Monday, April 20, 2009

many crows, few corpses.

I cleaned my room tonight. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think i'm losing the plot a little because I've stayed up until 4am drinking a twelvepack of Solo cans, watching 21 Jump Street and cleaning my room up. I found a lot of my old army stuff, including my old notebooks from basic training. Most of it is technical data and notes, procedures and drill that I needed to memorise. but here and there are a couple of pages where I've tried to make sense of my headspace, when i had one of those brief periods of freedom that I could use to sit down and write. It's interesting. it's odd. Reading it again dredges up that bittersweet fear and total loathing, but yet, total yearning. I hate the army. I miss the army.

but yeah, here's the shit.



It is the eighth day. Much of the facade and fear has been stripped, leaving weapons handling drills, ratel and pack marches. Soldier stuff. The good shit. Several times I have considered binning myself but I find these thoughts grow less and less frequent as the days proceed - I feel that they build on each other, that every passing day makes it more likely that I will endure the next. This is a strange place - Governed by tradition, built on honour and enforced by a medley of the bored and the faithful, the bully NCOs who resent this shit posting and the good NCOS who see this as the most important post they could possibly have been assigned. Life grows more and more surreal as time passes. I feel bits of me slipping away... Like I'm being fossilised. My soft, pink insides have been buried and are slowly rotting only to be replaced by hard silt and stone. Is this a dream? Is this life? This room has large windows but they are dirty, misty and scratched. light plays through the leaves outside, mottling shadows onto the table. Like everything - Like even the coffee-stain rings on my notepad, they remind me of DCPU. Clearly the indoctrination is working. I shall write again soon - This has helped.

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The differential screams
as borderline truths
of altruism and the common man
are independently acquired
the blood of thousands
paints the neatly laid walls
of Kirribilli House.
perhaps it is time
to paint the inside?
let maggots squirm
and shrapnel rust
in the bodies of bosnians
and serbians
and australians
and humans
while a 4.7 billion dollar convention centre
is used to sell cut-price straight-to-dvd movies
5 people to 1 bed in PMH
people, not numebrs
children, not people
instinct/reaction - start the fires
turn the masses
hearts and minds
as one
a dog's day dawns

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Twelfth day. Cracks forming. Life is disjointed and cannot link one memory to the next. No core stability - Constantly falling forwards, only just managing to keep my feet under me. it's like a dream, body acting and mind watching. It reminds me of ether hazes. I feel like tearing a young schoolgirl to pieces, or picking a fight with a wall. I want to get bloody. I want to cry. It's not as easy as I thought, but it's nowhere near as hard. it's just... different. weird. Distinctly unpleasant. My mouth tastes like brass. I'm so goddamn tired.

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From the moment of inception it was clear to all concerned exactly which way their priorities were arranged. The Big Machines - They got the oil while little Timmy rode his pushbike twenty k to school, shedding rust from his chain the whole way, mechanical ochre dandruff leaving a breadcrumb trail. We are that bike. Neglected by the bigger picture, overworked and tireless, begging for oil like the proverbial tin man.

We came into being as whimpering puddles of protozoan jelly, pools of congealing amino acids, and semi-coagulated sputum. Odds are, that's the way we'll leave it too, plus a little radioactive ash raining dowjn on us. The world will end with a whimper, but there will be an earlier bang that signifies the beginning of the end - The starter's gun which sets the rat race scrabbling for cover, vermin fleeing the burning ship. There are motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. They know they won't make it to shore before they drown but it's better then burning to death.

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Day fourteen. Thank god it's friday. Room and rifle inspections have revealed that I'm not quite as on the ball as I thought I was. live fire qualifier today too, that was another shock. My grouping were shoddy and I only scraped a pass, but when you drop the outliers I was laying down 99mm three-round groupings at 200m. Feeling better. Saner, calmer. But still disconnected.

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peach and nectarine kernels from the mess, crushed and powdered. Dried on the window sill while we're at drill. Brasso mixed with water, seperated to recover clean solvent. Extract cyanogenic glycosides from the kernel pulp and put into water bottle.

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hexy stove tablets, battery acid from one of the landies and a little nitrate from the wet-light matches. boiled for fifteen minutes, filtered through a sock and the resulting grey gunk packed into an otherwise blank round.

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If I find more, I'll post it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I laughed my ass off at the two very last entries. You sir have a way with words. What one might call a bard. The way the prose comes together is in itself a work of art, and the way you weave it in to the very fabric of the thing is just, Wow man.


When you finally get around to publishing somethings let me know, I will buy the shit out of it. Thank you again for a wonderfully epic, twisted and fucked up read that once again strikes home in an odd way.

N.R said...

no sleep for the wicked?