<span style="font-size: 150%; line-height: 116%;">UNTITLED NOTEBOOK VI, p22</span><br/><br/><br/><div style="text-align: center;"><a class="postlink" href="http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/6785/notebookinneed2bykonox1.jpg">[ img ]</a></div><br/><br/>Whilst murder was on the mind of the masses, I was in love with William Blake.<br/><br/><br/>Cities burned, I knew this mostly because mine wasn't and in the great, cynical, puppy dog brown eyes of my bed ridden mother this was a rotten mistake and a great fat misfortune!<br/><br/>Since the beginning of the end days she'd picked up a bad habit,<span style="font-style: italic">another one</span>, that scared our deadbeat devout neighbours. In quiet, sweet words she'd often ask me to-- I quote-- 'send the little green brain-eaters our co-ordinates. They missed!'. Better yet, if I wasn't home she'd shriek it at passersby dangling out of her window in just her undies.<br/>If she hadn't been under five foot tall, Asian and with an accent strong enough the twats from school prank called with orders for special fried rice and hung po duck it might've been more of a problem, as it was she was oddly cute. Irritating, but cute.<br/><br/>I distinctly remember that first week of 'invasion' (don't hold me to the term, Aristotle believes there were three definite stages that followed their arrival; invasion, extermination and hunting for sport, human reaction stages were a different ball game. My town was in phase one, denial) where I'd be skipping curbstones and flying past happy lawns (ours was different, very white trash in that we had a suspiciously stained loveseat and a broken lawnmower for decoration) along sides highlighting 'message phrases' and drawing little red hearts in Blake's poetry books, I found myself constantly having to double my footsteps over to the corner market and apologise to the poor sops sharing a road and/or planet with us. Being Mormon they'd SMILE it off wide enough you could count their teeth, â€œOh it takes all kinds!â€ and kindly sidestep my mothers mental illness and my clearly rebellious atheism.<br/>Suspiciously pleasant people. A little bit... oblivious?<br/>Perhaps.<br/>If there were aliens in disguise, I reckoned I'd found 'em.<br/><br/>The only other way I knew the game was afoot was in the media. One image caught my eye in particular, it should have brought a sense of terror and realism crashing home, but looking at things through glass was like flicking through catalogues, it distanced you further, like the event could only exist in ink and pixels...  There it was, Manhattan alight, the colour of ash and bone, spattered with dead leaf orange flames in the pale morning light, Saturday sixteenth November, superimposed on the dancing static, the uneven patchwork of television screens in the window of the pawn store...<br/>And me chewing bubble gum...<br/><br/>Someone was crying on the other side of the street. It wasn't mourning sobs, but little bursts of hysterics and broken noises. They were punched into her high speed sentences like lost punctuation, making fragments of her panic, whilst what was left was gummed up where her fingers had hidden between her lips.<br/>I turned on my heel expecting, well, I'm not sure what, but not the fourty-something old dame, sensible shoes, nostalgic scarlet lips, dear younger friend trying to calm her, that tottered back and forth on the spot.<br/>Her daughter was there. Herdaughterwasthere!<br/><br/>Don't get me wrong, I wasn't naÃ¯ve by nature, but where I'd grown up, grown ups didn't cry. I was fifteen and looking after my mother, so they weren't the be all and end all, the steely backbone of my existence, but mum was apathetic and the only adults I'd seen in tears were in crappy soap shows that I poked fun of on Fridays gone seven-thirty.<br/>(I liked to remember things like program planners, somehow hanging on to the pointless shit seemed to earn you social bonus points. Seven years down the line society dealt in information, it was our currency and the value of good memory-jerkers went through the roof!)<br/>So seeing this... old girl bawling like a baby, face contorted, bony fingers clawing... it ate a hole in the lining of my belly and dropped lead girders there. I ran back full tilt, wishing, most of the way, that I'd stopped to comfort her.<br/>She died three weeks later anyway.<br/><br/>So did my mother.<br/><br/>So did the furniture on our lawn.<br/><br/>So did our lawn as we followed in the footsteps of Manhatten...<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel <br/>And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides <br/>And a dark wind blows <br/>The government is corrupt <br/>And we're on so many drugs <br/>With the radio on and the curtains drawn <br/><br/>We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine <br/>And the machine is bleeding to death <br/><br/>The sun has fallen down <br/>And the billboards are all leering <br/>And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles <br/><br/>It went like this <br/><br/>The buildings tumbled in on themselves <br/>Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair <br/><br/>The skyline was beautiful on fire <br/>All twisted metal stretching upwards <br/>Everything washed in a thin orange haze <br/><br/>I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful.. <br/>These are truly the last days" <br/><br/>You grabbed my hand and we fell into it <br/>Like a daydream or a fever <br/><br/>We woke up one morning and fell a little further down <br/>For sure it's the valley of death <br/><br/>I open up my wallet <br/>And it's full of blood </span><br/><br/><br/><div style="text-align: center;">---------------------                  ------------------                   ---------------------</div><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>((OOC: Meet Che! =Dm<a class="postlink" href="http://i43.tinypic.com/f83yu.jpg">http://i43.tinypic.com/f83yu.jpg</a>m))