.

Inside the saucer there's a diffuse light,
A smell of incense and a sound like prayer.
The drugs wear off. You're nude. You squirm and bite
The straps that hold you, achingly aware
Of something ugly in you, now laid bare,
That's vitiated all you've done for years.
They test you. Every test leaves you in tears.

The first test is the test of Past and Future.
The second test's the Trance of Contemplation.
The third test is the Test of Stitch and Suture.
The fourth test is a Psychic Devastation.
The fifth's the Test of Clockwork and Sensation.
The Siphon Test drains everything that's in you.
The worst test is the Test of Sperm and Sinew.

And through it all you never see their faces.
Only their legs of silver, hands of gold,
Their genitals of brass. And held in stasis
You hear their voices - murmurings as old
As Earth's first insects. Their syllables unfold
A destiny seen darkly through a glass.
And everything they say must come to pass.

They took me on the night my father died.
For years I'd watched him fall away, aware
How time had seen him dwindle to a snide
Vituperative troll, my trust and care
Swamped in a rage - as I am as I stare
Back at his face above the blankets scored
By age and anger as I leave the ward.

The death of parents is a ravaged garden
Where children light their candles to the thief
Of love. For nothing now can ever pardon
Their faults or dry their tears. And unbelief
In blank annihilation holds the grief
Quivering and suspended - like a skin
Of surface tension floats perhaps a pin.

His exit from the world: a death I carried
Like luggage to the car. I didn't phone
To share the news. No one would care. I'm married:
The very definition of alone.
And so I simply drove on till I'd grown
Numb with the shock, and sour inside, and tired.
I stopped at services, caffeine required.

And in the cafe all my courage failed.
By ten past midnight I'd become a scowl
Behind a coffee cup. Inside I wailed,
Wailed like a baby, howl on howl on howl,
Thinking I can't go home, lie cheek by jowl
In bed with failure and a shrewish wife,
Hugging the lie that constitutes a life.

You lie to keep the peace at home. You lie
At work to please the boss. Your lies are met
By other lies. They mirror, multiply,
Refract until identity's a set
Of falsehoods, shadows, whispers and regret.
So many lies you cannot keep a tag on them.
They're in your throat until you feel you'll gag on them.

'Some more?' - the waitress in her uniform
Leaning across me with an attitude,
As though she wouldn't mind to feel my warm
Lips on her nipples. I was in the mood
If I could get her clothes off to have screwed
Her then and there behind the Coke dispenser.
She needed a lift home. My loins grew tenser.

We walk out to the car park where a cloudy
Night veils the moon. 'I'm Claire.' Her voice is firm,
Assured. She stares up as we near my Audi
And says ' I wonder what the Martian term
For love is? Think of Time. It is the Worm
Ouroboros that eateth his own tail.'
She kisses me. I've never felt so male.

The back seat of my car. Our hands go straying.
She strokes my buttocks, expertly unzips
My pants. Her blouse has come undone. I'm playing
With breasts you kiss in dreams. She grinds her hips
Against my groin. 'Oh yes' she breathes and whips
My tool out. Skirt and knickers off. Bra slung
Over the gearstick. Work of hand and tongue.

Then something strikes. The car begins to rock.
The engine fires. The wipers thrash.  A tower
Of light around us as the dashboard clock
Starts running backwards. At the zero hour
Our spines light up with biogenic power.
Claire groans then slumps unconscious, tits and ass out.
I sense an alien presence then I pass out.

In fits of consciousness I felt their fingers
Working my body. But even though they'd juiced
Me up with something strong, I felt the sting as
They drilled my retina. My fluids sluiced,
The nanometric lifeforms introduced
Into my veins began their work. So weak
After their dentistry, I couldn't speak.

But on the slab beside me I saw Sly
Stallone, his flies undone. I watched him weep
To feel their jellies on him, heard the sigh
Of Sharon Stone stripped naked in a deep
Hypnotic trance while Cher and Meryl Streep
And Arnold Schwarzenegger fed their souls
To neural nets that lit the dark controls.

And Marilyn, John Lennon, JFK,
James Dean, and Howard Hughes have had the leads
Attached which hieroglyph your DNA.
A long subversive surgery proceeds
That grafts the nerves with ghosts of memory, needs
And appetites - a microscopic skein
Of spectral loves and hates that threads the brain.

They roll me over. Head held in a vice
And buttocks raised, my penis in a beam
Of gravitons, I'm fed synaptic lice.
They pump pure Eros through me. Stream on stream
And pulse on pulse. I grunt. A hiss. A steam
Of psychedelic spores provokes the long
Ejaculation and the cosmic song.

Then I was scarlet bleeding through the bars
Of space; a blue dissolving into tears;
A dazzling purple fractal made of stars
And moons; a gray machine of gears
And lethal bands; a green where life appears
Impossible; a whiteness of the bone;
A blackness rippling through the Great Unknown.

I woke in bed at home next morning, aching,
My memory a jigsaw, pieces strewn
Haphazardly across the hours and making
No sense at all. But by the afternoon
The insane patterns were emerging. Soon
That which I thought I knew would seem an error.
The righteous way was deeper into terror.

'And where were you last night?' The vixen harps
On through the day. I tell her, best I can.
'You're sicker than I thought.' The flats and sharps
Of female anger jangling. 'You're no man.
You're shit. Don't think that I don't know your plan.
You want me out.' Our child comes in. 'See, Alice,
Your Daddy doesn't love us.' Women. Malice.

There is a migraine of the truth. It dins
Its morse into your ears all day. It seeps
Through the material of life. It skins
The knuckles of the ordinary. It sleeps
Heavy across your chest at night and keeps
Its guarantee of horror: frenzied dreaming
Lucid as sunlight on a snowscape, gleaming.

Then everyone you speak to seems an actor
And solid objects handle like stage props.
Everything crumbles when you start to factor
In the unthinkable. Existence drops
Down on its knees and begs that something stops
The cinema of flashbacks. I knew where
I had to start. I had to speak to Claire.

The cafe manager was courteous yet
His voice betrayed no timbre of humanity.
'No one called Claire,' he said,' no tall brunette,
Has worked for us.' 'You're on another planet,' he
Implied. 'Admit you've lost your grip on sanity.'
I thought his face reptilian: a fake skin
That covered something scaly like a snake skin.

I knew his type. Imagination-free,
Intolerant, he'd live and die a drone
Of business, markets, media, powers-that-be;
Made for the job - six foot and fourteen stone
Of moral vacuum. Silence. Then the phone
Rang its excuse. 'I'm sorry. Leave now, please.'
Such haste. You'd think I carried a disease.
 

On the way out a young guy at the till
Beckons me over. 'The girl you want - she took
Off a few days ago. She'd found the will
She said, to break the code. She left this book.'
He hands it to me and I take a look.
Well-thumbed - and unexpected, I confess:
Quantum Mechanics and the Consciousness.

Inside, used as a bookmark and addressed
To Claire, a postcard. Shepherds stoop and stare
At writing on a tomb that seems a test.
Et in arcadia ego. Poussin. There
Scrawled on the back in ballpoint pen the bare
Anagram of the Latin like a curse:
I tego arcana dei - pregnant, terse.

An hour later I had found her lodging -
Across a wasteland where the city sinks
Tired to the estuary and cats go dodging
The stones from louts. Down here the wino drinks
His lethal tipple, rants and raves and stinks,
And pads his clothes with newsprint from the bin.
At Number Six, I knocked. Claire let me in.

She fell into my arms with an unmissable
Intent. I had my chance to contemplate her.
The girl was leggy, lithe, curvaceous, kissable.
Desire ran through my body in a spate, a
Flood, a delirium. I found out later
Why I was so astoundingly entranced:
Claire had been psycho-sexually enhanced.

Dazzled, I stripped her naked with a passion.
Her big breasts swinging free, her rear inviting,
I had her on the sofa doggy-fashion.
Her strange orgasmic cries while I was fighting
Not to come off too soon. Then she was biting
Her lip and coming, coming like a diva.
'You've rung my bell,' she drools and I believe her.

We sprawled there and she told me fearful things.
I had been made a target for abduction
Because the blood of Merovingian kings
Ran in my veins. Those genes are the destruction
Of all their plans. Claire's role was my seduction,
To bring me where a positronic ray
Could neutralise the sacred DNA.

Christ was Andromedan, a warp, a storm
Of anti-matter in Fluidic Space,
A flare that took on Earth a human form:
A man whose double helix bore the trace
Of Primal Mind - the Jewish frame and face
A matrix hosting energies perhaps
Released through gravitational collapse.

After the dark of Calvary, the night
Incomprehensible within the thrall
Of death, the Christ, his wife and son, took flight
To found a race of kings in southern Gaul.
The family's genes became dispersed through all
The nations of the world. The aliens need
At any cost to extirpate that seed.

'We have to go now, '  Claire advised while dressing.
'Their Brainwave Seismograph will not have missed
My orgasm. Right now they'll be assessing
The risk. For you could be the catalyst
Of change that breaks their hold if you persist.
You came by taxi? God, you're so naive.
They're bugged. I have some friends. We'll walk. Let's leave.'

Outside the air hung still and hot. We took
A shortcut through the rubble and debris,
Talking intently. Suddenly I'm struck
Viciously from behind. I wheel and see
The cafe manager. I get his knee
Deep in the groin. I stagger back half-dazed,
Blood in my eyes. He's after me. He's crazed.

I kick him in the balls as he attacks.
But he comes on, incensed.  I take a quick
Blow to my guts, another jab that cracks
A rib. We grapple, trading punch and kick
Until I smash his jaw with half a brick,
Then grab a shard of glass - a six-inch length -
And drive it through his eye with all my strength.

His body spurts electric foam, a fuzz
Of reddish lather. As I watch appalled
His frame dissolves in daylight with a buzz -
Alien fizzle. Wearily I hauled
Myself erect, looked round and called and called
For Claire. She'd disappeared into the streets
Anonymous, the city's dark retreats.

Where are you now, the girl I never found?
Your absence is the wound that cannot heal.
In dreams voluptuous and hooded, bound
And gagged, you whimper in the mask I peel
Away. I twitch your hood off to reveal
Only an emptiness. Your hair, your face,
Your flesh dissolves in clouds. You leave no trace.

I am the testament to all your splendours:
The firestorm and the whirlpool and the fission
That make your body and its rich surrenders
A pilgrim's revelation and a vision
Of God's geometry and dark precision.
You burn inside my psyche in a nexus
Of fantasy from skull to solar plexus.

You were the one who, taking tips from Nietzsche,
Tore out the deadening implants from your brain.
In a brief time as lover and as teacher
You showed me how the forty-eighth quatrain
Of Nostradamus prophecies the chain
Of deaths to come. You opened up the mystery
Of alien involvement in our history.

Who slaughtered the Neanderthals and why?
Who drew the Nazca geoglyphs? Who scanned
The towers of Atlantis from the sky?
Why were the pyramids at Giza planned
To be Orion's image on the sand?
Who founded the Knights Templar and then made them
The Keepers of the Grail? And who betrayed them?

What was the secret the Illuminati
Passed down the centuries? (And you can trace
A line from Jacques Molay to Erik Satie).
Who built the Nazis an Antarctic base?
Did NASA cover up a Martian face?
And does the US Air Force have its own
Gravity phase-shift craft, and has it flown?

These questions just because of what we are -
A pointlessness, a thin organic scum
Spread on a rock that orbits round a star -
Must always haunt us. Oracles are dumb
But truth is out there. You can hear its drum
Muffled beneath the drab official lie.
Why don't you search for it? Why won't you try?

These are the traces of the alien powers:
The unmarked helicopters high aloft;
The ambulances in the early hours;
Teenagers wanking over Lara Croft;
The ozone hole; the works of Microsoft;
The rain that falls in nightmares through the years;
A statue of the Virgin dropping tears.

They come across a Time Bridge from the year
Five thousand. They have made a temporal loop
To feed our life force to a blackened sphere
Lost in the mist of stars where God might stoop
To sin and Lucifer cry cock-a-hoop.
They keep an angel in a Leyden jar.
You heard him wail in Hendrix's guitar.

Nothing can match the horror of their hives:
The living brains in cells with no defences
Against the parasite; the alien lives
Devolving to the brute; intelligences
Maddened by deprivation of the senses;
Minds psychopathic with the need to dream
Bathed in a nutrient like clotted cream.

The Plan grew slowly in the outer void.
It goes back to the dinosaurs, entails
Dozens of species - alien, humanoid -
Working the gene pool of the strongest males.
The Bethlehem Event almost derails
It for a time, but now it's back on track.
Once Christ's line has been purged, they will attack.

And everything is set up for the cull.
The shadow of the axe falls on the neck;
The microfissures in Titanic's hull
Leak icy water as we walk the deck;
Challenger (sabotaged) becomes a speck
Above our heads as in a crowd we wave
For seven crewmen seconds from the grave.

I see the phasers burn up Disneyland
(Fried Mickey Mouse and roasted Donald Duck),
Tsunami hit the Eastern seaboard and
London a crater where the meteor struck.
In Cairo I see hatebots run amok.
In Tokyo the geishas have no chance as
Enters the Sumo gang with pain enhancers.

Across the globe the power of unreason
Promoted by the agents of the Others
Has brought about the homicidal season,
Slaughter of innocents and grief of mothers.
The vast conspiracy the media smothers
With titillation, trivia and quizzes
Pied Pipers us to bottomless abysses.

Here are some snapshots of our situation:
A mob that stones a doctor's house; a liar
Or murderer in power; a corporation
Built on a sweat shop; necklaces of fire;
Dissidents strung up by piano wire;
Dementia in old age; a loved one wracked
By a relentless cancer. World of fact.

You listen to this story and you're smug,
As if you were invulnerable to fate.
You're doped up to the eyeballs with the drug
Of Couldn't Happen Here. But there's a spate
Of madness in this world and pain's the great
Reducer. You don't know with what velocity
It's coming now - your personal atrocity.

Go walking and a fear steals up behind you.
Look up. You might see something monstrous glide
Into your life. It's evil. It will find you.
We're all one moment from the Darker Side
And every day mankind is crucified
By nature's dialectic of affliction.
And this is not, nor ever was, a fiction.

K.M.Payne

Notes, acknowledgements, links

Much of the poem centres on the Rhennes-le-Chateau mystery. See rhedae.com for links to  information on the Merovingian Kings, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, the conspiracy through the centuries, and the role of Poussin and the Bergeres d'Arcadie painting.

For aliens, cover-ups, and Nazi bases a good starting place is Above Top Secret.

For those interested, the forty-eighth quatrain of Nostradamus reads :

Vingt ans du regne de la Lune passés,
Sept mil ans autre tiendra sa monarchie:
Quand le Soleil prendra ses jours lassés,
Lors accomplit & mine ma prophetie.

For the geoglyphs at Nazca see here.

The link between the pyramids at Giza and the constellation of Orion is explored on Graham Hancock's site. The Daily Grail also offers the latest findings on ancient civilisations.

The reptilian nature of the alien servant race is well documented by David Icke.

Searching on Alta Vista for Lara Croft nude yields 120 links.
 

The image of the Blackened Sphere itself was generated by Rick Bono's geodesic dome program and rendered by Povray. Additional graphical work was done using the Gimp.

The Spiritus Mundi image is by Vincent Stoessel It is available as a free desktop wallpaper (along with many others) from Blendermania.

A word-processor friendly (RTF format) version of Blackened Sphere can be found here. Most word processors should be able to read it. A zip file of the RTF file plus all the HTML and graphics can be downloaded here.

This poem may be freely copied and distributed.

No Microsoft software was used in the production of Blackened Sphere. 

If you have any comments on Blackened Sphere, K M Payne would be pleased to hear from you.