Brian K Vaughn - We Stand On Guard

Five graveyard years, crystal black reborn, he listens. Up where gravity fades, zone of salvation, he listens and watches. For her. Through walls and ocean sprays, her warm flesh radiates across the world. He listens. And laments his choice. "He said: You can print money, manufacture diamonds, and people are a dime a dozen, but they'll always need land. It's the one thing they're not making any more of."

Razor point rat death. Diamond encrusted celebrity. Angry and alone. Wishing humanity lost. All while father watching, soothing mother-like. Dirty city needs beat down. Cowabunga. "It's not Donnie who's lost."

Sex sprinkled over death, jokes and push. Reach back, paste past wound. Two steps, take five. If you leave them behind, forever gone. "Somebody blew up our desalination plant?"

Four-colour monstrosities, polymorphous perversities, dashing from hole to hole, and lording it above the rest. Reach over to hard crotch in the dark of the theatre and put it in the ass. Through binocular clear, the depth of depravities, adds up slowly to broken bridge and ruined world. Jack boots to clean. "Hughie, fuckin' twat him one!"

Fleet footfall, jump, hang, glide. Physics is your plaything, Bond. A full-lipped quip in a red dress. A lithe, lip-biting woman who craves your death, pulling you down into the rocks below. Always pulling. As you escape. "Oh, please James, spare me the Freud. I might as well ask you if all the vodka martinis ever silenced the screams of all the men you've killed... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women, for all the dead ones you failed to protect."

These young people, they give me hope. They don't turn their backs and they don't walk away. Not when innocents are caged and shipped and filmed and shot. Not when the alphabet agencies collude with transnational human traffickers to line their shifty pockets. They take aim at the heart of corruption and they pull the trigger. (NOTE: Apologies for garbled sound at the end. Not sure what happened!) "That's really going to clean me out."

She is living in a material world and she is a material girl. "Sea bear!"

Endless streams of words, jumping like fish from the cool flowing river, frolicking and diving, feeding green and grey, leaving readers rolling on floors and hiding their tears. This was the literature of youth, handed over to us by a man who could not grow up. We only miss him now that he is aged, broken, and gone. "Hold it men! Better do as she says!"

Silence, having emptied guts onto mossy rock, meanders through mud. Then, long days of salt, fog and wave, God of death, up from hell, voiced by child, marks his teetering grave, offering life for life, innocence saved. "God brought us out of that mist for a reason. We claim this land in His name."

Hear us Oh Wise Odin, we who hang from the world tree and slither our lives like vines fated along branches. Hear our call. Send seeress and he-witch to wake us from our hatreds. Give us a choice between kindness and kin. So that we might choose what must be done. "Prowl in shadow, slayer of my people. Hide. Even though your brother stole my eyes... I see you."