brawn without vim
text without consent
vortex within a maze
of trying to find out why
you were the one
worming into my
mind with love and
wishing only the best
for me caressing my limbs
and loins and I damned you
to hell for it as I hated myself
for loving it.
Forgive me.
That Cardinal is roly poly,
fat and holy -
the transcending poet
burp, fart
-the poet in dimenuendo
You may ask, and I have received congratulations to this effect, that after the traumatic events of September last, it must be very difficult to come public with this story. But I confess to you, my friends, that I feel compelled to. I must swallow my pride for the public good. Because, you see, I believe it is absolutely essential that no human being ever set foot again on the island of Tungululululu.
Like most students of the greek classics, I had read Plato’s account of the sinking of Atlantis, and like most, had completely discounted it as having any factual basis whatever. When I came across von Daeniken’s writings on the subject, and that Atlantis had in fact been located in the Southwest Pacific, with most, I could barely stifle my laughter. I never expected that I would discover the horrible truth of the matter in person, to my own catastrophic cost.
But to start from the beginning, as beginnings should. (and most would, I am told, if they are bold, and worth gold…)
– Excerpt from Adm Doowrong’s 69 days on a cargo ship loaded with ExLax in the South Pacific
You’ve heard from the admiral how we crossed the sea bearing a cargo of life-giving medicaments for the needy islanders. I must relate the most singular incident.
I swear there were partially salamander-like creatures disporting on top of the lava flow. I saw them clearly for several minutes as the mountain-side crumbled and the molten river poured into the sea.
But it may have been the peyote.
- Captain Cloudstench’s Memoirs from the edge of reality, up matter’s girthy posterior…
Load bearing members
technical notes
Tungululululu is a small island of about forty square kilometers in the Southwest Pacific in the vicinity of the Solomon islands. It’s major historical interest was a naval battle -or skirmish really -fought in its main harbor in early 1943 at the conclusion of the Guadalcanal campaign between US and Japanese forces. Due to the presence of several wrecks on the sea bed only a score of meters below the surface, the harbor is a favorite haunt of recreational divers who are also attracted to the “roughing it” aspect of sojourning on its alabaster-tinted beaches and its verdant hillsides.
Local folklore contains several items of interest to contemporary mythographers. The famous “lava people” - a reclusive community of island dwellers who shun contact with outsiders and live in stone age conditions – are said to reside inland, but rarely approach the main harbor – Eremite Bay, leading some to speculate that there are only figments of the imagination.
A still active volcano simmers several kilometers off the northeastern corner of the island, and a more interesting, and enduring, cycle of myth has circulated regarding it. While the “Lava People” already discussed have been so named because of the jewelry and other artifacts they allegedly create from lava pebbles thrown onto their own island and into its bays by nearby mt…there are other stories circulating of a legendary race of lizardlike beings who live on the volcano itself, and to whom human sacrifice was offered in previous eras.
-
I called to that people and they did not come, rowing across the seas of storm but I told them with a typhoon that if there was no sacrifice, there would be no glory. But the devil people of the shining artifices ground their souls down, and many did not escape but remained in bondage to gods less cruel perhaps but also less imaginative than I. But those who did dare were pursued with vengeance across oceans of reality and dream. And I abode with them there, smiting the skulkers.
Until we came to an archipelago dressed on the stones of earth’s blood, a paradise on the one hand and an island that vomited forth the Sea Goddess’ molten self into the waves to build more of herself. And there were the long ships of the pursuers who came soon, but my people had fortified themselves and after a grievous war the longboats left. I knew they would return, because the pursuers had not been prepared for a siege. And they did return, but the scaled gods came forth from the burning mountain, where I all along had known they had been hiding and biding their time. They looked with anger on the pursuers who arrived with implements of metal to enslave other beings into harnasses of the spirit. For lo, though my yoke is hard and my burden is heavy, nonetheless I demand of my worshipers none other than their full humanity and their self-giving to a cause that transcends the mining of metals from the hills to enslave other beings. And so the dragons arose from the flaming mount and the abyss with their primordial and cruel magics, and vanquished the pursuers, allowing enough to escape to bring word of fell doom back to their lands. And my people never again saw the pursuers, or heard of them. And lived in peace with the dragons, who were their surety and survival.
Legend of the Fisher King
Let me tell you a secret. There are no lava people. The island of tungululululu is really just a resort for american celebrities who are trying to avoid Paparazzi. All of the stories about the island – including some of the visible phenomena – are actually a hoax concocted to make the archipelago unattractive. And before the x-files era, it worked. But now, with all of the interest in paranormal phenomena and hauntings, any suspicion of it makes a place an instant magnet for individuals with cameras. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the celebs are hounded off the island. Perhaps the real lava people will show themselves.
The janitor.
Let me tell you a secret. The story that the islands are really a resort for Paparazzi-fleeing rich Americans is a hoax. The real story is that the U.S., British, and Australian governments have a top-secret research facility on the islands. That explains the lights and the strange comings-and-goings, as well as the unusual nautical traffic.
Janitor #2
What I heard is that after the ww2 battle the USN found large supplies of radium on the island, and they started to mine it. The indigenous people -”the Lava People” are what they call themselves because of their creation myth about their origin from the volcano – were moved to another island and well-remunerated for their silence.
I know this because one of them is my grandfather. He was paid to claim that he was Maori – ridiculous because none of the family has any connection to the Maori either by culture or descent, and a real Maori would see through us in a second – but a few years after the war he came up with an alternate Polynesian ancestry and we now claim we are from Tahaiti, which is more plausible. But the truth is considerably more mundane, and less entertaining, than the fantasies.
I still wonder though whether my grandfather’s stories about the elders of his day having telepathic and telekinetic powers had something to do with mutation arising from their contact with radium and perhaps other minerals. But – as a professor of anthropology at Sydney – I am aware that the language of shamanism and indigenous medicine is mythopoeic in the extreme, and it is difficult to say the least to fit those emic categories into the mind-set of the Lava people, from whom I am descended, but about whom I know far too little.
– anonymous.
I first heard about the Lava People when I was covering a reunion of Royal Australian Air Force veterans of the Southwest Pacific campaign of the Second World War. An elderly pilot was telling a humorous story about buzzing some fishermen in his Spitfire, when one of the boats launched what looked to him like a red Very light, and actually change colors and strobed as it descended. He considered opening fire on the boat, but decided against it. When he landed at base, a mechanic of local island ancestry told him – offhand - “Those must have been the Lava People…” and that they were known to have odd powers and technologies strangely out of place among the surrounding island people. I began to look into the story – solely for curiosity’s sake – and came across the oddment that radium deposits had been found on Tungul. There were rumors of a US Naval base on the island, and resettlements, but a post-Monsoon season trip to Tungul one year confirmed to me that there was no current naval base, that the local Tungulians – “The Lava People” were very much still at home and eager to entertain visitors, and that there were some interesting war era wrecks in Eremite harbor, mostly visible from the surface.
Most fascinating was the fact that I had not realized previously that the local volcano – Mt. Eremite, or Erebus, depending on which English speaker you’re talking to, the indigenous name is unpronounceable – is still active and smoldering. It last went up in 1948, according to locals, but another eruption is considered imminent by their elders.
The Royal Australian Geological society had no comment even on the existence of the volcano, which I found odd.
- Dilbert McKinney, Current Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald
The Story of Tungululululu island was largely unknown to the world until actress and rock star Juliette
Lewis wrote about her trip there in Rolling Stone magazine. Her story focused more on the natural
wonders of the island and its accompanying volcano – across several kilometers of bay – and her own
impressions of being inspired as an artist in such surroundings than on the mythology about the island,
although her suggested reading list was tantalizing. But this was the point that interest in the island
began in earnest among the American public. This flared up like a magnesium torch when the entire
cast of an American reality tv show disappeared on Tungululululu. The indigenous people had no
insight into their whereabouts or fate, but the UN Land-Sea safety commission concluded after a
lengthy investigation that they had been kidnapped and sold into slavery by pirates. All of this was
disproved - and made ridiculous – when the entire cast showed up on a local island, and averred that a
faulty GPS device had caused them to land on the wrong island in the first place. When that season
became insanely popular in terms of ratings, it was speculated that this had all been a publicity stunt by
the network.
The air shudders pregnant with shrieking
metal and the reek of smokeless
powder as Juergen and Vanya fail to kill
each other, mesmerized together
by the vision of a sunflower
poking petals through the rubble
of a fire-blackened library in Kiev,
1943, slats of ochre light
illumining its charred rafters
from the west. Each never finds
out the other’s name, though
they remember the moment
on their deathbeds seventy
years later, in Erfurt, and
Voronezh.
brown wise
truffle master
can’t think without
chocolate boiling
in the antechamber
the maestros dance
and percolate; the
dragons light torches
with ambient flatulence;
mastering me
duck tape shrinks
onto wires, tearing
the problems I cannot
cut gordian with wit
or electron fire
tired anxieties fleshed forth the
broken table, chained the rotten
flame grid; Eucharistic sun for everyone
I disbelieved but was drawn by the gravity
shearing excuse from the linen folds
tabulating the requirements
of atom load to leech
bloated frogs on the
pond -
us one whether we realize it
or not -
golden scintillant dream shrouds
lurch to life cast from the waves
by an unseen hand, or is it the sky?
Hurting in time to the threnody
of silver rain, a prayer to asteroid
entities that could have been written
by a cloistered mage musing
on the burning of his fair city
in the month of Hept, entranced by
the Machine Dream, before
it had a name.
Faith is not
a light in the darkness;
it is darkness, and learning
to love it.
Farther and farther
into the catacombs
pursued by devilish
legions whose feathered pinions
always find us.
In time we realize
that they are us, and
we are they, in a dance
of mutual oblivion,
between lives.
2.
The farmer on a spindle-limbed walker tractor crosses the fields
with hundred meter steps. We marvel before remembering to flee
from the towering spike-encrusted giants
bearing down on us with malevolent sentience
and glowing eyes, whose bones are girders teased then
tortured from galvanized souls.
3.
When we step from our ships
onto the surface of the new
world, we see that its cities hyper-extend
across the planet’s pitted surface and pollution
sears the silver sky in ebon billows.
This reality tastes good, like
soul, a sugar that gladdens
tongue but rips stomach
with acid talons.
- From a Reflection on the Month of Hept, attributed to Harmon Maasel
dawn creeps
across the inside of
my eyelids
mascara she
smudged on the
pillow
explosion of distant
dream, somehow the sound
of her pushing over a vase
in the hall is incorporated
into my dream as the dulcet
fire-fringed maelstrom of
hate love rock and roll
over Bach, mock him
once and regret him, mock
his symphony and you
won’t live to.
This is the culture that drags
chains between my ears and
shoulderblades, and eats quorn,
at all hours of the night, to cauterize
the slipshod with essential fire
of madness.
the cloak of kind
the savage binding
of the traveller’s way
not to be outdone
the camels dance
in multitudinous vision
of broken dreams
but water springs unbidden
from the rock you had to strike
hard with a piece of twine
and gravel, to quench your thirst
for a long time.
(plate 1)
Who would clamber Alexander’s path
must learn to move empires for the price of
a shrubbery.
(plate 2)
Archers shoot magical fireworks
across the lawn of the Library, to the delight
of the onlookers.
(plate 3)
The anthropologist sets himself up as high priest
to mediate the wonders and evils of technology
to the indigenous people he studies, and to protect them,
and his reputation and tenure, from us, God as wealthy
landowner full of that hatred called love.
Gently turning ride rumbles,
refractors fumble condign starlight
into irises of gold; we are beginning again
once more, having melted rainbow
all over the chocolate cake
because the Tabor-lens focuses
too much lightness through the night’s humid
thickness around the cockroach table, where bugs
morph back to human to munch
a leg of lamb, still squirming.