Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 25
December 31, 2014
Active or Inert?
Are you active or inert? They’d pared the greeting down to its bare bones. Perhaps to save time, time being at a premium in those days. But just as likely because no one wanted to hear the positives any more. They were a sensitive spot. ‘Are you good, well, happy, enjoying life?’ Well someone must have been but for the mass of people filing into their cubicles of a morning the unspoken promise that someone, somewhere was seemed easier to digest than the direct truth of it. After all, it wasn’t likely to be one of them and if it were then what? Envy, or awkward internal comparisons? No, keep it simple instead. Active for those who were ready to face the day, inert for those who just needed to endure it. That kept everyone on the same, practical page. With the added bonus of asking absolutely nothing from the enquirer.
It was never a negative question, everyone knew that. To be inert was a survival method, nothing more. After all who could be active for every one of their thousands of days on the production line? It was impossible, but it didn’t mean they weren’t happy outside of it. Some of them must have been, there were too many for happiness to be a completely unknown resource.
It was another matter of motivational necessity that you never saw your colleagues beyond the confines of the work place. It raised too many questions and took away too many comforting uncertainties. Plus, with no time for idle talk in the workplace, other people just sort of lapsed into non-existence. Tools, automata, background to the active or inert day. Again, not a negative, everyone knew that. Just a fact of life, common sense so common that no one ever needed to state it.
Things were getting better too. More common knowledge. The strident march of technology was even catching up with their lives, the news was full of it. Full automation was on it’s way, endless production and a future free of the inert. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, everyone would be active, everyone could even be happy and there’d be no bored, blank faces to either side to politely hide it from.
Until then it was a simple enough routine. Active or inert? As long as you were one or the other there was nothing else to be. And who could say? Perhaps happiness lived at home for everyone. The possibility was everything.
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December 28, 2014
Free From Drowning
Can you purge what is to be purged
can the fabric be made clean
or simply washed to hide corruption
Can you empty the house
and call it clear
while the bricks still bleed dirt
When the flood passes
are the tide marks washed away
or absorbed into the mortar and wood
to rot away the structure
And, above all
can the stained ever deny
that the mark is them
clinging to it
as shelter
and frame
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Living Rock in Dying Hands
It was almost done. Although ‘almost’ could mean a lot. A year, ten, twenty – they could all be near the end. But it was certainly a long way from the start now. A long way from those initial taps of the hammer and the first few chips of stone that had showered his face and cut at his hands.
The sheer wall of rock was no longer a thing of nature. He’d truly claimed it as his own. A creation which moulded the rock into his form, stealing it from the indifferent truth of time and tides. Though what it was beyond that act of theft he had long since lost sight of. In the last few strokes he could, with a squint, still see intent. A glimpse of himself engraved with pain staking effort huddled about his still labouring hands. But the rest simply was. Formed by his efforts no doubt. But looming above him was something no less indifferent than what he’d found that first day when nature had dwarfed him. Absolute and daunting.
Nearly finished though. Nearly in reaching distance of the clarity of completion.
Clarity most importantly. Completion, definitely.
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Poison
Draining the poison was a relief. The resentment she felt about the process was a minor price to pay. It dehumanised her, the procedure, it left her vulnerable. A feeling which, with the poison in her, would have been a problem. But as it was funnelled away from her blood by a bored looking nurse the pain of being a victim, a host, to her condition went with it. Until the next time at least.
There was no cure, there never would be, the experts declared. An assertion she detested but what could she say in argument? The barrages of tests, the experimental treatments, the endless prodding and speculation – it had all come to nothing. And after it all they still shook their heads and with hollow regret said there was nothing more to be done. So what more could she say? They knew better than she did. So they drained the poison when it needed to go, something to cling to at least.
The extreme, the crippled and broken victims, afflicted by the same consuming illness as her were all that lay beyond the judgements of the earnest doctors. If she was a host at least she was a living one, while they were simply sacrifices, their proud choice to refuse respite robbing them of all else. All choices and all freedoms beyond that one declaration of resistance.
The procedure was over now. She felt lighter, more human. Always the way once the poison was gone. Though she knew that over the coming weeks and months she would slide unwittingly back to that point of resentful inhumanity. An inevitability of her condition, until the final cure of death of course. That same path chosen only by those who clung to refusal as stubborn treatment of their own prescription. A mad few, a suicidal few but even as she dismissed them the choice loomed over her just the same as it did them.
Not today though. Not with the poison gone. Today she was human. Tomorrow resentment would cast the choice anew.
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December 23, 2014
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December 20, 2014
Occupation
It’s a moment of occupation
the ground below and sky above
shaking and darkened
by an invader you fear to look at
And your home disappears
a cell taking it’s place
alien walls consuming once familiar streets
And with a knot of nothing
the occupied look on
until skies clear
and your home is your home
now marked by something
that will never fade away
December 19, 2014
A Decayed Creature
I can see those eyes
that creature
mangy, broken
but vicious, fuelled by wounds inflicted
when last we met
Prowling with a snarl
No killer,
nothing so clean
nothing so final
though in the chase there may be wounds
scratches and scars
their mark more than their pain
or just the source of it
Embarrassing,
to see the mongrel skulking
The Beast
The Darkness,
delusions of grandeur for a scabeous mutt
a lie to make warriors
or martyrs
rather than the reality of easy prey
Not cowards
not weak
but those slavering jaws have their fit
around your throat
and in your gut
So kill Lions and Tigers
climb and dive
unafraid
The rat bastard,
the diseased,
the rabid
and decayed creature
can still bring you down
No killer here,
nothing so clean
nothing so final
Just a deluded scabeous mutt
who can scar
but never kill
unless you fall in the chase
Image by Ajgiel
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December 17, 2014
Life, Once Seen – Never Unseen
A hammer blow
a shock to reverberate and crash vision into distortion
The gift of clarity is too fine a thing
too free and too easy a thing
too easily lost
for you to possess
A hammer blow
to free you to chain yourself
to hang there and stare at fractured sights
as we do
Not malice, not here
but not love we admit
just freedom from clarity,
our one gift
and one you will never lose
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Space FM is GO!
On one of the days of Christmas my true love sent to me a reasonably priced eBook short on Amazon… let’s just pretend that scans.
Space FM is officially available for download as an Amazon exclusive. Cheaper than a poncy cup of coffee, more enjoyable than a family bag of Skittles and with more hard facts than a copy of the Daily Mail it’s everything you want and more. Plus you can read it in a day, so for all of you online types whose attention span has been beaten into bloody submission by a flailing mass of cat pictures, memes and comedic Tweets this is some proper writing you really can make it through.
As ever I need you, you glorious; beautiful, sweet smelling, perfectly coiffured, intelligent and goddamn sexy bastards to help me out by spreading the good word, writing (nice) reviews on all the usual sites. Buying copies for your nearest and dearest and generally being all that you can be. And when you’ve done all of that you can look to your left and sign up to my newsletter too, so you never miss out on the words I so lovingly craft for the sole purpose of pumping them into your eyeballs and filling your brains with joy.
There’s more coming from me next year too with some very different works in progress. Including a potential poetic anthology, a full length novel and even the vague possibility of some multimedia collaborative goodness. So stay tuned you glorious bastards.
December 15, 2014
No Cure for Shell Shock
Loathe to try and give background on poetry given that everyone will get from it what they’ll get and any message I have should be contained in the verse. But, as you lose a lot of context online when you don’t (necessarily) know the author and can’t hear a reading I will say that this isn’t written for the love of Jesus. I’m Agnostic at best and generally a Godless Atheist. This is an anti-war piece. Or at least a piece against the reactions that some have had to veterans. And now I’ll shut up…
—
They tell skeletons to walk
corpses to dance
remains to re-form
Let Jesus guide you,
you are the resurrection and the light
and to fail
to fall back into your grave
the weight of dirt cracking your bones
and cold earth claiming your breath
is to commit the ultimate sin
We, the living, may scatter in cemetaries
but only you, the dead, can read the names
And only if you refuse to rise
to be Jesus
do you deny the redemption we demand
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