nothing of any use

to you.

One of these days

the future will be concluded.

We will wake up to nothing.

•

Mr. Deað woke from expiry with a pass

to extension—flipping cadavers like realestate

scams. How about a jellyfish slurpee

with that refinance? Lenny Benjamin

concedes that he stole a notable flaw

from Mr. Deað, here among the slow

states of shift. Why were they all wearing

ivory pendants? They have no use in the city,

nor in the neo-cortex of a brain in a jar.

When hypoxia hits, it hits hard. Jar or no jar.

Where are you from again? Legal. I sent

you a box of unborn pears to bring you back

to life. None of this is homeopathic. Bacteria

is an Deað, not Lenny Benjamin, not you, 
our next of kin, buffed with strong genes. 

•

The Lords and Ladies of Darkness

are scheming in their glass houses.

They are at breaking point.

Who will stop the lookout boy

from falling from the roof,

who decode the colours

of the Kaleidoscope Kid

who spins the wheel of fortune

withough ever asking

if he should?

                       He shouldn’t.

There is enough mystery

and confusion here already,

enough blurred faces

and wallflowers hugging

the past, enough to last

a lifetime, of only we had one

to spare.

                The continuing story

continues apace, it never ends

but we do have constant pauses

for comfort breaks and tea.

One lump or two?

                                Plenty of bruises

to spare, purple is the new black,

grey is a sign of defeat and death

as your skin fades and pale

spectres attend.

                            Masks

cannot hide your demise,

costumes can be stored

for future tales. The script

never seems to change.

The Lords and Ladies of Darkness

are screaming in their glass houses.

They are past the point of reason.

•

It’s late night at the Parliament of Ganglions

starring the Lords and Ladies of Darkness.

In dark airglow, zodiacal light

converts its space dust

into hot plasma—tesla magnetic dipoles

cubing the distance. In the occupied ecliptic,

their last enfant terrible

mocks the Zodiac Killer.

What does EBEORIETEMETHHPIT mean?

Why did their enfant terrible write this word?

His Orionid is able to lift a still-wet palm print.

He writes a 340 character cryptogram.

It is never decoded with exozodiacal dust.

•

All will be revealed

when you decode the dzesorathan.

Riches will be yours… the secrets

of time travel… how to seduce women…

to tell the  future and forget the past.

But try as you must you never will.

This is it, your cold life in rags,

limping from village to village.

Glass people in stone houses

should not throw ideas around.

•

Favour for a favour? Returns are traded

on one side of agree—the casting couch

of aspirants deemed unfair by an unruly

mob of dzesorathanians. Quickly release

the captives from personal gain, malice

and envy—the agreed upon formulaic

hum of slightly off congruence. Never

before the public nor as visionary quo.

On occasion as archfoe and uber-quid.

What is the estimated value of injury?

Me, I correspond in kind and degrees

of injury as here among the just. Lex

talionis. The just? Here’s a late crime

of living beyond ones peak and severe.

If only this made us felons newsworthy.

If, as if, the tit-for-tat eye of stolen guts

reinvented a new game. Then scamper

by the fixed value, the absolute, clearly

pure and blue and stretching its copper

tubes like wings in an afterworld of red

algorithms. They must land on someone.

I was exactly equal to me. Try wergilds.

Why not? Origin in Hammurabi is very

clearly used. I love for example. You?

We’ll strike against direct retributions.

They live for equity, as early as to grow

and less threatened by the social fabric

of wrongs, feuds and vendettas, serving

no one whose bound to be the sick bond

of the unsaturated least, limiting actions. 

•

[Insert an oblique reference here to the Porto Cesaro and the Old Gates of the Temple. Perhaps mention the 7000 Islands of Cthanoiah and the story of brave Michel, who visited them all in search of love he never found. He was a pioneer in chromatic studies, the nuances of colour, light and shade, how to camouflage the soul ready for the next life.

Alternatively, offer simple instructions on how to guide the bullet into the train journey of our lives, so that we are not derailed in our holy quest, can walk all the way to Paradise, or at least as far as Tanzikaar.

Maybe it is the place for a map of the finest tea rooms to be found in the sacred mountains? Or the oases in the deserts of Llitfronia? I could share the secrets of spiced tea, the rituals and preparations that turn dust and water into magical embrocations?

Or perhaps not. This is a different sort of adventure. Let us walk away alone.]

•

They upend mongrels—[belly-pale umpas]—[maggot crustaceans]—[wax swabs]—[mix-breed ticks]—[inserted obliquity to dispel rote]. I see, Louis, playing hard to get. Dispatch a parrot and lay white eggs from which hatch  altricial young. I love the floral nectar of progeny, sentenced to nest boxes in captivity. Barry, I’m not arguing with you. Whose knows about involuntary commitment statutes? Arthur pipes in—[what pet trade?]. We’ve bridged the chrysalis—[been reborn]—[some amniotic, embryonic fluid we are drinkingjust before the giddy illusion of death.] No, no. This is all wrong. The macaw eats a walnut. I thought they were parrots? No, they were red avian dinosaurs.

Who else could they send? Who else could be trusted? Long way for taxonomy? Go to work Michel. Nothing says what the fuck like a frogmouth. Cockatoos? Stop it! Try to imagine that this isn’t madness. Face it, we’re having a relapse,

an episode. The critics are throwing their teak breakfast trays out the window. Please call our panicked associate and start the dictation. [Psittacoidea as well as all members of the Cacatuoidea]—[a gall bladder in skull bones]—[scatters

light in such a way.] We’re consumed by overwhelming sensations or appetites. Our families are genera. Our families are buff-faced pygmies at under 10 g (0.4 oz) in weight and 8 cm (3.1 in) in length. It’s in our faces, our hair like a glaze,

a coating drenched in afterbirth. Please stop the stampede. Remember a please. Remember the downward curves of a full spectrum family. [Keratinized bills as bill-tipped organs]—[seeds or position nuts]—[their large heads]—[claws elongated]—[a high level of dexterity.] Together, we’ve just had two stunning moments of clarity, which can be lowered and raised at will. Have two notable exceptions—[our prominent feather neck frills are raised and lowered at will.]

Such will. Pure will. Warning Will Robinson. We will not live without you/we! These are our portals. They are fast and furious. They are powerful. Our plumes. Our plumage. These beautiful peacocks don’t speak. We come from the asshole

of an organism whose sole function is to excrete a poison, an exfoliant necessary to destroy the miracle of human life. Will we own our patina of shit coating the best part of our lives? Who did the same but gave them low prices? It will take the rest of our lives to undo. [One formerly occurred]. Take two deep cleansing breaths and set that notion aside. We are poorly understood. We are as nomads.We rage widely. Please use your bill to search for grub. Many cases consuming

the home rough the home. Our home, rather than two green seed dispensers. As potent a feeling as this may be, it must stand the test time and the time is now. How often do poisons protect them? When are their apt collaborations

finally a chemical war? We’re not sure what else we can tell you. We’ve told you everything. [Remove seed coats and other fruit parts.] Settle this case on a flight at midnight. The years have passed. [Brush tips to collect this source of food specialized in nectar]—[in perfume of a god]—[a diet made up of an insect.]  Give me something I can print. Are these poems defoliants? A cancer lingers above all else. Why allude to carcinogens? We hear pained narratives.

Wait, we are monogamous breeders. We have mini-me offspring. Our privilege is absolute, but we die every day. We are pending, unresolved. We will never have our day in court. [Parade or stately walk and the eye-blaze.]

I may have carpal tunnel. I wrapped my wrist in gauze. My thumb is numb. My genes are indices, long and radial half of the ring finger. I doubt we care. I doubt pain as simple as a wrist. The true poets kill their poem. Who the hell is the course of normal? The faucet is running. Let’s empty ourselves of whim. Give in Stanley. How about a year without beer? [See a carpometacarpal joint.] It’s good to see you again. I admit it. I bid that job. [Primarily, a numbness and so intense as to wake I/you from sleep.] Pain is electrophysiological. Nobody sleeps.