Month: November 2016

The Institution

Architecture
The Institution comprises a labyrinthine complex of concrete buildings. No one knows how many there are. Many of the blocks are over twenty storeys high, and all are connected by a network of walkways. The way into a building is never the way out: there are strict rules. Security personnel tut under their breaths.

Work
The purpose of the Institution is widely debated. Some conjecture that it’s educational, while others argue it’s military. It may even be a correctional facility, or perhaps a religious foundation or a spam factory. The evidence points many ways. One thing is certain: the Institution is a place of fierce activity. Employees work long hours and remain connected to their workplace after hours through telecommunicative metal discs implanted just beneath the skin. Encrypted messages requiring urgent responses are transmitted from the Institution to its workforce at all hours, often manifesting in dreams. As a result, all employees with managerial responsibilities are prone to neurotic analysis of their own dreams, sifting through the imagery in case it contains some important memorandum or action point.

Pecking order
Most people who work at the Institution are middle managers. But they struggle to articulate their responsibilities and don’t know the names of those who manage them. There must be dozens, even hundreds of senior managers. But that echelon is a mystery.

Rules
At the Institution there are strict protocols governing use of the staff toilets. Employees wishing to urinate may do so only when it is raining. Defecation is even more problematic: a 20,000 word rationale must be submitted to a special committee at least a month in advance.

Business
The Institution welcomes a constant stream of visitors: clients, customers, consultants, clowns, costermongers, chiropractors, cadavers. The visitors are ushered into meeting rooms, conference rooms, dining rooms, boardrooms, ballrooms, bedrooms, darkrooms, panic rooms, throne rooms, billiard rooms, bathrooms, cloakrooms, classrooms, lumber rooms, showrooms, laundry rooms. There is no record of what happens to the visitors after they have been shown to their rooms. And since no visitor is known to have left the Institution, we can only speculate about the nature of their experiences inside that slate grey labyrinth.

Alt-right gobshites

Alt-right gobshites unite under your flag of noughts and crooked crosses tell the grievance brigade to shut up while you shout shit

Alt-right gobshites unite and say it like it is say it like it should be after all we’re all Adolphs right why are they so offended by your racist slurs and rapist curs and calls to deport and calls to make walls and calls to make tools with which to build your reich

Alt-right gobshites fight the light and fight to blind us to what’s in plain sight the plight of all of us the plight of the West reliving a horror story from the 1930s walking right into it falling right into it but hey it’s different for the alt-right gobshites they’re well groomed well dressed cool ironic their words are a game there are no rules they’re funtime fascists with meinkampf mindsets LOL though they may seem very nazi they’re entertainers these are just words a provocation a laugh a living who cares about the human targets huddled on boats and street corners the people they’ve branded stamped on (soon: stamped out!) the history lessons unlearned

Alt-right gobshites grease back their hair take their pay make waves take the airwaves pave the way for darkest days.

The poems

The poem exploded in a shopping centre. No one was hurt, except for an adolescent boy who looked into the white blast and went blind.

—–

He kissed her mouth, her neck, her breasts. She dug her nails into his back. A poem slid over them, pooled in their eyes.

—–

During their game, they broke the mirror hanging darkly in their parents’ bedroom. A poem hissed through the cracks, into their mouths.

—–

She wrote the last sentence of her novel, unaware that a poem was hidden in its tangled heart. The poem throbbed, awaiting the reader.

—–

The banners were red and black. The Bird King’s victory speech shattered all the poems. We collected shards and hid them in our dreams.

—–

You woke to see a poem hanging from the ceiling like a light fitting like a stalactite like a vampire like a noose like a carcass.

—–

We tried everything: disinfectant, weed killer, rat poison, bullets, napalm, nukes. But the poems, breeding like cockroaches, wouldn’t die.