Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 26
December 13, 2014
Space FM : T-Minus 3
As the obligatory madness of promotion starts to consume my very soul here’s a jaunty tune to see us all through… That which is dead may never die but with strange aeons even death may die. Although how that relates to a short ebook release I’m not entirely sure.
December 12, 2014
Space FM landing soon
Please fasten your seatbelts and put your tables in the upright position. Crew members with tasers and unhappy memories of a life lived poorly will be stopping by to confirm your compliance and collect any unwanted headphones. We’ll be touching down on planet earth on the 16th of December. Weather conditions are poor, with grey skies and relentless rain expected for the next four months. Please enjoy your stay on earth and be sure to recommend Space FM to all your friends or next time that ‘turbulence’ won’t just be a passing thing.
And to go along with that joyous news something slightly less cheerful, depending on your point of view. Laikanist Times, my first foray into the Indie publishing world which, until now, has been available for free will soon be, well, not free. Why? Because I’m moving it exclusively to Amazon, along with everything else and Amazon don’t want you to have nice things because Amazon doesn’t love you. Plus as this site has started to become more and more of a repository for my work there’s a hefty amount of stuff that’s already available gratis. Which I’m happy with and the plan is to keep this place as a kind of notebook for rough drafts, snippets, side notes and samples from upcoming projects. But the flip side of that is that I’m not sure I need to offer L.T. as a free taster any more.
Disagree? Feel free to let me know. Like Frasier Crain I’m listening. Also I’m drunk on fine wine and talking shite most of the time.
December 10, 2014
Ordered Life
The bodies were lined up in neat ranks. The idea was to stop you from noticing that they used to be human by piling them with all the efficiency of lumber in a yard. Someone, somewhere had taken the time to issue an order about it. Someone who’d never walked amongst the dead. A poultice for their own guilt probably, before they moved on to giving the orders that kept the corpses coming. Pointless, he thought, although he couldn’t blame them for trying.
Truth was though that he himself had long since stopped seeing them as anything to do with life. Even when they were walking and talking, before he and the others had played their brutal part. No, they were inert weight the second they stumbled into his world. Talking blocks of some vaguely human substance. Novel, almost, in their sorry impersonation of real people.
In a way that was a sad thought. Or had been, or should have been. Certainly once upon a time he’d felt something for them. Pity, or perhaps guilt. But those were just words, words which belonged to a different version of himself. Just as most of what he remembered of life did these days. The new him, the one who seemed to see things so much more clearly, had far fewer possessions to cling to. An arm of tired muscles, a blistered hand and a knife to grip. All united for the simple duty which he had made his own. Or which had made him it’s own, one of the two.
It was clean living, he vaguely thought as someone else set about shifting the dead to ready dug pits. He had found peace, the sort monks and eccentrics daydreamed about. Like the corpse bearers, like everyone else here save for the dead, he had found clarity in one action. Enlightenment, they called it.
But that was a thought of his old self sneaking in. He had to catch it before he started to slip back into chaos. One arm of muscles, one blistered hand, one knife to grip. That was him.
They were bringing more over.
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December 9, 2014
Suicide’s Last Scar
I try my best not to make any value judgements when it comes to suicide, although usually I fail. Whatever the motivations, no matter how understandable they may be, the ramifications will always hit harder. The living, after all, have a lot longer to have to deal with it. Anyway…
A bullet tears through flesh and bone
A needle makes a hole
A rope sustains the dead weight
With knives it’s blood that flows
But the greatest wound that death leaves,
the one that hurts the most,
is stamped into pristine flesh
a looming, grasping ghost
Stabbing at the living
but leaving no clear scar
It’s the curse that’s always waiting
Mind’s door always ajar
Open for the warm touch
The glow that marks the heart
A fragile human flutter
So no one falls apart
But the weapons leave just cold bones
carrion for the earth
a gap in all the lost minds
where bodies turn to dirt
And while the bullet impacts
Knife cuts and rope hangs taut
the force of that last feeling
evades our simple sort
The wound that marked the loved ones
the invisible rough scar
blinds them to the future
Mind’s door is still a jar
For you
and you
and you
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December 7, 2014
The Run
She was turning into Forrest Gump, it was worrying. Not least because Tom Hanks freaked her out, she strongly suspected he was secretly a psychopath. He had that look about him, for all the saccharine emoting he’d probably still kill a man for cutting in front of him in a queue. That wasn’t the main cause of concern though, becoming Tom Hanks. No, it was the fact that she’d been going for nine hours now. Running randomly through the city like a hyperactive puppy escaping a neutering vet. All she’d meant to do was have a quick jog.
If she stopped now her body would finally have it’s chance to take revenge on her. That’d be painful enough but even the prospect of broken muscles and bloody blisters wasn’t the real issue. That was in the fact that she couldn’t stop, at all. It had been all she’d thought about for the last hour. Giving up and getting the bus home, a heavenly prospect and one she wasn’t sure what sin she’d committed to be denied. Her legs had become autonomous pistons, pumping on endlessly with absolutely no interest in her views on the matter. Or perhaps they weren’t the problem, perhaps her mind was the one fuelling this impromptu marathon. A part of it that she couldn’t see through the exhaustion and the all consuming forward drive.
Either way she’d soon reach the city limits. Then what? Kent? The sea? Would she start swimming next or pass out before it went that far?
As she saw the lights of the M25 up ahead, London’s tarmac boundary line, she realised she might have to find out the hard way. And to be honest, the answers didn’t much matter.
Enjoy it? Support a struggling artist, buy my book!
Concrete Clouds
An anonymous observer
saw a world of concrete clouds
floating freely through the city
paths all narrowed down
Between the weight of presence
and the lightness of the gone
a world revolved around them all
no more real than a song.
Enjoy it? Support a struggling artist, buy my book!
December 6, 2014
December 5, 2014
The Bastard & The Unseen
Well now she’s gone
perhaps to die
The bastard Me never paused to ask why
I walked away with all the rest
imagining my hidden best.
But fuck the writer and fuck the words
a flimsy shield
of flimsy verse
Because when I write I make myself
a better man or someone else.
But she can’t rhyme her life away
can’t write herself a better way
And all our eyes should be on her,
not we cowards who darkness defer.
Because she will live or she will die
and the bastard Me still didn’t ask why.
December 4, 2014
London & The Cities
Stare long enough and you’ll get square eyes
or tarmac, brick and concrete ones
as the outside bleeds in and makes a city of your insides.
All natural, all artificial – the way it’s meant to be.
With buses for blood
congested by the mass of walkers
and seldom circulating to outer suburbs
of heart and head.
Skin is made steel
greyed by staggered rain and stained by the human pollution forced on perfectly imperfect architecture.
Buildings that are bones
sometimes prisons, joints seizing up to hold your metropolis in place.
Some open homes, yielding the outer shell to flood the inside with fevered foot traffic.
All natural, all artificial
all an infinte strip
of infinite cities
congesting one London
and one Paris
and one Milan,
New York,
Beijing,
Barcelona
All natural, all artificial.
ComBot 4000
The ComBot was a mystery to most of the faculty. A few years ago one of the less socially gifted students had presented it with smug ceremony at a meeting of the various department heads. They’d been very proud and everyone had done their best to act impressed but no-one really felt sure why it was there or what it was supposed to do. The Lecturer in Advanced Artificial Intelligence and Robotics had done his best to explain it. She’d even made a Power Point presentation, with animated singing sloths and everything. But the slide show had made little difference. Especially to the Humanities lecturers who took to heckling about half way through, hurling the odd empty beer can for good measure. Ultimately she’d given it up as a futile endeavour and simply assured them that it was really very impressive and made everyone at the university look very smart. Which had gone down well all round. With the vocal exception of the Head of the Theology Department who said he’d seen The Matrix and that it was all going to end in tears.
Controversy aside though the ComBot was kept around, if only because no one could be bothered to throw it away. The student who’d designed it went off into the real world to make countless billions for themselves either designing the software for a large network of porn sites or engineering rockets – no one was ever quite sure.
The ComBot simply sank into the background of the university. Appearing from time to time without reason or welcome and disappearing in a similarly mysterious manner. Comedy Bot 4000, that was his formal name and, most people assumed, the definition of its existence. That should have been simple enough of course. It was a vague sort of robot, with wheels, mechanical arms and all the usual gubbinz of high technology. But given its somewhat erratic behaviour no one could ever be sure that the title wasn’t a joke in itself. Some of the students liked it however. They adopted it as an unofficial mascot, it was cleaner than a goat after all and weighing about a tonne it was far harder for rival schools to steal. So in an ongoing round of juvenile hazing they tried to make it drink, set fire to it, dressed it up as a cheerleader, tried to molest it as a cheerleader – that kind of thing. The Lecturers sometimes felt that they ought to disapprove but they could never quite tell why, so turning a blind eye became the usual reaction. For its part the ComBot didn’t seem to care about the acts of hedonistic excess over-excited first years visited on it. Although it was hard to say what the machine cared about, if it could care at all. Its behaviour offered few clues as to it’s thought processes. In fact its behaviour didn’t seem to indicate any kind of thought processes at all despite the very clever programming which the only two people smart enough to understand such things insisted had gone into it.
When first told of its existence new students and staff alike generally found themselves intrigued by the idea. A joke telling robot? For the scientists and Philosophers it seemed like Turing’s wet dream, to the Literature and Language students it was either a challenge to their own art or a glorious proof of the evolution of creativity, to the Art students it was just ridiculous enough to be interesting. Such enthusiasm rarely lasted through the initial meetings with ComBot though. Seemingly mute, the machine tended to act out whatever it found funny. Or had been told to find funny. A habit hard wired by it’s creator’s love for slapstick comedy of the old school. But in practice it’s performances were less Keaton and Chaplin and more absurdism gone wrong. Or right, depending on your point of view. Or, for the true cynics, just goddamn annoying.
Where Chaplin could command a laugh with a mere look and Keaton could wow audiences with terrifying stunts ComBot seemed more interested in emulating epileptic fits, or throwing whatever inanimate objects were within reach as far as possible into the sky. The Philosophers loved it. Regularly being sent into gut wrenching paroxysms of laughter. But then they laughed at pretty much anything.
Things came to a head when the ComBot took it into it’s electronic mind to incorporate fire into its routine. Inspired, some said, by those same hedonistic first years who’d found it to be such a convenient object for their own amateur acts of arson. The Head Lecturer in Sociology, once the burns had healed up, was quick to demand ComBot’s destruction. And, despite some resistance from its admirers, his call for revenge on the ‘infernal machine’ were soon satiated.
The AI and Robotics department saw its funding slashed later that year. The first years stole a goat from a nearby petting zoo. Only the Philosophers and a couple of art students mourned it’s passing and, as the Dean could often be heard saying, who cared what they thought?
