xenoflare

First Breath: The Dance

Stalking the beast, you adopt a spirit of focus, and you remove distractions from your mind, cut out madness from your mind. Clarity is the first stance you should adopt when hunting a foe far bigger and stronger than you are. Internalize the footwork you'll have to do, work out your angles of attack, look out for the uneven ground, make sure those obstacles in your way now, will be there for your prey later.

Excitement and anxiety is building up, little bubbles of fright in the lungs, blurring the eyes. They will help, but not right now.

Why do you seek to fell this beast? What benefit does its defeat grant you? Is it a fight for valour, for the promise of the kisses of the crowd's adulation? Is it the fight for self-actualization? Or perhaps a holy war, a sacrifice to spirits and ideals?

I seek to tear this spirit's throat out, this fattened demon, I will plant its head on a stake. I must rake its face with gashes of crimson, such that the rest of the tribe can look upon it, and know that it is not insurmountable. More than that, I plan to survive, thrive, and that is my claim upon my domain.

To win this battle, I must fight, survive, and redefine the front line to be on the edge of my sword. Battlefield control is paramount to your success. If you build and lead a war-band, yet the others do not know why they fight, and thus do not wish to fight, the cause, and your lives, will all be lost. You cannot be a lone visionary, if you wish to lead them to greatness. Yet you have learned these abilities only in the middle of your journeys, aloof and alone. Thus, you will have to awaken these sleeping spirits by doing the impossible alone, for now, and the army will arise.

Second Breath: The Duel

I do this because it will achieve that. My way of doing this is designed to help me do this better, to achieve more of that, and that is significant in the bigger picture for...

Quest (research) to achieve that significance(knowledge generation, elicit discussion, question discourse). Methodology: (this) allows me to do (quest) better...

my central thrust is not the same as my main objective.

Related, but not the same; so what are they? lay them out on the ground, these pretties, let them sparkle in the sun.

Central thrust => what art, metaphor, myth, drama, performance, imagination, creativity, story, poetry can do for people.

Main research objective => how these guys use these games to tell stories, where they create worlds where these things come alive, within a social and cultural milieu.

Context: a culture where creativity is seen as something perpetually "other" by the mainstream, yet not taken of very well as a liminal space by the people to whom it is supposed to be entrusted. state and business muscling in all the time, seducing little children with the promises of recognition, to feed the dreams of the solitary genius with splicings of broken mirrored widowed glimpses, reifying the gods of individualistic meritocracy.

ok, ok, down boy. how are these stories told?

they are experienced through the perspectives of player-characters, that explore imaginary shared spaces - these explorations also define these imaginary spaces into a continuum, yet also leave the edges ragged enough to be expanded upon potentially in the future.

they never really end, unless they do. sensitive to things like emotions, schedules, real life, etc.

but does that matter so much? we'll never have the ends of our epics, for the most part. is that important? perhaps, but is it the most important thing?

no, i don't think so.

what's important is that people can touch the divine through the profane with this act of communal energy pitchshifting, to reach the magical through the mundane.

this is just another means to do so, to square the circle, that the gods may emerge from the wombs of these words, and bring benedictions upon these blighted lands.

as long... as long.. as we can remember this

we will never lose.

so bless me now mother, father

grant me this strength i need to turn these wheels

the rest of the tribe is one long distant murmur

gaaaaaahhhh

let it flow, it will, it must, so bids it, i am the magician, and my will is law, and where the law ends, the chaosmos begins, and my magic is meaningless there, but then boats are not needed on dry land anymore, are they?

uncoiling undulating serpent spined-fire each bone a shining maw let these fangs rain down and make that void between you and me bleed wisdom

hi babe. long time no see, yeah?

here's some food.

time to break out occam's gilette, the best shave a man can get!

(null hypothesis laser time! or alternative hypothesis? gah my head ok focus breathe relax. I-ke! Cyflash!)

premise A -> state in SG is sibei authoritarian. Falsifiable? Yes. Evidence exists; can verify this, with empirical observation of prior actions by the state. This manifested reality will serve as the anchor for the rest of my argument.

premise B -> (popular discourse depicts) there is a lack of creativity, of imagination, of talent in Singapore. commonly equivocated with: Singaporeans have no creativity, no imagination, no talent. Are these positions falsifiable with evidence? What is the result of these positions? The need to "develop" talent, or to "import" talent from overseas? Logistical two-step shuffle.

how do these two premises relate to each other? are they even premises? See, never take logic class, or quantitative research, silly boy. now you suffer. don't worry just whack it overdrive!

iron heart surge!

magic black box magic black box MAGIC BLACK BOX

Authority and creativity are the two spirits i'm trying to play with here, and discover the resonance.

(hint flare blast: if the state perceives a relationship between authority/ creativity.. hmm. they did summon Richard Florida, after all. and the pink dollar ritual.. hence, by opening spaces, or allowing carving of discursive spaces for the "outliers" - the special foreign talent, the special vegabuttsechs, the special crazy bohemianinjas, the elite elephants, the so-called Cosmopolitans as opposed to the Heartlanders who have no talent, who have no buttsechs, who are not bohemian, etc... then this fucks us all over for it's, as KK would say, same old shit again.

Spaces for "creative folks" are goffman cooling marks to defuse psychic energy upsurge? explosive reactive armor => boom, deflect the bigger shaped charge coming your way? Chobham armor style.

Primary goal => to maintain hegemonic relations, Gramsci-style. The intellectuals will acquiesce to your rule, ANKOKU DAI SHOGUN, and fight in exactly the arenas you want them to. and make money. State view: cultural capital is not seen as the resources one uses to make meaning out of living, but rather seen as culture for making one's living.)

(reflexive hint blast: that trend of thought is dangerously seductively easy to arrive at, Shard-soul 1. Are you perhaps too quick to draw a conclusion when you have not yet established the correlation?)

Authority/ Creativity.

Let's examine the ideas here.

Authority is not necessarily a bad thing. But over-extension and abuse of authority? Censorship, draconian laws, being unaccountable to the public, above reproach, monopoly of mainstream fields of cultural production, invocation of higher moral purposes, while at the same time claiming to represent and speak in the voice of practicality, thus painting others as impractical, allowing their labelling of all alternative hypotheses as dissident voices and then smash them down into Sentosa with Drago laws? I WILL BREAK YOU APOLLO CREED.

Cops in Head, Cops in Head.

Creativity => what is it? That divine fire that is common to us all as human beans. Promethean laser pistol. To make new things. There is an element of perception. To see, to make connections between things, and also the ability to express that vision into a voice. Creative vision, praxis, creative voice.

Hmmm, it doesn't stop there. It creates more creativity too. Very StormWatch Seedling Activation style. Creative vision in one, creative voice sings to many, and elicits a possible frame of creative responses from others, and the wheel of the dragon turns and turns.

Ok, next thing. Creativity is not necessarily intelligence, and neither is a necessary condition for the other. In this society, what is more culturally valued? It seems intelligence and knowledge is more valued by most folks in the popular discourse. We can see it from the education system, and also sense it from the semi-sneering attitude of the people who describe themselves as having played it "smart". You know who you are. You memorized pract crit essays for lit, you took the classes in school that were easy to score, you were shrewd. you agreed with the prof even when he was talking bullshit, you never spoke truth to power, cos that would hurt your grades, and because that is unimaginable to you, you claim it is not true or possible.

(Shard-Soul 3 *gently* : But... Neither authority, creativity nor intelligence has sufficient claims to make moral judgments, sempai. chill. relax your defenses.)

so. this supposed lack of creativity in singapore?

1, Is it a resource lockdown? i.e. the starving artist problem? Hmmm. That cannot really be the independent variable that explains the matter. Cos other places also got starving artist, ya? and anyway, resources are always present. It doesn't matter what kind. There's social and cultural resources, no? i may be starving, i may be working as a slave, but i can sing a song, a ditty from my father's father's time. you may throw me into a cell, gouge out my eyes with rusty old spoons, but i can still see the serpent's maw gasping from the milky way.

Social and cultural resources exist here. There's images. there's sounds. There's a mythology that inspires dialetic relationships - the national story is a good centralizing focus to create spurts of energetic thrusts in and out, see-saw, the fangs of the sky. But hmmm this mythology is under the control of some very powerful magi who have a whole bunch of apprentices protecting this story.

And there's even a common language of sorts, for people to communicate with. From these, we can get building blocks to do so much. Yes, money is lacking, yada yada, and that sucks, but it's not the main issue here, is it?

2, Is it a talent mire? Do we lack "talent"? i don't think so. You can't really draw some arbitrary distinction between People A and People B, and say these folks got no talent. That's essentialism at its most classic, just another racist rant against ourselves, that somehow genetically or culturally, we lack creativity, imagination, or talent. Unlike the Jipun Kia, or Comrade Americanski, or whatever gets our goosely hard-on at the moment.

And there's also empirical evidence to argue otherwise. Lotsa folks do really good work here, not just in the realm of the arts, but also in the realm of everyday life, of everyday creative activity. The singing man. the old couple dancing their tango in the middle of Waterloo Street. 10,000 unsaid, unheard, unsung spirits laughing and crying from new variations of uber tasty noodles to KOF combo tricksmiths at arcades to lui jumping up onto a table to sing and dance to josh's spontaneous witticisms to ed's 1234567 cos they can't shout knnbccb at the white horse recruits anymore otherwise they cry.

So that's not "creativity" in the public view, cos the state has become the biggest fool of itself. It has deluded itself into thinking creative activity is airy-fairy and special, following LKY's old chestnut:

"Poetry is a luxury Singapore cannot afford."

Poetry exists in an emergent state la, it is not ontologically inherent.

The whole talk bout "creative industries" have somehow ghost-danced and swapped innovation for creativity, and genius for expression here.

So oi recover focus la. Everyday, ppl do creative things, or do things creatively, just that this is not recognized as talent or suchlike by the most powerful social actors in this society. And essentializing ppl doesn't make sense, so no need to poke that side.

For the answers, we must go back to culture here, lol not least cos that's my training, but also, srsly folks, i have a feeling i'm onto something.

it's not lack of resources, or lack of talent, in Singapore. So what is it?

Lack of spaces? Lack of cultural contexts for creative activity, and lack of identification of such?

A ninja that is not hidden, is honestly no ninja at all. A visible man that nobody sees, *is* invisible.

if the spaces are few for folks to share and access, for folks to develop, and the boundaries between these sacred spaces and profane spaces, in Eliade's terms, are strong, to protect the "cultural stuff" of these folks from contamination, and well, the status difference is there, as people wanna feel special, then that means it is irrelevant for most people, and thus it exists, yet it is invisible.

society of interlocking, independent parts, incapable of communicating with each other, except through floor managers, that serve to articulate the system's joints, but also provide feedback stresses of their own, ultimately reinforcing their own existence, and even they report to the engineers of this mecha robot, who also answer to the pilot.

Galbraith's technostructure/ industrial state => specialization of roles for industrialization. Taylorism results to inculcate efficiency.

so, lack of spaces is the independent variable, are you saying that? wah lau. go koon lah.

upgrade: parallel processors for better fire control, faster lock on and field acquisition.
weapons: twin plasma cannons, twin knuckle shots on front.
stabilizers: fins on arms, legs, heads (all front), elbow and core (left)
engines/ generators: hybrid of rapid response and air strike systems.
chassis/ frame: hybrid for energy/ ballistic resistance.

the center of gravity is heavily tilted towards front and left. inherent bias towards left lol. well, easy to rush in, and then maintain ideal close range, while bursting speed to maintain distance for plasma. boost to left is faster, but turning to right is slightly slower, so keep at optimum distance is important, but not that far too. if come too close, can wait it out and punch.

hmm, damn dueling unit.

field radar: (general target acquisition) writing is privilege of the rich and powerful, dominated by class of elites. writing as Djehuty's gift, that is a mark itself of wealth and sophistication. people who write are themselves part of the modernist project; this postcolonial nightmare.

wait, what is central focus? is this a siege unit, or recon racoon? No, it's a duelist and fast strike craft, so reconfigure.

larger radar scope is to see the missiles coming in so you can dodge them, not so you can RUN into them, boyo.

stance switch: apparent "culturelessness" is actually culture. no sense to essentialize culture as high or mass or folk or pop, back to working definition => culture as process. if the rich and powerful have access to means of resources, they have higher degree of control over culture, back to Rajaratnam's social engineering and historical switcharoo policies.

The cultural elites within this system aspire to a reification of the ang moh standards as being timeless, the standard for all else to aspire to. an abstraction is granted free-standing ontic status.

people write about what they want, about what they fear, etc. Together with the remodelling of people into mobile suits to help mine the ore the state needs, there's some kind of hoppity hoppity hop situation at work. Chua's application of Gramsci to look at the situation, where there's mutual cooperation, even in the forms of apparent resistance.

WAIT. if the state is made up of people who want to become elite, whether it's in civil society or political society, and this general society is built on encouraging elitism - LKY's "slender resources needs to be given to top 2 percent" theory...

some people will always seek to become the elite, and apply their technologies towards transforming their status into the elite. of course, there's different kinds of elite. Via my education, i have to acknowledge that now i am a elite in terms of my acculturation, but i am no Big Shot. Hence, i am not a socially acknowledged elite. (though the auntie who sells nasi lemak is impressed i read so much, lol, that is also a kind of acknowledgement, more ikan bilis, thanks)

ok away away from subjectivity as illustration.

so => rambling long thing is, people who seek to become elites will become some kind of elite, but then they'll always be smaller than some other guy who even lagi zai than them. (correspondence to leet culture? interesting thought but not too useful at this point)

boundaries are drawn in order to create clear, bounded units of ethnicity. "our people do it this way." this guy is the smart guy, that guy the strong guy. classification fever.

clear schematics!

rework!

1, writing is fiercely guarded privilege of the rich. and this rich tends to be consolidated in a few classes/ industries and their ideas are representative of their class/gender/religion biases. Yeah la, and most of them are old men (or young women wishing they were old men). Whether it's professors, teachers, feminists, govt officials, liberal humanists, Catholics, Marxists, or whatever. in that sense, they maintain the cultural hegemony, and the horizon of knowledge that can be easily reached by most people is controlled by them. Likely also to breed resentment, so people feel these ppl are irrelevant to them, and find other elites to emulate.

2, the big problem: in a state where writing/ reading is the ang moh pai's gold card, the oral tradition is gutted with a vibro knife. The "i want to be writer" syndrome. Haha. Writing has such a powerful fetish bound to it. even this one. *pokes* hmm. this reality seems rather stable.

3, english-educated people look at english writings and see that world of writing as za worldo.

4, these english-educated people are either well-placed cultural producers in their fields, or cultural producers in the schema of everyday life. your "normal joe".

5, ideological blindness, because in that way, they see one thing (a particular) as representative of all (the whole)...

6, these games are themselves created by the ang moh pai, either becos they have access to social networks or other capital.

ok go eat la. come back later.

satori: unfold. THUNDER KONGO VAJRA YASHA STRIKE!

within larger space-time social context => (boomer generation in the world post 1945, singapore's experience: one sub-caste of the English educated elite had to deal with the individualistic mindsets of that time)

british trained anglophile founding fathers; chinese and indians who wish they were brits. They won and dominate current historiography had to deal with ppl who disagreed with their ideas. inherited power structure from the brits, primogeniture. hmm. perceive chaos on all sides, then the big bulge of baby boomers who saw the world as their oyster had to be tamed... no hippies, no long hair, all dangerous.

my parents' generation. some of the richest and the poorest were able to break away from the social engineering, by drifting away from the mainstream. but hmmm the individualism of the times was subsumed into a group identity, a fallen generation - where kids didn't know how to grow up into adults, and parenting sometimes left a lot to be desired. but everyone was just finding themselves, yeah..?

ppl were supposed to "get married" start families get jobs and be responsible. then the peasant mentality comes in, cos these ppl of the generation before us - my parents at least - were from peasant stock. so we didn't have big old money. so upward social mobility FTW, everything is a matter of moving on and on. Get english name, get western education, get job that is based on manipulating resources for an industrial purpose, and all that based around gaining symbolic capital of social prestige..

(and some of you want to run but you never do because you're scared of daddy, aren't you? sigh. and you're scared of mommy dearest. and you think of yourselves as stoic warriors, just like those salarymen with tie-bandannas in japan. please level up a bit more before the world eats you up even more...)

so anyway. next wave.

some of you get a mistress or a toyboy on the sly, others go to church or temple or mosque, get your damn car, your family's ok, you provided for your kids, so what if they're latchkey ya? They're fed at least. Send them to school, a good school, where they'll get good traditional values (another strange construct - those values you have?) Equip them with the skills they'll need to survive, and hope you did all right. And most of you did all right la... it was hard for you too. Your times were quite crazy.

Then our time comes in. The rebellion wave - bursts in next generation, we the Gen X-ers. For those from old money families, hmm you get married and stabilize really quick... but for those from other places, who don't benefit from the system that much, it's hard ya. You can't even articulate your rage. (if you benefit from the system, even worse, cos you got Catholic guilt now lol) You don't have the vocab. The cultural capital. You just know you're feeling pissed on. You just know that a bunch of guys who push papers around somehow get the girls, the cars, the big house, and the respect, and you're the guy who did mechatronics just like everyone told you to do so, and you got a PHD poly halfway dropout and then you upgrade yourself like siao to just get your job now and you're stuck in some office hell where some smoothtalking asshole tries to rimshot you all the time and get the credit for your work.

So the point is, the old guys dominate discourse and discussions, while the ppl who do well, want to do well, and not "be wrong" don't really see anything wrong (and quash any feelings of those wrongness if they get too strong) and then this middle/ upper class of cultural elite produce the media, reinforce cultural hegemony of this place being a world for the rich, and this place runs and thrives on this glut of mammon, and you justify its existence by saying "if this wasn't the case, would we have this or that?" then shout out any form of critique by straw man arguments. the intellectuals' roles within a knowledge-based political economy is very powerful.

middle class wants to be rich, rich wants to stay rich, maybe if you're rich dilettante, you can play at being poor and grungy, then poor also wants to be middle class. everyone hates themselves because they can't be you, and as long as there's you, who needs to do anything yeah?

then the really poor, who fall out of the cracks? Those who can't speak english? Those old uncles who worked as rickshaw pullers and then cobblers and then sit at coffeeshop tables with transistor radios but they can't understand JACK SHIT now because you took out their dialect programmes you did you motherfuckers oh and don't tell me bout meritocracy i'll punch your laser satellites out with my armpits. So they have no education, no media, no publications for them? and it's all their own fault?

oh wait they have THE NEW PAPER right, or whatever you have created to be the voice of the masses ya. Meh. So cynically you stalk, my scholarship-holding ninjas, you didn't even do journalism, but you're journalists now. And then you don't even know how to investigate. But ya la it's not your fault. You have to pay the piper, and give Caesar his due.

AND YES PUT IN SHOWS ABOUT HOW THE LITTLE GUY MAKES IT BIG DESPITE TROUBLE YADA YADA and it's all cos he got talent and the system works and there's no structural problems no sirree.

so programmes news publications here just push the little guy down and push the big guy up eat this fucking nice new restaurant ya it's so goddamn nice and go to this ccb place in dont know what continent to backpack and you're one of the culture elite

laugh at us push us down and then say we have culture by having goddamnawful programmes telling us to eat chicken wings at fuckall what hawker centre, that doesn't cut it, punk.

rage rage rage GODDAMN RAGE.

push the poor into invisibility, deny the social problems, quietly work on them on the sidelines so you even prevent people from having the moral grounds to criticize you, and work on them just a bit so they dont stop you from making your money with social unrest, and overwork the social workers who are living saints and bodhisattvas who wont ever complain cos they know they depend on you for their damn funding and too many things depend on this working right for them to risk it all on a burst of angst and so this sits inside INSIDE INSIDE and it never comes out

and another generation of drones buzzing beelzelbub rasetsumaru with no idea what their own angin is, all dancing demons in the skies of concrete!

you use your power to twist their lives, Gramscian attack dogs! and you drive them onwards and work them to the bone and reap the benefits of their labor for yourselves.. and your puny pathetic defence is "that's how the world works", hahaha, what did the dentist fill your rotten maw with when your teeth fell out due to a lack of moral fibre? Filth fillings? Tau sar pau and mantou got different fillings, same same can la.

then if media is controlled, dominated by you white people who can't find work elsewhere so come here do Red Threads and Masters of the Sea... and then act so goddamn cultural at holland v and dempsey...

who speaks for the little guy? can the subaltern speak? not with speakers, maybe, but with subwoofers, woof woof under the radar, when all we have are the tongues of curs.

need to go out to breathe a bit now. Refocus later.

*woosh*

what does it mean to possess cultural capital? re: singapore context.

ok, so i'm like some sort of an academic. i read a lot, write a lot (used to), think a lot, and i observe a lot. the work i do deals with learning, teaching, communicating and remembering.

my da and ma both graduated from nantah; they treat education with quite a high amount of respect. there are beautiful things in my house, from paintings to dinosaurs. i am reasonably proficient in chinese, more so in english, and a lil bit ok in indonesian/ malay.

i used to act, and used to play games, tell stories a lot more. those leisurely pursuits, together with my family's respect for the scholar-knight errant, had more to do with my current life in this configuration, than anything else. i grew up with a bunch of great friends who were from different walks of life, but were all expressive and confident in their own spheres of life, and we did many great things together.

what is it that prevents this greatness and exuberance from reflaring up?

the machine of this place.

hmm.

why am i able to continue doing what i do? family background comes in. not by birth, but by my family's cultural dispositions towards education, literacy, and higher learning, i was equipped with enough resources as a kid that nurtured certain nascent qualities within me. I have entered the ranks of a scholarly elite class that exists in this country. i do not *choose* to channel my social and cultural resources towards attaining what this country's popular discourse holds up as being "success", but that also possible due to my good relationship with my family. i don't encounter the same pressures as perhaps others of my social class do, to become an iron bowl bureaucrat, and they have encouraged at many times these interests and affinities of mine.

Cultural capital, in Bordieu's sense?

hmmm. university. it's not bout whether you can get the book or not, to read. it's bout the training, the apprenticeship to a discipline, the mentor-journeyman relationship, where you learn not just bout books, but about life and lives. books are cultural objects - artifacts that contain "embeddings" of culture, perhaps, but to associate books entirely with intellectual high culture is an aspect of the totemic fetishism..

yes, i read many things on my own, and i gained a lot from these readings, but it was not until the discussions, the arguments, the late-night conversations, the research papers, the putting of theory into practice, that my readings crystallized into learning.

(cultural capital also linked thus to social capital? to meet people of similar interests and affinities, whom you can apprentice together with, to learn a craft and master some skills? they then eventually go into certain sectors of society, and i can utilize those contacts and friends to do certain things?)

hmmm. and in this regard, RPGs - both as hobbies/ leisure activities and groups of people who come together, the hobbyists - represent a possible way by which people can gain access to cultural and social capital in a highly stratified society. It's not something that appeals to everyone - or can work for everyone; firstly, there are some affinities that are more useful than others. Power gamers and rules lawyers emphasize that bend-it-till-it-breaks ideology that underscores Weber's ideas of the bureaucratic elite and their knowledge-power base; linguistic affinities, ability to express oneself and understand others are also good skills to have, because all games are social activities and cultural products.

hence, ppl with interests in magic, but not necessary of that intensity/ sort to go into the full-gonzo occult lifestyle, can consume "fantasy"; the fundamental schema of reality within their reckoning is not threatened because it is not "really real", but also because it is not "really real" it is actually less dangerous and more comfy; so you can put it into your life in a more or less modular fashion that isn't so painfully stark.

Magic isn't limited to being an intellectual thing, but some degree of intellectualization and cerebral activity is involved. there is the whole breaking apart of cultural conditioning + the ability to have faith and belief in things. most of the time, without the latter, the former degenerates into some kind of flaccid agnosticism?

but anyway, not the point.

RPG => hobby groups and activities => different kinds of people play them, come together into different groups, recreate their social universes and express their fantasies and ideas, gain access to voice for self-represnetation, even if that voice is borrowed from other forms of culture through media => and speak for one-self.

context? => local arena, stratification of classes, tightening control of social and cultural capital for the technocratic culture elite, survival tied to global flows, loss of soul and spirit as language and memory is molded and spliced, increasing amount of empty markers of class boundaries, searching for "identity", for "who am i truly", while agnosticism increases, and the erudite love techne more and more for its "reality", and then the drive towards fundamentalist interpretations of scripture also increases, that are actually supporting pillars *and* distinguishing features of an increasingly atomized, self-worshipping, individualistic society, that seeks to define the limits of "humanity" and creates a cultural product of the "human being".

ack.

nightmare blade!

chill. relax. something gestated there. return to the void. namaste.

wandering ghosts of the seven clouds
where are you now and where do you go?
where do you sleep in these lands
when your homes here are gone?

this house is but a heart
caged in bone and brine
this tongue a dew-weeping bridge
from my world to yours

another brick of memory
a kiln of forgotten fires
cracked dreams, quiet tempest
in a pallid palace, that king feasts
and his banquet sings to the bereft

through you, thunder-god, sky-singer
old stone names whispered in a sheltered gaze
i taste this draught of my eyes so cleanly
winter's dart across these lifeless winds

embrace me
as i return to you
as a son
to this black earth

you don't know how to give to others, do you?

everything is conditional for you.

you will tear down the world to feed your ego, and deny your own true power, because you're scared of fighting for yourself, for other people.

and you will keep them down, push them down, tear them apart, to suit your purposes, rather than acknowledge the possibility that you may just be wrong, and reflect on that... it's too much to ask for you to make amends, is it?

this sword is a serpent, and this blood burns like venom.

ink of the skies, rain upon the soil of my brain.

infinity uncoils.

fucker

what a bitch.