There is nothing out there.  That is the first rule of life out here.  The second rule is that you should pick one direction and just walk it, as long as you can bear to walk it.  You will never get anywhere, except for maybe a small yak and goat farm on the border, but that is impossibly far off – an inconceivable distance.  Those are the two rules; never forget the rules.  That is our way of life.  Don’t think about the rules – they just are.  Accept that there is emptiness, there is the sky and the ground, but they create an emptiness; try to accept one direction, one direction of a featureless landscape is the same as all directions.

            The ground is salt and flat and pressed smooth by the ice age, there is perpetual dawn on all of the horizons, which never climaxes and breaks into noon.

            I have walked, but the land has never changed, so I keep walking in all directions.  I have tried to will the landscape, and it remains a desert of saline twilight.  The sun is coy here and never seems brighter in one direction or another: all of my perspectives have been choked down into a single vantage.  I look straight ahead at all times, because there is no reason to turn my head.  I imagine what the sun used to look like back home – where I was born and raised – and I can see it as a giant egg, cracked on the edge of the horizon and laid out across the sky.  The golden rich yolk piling up in the middle, ready to spill out in all directions with the a touch, and jeesuus the whites, oozing outward.  It’s cytoplasm splayed out and crisping in the hot oil and butter.  I would just have to scratch the salt from the flat of the ground and gently sprinkle it over the corona and dine.

            I came upon a massive swarm of flies, undulating and fantastic, screaming across the surface of the gulag.  They moved in a continuum, as a school of fish.  A bead – or beads – of mercury on a vibrating table, that combine and dissociate and combine, shuttering and morphing in a constant flow of energy across the flat circling landscape in a feeding frenzy of current.  They moved in and out of forms, some resembling a larger organism, they writhed in an attempt to spring to a consciousness.

-Flies.  Flies.  Flies.  Flies all around, when I gas them they’ll fall to the ground.

They all at once swooped low around me, buzzing in the ears and mouth and choking me in a black cloud.

-Do you know the direction home?

Buzz.  Buzz.  Buzz.

-What I wouldn’t give for an omelet right now…

Buzz.

Clrosh! Chorosh!

Swlrolsh! Shorosh!

Florosh! Fhorosh!

            Sing! Sang! Sing brinybrine!

            saltsong

Na Na

Cl Cl

            fa fa

            so so

Clrosh, Clrosh chorosh!

            Asia

Europe  T  Africa

            Argonaut, Sargonaut, Margonaut, Bargonaut, Largonaut

                        sing!

                        s_ng!

Swlrolsh, swlrolsh shorosh!

Igg, aahhh $

            Feel the salt air

                        my son

            Taste the salt

                        on the chap of your lips

            Sing too the salt song

                        my son, my son

                        mi so, mi so

                                    so la, so la

                                    Fa! Fa!

Florosh, florosh fhorosh!

            Names, names!  float solfege to the seafoam

                        cradled in the mist

                        mired on the palmbar

                        glass in hand

            Your life line is long

                        my son, my son

            Sit sit, drink drink: ruminate

                        my son, my son

            Think drink, think drink

            Seven years of twenty lost spent in drink

                        to drink the brinybrine: saltsong

                        and trace the contours of my own palm

                                    my brainfoam folds

                                    mixes with the sea

                        amber palm: amber drink

            Sit with me

                        my son, my son

                        and drink, drink

            My name, you know my name

            Her name: Calypso

                        Cralsh! Cralsh

                        Syfs! Syfs!

                        Shosh! Shosh!

            Croshsyfsosh!

            The sea sings her name on the foampeaks

                        embroidered in the choral

            I drink to hear her name roll between

                                    the tides in my brainbrine

                          to see her againagain

                                    tears spilling down her naked breasts

                                    kneeling on the opalshell

                          to taste the ustaste, feel the usfeel, smell the ussmell

            Your Mother

                                    my son, my son

                        I left her for her

                        I left the ussense for her:

                                    your Mother

            Fill my glass

                        my son, my son

                        aromatic muse the saltsea brinedrink

                                    bring me back into the usbeing

            Begin the chorale again:

                        not into the coda

                        the saltsong

                                    unending

                        da capo al fine

                        ruhe dieses Mal

                                    und langsam

                                    wie einem Totengesang

                        pianissimo

                                    my son, my son

                                                il mio figlio, il mio figlio

                                                mi so, mi so

                                                            so la, so la

Clrosh! Chorosh!

            Cralsh! Cralsh!

Swlrolsh! Shorosh!

            Syfs! Syfs!

Florosh! Fhorosh!

Shosh! Shosh!

Croshsyfshosh!

            The wind is still

            The shullbone is rot

            The song is sang

                        my son, my son

Croshsyfshosh!

                        Croshsyfshosh!

                                                Croshsyfshosh!

The last time I went to the old east I though heavily about lactation.  Great lactating breasts that fill the cosmos; the sun is just one of these breasts.  We all – all life, all everything plant animal and mineral – we all suckle off the sun.  The cosmos is filled with endless numbers of massive tits pouring the milk energy of life out everywhere across the universe of everytime, for us and them and everyspace and everywho and everywhat and all other matter to consume.

-Did the neurons agree?

-They have to.

Who is that man over there?  Do you know him?  I’m not sure that I do.  I’m not sure that I like him very much, looking at him now.  He seems almost self-consciously haggard.  A sort of quasi-mock-bohemian lumberjack; someone who wishes to portrait himself that way: a phony.  A liar.  Now that I stare at him longer – the moccasins, worn jeans and frayed cardigan, with black plastic glasses – I can tell that he is a charlatan.

-I saw through my mind a horrifying sight of the world dead.  All of it’s blood spilt out across the universe in a magnificent spiral of a comet tail shining magnetically in a nebular spray across the sky, with nobody there to view it.  The world has been dying now for ages upon eons, the earth is in its own process of cooling and turning to ash, an ash upon which only Homunculus and Golem can survive – with Moloch deep at the core – an ash on which nothing living can live and we are trapped.  This is the future vision of a world uninhabitable – even to a cockroach – an ashen ball spilling magma out across the vacuum, covered with another layer of even finer ash composed of the organic detritus of the human species.

There is always sunlight in the old east.  If you desire sunlight, it exists in the old east; if you don’t desire sunlight, there will be blackness in the old east.  A friend was talking to me about his unsatisfactory experience in the old east, and I thought to him that he must have desired unsatisfying desires.

-You know, us young boys, you know, we need the sunlight, but – well – also the blackness, but also the grey inbetween zones, which are caused by lowlaying clouds and pressure pressure pockets, from the cooling air.  We, us young boys, you know, we need a whole spectrum; a whole spectrum, which the old east cannot provide.  We need variety.

-The old east is the nature of variety and the source of misgiving and the source of nostaligia, and the spring of coldness – refreshing sprays of sunlight – and the rampaging boil of a superheated volcanic vent – twisting light into curls.  These are the old east.

-Bullshit, you know bullshit.  The old east is a whore.

-These are the old east.

-Well then, how about the neurons?

-Whose neurons?

-All of them, you know, all of those neurons out there, firing up at the sky and all around and inbetween everything in all directions at once, and sometimes in massive sweeping cascades that seem to be snow and meteorshowers touching down on the earth to bring life back into it.  Getting in your face and shouting at you and being a true pain in the ass.

-Its called learn, friend.  All of those neurons are trying to teach you something, make connections.

-Well, you know, I don’t appreciate it at all, those neurons ruining my good time.

-Yeah, I suppose that’s why you go to the old east, for a good time.

-Exactly, not some shit lecture from a damn acetylcholine squirting shit townboy neuron.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I listened for a while, and the neurons are part of the charm of the old east, but I never wanted to get some two-cent rampage thrown in my face about how continental drift is affecting global money markets.

-Yeah; okay; sure.

-That doesn’t really mean anything, anyway or anyhow.  It’s all a bunch of bologna.

            My friend pretends to the interested in the old east, that’s why he goes, only to prove that he does.  But, he doesn’t realize that the neurons are the only reason anyone goes to the old east, the neurons and the sky – and their interaction – that is that is there for anyone to see, and that is all anyone is there to see.  A vast orgy of endless connections and distance: that is the old east.  If the astronauts had known about the old east, and how to get there, they wouldn’t have needed to travel into outerspace.  It is all already there. 

Who is that?  Who is that face over there? I’ve seen that face before.  Somewhere, I’ve seen that face before.  I can see the lips moving.  Who is that face?  What are the lips saying?  I can’t tell.  I should move closer to hear, but then what if I am discovered?  I would be blind and nude.  I would be covered in sludge.  I would be recognized.  I know that face, but from where?  I can try to read those lips over there, on that face.  It looks like they are making a “w” sound: w… w… word.  w… w… world.  w… w… w… I can’t tell.  I know that face, but not from where.  What is that face?  Where is it from?  What is it saying?

-I’ve seen the world dying ever since I was born.  Politicians and soldiers are polluting the atmosphere with bad words and bad ideas.  Bad ideas leaking out of pores and anuses and mouths into the atmosphere; condensing into smog; condensing into ash; condensing into Molochs and Golems and Homunculi, which shake off spores when you touch them with more bad words.  They all walk the earth sloughing off bad bad things.  The earth is cooling and its oxygen is blowing off into the vacuum of space.  The ash is cooling the earth’s surface.  Ash is black and slick like obsidian; it reflects out into space.  The earth is cooling, and I cannot remember a time where discovery outweighed extinction.  

If I meant freeforall I meant feeding frenzy, a freedling buzz scrolling around: an explosion within an eyelid, which Farmer Mauve could view on the horizon, because I can see that distance, because I can draw my sixshooter faster and hammer faster than the ray of light…

…towards the sunlight in the old east.