quinta-feira, 2 de abril de 2026

The tale of the duchess

 Clive and Adriana lived in a high-rise apartment in Atlanta.
Adriana was a freelance designer, known for her innovative work with fabric and light. She spent her days in a small studio on the ground floor, just below their apartment.

Clive was a businessman, working for a company that offered services to Wall Street. His days were filled with meetings and financial forecasts, while Adriana’s world was more creative and fluid.
Over the time that they were married, Clive became more reclusive and rude and sometimes even abusive, even as Adriana put more effort into the relationship.

Clive and Adriana's marriage slowly fell apart over the space of seven years because Clive was neglecting Adriana and sometimes being abusive. Adriana, on the other hand, she didn't know how to handle this. Often she would offer herself and would offer help to Clive sometimes, but this didn't solve anything. And so the marriage slowly became abusive.

Clive spent more and more time at work working on his projects, and when he got home, sometimes he would be demanding of Adriana and tell her that she had to do whatever he said, and so she had no way of expressing herself and she felt completely taken for granted and also extremely exploited.

As time went by, Adriana started to give in. She started to become more compliant, and she gave up. She gave into it

Things didn't improve. He became even more demanding, and he would request that she stay at home full-time instead of doing her design job. And still nothing improved in their relationship. There was no extra spark. There was no extra warmth in the relationship. It was Clive who was hardened by the nature of his business, and there was Adriana who still had that spark of human light within her, but it didn't work out as Adriana thought. He would continue to take advantage of her, and she would continue to take it.

The story actually starts as Adriana starts having these lucid dreams about a town that she visits in her sleep. the town itself perhaps had more like 30,000 people, 40,000 people, and it had very well-polished structures, but some of the structures or some of the buildings within the town appeared to be archaic and completely different from the newer structures. There was some kind of discrepancy between the old archaic and the new modern, and there was nothing in between.

and her nightly journeys are quite safe. These dreams seem to be quite pleasant. She greets people on the street and they in return regard her, but a lot of them actually regard her first or greet her first, as if they already know who she is. And these greetings are so natural and so believable that she starts to identify more with her dreams than her waking life.

Then on one auspicious night, she dreams that she is walking through the town and she's going right through, so she passes through to the outskirts of the city, where there are fields, and on the other side of the fields, there are old factories, factories that look like they've been erected in the 1950s with the classic four-story high structure, chimneys, and the same short, narrow windows running along each story of the building, with that gray, intimidating color.

She can hear distant screams from within the factories. She gets curious. She doesn't know if she's willing to get closer and see what they are. The town seems warm and the factories seem cold, but they both belong to the same place, in fact. And so she forces herself.

And as she approaches, she looks through the bottom windows of the building, and what she sees lit up from within the factory astounds her and both terrifies her. And so she looks on, and what she sees is hundreds of machines that have been engineered specifically for one end or one purpose, that to torture men. And there were hundreds, maybe thousands of men inside being tortured upon these machines, maybe even two or three men to one machine, and all being tortured in unison, as if the building itself was trying to make music out of their misery.

 Even though she is feeling terror, she knows that in her waking life, she is feeling some kind of pain, similar to that. She is feeling not just that physical pain that those men inside those factories are feeling, but she also feels emotional pain, perhaps in an even more intense way than what they're feeling inside that factory. So she turns to herself and she says, well, maybe we have something in common, as she starts walking back to the town.

But in her waking reality, nothing changes. Clive is still abusive, and sometimes he takes a belt to her when he feels like it. Sometimes he forces himself on her when he likes, and this all adds up. This all does its damage, but she sees herself now not as a human being, but as an object. And her only humanity left is that of the dream. So when she goes back into the dream the next night, she meets a man from the town hall, and the man has a reddish tinge to his skin and perfectly white teeth, and he invites her in.

And there's something else. There's something to this reddish-skinned man with perfect teeth and well-groomed, well-dressed, with his cane and with his hat. He seems to be very confident, and there seems to be something else, another strange quotient to the situation.

As they're walking into the mayor's building, and they walk one after the other into his office, she gets that feeling. She has met this man before somewhere, maybe from another life, maybe in another form, but this person or creature, it's, it's someone or something that she has interacted with before. She just can't put her finger on it. She sits down and they start talking.

The man starts talking as if he's from the normal reality, not from some dream. Everything he says is too congruent, too coherent. And he says directly to her, Adriana, I would like to give you an invitation. I would like to extend you this invitation. And as you probably can tell, this place is familiar to you. You have seen the town, you have seen the buildings. There is something familiar about this place, wouldn't you agree? And Adriana nods, but she still doesn't want to say anything. She still doesn't, she's still not sure about what she's going to say. So the man says, you have become almost like a battery for your husband, Clive. He uses your energy and he uses you up as he goes for his career goals and your life goes nowhere. And you have been given no recompense. So we have devised something here for you, but before I extend this, I need to reveal something that might shake your ideas.

 He continues speaking and he says, this town is familiar to you, isn't it? And she says, yes, it is. I can recognize some of the buildings, but I still don't understand why there are these archaic buildings and then these new buildings, and the factories on the far side, I don't understand any, any of it. And he says to her, you were once a very important person in this place, but you won't remember because you left this place many centuries ago.

Part of your deal about visiting Earth again was that you would lose memory of your place here. You were a duchess of our region here, and you decided that you would prefer to spend some time on Earth and test out your magic. And now it seems you have lost all of your magic, all of your spark, and you have just turned into one of those tortured souls that we keep in the factories. And so I've decided to take a course of action that will invert things, perhaps.

He says, You mustn't do anything. Can you see the factories in the fields? They are full of tortured souls. And she replies, Yes, I can. And he says, Contemplate for a second. Clive has made you into one of these people who suffer just as they suffer in those factories. So he is using you as a battery. You can see that we have ample power in this city. We have very good lighting, and we have a very good glow. We can let the old and the new live together exactly in harmony because we have these wonderful, productive factories.

Would you like to have the opportunity of inverting the situation and putting Clive in his place? And if so, I need you to state that now for me.

She accepts the offer and she ponders to herself, I wonder what is coming. I wonder what I must do. And he said, I know what you're thinking, reading her mind. You think that you must do something, that you must change something, that this is going to revolutionize or you're going to grow yourself a new life. This is not going to happen. And in fact, what we here in the town want is for you to give yourself up even more, be more submissive, be more ridiculous, humiliate yourself more for him.
“And she looks at the man, completely befuddled. What is he asking of me? And he says, well, you're going to suffer anyway. We need you to bring this new asset in. Think of yourself as our talent scout. Think of yourself as our incredible closer”

of the Rigid and the Free

 Wizards alone become extremely rigid
tricked by blueberry muffins
freshly watered grass
and the insanity of faun flute music

Fauns alone become scattered their nature is chaotic
Controlled by haunting desires and impulsive acts
As they trees in the forest grow out of shape
so does the faun without any semblance of order

The authority of the wizard
Freezes the faun
The cupcakes distracts
And requires cleaning up.

The director's day off

 The ruthless man who ate caltrops
Found people's past sins and brought them up for discussion
Sat on the front lawn of his square existence
cheeto crumbs and caltrops bronze

Was a souless creature completely satisfied
wailing in silence yet with a mangled grin
Making a call to head office
and firing people he remembered didn't fit

Not far from his position in the grass
Were the neighbors sunlit steps
where three emmaculate cockerspaniel puppies sat together quietly
Enjoying the morning sun probably

 On further inspection the puppies were to quiet
Approaching them it was evident
They were lifeless on those steps
Was it the man's mere presence?

Their family fun approved

 They consumed cupcakes
Their mouths were stained with colors mostly blue
This was the entertainment
The group enjoyed and became carefree

Poking fun at one another
The blue stained mouths
Their laughter g spot
Their compulsory fun

Blue stained chins and cheeks too
A mild form of approved slapstick
Permitted giggles
In their gaggle

Way of the Faun

 The faun breaks through the undergrowth.
Leaps onto two feet and blows on it's flute
The countryside awakens
It runs through the forest playing it's tune

The animals emerge curious
Some in trance
And follow the faun on the ridge
sheep break their fence to be near

It turns it speaks it raises the leaves
As if a sun of itself
Echoing it's mystical melody
and naming the new day with it

The fields and forests invigorated

quarta-feira, 1 de abril de 2026

Movement and stillness

because you loom and find yourself upon movement
upon stillness

Eyes soaking reality in
Words profaning it all out

because when you look at me you may see a man who has no expression But inside me there is a flaming hurricane of thought and emotion being harnessed by a thousand flashing hands My face is blank, but my desire is to sprint and aggress, to devour the earth whole. To move faster than light. And to be completely still.

Jutting rock A bumpy life

 How bumpy this road to nowhere is ...
coasts jutt their rocks out forth to anywhere
Lost statues the sea slowly devours over sweet millenia
Licking their surfaces in intimate salt obsession

Washing into and out of earth's pain
The car jumps and picks up again
The Coastal rock's dark shades speak to me
The stained window of the car

Sea spray hits as I roll down
I see the giant approach alone
It is the towering sacred stone
revering the elements

Changing to be so divinely jagged
How bumpy this life of fallacy
The hardened edges of our reality
The acidic sea salt owning the wind

Will it topple these rocks
eat them whole in fury
each beautiful century
quasi immortal

I hear the humm
I hear the crash through the bumps
I see the stains of the ages 
Imagine being as sturdy, as being as sane