"I Saw a Pale Rider"

#0010. Death is a hiccup. Death is the aberration. Other things have learned of its illusory nature. The Lobster is immortal because it understand that Death is a hiccup. I do not mind. I will gladly take her hand when she comes for me. But I want her to know I know. I will look her in the eye and I will tell her that I know. I will frighten her. She does not frighten me.

"The Things That Alice Believes In Are Manifold And I Do Not Agree"

#0011. You worrisome creature, it says. Look! it cries. You worrisome little toad. I cannot abide its insults and I ignore the floating eye. Look! it cries again. I try not shudder in its presence. I am not afraid of you, I say. But it knows everything. It sees everything. Are you She? I ask it. But it is not. It is something less than that. But it knows everything. It sees everything. Are you She? I ask it again. But it will not respond. It only insults me. It never answers my questions.

"Her Special Day"

#0012. Cold and shivering she waits by the pedestal. There are worshipers beneath her. But she is cold and shivering. She has waited for this day for so long. The throngs rise up on their own shoulders, clamoring. The pedestal has no ladder. The pedestal has no staircase. She is stuck below it, holding her bouquet, wondering if her groom will appear. There isn't time. The crowd tears her to pieces. They claim pieces as relics. She is theirs now.

"Melancholy"

#0013. Everybody leaves. That is a sad fact. The saddest fact. I have stood on many docks waving at ships departing over the horizon and there I am, alone again. Everybody will board that boat. They will give me parting gifts. Bottle caps. Pieces of string. Letters. So many letters. So many letters stuffed in a box. Everybody leaves. Except Melancholy. He stays nearby. He does tricks. He can somersault. He is good with the puppets. He'll stay. The ships will sink after the crest the horizon.

"All the Things are Things to Fear"

#0014. I have always been afraid. I remember, vividly, just so much fear. Every mile brought new dreadful things. Old cities teeming with death. Lakes and oceans waiting to drown you. Monsters around every corner. The spirits of the world, all the living things that live in the things that are seemingly dead would scream to me. I was at their mercy. I have never conquered a fear. I am their subject. I am a citizen of all fears.

"Fifteen"

#00015. Fifteen. Aspects of Alice. Rain gods. Disciples. Sacred cities. Fives and threes.

"Someone to Watch Over Me"

#0016. They are likely there with you now, but you are too logical to see her. She has been by your side for aeons. She has held your hand. Or held your head underwater. Other people take credit for her footsteps. They are in every nest. They listen to your prayers and too many of your dark thoughts. They will abandon you soon. You forget about them too often. I'm afraid if we forget about them, they will leave us. That doesn't bother you, though.

"Goodbye, You Damned Husks"

#00017. Oh to be the abandoned again. The drowned little girl. The frightening eyeless visage from one watery grave or another. She was afraid of drowning. And now she waits for you, rotten in some box. The last thing you might say to her was that you were sorry. You didn't do the drowning, though. The drowning. Why did you feel like you had to apologize?

"A Reminder About the Nightmare"

#0018. It may follow you around. This is not normal. This is not what you should expect. Demand better. Sleep better. Sleep longer. Let this dissipate. Let this disappear. Once, it might have clung to you in wispy remains. It would shake you by the shoulders. It would beg you for its freedom. It may hold tightly to you. This is not normal. Do not allow this to continue. Demand better.

"A Demon Inside the Cover of Your Favorite Book"

#0019. Listen to the piano clink away atonally. This is to disguise the meaning of the melody. It's there if you listen closer. Under the dissonance. There is a beautiful melody. The Demon in the Book cowers at melody. This is what magic is, for real. It's keeping the wolves at bay with the right song. We were lucky to have stumbled across it. Math is just not as effective and keeping these things locked up in the pages where they belong.

"The Moon"

#0020. Athena waits there, quietly strumming her ukulele, looking out over craters, looking out over dusty seas. There will be a gleaming city in the place she taps her foot. The dust catches fire. In a haze of jeweled controlled explosions, there is a new, lonely city born. 

"A Sentry Warning Us to Stay Back, Back, Back Further Than That"

#0021. There is a warning shot you'll hear as you press forward. And every successive movement will lose you ground. They own the high ground. They own the night. You rule the daytime, maybe, while eyes of the world watch, but once the sun goes down, they are in control again. Move backwards. They will not yield. They will not yield and so you will have to.

"Aftermath"

#0022. I cannot stand this world. Every moment in it is like agony. The pressure of the world above pushes down on me until I feel my spine snap. I am alien, here. Alone. The prisoners around me are in a daze. I feel so empty. I feel so isolated. They are moving with purpose, like clockwork toys. But I know they are liars and cheats. I want this to be over so badly.

"Elisabeth at the Mountain"

#0023. All that she wants in the world is the love of her raven haired girl. All that she wants in the world is the love of her raven girl. All that she wants in the world is the love of her raven haired girl. All that she needs is a miracle.

"Itchy in the Red Room"

#0024. He is like me. He wants there, so much, to be some sort of meaning. He has traveled to hell to find it. The Red Room, he thinks, might be a place of meaning. It feels bigger than him. It feels like a place where secrets are entombed. To his naked eyes, there is nothing there. But that only makes the prospect of secrets loom larger. He wonders if he can make secrets appear from his will alone.

"Specimens"

#0025. Here is a glimpse at the things from another world and another time. Vaguely alive, of course, no longer even vaguely. Bottled and pickled. This is what he was looking for. Meaning. The combination of cells and amino acids and that ephemeral quality of what it means to be alive. They are here, stored away, tucked away. Don't tap on the glass.

"A Place of Rottenness"

#0026. Before he came to prison, he would wander streets. Bloody arms. Bloody eyes. The darkness wrapping him up. Cocoon. Drifting little mind. Those nights took him by surprise. Rottenness settles in on the core of him. He looks up and sees decay. He looks up and sees moments draining through gutters. He wants to cry. He locks himself up, instead.

"Take Up Arms in this, Your Holiest Cause"

#0027. Artifacts and holy words are enough to survive in a dreary landscape, but when those things are lost to time, when logic supplants them, then you are stuck with nothing. There is convenience in science. There is quality increased. There is a better, sleeker place. But what drips out like fat from meat is something harder to enumerate. You lost your holy words, and without them, you're unsure of how to progress to the next world. You might even say that that would be impossible.

"Idamae"

#0028. Oh you think you are safe. Idamae will shake you from that notion. She will grab you by your throat and pull out every whisper of hope you might harbor. Look in. Idamae will shake you to your rotten little core. She is ancient. Idamae will shake your bones loose from your tangle of skin.

"Loose Ends Meet Loose Ends"

#0029. This is the morning he woke in prison. Flawed design and failure. Snap the photograph. All walls crumble. All cinder blocks tumble. He woke in prison and felt, maybe, for the first time, safe. Apart from Alice. Apart from Idamae. The prisoner looks around and his cell is quiet and it is safe. He crumples like paper. He will wait here for expiration.

"An Attempt to Build a New World of Logic and Order"

#0030. In ashes colored by bodily humors he draws out the pyramid. In ashes colored by bodily humors he trisects the pyramid into three new pyramids. The equality is pleasing. The order is satisfying. Each branch is its own color. It is a set of prisms. A new world order upon which to build his lonely city. It is derided as mere triangles. He sees it as something more substantial.

"Hurtle"

#0031. Waking up to this every night. The White Void abandonment of flesh. Each supplicant standing on the brink. He or she will hurtle themselves into it. And one by one, they are stripped to the bone, screaming out in agony. The White Void is the End of everything. If I had a time machine, I would hurtle myself to this point to watch the parade of supplicants skeletonized and bared.

"Beauty in Every Cup of Ash"

#0032. Overwhelmed sometimes by the ability of people to just exist. I watch movements under glass magnifiers, like a scientist with bacteria on a glass plate. They move with such distinct need and wonder. Holding the hands of innocent little children. Pausing to bend and pet a puppy. They distract each other with kind words and sweet compassion. And then the ringing in my ears starts up again. Do not worry. Do not worry. Do not worry. All I can do is worry. And even this makes me so sad.

"The Return and the Adjustment"

#0033. Find this. Find you well. Find all of this better than I could have left it. She does not qualify. She does not wonder about you any more. This day I don't give a damn about her. But those are the lies that weasel up my stomach and bore holes into my gut. The ants are running the show now that the maggots have left the scene. Her special day is long gone. I am left behind like always.

"Metamorphosis"

#0034. You saw him in another life, different and more aloof. This version begins to desiccate under the sun of an older world. Gaudy baubles adorn him and he no longer is the ruler or the conquering magistrate. He is gentler now, but with a frightening gaze, hollowed out by years of memory and loss. He would give you his memories if he could. His mouth is gaping and gasping for air. Goodbye, he will say. All of it will expire.

"Unforgivable"

#0035. Each morning it changes a little more and I am afraid of what it will become. Those blurry lines around its maw. I try to capture it. To bring it to life with chalk and with my blood. But I cannot do it justice. I cannot make life. Alice does that. She parades out her puppets. But I cannot.

"This Thing Lives Alone and in Lush Isolation"

#0036. Puppets, is what I said. She is that puppet master. Puppet mistress? She rules over these things with such a heavy hand. She is there, threaded through each world. And each thread... did it just move of its own accord? It startled me. It should be silent. Be still, now. She is there, I repeat now, threaded through each world. And each thread is tied to one limb or another. But he is cut from her. That's what she thinks hell is: isolation. But she doesn't know how envious we can all be.

"Oh, How Fitting it All Becomes"

#0037. I fall in love with the dark undercurrents. Was she sitting next to me on the train that day? My hat in my hands, like a gentleman. The rows of field corn ready to be harvested. I had tears in my eyes. She stared out the window and if I remember right, it was drizzling. She watched the rain drops slide down the glass window pane as the train rocked quietly. Quietly to us, at least. She was next to me and I was in love with her dark undercurrents. She doesn't remember me. She didn't see what I saw later in Wonderland.

"Alive in a Place That Does Not Welcome the Living"

#0038. The littlest things crush me. Under the weight of it, I surrender. Little fragility, that's what does it. I see things innocent and pure and their inevitable torture at the hands of Life just crushes me. Fragility. Little wings. Little eyes. The thing chirps out a beautiful song. Something larger, soon, will cripple it, slit its tiny throat. I want to hold it and provide it some sort of armor from Life. But there's too much of it and I am as helpless as they are.

"Clocks"

#0039. Time is my only real obsession. Time is at the root of all of my fears. The order of it intrigues me and gives me comfort, but I hate the inevitability of it. I hate that it gets to impose its order on me. I hate the idea of a bedtime, or a time to rise. Out in the darkness, I take great comfort in lit windows and all night diners. They are not my kin, I loathe the night owls as much as I do anyone else. But I appreciate that they are there, as unbound by clocks as I want to be.

"New Year's Day"

#0040. It is the promise of a new beginning, but don't misunderstand me: I hate beginnings. I hate them because they gnaw on the bones of endings. And endings? Oh, dear Alice. Oh, dear Alice. Oh, dear Alice, it's the endings that hurt me the most. The twilight comes and I can feel all of time's black tendrils recoil. I began this year, like so many, in my prison cell. In his prison cell. The new tendrils overtake the old and cuff me. I am under their spell. Happy New Year,