The Keys to My Karma

Many long years since I put pen to paper
My mind's full of mist or possibly vapour

And so my new poem is bound to be vapid
whether or not the wordflow is rapid.

But what can I tell you, what have I learned?
What have I clung to, what have I spurned?

Fell in love with my self for a decade or three
but came to my senses eventually.

And then I began to notice my flaws
transgressions, obsessions and festering sores.

I felt down, I felt out, and very unhappy
My life seemed so empty, and yes, rather crappy.

Until I remembered the rule that is golden
the one that ensures one is never beholden.

As long as you give as much as you get
you'll be free as a bird, don't ever forget.

HOME

eBooks by Cosmic Rapture
(for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.)

NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS. This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously and grotesquely illustrated.

AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?). We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS. A disturbing repository of quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.

MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS. An unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms, including but not limited to barbaric episodes of herring-flinging and kipper-kissing. A cacklingly bizarre read that may induce fatal hysteria. Not Recommended!

FIENDS & FREAKS and serpents, dragons, devils, lobsters, anguished spirits, hungry ghosts, hell-beings, zombies, organ-grinders, anti-gods, gods and other horse-thieves you wouldn't want to meet in a dark cosmos. Immature Content! Adults Maybe.

HAGS TO HAGGIS. An obnoxious folio featuring a puke of whiskey-soaked war-nags, witches, maniacs, manticores and escapegoats. Not to mention (please don't!) debottlenecking and desilofication, illustrated. Take your brain for a walk on the wild side. Leave your guts behind.

dark sprite

What dark sprite pursues you down those corridors of ice,
that endless, lead to nowhere but the fear within your heart?

Dare you name the creature that has stolen your joy,
and insatiable in its fury ever thirsts for more?

We remember you in the golden time,
before the fall, when your soul untrammelled soared among the stars.

Please don’t go away; don’t leave us only with memories of your fierce dark mind,
the mysteries you create, the paths you tread where none has gone before.

I wrote this poem with a particular person in mind. Over a relatively short space of time, the person's personality and behaviour changed from light to dark, from loving to angry and hostile, from joyful to resentful, from kind to cruel. We've never found out what prompted the change, but we suspect it was a specific episode/incident in that person's life. It has been heartbreaking to witness.

Published in AWAREWOLF and Other Crhymes Against Humanity for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.

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Can't do nothing properly!

One day dad went into McDonald’s for a burger but it was quite busy and he had to wait in line. Also, the teenage staff weren’t very efficient: one was flirting with a boy, another was talking on her phone, and another was just plain slow and useless full stop.

Dad got more and more impatient. He had a terrible hangover and all he wanted was a nice greasy burger to throw to the pain in his gut.

Finally, he got to the head of the queue and grumpily placed his order but was told it wasn’t ready and could he wait a couple minutes. That got him steaming mad.

The story of the story of the magic painting

St. Anthony Plagued by Demons, engraved by Martin Schongauer in the 1480s.

In my harsh and bitter years of toil as an indentured servant in the household of a cruel, demanding master, every day I would arise three hours before the sun. My first action would be to retrieve my bloodstained, battered notebook from its hiding place. Then, in the light of a spluttering, stuttering candle, with the stub of a pencil I had found in the fields, I would write down what I remembered of my dreams the previous night.

On one particularly dark and frozen morning, I began to write about a Magic Painting that was a doorway, a portal. Anyone who looked into the Painting was miraculously transported to another world. And everyone returned from the world of the Painting miraculously healed of all wounds: physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual.

But before I could finish writing the story of the Painting, I was summonsed to my duties, which were many, unvarying, heavy and onerous. Much later, two hours after the sun had died in the arms of day, my body aching and bruised from strenuous labour, I crawled onto my thin and threadbare mattress in the corner of the dark and tiny stall assigned me by my keepers.

Is murdering children absolutely wrong?

Aztec ritual human sacrifice portrayed in the page 141 (folio 70r) of the Codex Magliabechiano. 16th century

Can there be morality without gods? Can there be right and wrong without gods? Can there be values without gods? The answer is “yes” but only in relation to relative not absolute values, relative not absolute right and wrong, relative not absolute morality.

Most if not all values people accept or reject in this life are relative, not absolute. And that is simply because absolute values do not exist in this life, in this world.

Values differ from one culture to the next, one point in time to the next, one person to the next. It is the differences that comprise the relativity of values.

Take murder for instance. Most cultures today would condemn murdering children as "bad" or "wrong". Nowadays most people share values relating to protection and nurture of children. But in many ancient cultures, including the Carthaginian and Aztec cultures, child sacrifice was regularly practised on a large scale (see image above). In the Aztec culture, thousands of children were ritually slaughtered to appease the god Tlaloc. In the Old Testament the god Jehovah asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, saying: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” (Genesis 22:2-8).

The laziest man in history

Once upon a time there was a lazy man, the laziest man in history. His name was Henry Peter Gaines.

He was so lazy that he couldn’t even do the things he enjoyed doing like eating and watching television, because it was just too much effort. He was so lazy that he found it an ordeal to do nothing but mooch around the house all day in his dirty underpants munching pistachio nuts and quaffing fizzy drinks.

As well as being lazy (some would say because of being lazy) he was also very bored — so bored that on weekends and holidays he could think of nothing better to do than to sleep.

Every Friday night, for instance, Henry would go to bed around nine, nine thirty. He would wake up around eight on Saturday morning, doze in bed for an hour or two, then get up and shuffle to the toilet. After that, he would either go back to bed, or make himself a cup of tea then try and decide how to spend the day.

The taste of anger

Anger is an acquired taste, like the taste for blue cheese or witchetty grubs. When you first drink at the Well of Anger, you’re not sure you like it. In fact, you don't like it at all. But you soon learn. And the deeper you drink, the quicker you learn.

Many times have I been drunk on Anger. Many times have I chased that oh-so-delectable feeling of being out of control, of being authorised -- even empowered -- to transgress boundaries I wouldn't even dream of transgressing under calmer, gentler circumstances.

Rage is an even headier brew -- the bitter toxicity of it burns your throat as you gulp it down. Rage makes you feel... fine and hot!

the amulet of ouroboros

Secrets imprison knowledge, constrain understanding, obscure true pathways. Some secrets throb with power, sparkle with the colours of alchemy. Such is the secret known as the Elixir of Eternal Life. Such is the secret known as the Philosopher’s Stone.

Some secrets are tucked away at the back of your mind never to be known on pain of death… secrets carried to the grave and beyond… secrets that curl in on themselves like frightened creatures, furtive and small… hidden in places where the foul miasma of corruption marks the presence of horrors beyond imagining.

Dark knowledge lies pooled in stagnant ponds, where the stench of decay hangs heavy and close. Such is the nature of the Secret that lies forgotten and inert inside the bottom drawer of a dust-covered cabinet concealed behind the cobwebs at the back of a dark benighted chamber behind a heavy bronze-studded oaken doorway at the end of a twisted passage in the Mansion of Unremembered Things.

the pact

Once upon a Frosty Friday
In the merry month of May
Seven sisters swore a secret pact
To bind them night and day

They packed the pact up tight and good
Within a pact-box made of wood
Seven sisters thought that that was that
Or so they thought they understood

Each went about her daily life
In which misogyny was rife
Forgotten was the deadly pact
Until the first became a wife

Their tragic story must be told
Six sisters bought but one was sold ...