On Seabirds And Sleep - SCP Foundation

We keep the exhibition space open for anyone who wants to use it. We never take anything down: the only person allowed to remove a piece is the one who put it there.

Many pieces stay up forever. There's nobody to take them down.

We Don't Know Where We Left The Birds

(T. N. Kumar, 1987, Crayon on Corrugated Iron)

DCAT-E1058

the sunset here is that weird palette

of a huge golden circle on the horizon

and then the regal blue of tired clouds

with spatterings of black inky seabirds

they crawled out of the desert

(this is odd for seabirds, yes)

and screamed pentathol notes

we took one from the sky by plucking it in midair

it started leaking when we cut it and the pitch

dribbled out of the incision and coated us all in

a deep darkness which despite all soap and fire

never got free of our cloth or knife or skin.

Oh, yeah. I remember Kumar. Decent enough chap. I was always confused about the crows, though - I mean, he calls them seabirds right at the beginning. I guess he just thought that since the crows were next to the sea, they were seabirds? Whenever I asked him about it, he just shook his head, you know, kind of grimaced a little and walked away.

Last I saw him was '92. Did he kill himself? I mean, that's just what I heard, anyway. You'd know better than I would, right?

the pitch stuck to us, an odd

combination of resonance and

resignation caused and caustic

meant it was not ever going to

leave our hands. we had killed

a seabird and you should not

kill anything which flies if you

cannot do the trick yourself

it rung in our minds as we bravely leapt into unconsciousness

but when we closed our eyes and opened our minds all that we

saw was that huge golden circle and regal blue and countless

black seabirds being pulled by us down through huge pipes like

we were fracking the skies and driving these living thinking

beautiful things down into the dirt and caging them in the most

horrible of prisons and forcing them into those human simulacra

we did not get

as much sleep

as we should

have preferred

but none of us

thought to ever

say a word.

Man, that guy was a ghost. He'd kind of… I dunno, "shimmer", I guess you'd call it? He shimmered a bit when the light hit him just right.

I mean, obviously the birds were probably metaphors for something, but I'm not sure what.

we could not keep our pupils dilated

because the sun was always at the

edge of our vision and so we tended

to have to squint even in the night

for the glare was not quite blinding

but it made the corners of our eyes

itch like they were being salted by

malicious things which hated us for

perfectly understandable reasons

corvids make me uncomfortable but

not because we killed so many it was

actually in my childhood when I saw

a crow ram into the side of the wall

of my grandfather's old shed which

is actually what I am writing this on

since he died in august of last year

so I tore down the shed and the

bump that the crow left is almost

impossible to see but I can tell

the crow wriggled and it made me

sad to see a thing which used to

be animate slowly but surely fall

out of its own mind and into that

hypothetical great beyond which

even now I don't think I can quite

bring myself to believe in because

when that crow died there was

no soul spirited from the body

when the light left its panicked

eyes I knew that it did not go

anywhere because a candle flame

snuffed out does not go to the

source of all heat and fire.

It didn't quite constitute an information leak. Out of context, you couldn't deduce anything of a sensitive nature. So no, it wasn't punishable. And as far as I'm aware, it wasn't us that killed him.

It was certainly concerning that they took the brain.

of late the

dreams have changed

a little bit from what they used to

be because I no longer go to the sunset and

there aren't any birds there only men of iron and steel

who are riding on steeds made of copper and formaldehyde and

the whole thing just reeks and the stench of arcing

makes me want to vomit but I keep my mouth

shut tight and the contents of my stomach

ram against the inwards facing side

of my teeth and I coat

the graves below

in digestive

juice

but there

is a way to stop

the awful things that

we created, because a free crow

flies higher and further and greater than

uncountable crows in cages so we, that is, I

and the rest of the seers of seabirds in sleep went

to try and save the rest of the dreamspace

from the awful things that the fracking

of the sky had brought into existence

the whole industrial machine could

be undone from the core of it if

only we could recall that vital

piece of information which

for some reason was the

one thing somehow

not etched deep

pitch in our

heads

-

we don't know

where we left

the birds.

He told me the birds were in Memoriam. I never really understood what he meant by that. But, well, y'know. Poets don't write to be understood.