Jeff Mach's Blog, page 35

The Carnival Moon

Behold, the Carnival Moon,
Huge in the sky,
Full, of course;

Werewolf dreams happen here.

Behold, the Carnival Moon,
Reflected light, we’re told.
But it reflects like the kind of magic mirror
For which any faerietale would give its eyeteeth

(you know faerie tales have teeth, right?)

Behold, the Carnival Moon,
Surely inhabited,
Surely alive itself,
Surely winking at you.

Behold, the Carnival Moon,
Beloved companion of eventide,
Smiling down on us with love and approval
At our merry gambols and feisty frolics.

Behold, behold, BEHOLD the Carnival Moon;
Why don’t we worship Luna anymore;
What is possibly more ravishing?

____

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The Cult of Ecstasy

I sing of the cult of Ecstasy,
the abandoned, and forbidden,
the subverted and inverted,

the heresy of pleasure,
the long-hidden doctrines of Joy.

I make no claim of personal godhood,

of special vision,
of being a needed intercessor

between the pain of the grey, bloody World
and the healing coolth of Bliss.

But I will say that,
like the Sufi sage,

I would hurt water into Hell to make ash of its flames,
hurl flame into Heaven to make ash of its palaces,
so that we act, not out of love of Heaven or fear of Hell,
but out of desire to make this life better,
regardless of whatever else is on the Wheel.

As for me,

I will not get lost in the ecstatic rites and become a beast and not
a thing of man;

tempting,
tempting,

tempting is that not-undiscovered country
of unthinking action, where consequences
are unimportant until
the moment when they
slam shut behind you.

Tempting,
tempting,
to leave this world of thought
and planning
and rehearsal
and practice
and rewriting
and editing
and moving
and being,

but I have spells yet to script,

potentialities to inscribe,
even a world I might help make
a little less wrong
for a little while.

Perhaps.

In wine is truth; in too much wine is too much truth, at least if the wine’s in me;
it turns roundabout, takes peculiar pathways, seeps out through words whose
perambulations ’round my pineal gland

always go unnoticed
until they’re thoroughly dipped
in strange waters.

I won’t worry; let it go, and let it come, and
let neither the heights nor the troughs
stay me from my appointed mission:

joy for all,

enslavement to nothing,

not even joy.

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Once, The End

Once upon a time, there was

THE END.

…sorry about that.

It turns out that while I’m still
the Storyteller, certain parts of the
tale have been licensed to

THE END–

Sorry again. The new owners of those bits are very protective of their profit margins,

and do you have any idea what the upkeep is on a tale of a princess who spent a hundred years asleep in a glass coffin? The real estate taxes alone are as painful as

THE END

…ah, Hellfire. It’s being recommended, rather strongly, that perhaps what a hip, with-it, profitable audience seeks is to have no waiting, no test of their patience,

not much work to do between the beginning and

THE END,

and who am I to dictate taste?

Once there was a story that never began,

all that could be found was
(I bet you’ve guessed)

no story to strain you,
no real words to offend you,

nothing that could do you the deadly harm

of participating
in a fairytale.

Once upon a time, there was
THE END,
THE END,
and THE END

and I’m sure it made everyone happy,

like a pocketful of dirt,
like the story told by a headless statue,

like the satisfaction of knowing you made it to THE END,
because why would any other part matter?

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Tent-Peg

I want to say a built you a Circus
to get your attention;

but the truth is,
you would have noticed
if I’d hammered a single tent peg;

you’re busy,
but you see.

If I were a slightly better liar,

I would say I built a Circus
as the barest token of my esteem,

that I could not think of a way of telling you I liked you

unless I could say it with a dozen brass bands, under
some vast balleyhoo of a giant tent.

The truth is,
this is your circus,
and these are your monkeys

(except Herman; Herman doen’t
play well with others, and I’m
training him to be a bartender/assassin;
I’ll introduce you once I’m 100% certain
he knows the difference.

Some lovers would send a single
perfect
rose,

others,
a map of the heart,
drawn with disciplined rhyme.

I am simply fleshing out some of your ideas,
tearing them out of Perhaps and into IT IS,
and powering it with the collective gasp
of a thousand chests

watching the trapeze-artist
(apparently)
miss her swing, and–

Why not come in?

The elephants ate the caviar,
the roustabouts drank
the elderberry wine,

but I have popcorn,
and whiskey,

and the Greatest Show I could ever

lay at your feet.

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Gaslighting For No Fun and No Profit

I had a friend, once. Let’s call her “Porcelain Puppet”, because that was her nicknamename. She had a tempestuous relationship with her partner at the time. Before my own cancellation, when I was in a position to help her, I did.

In the past three years, we’ve texted a bit. Often we’ve apologized to each other for being bad correspondants and reinforced our friendship with little <3 symbols and well-wishes.We had a friendly—even warm, though absolutely never romantic on either side—correspondence from( let me check my phone)--March 20th, 2018 to June 7th, 2021. Today, out of nowhere—that sounds like some kind of euphemism, but sincerely, the only indicator I had that anything might be negative was that it had taken a bit of time for her to respond to our last set of messages, and she was, if anything, a bit annoyed that I thought something might be wrong – that is, I asked if anything was wrong, and she replied that she was slow getting back to everyone.Today, out of literally nowhere, she told me not to text her again. This is quite normal. Any society that lives on social currency will reward someone who says, “You know that person our social group hates? I hate them, too! I'm a member of the club! I'm cool like you are!”--just as the people who remain friends with me sometimes find other people unfriending them for no reason other than the fact that they haven't unfriended me for no reason.I told her I would make a video about it. I did. I didn't name her; why would ? She's just one of tons of people caught up in a moral panic, one of tons of people who know that shunning The Accused will get them love-bombed, and giving even the benefit of doubt to The Accused will lose them friends.Her response was a series of threats. Her boyfriend is a lawyer, she said. Any further contact would be harassment, she said. Talking about what happened would be harassment, she said.If you're familiar with abuser tactics, then none of this is new to you. Of COURSE they want to isolate you. Of COURSE they want to frighten you. Of COURSE they want to think that telling anyone your story, explaining your abuse, discussing your pain, talking about how they've hurt or abused you... of COURSE this will be answered by force, by police, by ostracism. And of COURSE they'll threaten you with things that aren't real. Seriously: do they think it is legal to accuse people of theft, assault, chicanery, or general horrifying (and illegal) behavior—but NOT legal to call someone out, not even by name, for trying to make you think you're insane?I know a cancelled person who refers to the (fairly major) news coverage of her alleged actions as being, essentially, attempts to get her to kill herself. She may not be wrong. There's no doubt in my mind that, even if they had mixed feelings internally, many of these people would give voice to the loudest possible voices of approval if I were to suicide. Even if they have mixed feelings, they know that they can post something like:“Such and such person was bad in every way, and not even human, because of their horribleness. I am glad that being is dead, because they're not a person, just an embodiment of how cruddy this world is, and I'm happy to see one proponent of Bad Things buried, so that I will never have to worry about explaining myself to that person's face”----and get tons of “Yes! You go! You're strong! Be brave! You're bold! Be defiant! Hate this person whom we hate, and we will reward your act of bravery with even more status and with even more affirmation.”I get where it's tempting. It's gross; it's wrong; it's unjust; it's why we had the murders of the Witch Trials, the insanity of the Satanic Panic, the alchemical transportation of Halloween fun into fears of (literally nonexistent) fears of Poison Halloween Candy.After years of trying to see their point of view, of trying to listen, of investigating my words and actions, I've come to a simple conclusion:These people cannot and will not EVER back up what they say, not ever, not even once, because none of what they say deals with reality, and worse, they fear the HELL out of reality. They fear nuance; they fear situations where they might not be wholly right; they're terrified at the thought that they might be forced to live in a world where they need to act based on what others do, instead of the stories they tell about other people.These people have gaslit t/hemselves so hard that you could feel sorry for them......were it not for the fact that too much gaslight produces toxic residue which hurts absolutely everyone.You can give them the benefit of the doubt. You don't have to attack them personally, even if they attack you by name (but I imagine you can; your choices are your own).Just call out their behavior. Help the world know that this is a dangerous and pervasive malicious insanity. And we cannot and will not abide it – not simply because it hurts us, but because it hurts everyone

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Join The…Something

I tried to run away to join the Circus,
with no real idea of what a Circus was,
just that it traveled from place to place,
never tied to a single location,
a single set of thoughts,
a single local yokel insistence that things are Right
in this town, in this burg.
But Wrong in some other place,
some place that sometimes doesn’t even look different.

I know I’m not supposed to let anyone call me a freak,
and I don’t say it’s a word for everyone,
but it’s a word for me:

I am a sport,
a changeling,
I’m one of the Others,
whoever or whatever the Others might be.

I tried to run away to join the Circus because
I was tired of being alone and never fitting in.
I wanted to never fit in amongst a big, roaring tribe
of misfits.

I ran away to find a Greater Show than everyday Earth.
And I ran for a long time before I realized the Circus wasn’t just out of reach;
I simply wasn’t reaching far enough.

I kept thinking that it was easy for everything to become bizarre, but hard to enjoy it.

Know where everyone belongs?
I’m the exception that proves the hypothetical rule; I am a collection of symptoms looking to hunt down a cure and eat it for brunch; I am a whole freakshow all by myself.

Know where everyone is comfortable?
I like comfort. But I don’t want to0 stay comfortable;
I’m restless of mind, restless of spirit,
once I have seen The Most Explosive Explosion in the history of Explosions,
I want to see how it will become greater,
stranger,
boomier

next time;

if Life is going to fire cannons at me,
I want to be fired OUT of a cannon and AT life

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A Brief Tale Of Superheroism

 

People have peculiar ideas about the challenges of robbing a bank as a superhero.

It’s not that they dispute one’s ability to go through fiduciary security precautions like a particularly overheated sword through an exceptionally soft lump of butter. We may not have superpowers such as those featured in the popular media, but speed, strength, specialized gear, and an audience of people who’ve seen us punching out small armies of the opposition will generally lead to an extraordinary level of peaceful cooperation from bank staff, security guards, police, and the collateral-damage-in-waiting which is your typical semi-innocent bystander.

No, the difficulty is in not being labeled a supervillian, which would not only increase your likelihood of dining repeatedly on knuckle sandwiches, but also interfere with the larger plan, and that would be vexxing.

But, fortunately, people are easily trained to fear impossibilities as likelihoods, so long as the circumstances in question are horrible and bode ill for all civilized life. It is a matter of but a few adventures to convince people that if you’re purloining the safe deposit boxes of some podunk place of commerce, you’ve been hypnotized, or it’s a robot dummy, or you have some critical motive which will prove, in the fullness of time, to have been deeply necessary and utterly justified.

Sure, any qualified hypnotist will tell you that one can’t be induced to do something so deeply against one’s ingrained values; we obviously do not have robots which can duplicate superheroes, because if we did, our enemies would deploy them, in massive armies, y against us; and those who think you must have some necessary-but-invisible-reason are most likely simply addicted to a lifelong struggle against Occam’s Razor.

Speaking of:

If ghosts were both real, and capable of troubling someone who lives in a mansion covered in so many wards and magical sigils that at least one of them is probably effective, the ghost of Jack Kirby would haunt me so damn hard it isn’t even mildly humorous. Nevertheless, comic books are fiction, but anyone who reads between the lines will note, as is fashionable in modern circles, that one seldom sees the existence of supervillains in any world unless there are superheroes to oppose them.

One might theorize that the appearance of supervillains is so traumatic that it spurs something in the psyche of latent heroes to turn themselves to the masked, weirdling, offbeat, inventive, and peculiarly specialized task of defeating the sort of villain who thinks you’re not really committing a crime unless you leave an appropriate set of riddles, clues, wacky calling cards, and other strangeness.

One might, if one were anything other than a manipulative bastard with a lot of dough and a love of tights.

I don’t really need to rob banks anymore; at first, I wanted to make sure I didn’t erode too much of my trust fund in my weird desire to try to help the world; I may be generous, but I’m not entirely sure that the hypothetical-but-unproven good of the many outweighs my personal need to have Beluga caviar and Gosset champagne on the daily.

But now I run a very profitable, if very, very underground string of Superhero/Supervillain supply stores and training academies. The Heroes think they’re keeping an eye on the Villain cadets, and the Villains think they’re putting one over on the heroes; and they’re both idiots, if you ask me; but you oughtn’t ask me; I think everyone’s an idiot.

But I don’t really see any need to duke it out with the Villains these days; eventually, one of ’em might get lucky, and feeding the engines of Antichance is not my prime motive here. So I rob the bank; I cash-infuse whichever of my supposedly-secret-and-not-connected chain of Hero/Villain preperatory facilities is running behind, and then I go to the media and explain why this was all necessary as part of some convoluted plot to Save The Human Race, or whatever it is we feel like saving right now.

And still, none of them have figured it out. Or if they have, they’re keeping shtum; because they know a good thing when they see it.

Nobody needs superheroes.

Nobody needs supervillains.

But…

As has been noted (but, weirdly, only in fiction)–once you have yourself caped crusadin’ idjits running around, foiling simple robberies and beating up people who pretend they’re in the Mob

(the real Mafia has run the stock market since 1981, and gives not a hang nor a whit of sympathy for the idea of shaking down shopkeepers for petty change; but it hasn’t stopped people from claiming that they’re connected to powerful New Jersey mob figures, most of whom are more mythical than I am, and that’s saying a lot, since I’ve faked my own death eleven times)–

once you have weird, OCD, aneurotypical, steroidal Heroes with their unbearable picadillos and their weird little allergies to bits of space rock or assorted colors, you can be sure that Villains will follow. And that’s what’s great here.

Because, sure, comic book Villains are often megalomaniacs, are often determined to take over everything, with couple of extra Moons on the side.

But it’s expensive and difficult, and it just doesn’t leave you much time for the banality which marks the worst of our crime. Crime of passion? Ordinary person gets angry in love, commits an atrocity, nobody wins. Crime of pure greed? There goes the pension fund. Crime relating to the general bans on various dangerous weapons, technologies, pharmaceuticals? That’s human misery right there.

And it’s damned hard to do any of that when you’re busy washing your cape, making sure you have a clean mask, saving up for a getaway rocket, trying to drill into the molten core of the Earth.

Yes. I invented Superheroes so that they’d breed Supervillains so we’d have an outlet into which to channel our ugliest and most everyday criminal thoughts, forcing us to perform for the cameras like superhumans, making ordinary crime seem terribly clumsy and uninteresting in comparison.

The crime rate is up 15,000%, and the actual harm done by that crime is down by something like 86% and dropping.

It’s ridiculous; but who ever said that the game of Heroes and Villains was anything but?

Now please hand over everything in the vault; I need to have some gold-embossed riddles for The Perplexer to drop off at Wombatman’s secret lair by tomorrow, and I really need time to get the kerning right.

Thanks for your cooperation, citizen.

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The Smallest Person In The World

The Smallest Person In The World

is secretly not upset that you can’t see her.
is secretly not annoyed that your default is not knowing she only
fractionally exists,

doesn’t mind
any short joke ever.

The smallest person in the world
is Seven Wonders in one fun-sized kit,
is what a dollhouse would aspire to house,

if only she were taller,’

couldn’t get a job
selling electron microscopes,
because instead of buying the nice shiny gear,

people would be busy saying,
“whoah, nobody’s that small.”

The World’s Smallest Person

appreciates your presence;

feel free to hang out;

live largely,
in comparison.

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The Uncannon Act

Hey! HEY! Step UP and step IN! You do NOT want to miss this!

You’ve heard of people being shot out of cannons? Perhaps you’ve even seen it—if not in person, in films, or perhaps cartoons?

Amateur hour, friends. Today, we’re going to do something far, far more difficult: we’re going to shoot someone out of a TOTAL LACK OF CANNON!

That’s right! This will be one to tell the gradprogeny about!

Picture it, if you will. The biggest 19th-century cannon you ever saw. The kind that would have won Napoleon, not just Waterloo, but every battle in history, because nobody with a time machine would have refused it to him.

Now imagine something much, much bigger. Something they wouldn’t allow into this venue, or into this timeline, for that matter.

Even THAT cannon is less exciting than this one, because this isn’t an imaginary artillery piece—that would be too easy. This is an artillery piece which never even touched the world of hypotheticals.

When it booms, it will be the sound of one hand clapping, and that one hand is five thousand feet long, prehensile, and made out of titanium.

When it sends the Cannoneer through the air, he’ll hit orbit in seconds flat,

Be pulled halfway ‘round the world in a long oblong

Before the remaining force pushes him straight out of the atmosphere,

But hopefully, he can hold his breath,

And on the other side, he’ll slip

Gracefully

Into another no-cannon-at-all

And blast him straight back at Earth;

Watch the stands!

He’ll likely grab your beer as he flies

About eight inches above your head, coming to a landing

On the roof of some other tent,

Sipping your beer;

Miraculous un-escapes

Are thirsty work.

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The Master of Sleep

The Master of Sleep
looks like sleeping is the last thing she will do;
that’s a hard mattress, maybe harder than a floor,
and that pillow is a lump iterated so many times that there’s definitely
no pillow, just enough of a shape that you can differentiate what it might be,
if it wasn’t Lumpland, Dominion of Lumposity, where no back or shoulder will awaken unachened!”

And yet, the Master of Sleep snores still.

Soon enough, we’ll march a youbig brass band through; not just any big brass band, the biggest, the brassiest, the most bandied-about-band in all the known World;
and yet, the Master of sleep sleeps on.

Behold! Here are a stack of alarm clocks, each more startling than the last, and would you look at the time? They’re about to blow! And yet…
onwards, onwards, endless, the Doze.

She might be late. She might have an important job. What if she’s dreaming things about YOU and you JUST HAVE TO KNOW?
It doesn’t matter.
So gently, so ardently does she snore, so careless does she trip away her very close and personal time with Morpheous that you cannot begrudge her. And why go around begrudging things, anyway? Interferes with your sleep, and if sleep isn’t pleasure, what is?
If sleep isn’t pleasure, what is?
If sleep isn’t pleasure, it might just be time to find a better class of nightmare with whom to spend your unconscious times. She did. And now she’s here.
If logs could sleep, she’d be sleeping just like one right now.
Spend a few minutes with her, and even the most jealous insomniac goes home,
winds down,
and unbuckles
where the snores are.

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