UFO Homes (Taiwan)

Outside the Pic, Inside the Pic

The Red Balloon/Blood

it's a picture of a red balloon....

so i was thinking setting being somewhere like the docks of london during a parade, the scene will be one of suspense/thriller/action/noir. lots of balloons everywhere and strangely ominous floats or people dressed up going along in the parade. the subject (maybe the main character, tho probably not) is walking through the crowded throng probably to meet up with someone (an informant?), so in one shot you'll see him another he's obscured by the parade/balloons/crowd, then the next shot you see him again. cut to a sudden explosion of fireworks.

now the pov goes to the character and you see from his eyes the balloons, crowds etc. a single red balloon like the pic above is the next shot. the pov follows the balloon upwards so that the balloon stays in the same position of the frame while the background pans up london tower or the london eye which you're able to see through the balloon. cut to 3rd person pov from above the crowd and a huge mess of balloons are released simultaneously so that we can't see the man anymore.

the balloons pass and the man is lying dead on the cobblestones with a stream of blood flowing down his forehead and into his eyes. (the play here ultimately being that the red balloon wasn't a balloon but was a drop of blood on his eyeball and the pov following the balloon upwards was really the man falling backwards in his death-collapse)

The (Undreamed) Dream

Surrounded by jobs, places to live, and people that live there, by ways to stand hopeful, open, and giving of yourself, it can be that none of it seems real. As you wake into a world that feels familiar, yet doesn't feel like home. Where days run quickly into one another, without distinction or accomplishment; and every possibility just stands as to exterminate all other possibilities - a festering indecision. Where the only thing it seems you know, you've known for so damn long, a feeling inside you that could build a home, bare-hands, with its hope; you're forced to face the possibility, that it isn't real. That it's never been real...

I've seen people go on dreaming impossible dreams for most of their lives, in the face of all the evidence, 'cause they knew too well that to stop believing, to accept that evidence, it just might destroy them. You see, it's not the finding-something-to-believe-in that's the problem, but learning to trust a new belief against a burdened past. It's trusting yourself enough to take on that burden - willingly; to live for a time, adrift without mooring, in an unbelieving, unbelievable world.

Even strong, faithful people can't survive for very long inside that world. A world that offers you no guarantees you'll ever find anything more real than what you've already left behind. But without the faith to enter it, and I don't know where you find that faith (though I think I've seen it), a person will hang on to rotting dreams, like a dead man who doesn't know he's dead. Who just keeps on about his life with only this such quiet seed – of a down-grown near bottomless desperation – tucked neat inside his pocket.

The world without belief, it creeps up on a man like that, a man who could never survive it. And for him, it's much, much darker. He can seem so gentle and composed to everyone around him. With death in his pocket.

I've watched his world swallow up whole people, cities, countries. And I've seen him walking in the shadows on the other side, like he'd no idea of what he'd done. Like just what anyone might find inside that pocket of his, were they foolish enough to go looking for it (or even stumble on it), well, it didn't really have much of anything to do with him. As though it were some force of nature, some untameable wilderness that's a part of the world we live in. Like it or not.

Neo-Gothic

1

The building rises, like a Goliath, on the spartan rural landscape. /// Free from the messy particulars / of particular community, in a world of Walmarts, // and ghost-town arterial main streets, / it offers a centralized mission statement, / communion // en masse. /// Survival now proffered / from the stage; consumed // in stadium seating... [//] The church walls slowly. The inhabitants / unsteadily. Of daily offerings. Compliance / to conscription. Community espoused / through ritual. In cleansing. // Whose God / is dead? // The church walls slowly // Spell his name. [now] Over and / again.

2

Where constant bombardment / provokes indifference, dilapidation / running rampant (as it is, always, / seeming / to do) // Creative forces are / yet surging from / that wellspring // Here. In these heart lands. Whose heart / grows cold... [//] Heaven Is. / An ugly place. / Without art. // (The overlay obstructs, / and – creating juxtaposition / from prior distinction – / provokes) // A beautiful heaven / births what art? /// This (your) misery / bears such bountiful fruit. // Hung so strangely. / From the poplar trees.

The Foreigner

Wronged by the foreigner, by what I do not know – this writing not my own, nor my father’s, nor my father’s father’s – an invasive text / has entered my home. // I preserve, and destroy with each prayer; each verse, as it escapes my lips. // With each breath I mangle the histories of a people. With each breath I kill - myself, my father, my father’s father, my people. I: the foreigner. // who must defend my home, invader that I am. I am in granite. I am in bronze. // The first division of power: author from keeper. // [The scroll is written. The scroll must not be touched.]

The Ladder

As in submission to / routine, not logic of / routine, wherein / they found their meanings; land's / the land. Its beauty not in theory; / gone unproved. // Who threw themselves upon it, upon prayer, as upon structure, themselves thrown there absent meaning, some small peace they hoped might still be found // within the lives / they lived, if only / as to end, not only / to be lived. // Who climbed and climbed and climbed and in the end yet found no ends, their reason only circling back / upon itself, their thoughts caught staring out / on such totalities... of earth.