The excavator-man takes a walk
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original creative writing
and images by @d-pend
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I blink in the grainy air. A whole world is born to me in that moment — one of half-fantasy, half-reality. As I swivel my rickety neck to look about, paintings are carefully splashed to life by my eyes, then chopped into tinder by a malevolent void of unseeing. Who would destroy such masterpieces but one who refuses to see the omnipresent beauty of the mundane? Wait — let me pause a moment and think. My body aches with the tiredness of a few decades of accumulated stresses.

*
Everything slants in the suburbs: strange diagonals haunt the energy fields of all its occupants. The opposite of anthropomorphization occurs — the inanimate objects placed by long-gone hands project their mechanical qualities onto the still-living shapes that morph through the passages its roads carve out. The split hair-ends of a girl I passed playing on the sidewalk strongly resemble the geometries of worn fence-plank-tips to her side. I shake my head in disbelief in the same pattern as a cotton American flag jostles in the light, warm breeze.

My feet are anvil heavy and scratchy as gravel. The canvas shoes I drag beneath me assert their attitude upon my fingernails, and I think, for a split-second, I see the reflections of mossy stone cogs in those segmented guardians of sensitive skin beneath, glancing at them as if recently manicured and inspecting the workmanship of whoever carved those weird lithographs.

I pause at the bottom of the stairs. A ghost rhythm sets itself up in my subconscious — subtle, metallic, robust — as I stare at those reinforced platforms of stone and painted wood. Ah, I think, It's the aetheric seed of a poem attempting to plant itself in my Mynd. With an equally ghastly hand, I pluck the parasitic seed out of the Myndsoil and flick it far away. I'm not sure where it landed in the astral plane, but judging by its velocity and angle of trajectory, it's possible that it flew as far away as Tennessee. I chuckle to myself and wipe perspiration from my forehead.

The Texas spring is lovely, though a bit oppressive. I think back to my suburban walk as I trudge up the steps, passing the stray cat that has taken a liking to me that basks upon the warm stone. Honeysuckle explodes from the fenced-off creek area, yet so do cruel thorns of green, black, and brown. All the vines seem to have the quality of flimsy wires, hastily slapped-together in order to enable an urgent machine to operate — a mechanism that has lain dormant for quite some time.

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Inside, I look in the mirror and see a humanoid body with a mechanical excavator claw where the head once was. As I grin, metal teeth swivel in organic asymmetry. When I crane my neck to assure I am not hallucinating, pistons pump to operate the precision movements in multiple independent axes. I sigh in delicate pneumatic steam — everything is right with the world.

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Original writing and images
by Daniel Pendergraft
— created for HIVE —
published on April 4th, 2022
to Proof of Brain Community.
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_{Writing is fully original
and can be considered a first draft/blueprint
towards eventual completion of a piece
shared and preserved immutably on blockchain.}
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_{Images are original smartphone photographs
taken with iPhone 8+ and processed
using Deep Dream Generator
with custom style images.}
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