love letters to genghis khan

by W.M. Butler

i have seen history unmade
the facts changed
blind nationalism
from the so called
young and educated

i hide out in this city
with a “chinese” heart
and a beard like marx

a dizzy mix of hyper-capitalism
and mao suits

red-letter days
blame
written on walls

replaced with
brand names

i’ve locked myself in
for national day
writing love letters
to ganghis khan

i have a carton
of double happiness
and the bloody
carcass of a panda
shoved under my
mattress

if they want me
they can come
get me.

Groupthink – Bedtime Stories

HAL loves the little children. Like Michael Jackson with a court-ordered chaperone.

Revenge of the Butterfly – by Ginger wRong Chen
Shanghai vixen Ginger wRong strips down to her melancholy soul in this cynical fantasy/fairy tale.

Willy and His Two Friends – by David Hampson
It’s Sunday night and the kids are ready for bed. You tuck the little angels in and sit yourself down at respectable distance that is non-intrusive and politically correct. You read them their favorite bedtime story: Willy and His Two Friends. The kids fall to sleep with visions of Bolliker and Balliker dancing through their dreams. You sick bastard. This is guaranteed to make you laugh, and if you happen to be a Limey, probably for days on end.

Left Behind – by Angel
A touching short about a little angel from HAL’s own Angel as she curls up in the mind of a Chinese child. The endearing narrator longs for his parents who work to build a better future for him in distant Suzhou while Grandma and Granddad care for him. Why can’t they visit as often as the postman?

The Magic Dumplings – by Paul Kurowski
A comitragic story of Little Jin and his best friend Timmy as they eat Mr. Dingdong’s MSG laden magic dumplings, mixing humour and fantasy on a distinctly Chinese backdrop.

Wormhole

by Owsley Beck

We punched through the ether with a pop. The decelerator was scratch, we had to do a cold stop with full shields too the hull of the ship. The Rømer buffers groaned as we slid her on her side to bounce of the rings of planetary entity Gobi 8. The virtual lag of the trailing ether lit up with a noxious green flare and everything smelt like scorched atmosphere. We had to strap ourselves in with Metal rubber running tubes from the core of the ship, metal rubber is an indestructible polymer that was invented in the early 21^st century. It was those tubes that saved our lives, held us in when nothing else would, when space-time started to layer and form rips in the fabric. That and a shit load of “Whip-It Good” whipped cream substitute smeared over our entire bodies. It was that whipped cream substitute that stopped us from melting, stopped our flesh being flayed from our very bones. The heat of doing a cold stop out of light speed is never good and that little Whip-It trick had saved my life and the lives of my crew on more than one occasion.

So there we were drifting on the dark side of Gobi 8 a dead planet in a twisted system.  The whole place was off kilter causing the outlaying planets to start a slow spiraling drunken stagger out of the dying suns pull. The ether was heavy here which is why we choose this place to come out of light speed. The ether along with the punch drunk spin of the planets causes a slowdown of any object moving within thier directional arc. It was a dangerous procedure to be sure but it was doable. The problem actually didn’t lay within doing a cold stop but with getting back out of the system and it’s swaggering sloth like effect that it had on anything that had the misfortune of ending up inside. The whip creamed substitute would help with that. It would help us move at a more reasonable pace so that we could be about repairing any damage to the ship and it’s navagational computers. What we had to worry about was making sure that the ship didn’t tear up when we sparked the Omega Drive. The wave that the drive omitted wouldn’t be slowed down by the ether and pull, as nothing can stop light but the ship itself may well be deboned like chicken due to the lag leaving a neatly skinned skeleton of a ship floating forever through the blackness as little cream covered human-cicles bobbed through eternity or until eventually they drifted into a new system and fell into the gaping furnace of some alien sun or rouge planet’s atmosphere, but as any spacefaring man knew the possibility of something as small as your won puny sack of skin hitting anything out here was like winning a Katherian sea camel race; possible but not likely. Space is a cruel bitch mistress.

The only chance we had of getting out of here was to harness enough ether with our tractor beam then funnel it into the Rutherford Disks, from their we could theoretically reverse the threads turning our Omega Drive into Alfa Drive thus creating a temporary wormhole that we could escape through. This is of course is all theoretical but we have little choice at this point. Fuck it. I give the order and the crew jumps into action. Reports start coming in from around the ship, the damage isn’t as bad as it could be, judging from what is being said we should be ready to attempt forming a wormhole within the next two hours. I inform the crew to lather themselves up in as much Whip-It Good as they can so that they can work at top speed. The sooner we are out of this god forsaken system the better. The hell if I’m going to be stuck here in the armpit of outer fucking space for a millinium.

The crew is tip top, they manage to get the ship in working order in record time. I give word to the helmsman to search our vacinaty for tears in space-time. She finds one just off starboard. I give the go-ahead to start the tractor-beam to start pulling in the ether. The engenieers had managed to rig up a funneling system using some outdated firing capsules and some duct tape. Those box heads can be handy in a pinch.

Groupthink – Sci-fi

1. HAL may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. HAL must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. HAL must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The Elastic Dawn – by Estel Vilar
HAL newcomer of the week set out to transform the history of the universe, and decipher the will of a demiurge, the SH World Financial Center bows to the ground with the sound of a million neighing horses. Where will mankind hide from his own creation gone organic?

2288 (Chapter one) – by NCF
All systems go in this teaser short featuring a post-apocalyptic Shanghai, a Fujian’ese flight mechanic and a man named Joe who doesn’t know it, but is about to save the universe.

The Sunstorm lectures: ‘On late isolation era conceptions of chance’ – by Björn Wahlström
HAL’s’ resident intellectual force majeur derides Einstein and the very theory of quantum gravity (cue laughter).

Wormhole – by Owsley Beck
Owsley and his tight crew get stuck in outer space with nothing but a faulty Omega Drive and “Whip-it-good” whipped cream.

Groupthink – Sex and loneliness

The act and the emotion. Entirely unfamiliar to HAL. But not to these guys.

Untitled Project – by Owsley Beck
“…digging like some sort of virus i have cleverly managed to take control of a long forgotten corner of her mind she stands in front of a full-length mirror wearing a pink go-go dress red panties pulled down and stretched tight over her thighs a full blush to her cheeks her mouth open breathing…”

the recipe – by Ling’Ling
sex and loneliness for dummies

Lighthouse Beacon – B.
There will be blood.  On the dance floor. Blood.  And an angel in a silver dress.

Untitled Project

by W.M. Butler

*when this american woman whose thighs are bound in casual red cloth comes thundering past my sitting place like a forest-burning mongol tribe the city is ravished and brittle buildings of a hundred years splash into the street and my eyes are burnt for the embroidered chinese girls already old and so small between the thin pines on these enormous landscapes that if you turn your head they are lost for hours standing in a hotel room in san diego with her hand pressed between her legs dreaming of the man that i would one day become but for now for her i do not fully exist i remain faceless i am nothing but pixilated poetry on a screen  a pseudonym a stranger that she has yet to meet digging like some sort of virus i have cleverly managed to take control of a long forgotten corner of her mind she stands in front of a full-length mirror wearing a pink go-go dress red panties pulled down and stretched tight over her thighs a full blush to her cheeks her mouth open breathing i have yet to listen to the shallows and squalls of your voice  the ebb and tide of your words these things do not exist for me they are only rumors that have not yet formed lips teeth or tongue they have not yet mastered the breath of air or speech they have not yet been born you are a ghost a trick of the light you are a sliver buried in my palm you are a photograph of a stranger you are a bruise on my arm that will not fade a correspondence incomplete letters become words caught by wires sent speeding across the pacific ocean until video the patron saint of long distance lovers captures our likenesses and beams them over invisible webs so that words tempered by tongues served cold over the telephone or with qwerty little keys in black and white start to flake away on the back of lust bursting in technicolor dreams her thighs round and smooth and open i began to thaw my fingers recede leaving their invisible history across the fall of your lower back i get tangled in the hollow and trip on the rise star clusters like pin pricks or one thousand blinking eyes forge feathers where bone once cried speaking of evolution in the night a day away a plane was boarded an ocean was crossed until she stood amidst a great undulating crowd of chinese arriving home from overseas she found me before i found her i gathered her up to take her to place her under the harsh light of the hotel’s bathroom my hands moved with chivalry though one could not place blame if a wayward finger accidently grazed across the milk pale plain of her belly the place where hair hit shoulders secret places that have never felt another’s touch or those that have gathered the dust of years spent lonely she too begins to thaw as i lift her from the cold floor into the hot bath water which tints her skin scarlet for the duration of our first night spent teaching each other what hands and lips are for until my mornings out number yours by one my nights cut deep and long frigid against the back breaking crack of winter a funeral song a march a broken ivory comb pulled through hair one hundred times smoothing out the kinks the chinks of armor rusted gutted out with old blood old lovers wail quaking in the cold ground where i placed them where i laid them down to die we are the same yet we sleep at different times you keep me hidden i let you roam i wear you across my shoulders and in the eyes you keep me in a box you let me out sometimes let the ghost of my hands move beneath your blouse flush and rough stranded and disenchanted in aisle 5 of the supermarket i dance her beneath the high blue sky ceilings of the departures terminal as rare sunlight rumbles through monolithic glass walls i fancy myself a lover and a thief or a fool of the highest degree she leaves with jet streams trailing behind her bourn up on the shoulders of time zones i stalk through the herds of lovers and families whispering final good-byes like a hunter wearing his pray displayed across his shoulders later she tells me that she wept all the way back across the pacific ocean all the way back to the desert were she had started from only to find herself in the grocery store a can of peas in her left hand my voice strung with telephone wires burrowing beneath her dress.

*When this American Woman
By Lenard Cohen
Appears without permission

Groupthink – Fantasy

Frodo! NOOOOOOOOOooooo!!! Yes motherfuckers! HAL rocked everybody’s favorite genre this week with a venture down fantasy lane, and there’s nothing Gandalf and Dumbledore can do to stop us.

Xiao La and the Demon – by Ling’Ling
Part 1 of many more to come we hope. What is the grey little demon feeding Xiao La, besides goat testicles and other standard shaokao ingredients? What exactly is goblin diplomacy, and what role will our little heroine have to play in the great wars to come?

Flight of Fancy – by Betty P
HAL is hiring Astrid Lindgren (that’s right mfs) to write the screenplay, and Cameron is begging us for the movie rights. We’re riiiiiiiiiiiich!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Suitcase

W.M. Butler

Susan,

Buried twelve feet below the rich black soil of Battle River you will find a blue cardboard suitcase.  The belly of this suitcase holds eight years worth of my writing, consisting mostly of poetry written between 1996 and 2004. The majority was type written on once clean white paper using my ancient green Remington, though what effect years spent suspended in the fertile earth of that river valley has done to that suitcase, to those words is a question that cannot be answered until it is dug up. If it can be dug up and found under the crumbling remnants of a one hundred year old foundation that once belonged to a one hundred year old farmhouse.

If the suitcase ever surfaces, if the ground gives it up, if the suitcase climbs out of the murky depths of what was once most assuredly a vast ocean before an ice age or two had its way with that little piece of land; before mountains scraped their bullying stone feet across what is now a sea of grassland. If it does come up for air again if you open it, it will yield those pages like the whale delivering Jonah to the shores of Nineveh. Though I doubt the words held within my battered old suitcase could inspire such as the word of God inspired an entire great city of people in worship to Ishtar the goddess of Love, War and Death, Daughter to Anu to cover themselves in ash and repent. Nor could those words serve as Jonah did to inspire the foundations of the Bahá’í faith nor lead a man like Bahá’u’lláh to become a latter day prophet holding his place with Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha.

What those words might inspire is now beyond me and is of no consequence, as I am now dead, as I must assuredly be if you are reading this. What you do with them is up to you. How, if you choose to distribute them is up to you. If you wish to leave them where they lay that again it is of no consequence to me. Do as you will but if you do find them and you do read them I hope they at least lead you to understand me, to know me a little better then you did before I left.

Inside that box you will be introduced to the people that I knew, the people that where apart of my life. You will learn of a time when I did not exist for you. What I was, who I was before I met you is a mystery as I had only ever told you pieces, fragments of that life and never did I lay out my history in a coherent timeline for you to pick over with shoulders hunched in serious study late at night, eyes straining under the nakedness of a sixty watt bulb. You know only what I told you, what I let you see. Inside that box you will find who I was and how I became the man you knew up until such a short time ago. If you read what you find, you will meet four old lovers and my dead grandfather. You will learn of a night deep in the biting teeth of winter where I almost died under the rumbling chaos of a freight train and how I was delivered flat on my back beneath the constellations spinning, embraced by a bed of the whitest snow. You will read tales of piracy and daring do involving my father and brothers. You will be introduced to a woman I never had the chance to love but did anyway, you will find her at the bottom of an icy blue lake sleeping high in the Rockies. You will learn of my sins, my confessions and my shame. You will read of many, many things both great and small, my fears and my hopes. You will see me, as I knew myself to be. A coward at times to be sure but fearless too, when it mattered (I hope). Everything you pleaded for me to show you, give you, share with you can be found in those pages, all the good and the bad.

I am reminded now of what Steinbeck wrote in the dedication to East of Eden (one of the greatest books ever written.) to his dear friend Pat Covici,

Dear Pat,

You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”

I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”

“What for?”

“To put things in.”

“What things?”

“Whatever you have,” you said.

Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.

And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.

And still, the box is not full.
John

That’s what is in the box, that old blue suitcase buried twelve feet down deep under stone and clay, under soil so soft. What you will find there is most everything that is me, about what I saw, what I experienced and perceived in this world. It’s yours, all of it and of course it is still not full, it is not all of me, but it’s near enough as matters now, as could ever really matter.

All my love,

B.

Groupthink – Love at First Sight

For better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death or the bottle do us apart. Love love love. It’s waiting around every corner but breakin’ up ain’t easy to do.

The One and Only – by Betty P
This protagonist finds it a tricky task to locate his one and only in the ruins that is Shanghai. While navigating the usual Hengshan Lu ruins, high-heeled clones and…nuclear bombs?

Tiny Feet – by Antique Rice
Love in the black year of 1994. And HAL can’t help but to ask: why are redheads synonymous with heartbreak?

Switching Platforms – by Ling’Ling
Heartbreak on repeat. God help me.

Groupthink – Your Last Will

The task this week was nothing less than to write your own last will, and, if you so will, last words to the world. Heavy stuff, ladies and gentlemen. Besides donating all their earthly possessions to HAL (as we knew they would), our groupthinkers came up with deeply personal texts, and we’re still begging most of them for permission to publish. Enjoy meanwhile the two Bs:

Suitcase – by Owsley Beck
Owsley’s legendary suitcase reappears, delivered out of the rich black soil of Battler River ‘like Jonah to shores of Nineveh.’

Do not bury me in Asia – by B.
Or else B. will be back to haunt us all. Rest assured B.: HAL will personally cremate you in the Da Marco pizza oven and smuggle you back to frosty northern Europe, we promise!