The Green Man

The Green Man
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
-Emily Dickinson

Stand, moving only with the breeze.
Green, soft feathers brush the skin, and whisper...
This is the smell of her hair.

A snap, a footfall, a muffled voice making desperate promises, while the heartbeat in your chest does the same.

Let it wash away.

Let it slide from you like smoke through a wire screen.

Let it settle and slip until you are clean again.

And the thirsty earth...

She drinks.

Sister Night

Sister Night
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Black as the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness
that sucks at light. I love your vigilance

Night, first mother of songs, give me the voice to sing of you
in those fingers lies the bridle of the four winds.

Crying out, offering words of homage to you, I am
only a shell where the ocean is still sounding.

But I have looked too long into human eyes.
Reduce me now to ashes Night, like a black sun.

-Marina Tsetayeva

Saw-toothed and sharp-tongued slider-through-the-dusk.
Hips rocking, calves stretching, muscles bunching, she sways.
Sweat, like blood, pools in the small of her back, shaking free of her
almost-addiction...or...trying.

What blood pumps through that hammering chamber?

And when she walks, at night, is that sleep in her eyes, or a more pungent fatigue?

The quick flash of the daggers in her eyes never goes unnoticed, however unremarked they may be.

She'll talk.

Or she won't.

Either way, she'll tell you something...

Whispers

Whispers
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
-Oscar Wilde

Red mist across your eyes like a veil. Thunder in your ears.
She has brought you to this place with a slip of the tongue, and
a stench to be reviled.
In your own home! In this most sacred of places!

Struggle to remember the ardent whisperings, the soft caress, the whisper of flesh.

The smell! It hits you like a rock, blinding pain, stars in the eyes, the slow, awful twisting of it in your very gut.

Touch her! Feel the throat in your hands, so open, so trusting so...filled with lies, with betrayal, with the memory of her shuddering ecstacy at the hands of cold monsters!

Shake, scream for focus. Struggle against the urge to let rivers of blood slake your unholy thirst for vengeance. Fill up your fists with the soft ruin of her shaking, shrieking, bloody and beaten...bloody...and...
helpless...and...whimpering...and...crushed...by...your...hands.
Bloody. And soft. And crawling toward you, hand outstretched.

You remember the gentle breeze on the back of your neck now, the flashing pearl of her smile. The way your spine shifts when she walks. The way your head fills with flashes of blue lightning at the very smell of her...the very smell of her...surrendering to you...giving away that pumping red, richness...to you?

No. She has...she has...them...on her. In her. Around her.

And the soft sigh of her voice, the desperate needy cry of her stumbling, fumbling toward that soft, clamping brilliant feast of her own fulfillment...driving you towards your own in slow, twisting anticipation...so much...

Agony.

And she lies there before you, (sits there whispering), broken and bloody, (laughing in her way), covered with the mark of your mercurial affections, (leaning toward you for a desperate touch), and she reaches for you, (lips parted for that most tender of unspoken messages), and you...

Twist, creaking. In a lonely, midnight wind. Alone.


Bastard.

Entanglements

Entanglements
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Take you in my belly
Sure as night is black
Take you for religion
Like the skin across my back
When I'm buried in your thighs girl
I could understand
You gotta tell me just for once child
You ain't got no other plan
You ain't got no other plan
You gotta tell me just for once sister
You ain't got no other man
-Chris Whitley "Kick the Stones"

All things should be so ... blood simple.
Requiring little thought, only twisting anticipation.
Needing nothing but oxygen.
Wanting merely the soft gliding friction of a fingertip or tongue.
And the taste of exhausted, weary, well-worn sleep.

For the first time in a very, very long time, there is something here worth protecting.
And all of it, every part and parcel, every green, growing, good thing...can be held by holding...her.

Breaking Strain

Breaking Strain
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

In the name of Hypocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."
-Edward Everett Hale

The taint on her is evident.
Shuddering muscles.
Slurred speech.
The arrogant grace of her eyes, muddied by a crawling, creeping fear.
Unsufferable.
Better she be given to the void, than allowed to continue as a shambling, creeping shell of herself.
But if she is strong...
If she is fearless...
If she can only embrace what she finds there in the dark...
She may awake to a different dawn.
Brace your shoulders against the wall as she sobs and pleads and promises every dark delight in your twisted, secret heart.
Close your eyes.
And damn the treachery that slides your hands toward her.

Dark Tangents

Dark Tangents
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Standing there with that aquiline, slavic grace.
There is a haughtiness to the air in her lungs, given lie by the slight tremble at the corner of her eye.
Something familiar, crawling, beckoning behind the faraway rustlings of memory.
Stand there and breathe her in, just like the scores of others whose grace and self-assurance you have devoured and excreted in the red-hot spraying mist of their own missteps.
Hands tighten like claws, mouth twists into an arrogant sneer, and your body tenses to spring...
Except that it doesn't.
It doesn't.
You have been betrayed.
By your own treacherous blood.
By your own swimming head.
You have been ... betrayed.

Machinima 2

Click To Play

The second of two machinima pieces. More...if and when RL settles down enough for me to play.

Machinima 1

Click To Play

This is the first of two SL Machinima projects I've done, focusing on Midian City. Both make use of a blend of stills and video. Enjoy.

Epithalamium

Epithalamium
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

- ee cummings

Carry her, bent, bloody and broken.
Life dripping, spent, spattered on the dust of broken roads and buckled dreams.
Splinter your knuckles on the rough, ragged wood.
Let the soft pillow of her ragdoll charm lie in the cold, and dark!

And when the screaming, scarlet dawn drags its ragged, broken fingers over the eastern sky - listen for the sounds of desperate, stifled agony.

And swim in the lonely, forgotten ocean of her flawlessness.

Coil

Coil
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free--
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!--Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
-Rudyard Kipling

Shifting, midnight rambling. Frozen whispers chip away, chip away, chip away at the frosty edges of conciousness. Desperate pleadings, the soft grunt, pop and scrape of the switchblade shuffle.
But something new is in the air...
Something...familiar.
Sparks dance along myelin, a twitching, itching ripple up the spine.
Overhead, the stars have collapsed. A searing, flickering void, a low, whining keen that causes a resonance in the skull.
Feel it through the subtle shifting of the crumbling concrete.
It. Is a She.

Broken Bridges

Broken Bridges
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us., with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that our eyes once watered.
- Tom Stoppard

The creak and shift of splintered wood underfoot is sharpened by the soft, persistent sighing of the wind. Every step is a single day, a memory, a lifetime.

Look down and gaze at the reflections of faces flickering in the slow-moving water. Ripples distort, amplify, evoke.
The soft, glottal sloshing of liquid over stone...echoes of the hiss and spatter of another, crimson river.
Taut, prickly hemp threatens to burn flesh with friction. Its phantom heat, the revenant of dim, helpless struggles.
The smell of distant storms, mixes with the memory of cheap whiskey and the dust of the plains. Heated fumblings with handfulls of flesh, and sweat pooling at the base of the spine.
Motes float suspended in the flickering electric light hung high over an ancient quonset hut. The feel of warm steel and grease on the hands, and the distant lowing murmur of cattle in the paddock.
Her mouth covers your own, filling it with graveyard dirt and peppermints. The film of sweat across the back cools straining shoulders, giving lie to the desperate shuddering beneath the skin.
And the music comes like machine-gun religion, tinny and filled with the screaming static of imaginary angels.
There comes a sudden groan, and a splintering crack...

The azure sky blazes above, a distant, uncaring canvas.

Rangers

Rangers
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

And Nuh did certainly call upon Us, and most excellent answerer of prayer are We.
- The Quran

The constant, arrogant susurration of the human cancer is almost lost, here. An almost-forgotten prayer, answered with the soft sigh of the wind.
The green smell of earth, turned, mingles with the slick feel of dew beneth bootheels.
And the hollow, buzz of a twisted voice mixes with a sly whisper.
Emerald promises, slipping with stealth below a flickering sky.
Steal away, with a chestful of something clean.

Gates

Gates
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
-Kahlil Gibran

A dream turned dark and twisted, shuffling and scraping through the night.
The groan of a rusted hinge, muffled whispering.
And in the distace, the far thunder of forgotten music, drifting like smoke through a wire screen.
Candy-apple nightmares, the stuttering, lonely fear of forgotten children.
And the steady, aching emptiness which comes from realizing you have simply been...

discarded.

The Road to En-Dor

The Road to En-Dor
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.
-Rudyard Kipling

The old ones say to be wary of the stranger you meet in a lonely place. They say that oftentimes, what you meet may not be entirely human.

Shake your head. Focus.

Forget you haven't seen your own footprints for the last ten miles.

Lethe

Lethe
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

All things one has forgotten, scream for help in dreams.
-Elias Canetti

Coppery tang and slippery teeth, drenched in the memory of rended, dripping ruin.

A cool, ancient voice whispers a soothing, wordless murmur.

Let it lead your padded footsteps, guide your spattered skin, sooth the rustling, hot parchment of your ancient heart.

Shrug off the slouch and slaver. Arch the back and roll the eyes toward the stone arches of this most ancient of wombs.

Be born.

Again.

Rage

Rage
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Passion and shame torment him,
and rage is mingled with his grief.
-Virgil

Packed tight and stinking of night-sweat, greed, lust and fear.
Concrete canyon, abattoir unrealized.
Petty, self-important, wretched refuse, mocking the soft embrace of the
grave.

Casual cruelty feeds cancerous sneers, malignant, uncaring...unaware.

Hubris cries out, and is answered with a sly, soft rustling in the leaves.

I see you.

Empty Kingdoms

Empty Kingdoms
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,
He travels fastest, who travels alone
-Rudyard Kipling

You know how it goes. The feeling at the back of your neck like someone's watching.
Except, this time, it's a feeling inside your head. Altering your course by a few, scant degrees. Barely noticeable. Minute.
Just like continental drift.

This is a place of titans. Filled with memories of fire and smoke and laughter and shouting. The echoed splash of water gives life to memories of sleep and the smell of skin and cooking meat.

Remember that Kipling passage about the cost of debts and dogs.

Wonder.

Bridge of Sighs

Bridge of Sighs
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

The sun don't shine
The moon don't move the tides
To wash me clean
-Robin Trower

The sibilant whisper of a dying breeze carries the echo of ancient laughter, distant and dying.
Sun-scorched skies flicker orange and red on the far horizon.
And the kiss of stone against well-worn leather is an empty, lonely thing.
Wanderers come here. Most ignorant, but a few...a few must see and feel.
The not-quite-vanilla scent of ambergris...something clean...but something buried.
Feel the dirt beneath your fingernails, the rich smell of loam and peat moss on your hands and knees.
Take one last, long breath...turn your back to the sun, and your face toward the moon, and home.

The House of Hyperion

The House of Hyperion
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The flickering candle of a dying sun offers strange comfort in this ancient place. Stone, stained with the promise of a lush embrace, arches everywhere. The heavy, still air whispers autumn promises, but delivers a memory of newly-slumbering summer.
Close the eyes and smell it.
The sharp tang of hollow laughter, the cinnamon of whispered secrets.
The first Watching Place.
The faint tingle of trickling, electric silk brushing across a back.
Spin, search, smell the air.
There.
There it is.
A caern...buried.
But alive.

Threshold

Threshold
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Yeah, it's fine
We'll walk down the line
Leave our rain, a cold
Trade for warm sunshine.
-Alice in Chains

The name came in whispers, fading echoes and distant memories of jounreys past. The Plains of Aleion, the wanderer's empty, haunted heaven.

The massive gates hung worn and weathered. Stone glyphs rendered into cyphers by time and the elements.
The gentle scraping of boots on mossy stone is accompanied by the occasional haunting cry of birds in this lush loneliness.

Unfold the old map, onion-skinned and translucent with antiquity. Fingers trace carefully the inked passages, drifting over the old legends, and guiding eyes to the last of the Great Harbors...now a shattered, sunken ruin.

There comes a silence, so gentle and smooth it seems as if the world had always been as empty and pure. Motes sparkle in a wayward shaft of honey-colored light, and the air drifts, languidly.

Then comes a slight shift. A gentle carress as a teasing draft carries the smell of something both ancient and familiar. It is the smell of a promise, waiting to be kept.

Follow.

Advent

Advent
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

City smells no longer clinging to cloth or skin, the din and crash of that stinking symphony reduced to a fading echo.

Silence is now filled with the creak and whisper of wind through branches and leaves. Graveyard quiet. Ice slides down the spine.

The smell of old pennies and voided bowels drifts across the matted grass like a sly punk; posturing, threatening, but impotent in everything but the bad, bad dreams.

Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins...have all emptied themselves in this place. The silence of their shrieking ghosts is made all the more hideous by the sudden clang and whine of massive air-handlers.

But grim tragedy is blunted by the same silence.

No life was sold cheaply, here. Not in the end.

*smile wickedly*

And those who paid this final butcher's bill, paid in full.

Ease the pack from your shoulders, straighten the spine.

Welcome home.

San

San
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

"Only a mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the cry of a wolf."
- Aldo Leopold

A rough, wet tongue, laughing eyes and a curious nose.
The smell of something wild and free.
Shattered, bent and bloody.

The gentle, searching, massive paw.
A soft chuffing breath, playfully puffing.
Twisted, burned and raw.

Emptiness. Cold, sinking desolation in the pit of the stomach.
Rage, pure and perfect.
Murder in the eyes.
Murder in the heart.
Murder in the hands.

Deaths and Entrances

Deaths and Entrances
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances,
When near and strange wounded on London's waves
Have sought your single grave,
One enemy, of many, who knows well
Your heart is luminous
In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,
Will pull the thunderbolts
To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys
And sear just riders back,
Until that one loved least
Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.
- Dylan Thomas, "Deaths and Entrances"

There is something wrong here.
Some smell, tickling the reptilian hindbrain into twitching life.
Skin, sweat and a certain spicy tang...that drifts foglike into the brain.
*frown*
...at the sudden remembered taste of another mouth. Used breath from other lungs pulled into your own, sobbing cries that have both nothing and everything to do with loneliness and pain, ecstacy and worship.
*shake the head*
Clean lines slicing through blue-green water. The hiss and zip of reinforced nylon, the grunt and clink of effort as arms and hands strain at a carbon fiber pole.
Sushi. Fresh and red in the late afternoon sun.
*wince*
The sharp splintering crackle and suddengodalmighty THUNDER. Faces dissolve. Bodies consumed by light and heat and actinic white glare inside a rolling, discordant avalanche of sound and pressure and heat and violence...
*turn away*
*blink*
Let the distant static of a hundred voices wash over you like a soothing balm.
*shake the head again...and...*
*suddenly smile*
It had just not been a good day to die.
*move away quietly, laughing*

Ribbons

Ribbons
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

"I'm lying on my back now
The stars look all to near
Flowers on the razor wire
I know you're here"
-The Sisters of Mercy

Found on a portable digital audio recorder in a Midian City trash dumpster...


(*sound of a cigarette burning, followed by a rough, hissing exhalation. Background noise of a crowded bar*)

How many times you want to HEAR this, pilgrim? I’m runnin’ out of ways to TELL it.

(*the slow squeak of denim on leather and a heavy thunk as of a glass bottle meeting a tabletop*)

I grew up on the great plains. Nothin’ but the wind and the sky as far as you could care to look. Family sent me off to private school...they could afford it at the time. Ranchin’ was good...at least for US it was. Things didn’t really go to shit until I left for college, and
even then I had no real idea just how BAD it had gotten. Dad never liked to talk about it, and mom never wanted me to worry.

They were both raped and killed two weeks before graduation. I didn’t find out until after, when they didn’t show up to watch me walk. I didn’t find out about the roaming bands of redneck marauders who’d taken to killing and robbing farmsteads for food and the
agrichemicals they used for drug manufacturing.

I spent two weeks, seeing to their arrangements. Sold off most of the stock except for some breeders and bulls, and turned the place over to a cousin to run.

(*scrape of a bottle against a tabletop*)

Why? Well, it just didn’t feel much like HOME anymore, friend...that’s why.

(*pause*)

It felt like I’d wasted my life. Studying biology and psychology *snort*, what the hell was
I thinkin’? Every time I turned a corner I’d think I caught a glimpse of one of them in the house. I’d wake up at night absolutely SURE that one of them was calling to me.

I needed to get the hell away from that. I needed to get my head together.

(*cigarette sounds followed by a tapping of fingers on a tabletop*)

That’s when I joined the service.

(*laugh*)

Talk about shitty timing. Three months after basic training, and I’m up in the Urals calling down artillery strikes against Turkish armour. I turned 25 that year...in January, you know? The Atlas Campaign? That kicked off on my birthday.

(*cigarette sounds again...a longer, perhaps unsteadier exhalation follows*)

For my present...I got to kill twenty-five hundred Turks by dialing-in howitzers on their dug-in positions.

(*pause*)

Happy fuckin’ birthday.

(*pause*)

Yeah, sure I could use another...long as YOU’RE buyin’.

(*pause...and a noticeable drop in the level of background noise from the bar*)

Cheers, then, brother. Now, where was I. Right, the war.

(*sigh*)

After we set the Atlas mountains on fire, we turned north across the Med and “repatriated” greece.
They say Athens will be burning for another ten-thousand years, if you figure in the
half life of the dirty ordnance dropped there.

You KNOW that was the beginning of the end, right? When they decided to go nuclear, there was just no turning back.

Two weeks after Greece, they put my ass ashore off the coast of Tunisia in a high-speed combat hydrofoil. I crawled and wiggled on my belly for almost six miles in order to find a good hiding place in a small cave near Tunis. Two days later, the artillery was in position off to the west, and I went to work.

(*pause*)

The definition of cowardice is billeting your soldiers next to schools.

(*pause*)

Not that it would stop a ... professional ... like me.

(*The scrape of a match, cigarette sounds.*)

I was TRAINED. I was FOCUSED. After the Atlas campaign, I was GOOD.

(*pause*)

I made sure the first spread of three high-explosive shells landed directly on top of the school. Not one of those kids knew what hit them. None of them were caught by
shrapnel. None of them were...disfigured. They just...vanished.

(*pause*)

After that...the headaches started.

The rest of the war, is just a blur. No...not really a blur. Just a series of screaming,
disconnected nightmares. I remember some of it.

(*pause*)

I remember crossing the himalayas, wondering what the hell had left all those
dessicated skeletons scattered along the foothills.
I remember the bulldozers clearing the bodies stacked shoulder-high in the Khyber Pass. I remember feeling like I could never, ever get clean again...no matter how many showers I took. No matter how much I scrubbed my skin.

(*bottles clinking, more cigarette noises*)

And then...it was over. Just like that. Five years of my life just...gone. There was a crowded, bumpy series of plane rides, and then an empty stretch of tarmac and a
duffel bag on my shoulder.

(*pause*)

Afterwards? Afterwards isn’t much to tell. I stopped by the homestead, found that my cousin hadn’t fared a whole helluva lot better than my folks. He was still breathin’, though...even if it was through a tube.

(*pause*)

No, I had nothing to do with that. I was sicker than a dog for almost a week solid when those bodies were found. I was out riding fences at the time, and had to hole up in a line shack...lucky I made it that far before I started throwing up. Bad water, I think it was.

(*pause*)

Anyway, it was enough to show that there just wasn’t any home left at home anymore, if you know what I mean.
I packed up, climbed on the bike and headed west...looking for...I don’t know...
Something else.

(*long sigh*)

Japan. Yeah.

(*Fingers tapping lightly and rapidly on the table*)

After that mess in California up by Emmigrant Gap, and that other mess in North Beach, I thought it might be a good idea to put some distance between myself and people with Italian surnames. An old ... friend of mine from the Tenth Division told me there was work in the Land of the Rising Sun, and I decided that was a much better place to be than in some cheap hotel in Eureka.

Three weeks later, courtesy of a decent enough container ship captain, I was in
Okinawa. Two days after that, it was Kyoto. That’s where I hooked up with old man
Watanabe for the first time.

(*cigarette noises followed by a long pause*)

And there’s where I sorta lose track of things. Somethin’ BAD happened, I know that.

(*pause...Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” begins playing in the background from a worn and tired jukebox*)

I don’t KNOW what, friend. I remember wakin’ up on the damn beach, torn clothes, no money...and not very damn happy about any of it.

(*pause*)

No. Now I’m not sure I WANT to know. I’m tired of it, pal. I’m just fucking tired. And I’ve
seen what the rest of the world has become, friend. Midian’s as good a place to die as the rest.

(*Quiet. Enough to notice there is no longer any background noise, save for the mournful crooning of Patsy Cline. The sliding of a bottle is followed by a cigarette noise...and a long, slow exhale.*)

Now...

(*Voice so quiet it is marginally better than a murmur..*)

Seein’ as how we’re finally alone. How about you tell ME who’s so interested in my past,...

(*pause...the voice continues with icy menace*)

...”friend.”

Recording ends.

Acheron

Acheron
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

To percieve is to suffer.
-Aristotle

The River of Woe. The phrase appears in the mind's eye, seemingly from nowhere.

Words, images of books, dusty smells. A library. Remembering the crisp feel of paper, the crinkling sound of pages turning.

Gentle, quiet laughter, and the hint of vanilla in the air. A gentle touch on the wrist, and a glimpse of a smile as bright as the sun.

Blink. As antiseptic smells overpower the memory. Wincing at the rough, fast succor to the skin. Words, distant and muffled, urging caution and mild rebuke. Cold metal table.

Limping easing into a more confident stride. Step onto the street. Breathe again. Hackles rising at the discordant noise which covers nearby pleading.

Close the eyes. Find a new ocean. A new shore to settle. Anything but this dreadful, heavy concrete wasteland. Shift the feet.

Open the eyes.

Shit.

Still here.

Nightlight

Nightlight
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

"What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness."

-M.C. Escher

Wandering, again. Neon flickering, shadows dancing, light cut through smoked lenses.

And the voices. Oh, the sounds.

Soft sighs, whispers, and murmured conversations. The occasional shriek. And the ever-present shuffling of cities, everywhere, breathing, moving and alive.

Let the dark red snake slide from the spine. Leaning against the wall, it slips into the concrete to join a complex and tangled dance. Breathe out, relax.

Observe.

Families, squabbling, posturing, preening at play. Watch them move, find the comfort of the familiar, mark the prickling of the unnatural lurch.
Breathe in. Calculate.

Epitaphery

Epitaphery
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

"The bus at the corner
The clock's on the wall
Broken windmill
There's no wind at all
I've yelled and I cursed
If i stay here I'll rust
I'm stuck like a shipwreck
Out here in the dust."

-Tom Waits, Whistle Down the Wind

A stuttering ellipses of flashbacks.

Awake now.

Darkness curled around the heart like a fist. Smell of blood beneath the fingernails. Loose teeth. New scars.

Shirt spattered with gore. Crimson camoflaged as orange by distant, flickering neon. Dark stains on the sand of the beach. Boardwalk creaks above.

Shake the head. Clear it. Clear it. Blink. Breathe. The cool breath of autumn against wet skin, a taste of copper, warm belly, warm belly, richsweethotnicetaste Concentrate. Concentrate. Spike in the head, hot and heavy.

Fingers tracing scars and ridges. Stroking the skin, begging for memory. Her scream, highfalteringstaccato sharp whiff of cordite and the ocean filling the mouth

Bubbling, mewling sounds from the thing on the beach.

Back away. Back away. Force down the seductive murmuring rage. Feed the hunger its own dark nightmare.

Just breathe.

Just...keep...moving.

Verti(cal)go

Verti(cal)go
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.
-Aesop

A wave of quick dizziness descends. The whine of the departing cab muffled by a heavy blanket of nausea which sweeps through the gut like sour milk.
Head throbbing, eyes flickering behind shattered glass. One foot after the other. Glances keep you moving straight.

Suck in the next breath through the teeth. Let the hissing sound keep you focused, centered. The chatter of a thousand eager voices battering at your ears.

Blink. Keep moving. Salt smell and surf rumbling beckon at the end of this spinning, heaving tunnel.

Blink. Feel the stubble gracing the skin of the skull. Feel the warm salty water trickling down your neck. Let the razor do its work.

Blink. Smooth skin welcomes fingers tugging dreads into place. Shake the ocean from your face.

Stand.

Breathe.

Smile at the silky voice and pressure at the back. Steel against the spine.

Welcome to Midian, pilgrim...

Fade to black....with a touch of...

...red.

Apogaion

Apogaion
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

Cab ride.
Me, smelling ulpholstery which hints at cigarettes and whiskey and cheap, fast love.

An ache, climbing the side of my bruised ribs as we roll to a stop, threatens to rap knuckles against my brain.
Take a long, slow look through the stained and pitted glass of the window. Check out what has the potential to be something distantly related to the concept of "home".

Shake that off. Concentrate. No time to be woolgathering.
Get all misty-eyed, and get all dead. Remember what happened to...?

But no...the names won't come, and the faces simply waver and disappear from the mind's eye.
Dammit. Focus. Open door, boots on the ground. Stand up and move.
Movement gives purpose. Purpose gives meaning. Meaning gives...?

Tug at the mustache, scratch at the hair on your chin.
Let the scowl settle on your face like an old friend, as the heartbeat of the city makes itself known through your boots.
Look forward.
Breathe.