Ah, my dear blue-eyed Epimetheus. You have left me a sleepless wreck. In twenty one days of searching, I have not discovered the true nature of the object you have left me, but I have at least found another term for it: the Zahir, the cage of consciousness. Except that doesn’t really work, does it?…
Burning black
Creation was a crystal sphere In my design. Completely clear To light that witnessed every space. Moved planets in their paceless paths, Bred ferns that flowed with scaled tongues And guided hearts. These laws defined The workings of each worldly part In my unending cosmic play. So this design I split to seven, And every…
Forty days
Upon the hill a temple stands With high chimneys and glassy flanks That shine bright white in the mindless Sun. Within, the priesthood of delay Acts out its rituals, pauses decay And tries to check a pale king Whose grandeur grows with every hour. Without, and all around abound Us, we living ghosts, driftwood Stranded…
Blindness
He had never meant to end up alone. He had never made some grand decision that he was better off without people, irritating, dull, ignorant. It had just fallen out that way. He hadn’t felt that white-hot spark between himself and someone else, promised all through childhood, that welded soulmates together, or inspired friends of…
Isle of Mull
4pm upon the train from Glasgow, on the East Coast Main. Cabers tossed and Munros bagged, by this point we're pretty fagged. Still, a neighbour’s greasy cough makes it hard to just drop off, even in my dozy mood...
Cephalosporin
The tribe had settled at the fork of the river at a time beyond the limits of even mythical history. Where the first founders of their settlement had come from and why they had decided to migrate to that widening strip of land between the two bodies of water were questions that no longer had…
Death by water
It is a matter of some consternation when a lady’s fiancé is drowned. If I am adopting an air of faint indifference to the destruction of an entire world in saying so, please do not believe that I cannot appreciate its import. It must merely be remarked that one’s own world is thrown into disarray.…
Laepuria
The existence of the city of Laepuria is first felt in the marketplaces of Alexandria and Suakin. Ask a silk merchant in either city of the origin of his goods, and he will tell you of the Saharan city of weavers, whose shallow pitched workshops lie buried beneath the dunes. Life, he will tell you,…