Stuart Buck

the golden ratio (2+2=5)

by Stuart Buck

Monday 12th December 2016 3:14 pm

I spent the night of the crash speaking to Morpheus

Telling him how your bones rattled

Not like the psithurism of the trees in winter

But like a hessian sack full of river smooth rocks

Not tectonically, nothing as monumental

But like sticks brittle from frost

A personal earthquake

Marrowed pins pushing through your beautiful sack of organs

I told him how in the halcyon days before you started drinking

You had reached into my mouth with slender digits that tasted like orchids

Coaxed my willing tongue from my mouth and pulled

Pulled until it wound from my chapped lips

Down to my lap

Endlessly spooling out of my mouth

While you stubbed cigarettes on my arms

How we laughed

How we cried

They say everything is numbers

That when we die the equation changes

Ever so slightly

That the binary of the world shifts

Almost without a trace

But it is there

If you look hard enough

You are sat in a car

011 00 0100100 001

The rain lashes on the windscreen

011 1100110 0010 0011001

The lights from the truck seem like neon reflected in puddles

00110 0110 001110 0110101 00010

Th01110ere is 011a sou0011100nd

Li01101ke11 a s010110cre1010am

0011 0101 00110

001 1001010 1001011100

Oh0101 go11100d I c10101an se11010101e yo110101ur e1010yes

Yo010110ur e110101yes 0101are so00 sc10101ared

The10101n l1010011ights

Meta10101l sho1101oting t1010hroug10101h skin

Bo10101nes s10101hooti110101n10101g out

Bl10101ue 10101blac100101k blu101010e b1010lack

You ne000101ver ma10001010de th101010e amb101010ula01010nce

01010101 001 000011

11000 11000 10110

110000101 1010001

01101001 011

0100001

0110

◄ see, saw, seen, sworn

breaking an azeotrope with unidirectional pressure manipulation ►

Comments

Stu Buck

Thu 15th Dec 2016 07:32

thanks everyone for your nice comments. i really appreciate them. im actually going to tinker with this, not with the content but with the layout. i had hoped for a more graceful, flowing end with more space in between the words, numbers. but i am happy you all got so much out of it.

suki spangles

Thu 15th Dec 2016 02:54

The last verse is spectacular Stu. I read the last verse through a few times. Genius. Thanks for sharing. Audacious, and it works.

Tom Harding

Tue 13th Dec 2016 23:23

this is an awesome tumbling adventure, great

raypool

Tue 13th Dec 2016 17:29

A trip where everything spirals out of control and an impetus of contrasts like the scene from 2001 with the flattening colour spectrum landscape. Powerful, persuasive yet confusing, Stu. Rich veins continue to spill out of your mind!

Ray

elPintor

Tue 13th Dec 2016 00:07

A fantastically clever spectacle, Stu. I read this first at work and am now sitting down to go over it again. The last verses remind me of broadcast interference..a blinking in and out to digital space. Really great stuff.

elP

ps
I wondered briefly if you received any inspiration at all from salting--ah, cryptography and technojargon. Probably not, but it just came to me that it would be a handy device if the occasion called for it.

Noetic-fret!

Mon 12th Dec 2016 23:46

Hello Stuart,

I was a soldier once, I had a very particular and specific number that went alongside my rank, but I'll come to that in a moment.

I like this but at the same time I find it frightening. I used to drive from Dorset to Manchester very frequently when I was in Barracks and not overseas on Operations. I was a bit of a dare devil of a driver, and sometimes the lads I took home to Manchester would get the train back to Dorset. I had a Toyota Celica 2.0ST. A poor mans sports car back then. After a certain amount of time overseas I returned home one particular day back in the late 80's early 90's. I was absolutely knackered but once again found myself driving North to be with the woman I was madly in love with.

I was tired though, very tired, and found myself falling asleep at the wheel on the M5. Then, after some time I came too from being asleep while driving at 80mph in the middle lane. To this day I have no recollection of that time I was asleep. I don't know how long I was out of it, but i sensed it was some time.

Sometimes, to this day I feel like I have died. There were many incidents like that that were perplexing. I also skydived in the Army too. One exercise prior to deploying to The Gulf back in 1990, I was in Cyprus. One night i had a drunken fight with another soldier over a stupid incident at a bar in Ayia Napa. A couple of days later I found myself going into a flat spin on a 20 second delay skydive. I passed out, and couldn't remember pulling my D ring that deployed my chute. I could quite easily have gone into unconsciousness as a result of injuries sustained in the fight, yet, my rig deployed and I found myself coming too beneath my chute.

Then there is the numerous occasions that had me thinking I have been bumped by a foe, and there is also the times that through PTSD, I have tried to take my own life. All in all there are many occasions I can relate back to that see me questioning on a daily basis whether I am alive. But i say to myself..........'I think, therefore I am!'

It doesn't always work though. After military service i tried to undertake a HNC in Electronics and Electrical Engineering. Part of the course was to do conversions between Hexadecimal, Decimal and Binary number systems. I used to be able to do it really easily, but then mental ill health kicked in in a big way and I became severely disabled.

To this day, I don't know whether I am alive or dead. And to top it all, you are identified in some instances in the military by your last 3 numbers.

Reading your poem says a lot to me about death, and it's impact on others. Particularly witnesses to accidents, and I wonder, are we all part of a matrix where death is never real???

One doesn't really know! But still this piece is a good read.

And my military number............24729001.

Stay well blue.

Mike

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