Ozymandias, King of Kings

In a remote corner of some uninhabitable jungle, amidst the trees, vines, miasmas, insects and demons, there is a misshapen rock. It alone suggests that a civilized hand was once here. Carved into the side of the rock in an ancient and nearly forgotten tongue, were the following proverbs. I reproduce here what translation I could muster, from what little etching remained.

...
He who ... pestilent [or pestilence or death]
the [unknown] worm [or snake] forgives the plow [or oxen]
Lower the lover of water into the river.

A fool [or ape] doesn't see the tree [or mountain]; the wise man sees.
...
... he would [or wanted to] become wise

The rest is illegible, eroded, except for a few miraculously preserved lines:

The cistern contains [or holds]; the fountain overflows [or breaks].
...
Joys don't laugh! Sorrows don't weep!

I apologize once again for the poor translation, and the unfinished text. I spent a day which felt like an eternity in that sauna of jungle attempting to read and translate it.

The whole experience of that jungle was bizzare. One could actually watch ants constructing trees; vines being wound and dropped; and leaves actively growing off of these structures-- trying to break free from their prison.

Clockwork

I've been inside that machine-- the one they say revolves the heavens about the earth-- I've watched its gears turn, traced the outlines of their teeth with my fingers; I've even stood on some. I watched a gear crack and fall, a spring loosed to follow its own path.

I looked up through the labyrinth of clockwork-- the endless cacophony of ticking and grinding-- and I thought to myself "This is not the machine which revolves the universe."

*-*-*-*-*
Everything under *-*-*-*-* is meta; always. "*****" will be "in character" as the saying goes.

Albert... I like Albert; there's a good chance you'll see a lot of him. :D

First Post!

This has been edited... Cleaned up a bit. Hopefully, some pretension has been dropped. Hopefully.

I've finally decided to actually begin publishing something I've been meaning to get around to for a while. I don't expect to write here often, but it's a place I can throw half-baked ideas in my quest for some mystery which undoubtedly is unattainable. "What unseen pen etched eternal things in the hearts of humankind, but never put them in our mind?"

Anyway, what is (are?) Landscapes:
This thing is (read: will be) a collection of short, surreal, imagistic stories. Each one is intended to be a stand-alone "image" (Pound says: "An intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time")-- an attempt to convey in words "a groan that cannot be expressed in words", or rather, the emotion which spawned that groan. All of the stories are to take place in the same surreal universe; as such, they are to be seen as related and building on each other. When I'm done, hopefully this will be a projection of a projection of a subset of some universe.

Most will be written from the first person, all narrators who are part of the universe will be named, if nowhere else, in the "labels" at the end of the post. The narrators have very pregnant(4,5) names. Also in the labels section will be a clue as to what part of the universe the image pertains to.

Also, the "meta" category contains only my own thoughts and comments on the series.

Cheers,
Cory