Artwork Incarnate on the Inside—more detail, full artwork and technical description below.
The Summer of the Seventeenth Heatwave
“… then the waterfowl,
in silent affirmation,
chose me as their leader …
“… and in the summer
of the seventeenth heatwave,
I followed my dreams to where
the flowers bloom after dark …
“… the villagers rose up, carrying
torches and brandishing kitchen
cutlery, some wore necklaces
of garlic …
“… and yet, the little
happenstances
of life still thrill me.”
Yuri was looking out through
the windows of the coffee shop.
She pointed. I hadn’t
noticed the desperation
in her eyes.
“Oh look, it’s the Imperial Martian
Battle Fleet.”
I turned, excited to see their fifties
flying saucers. Squinted,
and decided it was probably
a flock of weather balloons.
~/~
When I turned back, there was
nothing but an empty coffee cup
and a half-eaten strawberry frosted
donut opposite me at the table.
As I ate the remaining half,
I wondered—was it me?
But more than that—
could it really be Deija Vitro,
the Martian Princess of Glass,
coming to Helensburgh?
Would her fleet lay waste
to this charming rural town
with their fiery energy beams?
And would she visit this very coffee
shop, the Café Economique,
for a quick snack?
Hoping to catch a glimpse of her,
I decided to stay for a while,
and ordered another donut
—pineapple this time—
with another latte.
Illustrated poetry collection Texture of Silence, a collaboration with Eugen Bacon, has been nominated for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association’s 2024 Elgin Award. Out now, Purpose of Reality, illustrated collections of poetry and stories in two volumes from Meerkat Press.
artwork
Incarnate on the Inside (detail x 3 & original) from my #BeyondAI project. Existing textures enhanced by AI’s StableDiffusion with EasyDiffusion run from an AutoIt3 script (ControlNet dominates). Five-hour runtime on an NVidiaGeForce RTX4070 Ti Super graphics card. Evolved by the Visual Evolution Engine, my software that seeks unimagined realms, with cyclic nonlinear desaturation, ultracubism, and adaptive layered image synthesis. Art and poetry also on Instagram.
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