from SHADOW TIMES

 

by Paul A. Green

 

 

 

 

SHADOW TIMES 11

 

Metal scrappage from our Intervoid will be sorted, according to reliable sources.  The chant of the weed, nasal angels, all the normalised sound tracks will keep you on message.  Crump went the golden lights of old Baghdad.  Keep staring down the telly. 

 

The Void tried to get into my cot, it put its metal angular head over to say hallo, my darlings.  The angels and maggots are line-dancing across my screen.  I’m pluralized by the bursting stars.  It’s dark inside the radio.

 

The statement said they desired men of iron.  I felt trapped on the wrong astral plane, barred from the consummation areas for a half-life.  The others, brighter young things, brayed with entitlement, but I forgave the girl in the pirate hat. 

 

A green-backed angel with scalloped tin wings crawls into a stone.  Its priests who smelled of old soap smelled danger and the terrifying simplifications of old age.  The slang of love was verboten.  Her every cleft would be botoxed by now. 

 

 

 

 

SHADOW TIMES 12

 

I am falling straight out of the rocking caboose of history.  I was ambling along in sleep-mode.  I had timed out.  I was a phantasm of the living dead.  I split at light-speed.  I will shrink in the death-process but will wrap up well.  I have kept the prayer wheels turning. 

 

Stop mixing down the messages, flapping through the channels.  Stillness reigns.  All quiet in the Queendom.  Time has been corrugated so that it virtually disappears.  I might not survive in a space race.  The sweet taint of wine on her breath has been noted, long ago. 

 

 

 

 

SHADOW TIMES 13

 

Arrange yourself in front of this table in a talking position.  Tell me the universe is a machine for making gods.  Go on, lurch around the domestic capsule.  This is a room full of situations. 

 

They say the houses in your favourite suburb have caught fire, or are concealed by mist.  Satan ordered the face-to-face execution of the bourgoisie.  Their fun-trap was a sparkly killer.  You’re now as cold as a rat’s bum.  Stop trying to bracket off the world.  Just remember a shape-shifter, running you around the woods at twilight. 

 

 

 

 

SHADOW TIMES 14

 

I was formed by a brief shimmer of biologies, in a period of convergent war-gaming.  They will try to normalise you through binary profiling.  The shamans were neutralised by the abstractions of repressive tolerance.  Dessicated fragments of aliens hung from the rafters.  There’s so much chaos I’m bursting to upload.  I’ll troll it around the world. 

 

I went to check my memories in the mirror.  Rain sizzled down on our white macs.  A grubby parade of shops.  I briefly believed I was in some sort of sexual hypercube, but the zones wouldn’t align.  I subsequently inspected a complete working model of the city, which had become infested by succubi. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul A. Green’s The Gestaltbunker – Selected Poems was recently published by Shearsman Books.