A Call To Arms

Let us not think;
We have been thinking long hours.
The confines of our consciousness yellowed with retention,
Creased with labour -
It has been arduous, it has been painful.
let us not think;
Our minds have been narrowed with the day's dark reckoning.
We must open again, and in a gasp of warm stupor
Engulf ourselves.


Let us not act;
Let us not act as we "ought", for in that "ought",
There lies a hateful spirit.
As in the pale ignorance of a salient church bell's clamour
We chasten our unripe mastery.
Let us not act;
Blunt and ungainly, let us stammer and stumble
And bathe ourselves in kaleidoscope static,
And paratactic - Action, to us,
Will come.


Let us not feel;
May the air thicken with narcotic numbness.
In the wake of regimented daylight hours,
Guided by sense,
Let our senses hang mute beneath the whirling folds of our motley vestiments.
Let us not feel;
Emotion is as a caustic on the spirit.
Abstain - and may the perspiring closeness of anaesthesia
Inhale us.


Our self dissolution imports interaction,
So we melt and we mould
To uphold our abstraction.
Thus passive, and pursed, and glowing with pleasure,
Let the dumb and the dull and the drunk take their measure -
And let us not think.
Nor act, nor feel.
For when we are beyond thought, command and feeling, what pleasures await us
In the warrens of our misshapen madness. To drink!

The opening to my brilliant post-modern thriller

Autumn wind. It struck me, a loose, dusty slab of it, as I emerged from my small hilltop residence. The manipulation of the bronzed leaves in the air, like puppetry, made for a remarkable tableau: brown, against grey, against my brown study. I’ve been thinking about brown a lot lately. The brown of churches. The brown of tea leaves. The brown of my mahogany table, weary with the weight of unread papers, aged with the stains of red wine, of solitude, of vegetable oil, of banana smoothie, of consciousness and of meaning.

Ah, meaning. Hmm. I let out a long sigh, and brood a little longer. How the sands of time have gathered about my feet. Do all things pass? Yes, I suppose so. Geez.

With these powerful reflexions completed, I began my brave march into the dying embers of the morning.

Praise for the opening to my brilliant post-modern thriller.

-          “Uncompromising and lethally understated, Walter’s prose skims gracefully across the face of a profound lake of meaning. The opening to his brilliant post-modern thriller is superb.” –  The Times

-        “There is no combination of 142 words that could possibly deliver more intensity[…] This post-modern thriller’s brilliant opening delivers a visceral blow to any who dare read it. The age of writing is over[…] Walter has clocked it.” – The Daily Telegraph

-        “The opening to this post-modern thriller[…] is brilliant. Walter’s bravery in tackling the heavyweight intellectual dilemmas of our age – implicitly, mind, in riddles and in paradoxes lying just beneath the surface – is a war cry to a generation of intellectuals.” – The Washington Post

    “It gets a little[…] brilliant[…] towards the end.” – The New York Times