Lines straight and lines long
From ancient history they're hanging on
For what purpose held is unknown
But certainly some theories have grown
Lines that are curved and lines in shapes
Could be a calendar month, or day
These lines have fingers and are lines with eyes
Yet they can only be seen from the sky
Which is where another theory is born
They are lines of the stars and a map of their lawn
The lines of a belt and lines of a plough?
It's plausible, but not sure quite how
The lines that point are the lines that are straight
And they have a more likely purpose made
Linking Nazcas to a rare touch of rain
The lines spread water on the desert plane
These lines have a reason and these lines answer why
But who knows if that's where the answers lie
Lines lead to more lines and they touch as mates
Curved line, the picture line, links to next by a straight
So shows reason being when lay as lines in their time
But now these lines; lines curved, lines straight and all
Are protected for present day to view more

Splashed milk coated the pitched skies,
millions of galaxies arrayed
in glorious splendor
spun above our campfire.

We watched glowing embers
swirling up into infinity
& we spoke about the universe,
joked about aliens & such.

And with the viewing
of ancient-lines the following day,
we realized some things
may be real
& no laughing matter.

It's amazing the things
we can discuss under
the sacred heavens,
full of life,
some perhaps,
even extra-terrestrial.

Crossing contrails looking down
At the plains of Peru
A negative image of Nazca's lines

Copyright 2016
Richard L Ratliff

Pavement where
an egg shell should not be

that perfect shape
fractured with spider leg cracks

across the surface
of its world

how did they get there?
those Nazca Lines?

And the amount of discarded shoes seems to be multiplying each day,

the busted boot on the traffic island
its been there for weeks

a plimsoul
childs shoe

strangely,
they're all left footed

is there significance in this?

I look for patterns in everyday things,

TV Schedules
wallpaper

colouring books
Sudoku squares

floor tiles
Tube maps

football scores

I keep looking for clues
like a retired detective who just can't let go

He was born in the rendezvous of a clap of thunder
and a shooting star, fully grown and bigger than
a mountain. When they asked him who he was,
he said, A Wanderer, and when they asked where
he came from, he said, She left me, and no more.

But he was ravenous, ate splintering trees with all
their monkeys and birds and lizards, then washed
them down with murky rivers teeming with fish and
frogs and crocodiles. Soon the once-green valley was
a bony desert, and still he wanted more, so he cracked
his teeth on salty boulders, then swept his fingers
across the soil, creating massive tributes to his hunger-
fueled ruin in the soil and licking the grit off of each
digit, savoring the bitter zest of his destruction.

And when his throat was caked, they pointed to
the ocean, and he ran—an earthquake—to the
gloomy deep. He made himself a bed down there
of slime and old shipwrecks, slurping squid
and jellyfish until the day that she comes back.

Reading about the paranormal,
The unknown,
Hearing of ghosts and spirits --
It hurts.

The otherworldly
Stirs up the painful memories
Of you.
I'd rather feel
Horror and fear
Anything else but this.

The demonic
The satanic
Can do little else to me
That you haven't already done.

Ghostly visitations,
Hauntings,
UFOs and their merry little abductions --
They all remind me of you
Still lurking my nights

When people trade stories
About aswang and demonic possession,
Cattle mutilations in the middle of nowhere,
I get chills
Thinking of you.

You are as inscrutable
As the Works of the Old Men
As the Nazca Lines
As the Coseck Circle.
Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript
Is nothing compared to the puzzle of you.

Listening to UVB-76
Max Headroom
The Bloop
Rebecca Black
Makes more sense than listening to you.

Unmask Jack the Ripper
Explain the Toynbee Tiles
Solve the Taman Shud Case
And I can solve you.

It's far less taxing, really
And more merciful on my limited cognitive faculties.

Bring me the Mongolian death worm
And Spring-heeled Jack
The Wandering Jew
The Dover Demon
And the Am Fear Liath Mòr
Before I decide
That sympathy and love
Are more that mere legends
Roaming the windswept wastes
Of your icy, shriveled heart,
Closer to reality than cryptozoology.

Abandoned cities and colonies
Only remind me of how abruptly and senselessly you left,
Leaving me a decrepit mystery of ruins

You believed in Atlantis
I said it was Plato's illustration --
His Republic,
Like Augustine's City of God.

Perhaps this was why our Atlantis
Sank to the ocean floor --
We were just good on paper.
Or maybe we started slaughtering
Noble half-breeds and changelings wholesale
Out of a misplaced sense of pride,

Or our union was unholy
And rankled the senses of the Sovereign
Who deemed it an offense
And thus condemned it,

Or perhaps this was an act of mercy
The equivalent of what Lovecraft said
The most merciful thing
Is the inability of the human mind
To correlate all the ******* he encounters
And has to deal with
On a daily ******* basis.

That the solid waves of mindfuck,
Pushing and heaving like tides,
Emanating from little ole you,
Would have finished off
Whatever was left of my mind.

You believed in ******* everything
But us.
Lost continents
Fox spirits
Psychometry
Were-boars
The ******* occult
No problem
All that which science cannot quantify nor qualify
You embraced
Yet you ran from me
And into the arms of another.

You claimed to be an empath
So tell me
How do I feel
After what you did to me?

You tell me.

And isn't empathy
Supposed to make people more compassionate?

The **** is this, then?

These stories
Of yetis and apparitions
Poltergeists and precognition
Used to intrigue and thrill me as a child.
When I grew up
I started ignoring them.
You put meaning back into the whole thing,
However insipid.

I was a skeptic.
You walked the line
Between the physical and supernatural
At least
If what you said is to be believed.

You were nothing but a specter,
Luring another hapless soul
Out into the barren wastelands
With a *** of stew,
Just beyond reach,
To its doom.

You're nothing but a ghost
Of an angry girl
Murdered by the cruelty
Of your parents and the church
And now I'm one of your victims.

Now as I start to see
Faint vistas of the supernatural,
They start to run
With memories of you
Until I can no longer
Distinguish one from the other.

So I'll ignore the glimpses
Of lurid phantasmagorias
And lock myself in
My world of letters and literature
Of armlocks and flying elbows
Of video games and liquor
I will pretend your world never existed.

Please, please keep out of mine.

Urban sprawling anaconda veins
Pump through concrete jungle rivers
Into civilization's heart of darkness
Metropolis excess electric existence

O mighty, tiny heart,
One thousand blessed beats a minute,
beating time, beating gravity, beating death
O mortal metronome
ticking seconds into that certain future
Little wonder Aztec gods bow,
and Nazca lines testify to your
glorious, thirsting, bursting
hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm of life

now still

An opening closed you could not see.
Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm

O purple thud
O feathery fall from grace
cradling leaf and Gulliver’s hand,
hourglass of heartbeats run out,
lived and gone as never was
Are we responsible for the things that die
because of things they cannot see
things we cannot see
things we cannot

(The Nazca Lines  are a series of large ancient geoglyphs stretching for miles in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. One portrays a hummingbird.)

Clay baked, brown, red and white
In white hot heat
Points to sky, raincloud free
And sinking off into the hills
It goes on and high.
Weak legs on strong lines
Chalked toes and dry mouths,
Breaking their belief
Shattering the smitherins into the atmosphere
In hope the gods will weep.

well, it's definitely an end of something, never mind the linear interpretation of an end of time, considering that time moves in waves, ripples, bends with space, caused by two black holes merging donkey's years ago; but i woke into a history of the world, where after centuries of power broking, power monopoly on literacy everyone can write as much as they want, and whatever they want, we're reduced to looking at the "sacred scarcity" of certain books with bewilderment, as to how so little written could have swayed so many years; like the whitewashing donning in sheep clothing the crucified one, probably like whitewashing someone "innocent" sitting an electric chair... something must have swayed them, i'm still putting my bet on that oddity that was the star of bethlehem... gold / could have been silver that was given to judas... myrrh / have you scene the thorns on those bushes? / crown of thorns... frankincense / got no lead on that one expect the aroma of catholic churches... but i have something on the symbolism of the tetragrammaton being vaguely represented by the four canonical gospels like some beautiful blasphemy.*

well, i mean the existential stress for ambiguity,
i get that sartre went a bit too far and made one
word ambiguous to begin with, esp. when i poised
to make eschatology the deserving
word of ambiguity, but i agree with sartre
on the point: negation as a source of bad faith,
which can only precipitate in going
backwards and reaching a definition
of good faith, associated with descartes
and doubting -
so this ambiguity derived from eschatology,
as based on the world:
a hindu scholar said once that man is
capable of recording and keeping about
10,000 years of memorable history,
after 10,000 humanity does a massive
censorship spring-clean, or ridding itself
of the past, in some way...
currently we're working from the epic
of gilgamesh, or the upanishads, or some
other ancient text... after that we have
this massive abyss where there fossils,
cups and plates, rusty knives, massive lizard
bones... drawings in caves of gazelles
and mammoths and generally nothing
of intellectual worth... or at least nothing
relevant to our current surroundings of warm
houses, the electricplace (new fireplace)
where people congregate and get puffed up
on news from around the world amongst
other things...
so what i'm trying to reference, given with
the times, is the "eschatology" of trying
to revive the roman empire... air strikes in
what would be ancient carthage...
the destruction of roman artefacts elsewhere...
what i mentioned as human censorship
of past history, a blunt and therefore blatant
desire to hide something - a denial rather
than a doubt -
so with syria... it looks like this happened:
sunni muslims believe(d) that isa (jesus)
would descend on mount afeeq, on a
minaret in damascus (syria)... something about
praying... something about some evil
figure being sought and engaging with...
and 700,000 drowning syrians in the aegean later...
something something... the revised revival
of the roman empire having actually moved
into once unclaimed germanic lands,
and further, past the old borders of dacia,
rhaetia, norica, etc.
or perhaps the ancient voices are just shouting:
why is israel playing european football
teams and can compete in the euro championship
and we're not allowed, don't you remember
when claudius, nero and constantine watched
syrian gladiators fighting the carthageans in
the ancient arenas? you don't want us to join...
fine... we'll have ourselves a civil war.
all of a sudden there was a sharp divide in
rhetoric: only about 5% of turkey is in europe...
yep... the bosphorus... after that it's asia...
god almighty... first they divide the earth for
vanity and glory and some idealism...
then the realm of hades reveals itself in a division
as it was: gorda plate, pacific plate, eurasian plate,
iranian, arabic, cocos and nazca plate, etc.

6 sides
Latent enabler
Counterpoint to truth, amorphic
Dada to life
Callous Birth
Islands dripped in collagen
Mystic, effortless life
Tempests laden iota in tune
Riven
Licked flat, obtuse
Crescent stench
Pagan cells
Hazard the thought
Pick the Atlantic cherry
Reach further than comfort
Pushed & consumed
Spirited paste
Jesuit told in spheres
Lament interest, matted quill
Totem, Saxon tribe
Inflections of hearsay
And Swastikas on parade
Guilt of the blacksmith, undecided
The arms of tablets
Ashtrays & tropospheric light
Another page turned
Capsules filled with perfume
Loose skin lost in relics
Temporal lobe
Cautioned indignant
Pardon the prose
Sonnets dissolved in ethanol
Caricatures of the fleeting
Of our cities last broadcast
Absorbed by times gone
Glittered pestilence
Canceling subordinates, powdered Semtex
Soup of the sewer
Lift the butcher above your head
Nazca lines
Suborbital
Silk screen with *****
Horizontal qualm toward revulsion
Incursion
Calm, cued and cubed
Lab coats coated in pharmaceuticals
Base compound, ionic bond
Covalent CNS
Sympathetic vibration
Default to nature
To theorise movement
Agitate intolerance, turbulence
Beautiful thought
Calculate causality
Passenger of licked lips
Token to latex
Croft in ear, to taste
Unlaced tips, rings of halothane
Bliss
Intrigued with obscurity