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Showing posts with label dark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dark. Show all posts

16 November 2018

19 October 2018

haiku 18 Oct 2018

On a cold, dark night
Stones fall and twigs snap nearby;
In the tent, I shake

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

02 March 2018

dreamscape writing 1 Mar 2018

[This dream occurred after I had gone back to sleep following my morning thankfulness ceremony, having eschewed my morning meditation practice due to poor sleep and being in a foul mood.]

I and a handful of others were in a steam locomotive working our way through a long system of tunnels. We’d come far already, having traveled a great distance under what felt like a vast mountain. Reaching a fork in the path, the train split into two part, each with its own locomotive. From an initial position at the front of the first loc my perspective switched to the cow-catcher on the second engine, from where I could see and hear the engineers running them talking to one another. The first loc was driven by a dark-faced man, the second by a woman with dark hair. They were both wearing World War 1 style doughboy helmets and had to duck back into their compartments repeatedly due to the tightness of the translucent white tunnels through which we passed. (The tunnels were open at parts, bisected here and there by pillars that seemed organic, as if they’d grown into place.) The trains rapidly decelerated, and the female driver informed her counterpart that the tracks stopped just up ahead.


At least five people left the trains and walked into a large cavern located at the tracks’ terminus. Both tunnels opened up into the cavern via vaulted passageways. The rear and side walls of the cavern were of rough-hewn, living stone about five meters high and ten meters wide. Its ceiling was shored up by rough timber scaffolding and sloped in a rounded fashion downward from the rear wall forward, which I could see had a door of wooden planks set into it, locked with heavy iron chains. (The cavern was shaped like the quarter of a cylinder.) I and the others began to explore the cavern, finding a running spring to our left (protected by a rusted iron fence whose gate stood open) and four separate raised garden beds, two on each side with a shallow trough running between them. I began planning out where we could sleep and in which beds we could plant crops. As the others continued to explore, I floated over and examined the locked door, at which point I discovered that some of the planks had fallen aside, revealing through a square of intact mosquito netting (set into a framework painted red) a suburban street beyond (the street was one located on a hill above UCLA in Westwood, CA). Our group rejoiced upon finding that our journey was nearly complete.

Using a power-drill I then began to try to pull out the large screws that secured the chains to the crude planks of the door. They were slotted screws and my bit kept slipping, as I was using a Phillips-head. Suddenly, I and two other unseen presences were sitting on a vast mudflat which stretched ahead of us for at least five hundred meters, terminating in a coastal road with tall green mountains rising above it. The screws I was trying to undo secured not a door but chains wrapped around a gambling machine the size of a 1980s boombox. The machine had slots for coins and bills, the jackpot being a million dollars. I asked one of the others for a dollar to feed into the jackpot slot and was rebuffed. Attached to the rear, right-hand side of the gambling machine were various removable implements such as a multitool and an old-fashioned label maker, both of which slotted neatly in grooves designed for them. (The label maker was marked with the numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, and others.) I was attaching a slotted screw-bit to the multitool (for some reason, it featured a low-quality, full-sized steak knife), removing other tools so that I could manipulate the screws using the short bit. At that point the seawater started to rise around us and I patted my left pants pocket, dismayed to find my mobile phone located there. The unseen others and I grabbed the gambling machine and scattered tools and rushed for a mound of mud behind us, at which point I saw at least two others, the dark-haired woman and a man, bathing in a pool of blood-red liquid to our left. (We became halfway submerged before reaching the mound, which caused me to fear for my mobile phone and plan for ways to dry it out using rice.) Once reaching higher ground, a blond-haired woman jumped carelessly into the aforementioned, gated spring, which now filled a deep basin of tan sandstone, the roof and one of the sidewalls of the cavern having disappeared. The dark-haired woman, still dripping with red fluid, entered the pool as well. When she resurfaced her hair was also blond. I turned to look at the far shore and reckoned it would take us at least an hour to swim over to it, the mudflats upon which we’d been sitting have been entirely filled up by the sea.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

29 September 2017

glimpse at goddess

There was little she could do to help, Nuuzstathena reminded herself, whereupon she settled back onto her shield, legs crossed in full lotus, or shuang-pan.

She knew that some of her sister goddesses, especially Guanyin, were better able to penetrate the layers of suffering that gripped the hearts and clouded the minds of humans alive during this dark age, the compassion of the many-eyed one a bright beam to pierce the seas of darkened woe. Nuuzstathena excelled at wisdom, trickery, and the use of force to benefit mankind; quiet words and soothing touches were largely beyond her ken.

Which is why the grey-eyed one sat the way she did, waiting for man to set aside his love of the blind wrath of Ares, waiting for him to choose a brighter path, one not bathed in rivers of blood. Perched upon her lap was her spear, Reason, to which all men must eventually listen.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

14 July 2017

another bad witch

A bad witch named Baya lived on the edges of the Web, near its darker fringes. In her yard were cute things, puppies and goslings that, seeming innocent, attracted youngsters.

She quickly infected the minds of children who strayed inside her home, however. On her outspread apron were embroidered images that young people weren’t supposed see, moving pictures of people doing naughty things to each other. The pictures got stuck in the kids’ minds, making them callous and adult at an early age - too early, many argued. Baya changed her address frequently, for she lived in a moving house. On taloned feet it picked its way carefully through the tangled mazes of web domains, always one step ahead of the angry parents following it.

One child, a precocious and prepared young lady, saw what was going on and, as she fled from the bothersome images, dropped behind her a few bits of rotten code. The discarded virus soon took over Baya’s home and brought it crashing to its knobby knees. But much damage had been done to others, many young minds ruined.

And, soon enough, another bad witch took Baya’s place.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

12 April 2017

dreamstate writing 11 April 2017

I had climbed into a rail-mounted, bullet-shaped carriage in order to visit a subterranean Harry-Potter-themed attraction. With me in the carriage was another entity, a male figure who has been for the last couple of nights leading me through massive hollow structures that are poorly lit and full of shadows. The structures remind me of abandoned airport terminals. I encounter few other entities in these massive structures. The shadows, however, are often alive with fearful and stunted figments that follow me, tracking my movements.

The carriage had stopped at the door to the attraction. A backlit panel displayed the logo and name of the attraction as well as a clock showing the minutes left until we could enter. Feeling confined and cramped in the suddenly tiny space (my head and torso had been bent backward on the way into the narrow tunnel), I had jumped out, whereupon I found myself on a flat plain lit as if by a full moon shining in the sky on my right-hand side. Dead trees and ruined buildings stood upon the plain, their outlines at times pixelated, at times clearly defined. To my left was a three-storey building, dark, decrepit, scary.

A few hundred meters in front of me was a line of tall buildings that appeared to form the boundary of the plain. A shadow moved there, jet-black eyes winking open in a jet-black body. It oozed swiftly my way, flitting from shadow to shadow. As it came closer it took the shape of a giant dog. Panicked and full of fear, I cast about for a way to escape the bounding beast’s gnashing jaws. I noticed an open door in the collapsing building to my left but resisted the urge to leap through it. Instead, I lifted my right arm. The shadow-dog grasped my right hand in its mouth but its teeth found no purchase, and no matter how hard it whipped its head around, it could do me no harm.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

14 November 2016

whites only oenotheque


Tired of dark-hued, reddish wines? Looking for a place where only whites are served - the finest, most pure whites around? If so, come on down to Whites Only Oenotheque on Jackson Avenue and Union Street for a fine selection of Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc wines. Rest assured - no coloreds dare darken our reclaimed barn-wood countertop, threatening to besmudge the white leather seats of our hand-made, wrought-iron barstools. It’s whites only all day from the first drop poured to the last sip taken. Most of our wines are grown, fermented, and bottled right here in the United States of America. Each of our wonderful domestic whites comes with a certified paper of origin, and all imported whites undergo thorough vetting and approval procedures at the hands of trained technicians before departure and upon arrival. Don’t bring anything into your home even a shade darker than the best, finest, provenly superior white! Travel-proof and inconspicuous ‘Bagged & Boxed’ white wines now available for discerning but economically disadvantaged customers who insist upon quality whites at a fair price. There’s something for every checkbook at Whites Only Oenotheque in downtown Durham, North Carolina - stop in today!

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥