For all these years,
One lesson learnt:

The Line:
Pioned.
The ethereal days:
Forgotten.
The stones and the grass:
Pioned.
Every vision, henceforth,
A mark.

You are a venerable student of The Line,
Why not see it as Peter Paul Rubens saw it?
Why not see it as Osman saw it?
Why not see it as Rembrandt saw it?
Why not see it as old Blake saw it?
Why not see it as Sandro saw it?
Why not see it as Hermes Trismegistus saw it?
Why not see it as old Palmer saw it?
Why not see it as Marc Chagall saw it?

A vision of The Line,
As the old masters saw it.

Come,
Let us sit.

Let us burn firewood.

Let us practice The Line within chambers of the mind.

If you remain studious, deep into the night,
You shall hold the mark.
You shall part the waters.
You shall move between the swells.
You shall till the earth,
Striking iron against iron,
Creating new Lines!
And when you master the six realms of sight,
And wear the seven, sacred heads in the afterlife,
Remember Hermes Trismegistus
And those who stand at the centre of The Line.

The Human dream became the Martian dream as we slept on our Mars-bound voyage. We could see colonies amidst landscapes pristine, teeming with strange Martian plants discovered post-bloom.

The Martians were adorned with ivory carvings and had surrounded themselves with esoteric paintings of marauding faces. They spoke in strange tongues, switching between Martian and another almost incomprehensibly clandestine tongue of barbaric intonation. Although they clutched sharp, ivory spears with a fierce resolve, they remained docile in our presence, and told us of the vivid dreams they had engaged in as a group prior to our arrival; abstract dreams, tinged with fragmented images of insemination and visitation by the Mars Moth-Man— he who was oil-funded and had been delivering concrete messages to the people of Mars ever since the first settlers had arrived in the distant past.

But, once we had truly set foot upon Mars— from outside the strange realm of dreams which lives solely within our collective mind's eye— we could not have foretold that our shared dream was revealed to be a sprawling wasteland of infertile soil.

The surface remains intact.
The heart remains intact.
Each culminating inch of frame and cell,
Vowed upon and burnt through to the cinder,
Is now frozen, ashen mass.
Yet, the mere image is once again—
It is truly built upon—
And, even with no ember, remains intact.

A low frequency
From the depths of the factory
Stirs old memories within the ageing workforce…

In the greenhouse,
Pruning the greenhouse walls—
Producing strawberries and raspberries at a considerable rate—
Noticing the days begin and restart,
Bathed under LED light;
Ever endeavouring to
Move closer and closer towards
Enlisting in repetitive thoughts,
And enlisting in repetitive thoughts,
And enlisting in repetitive thoughts.

It was as though we were cast in stone.
The weary ones knelt at the shore.
A fitting end to the journey,
Yet our souls still danced on the old, iron roads.

It was the weak among us
Who gazed at Medusa—
Suckling on the serpents of her head—
Fearing within our iron hearts
A cold and meandering dread:
To be left in stone on the old, iron roads.

It had been many weeks since I had seen Tokyo, and my gentle rowing would lead me back to Tokyo, back to a semblance of a piece of mind.

They had been frying the fish and chicken in the same oil at the local chip shop.

O! what is this? That was not chip!

We shall echo the points that scrape the skies
Above the streams of Wonder City.
On the streets below, men shall shift through time,
Watched on by soaring concrete;
And in the steaming sewers strewn beneath
These streets— O Wonder City!—
Rats shall run the labyrinth of the sewers
To find the traces of a world
Before the life of Wonder City.