Luka & Back With Bad Poetry And Good Bits.

Sermon given to an empty church: "The signs and portents are all there, as numerous and as commonplace as the pigeons, the city bustles with them. take for instance the parakeets of Richmond parkland and Hampstead Heath, harbingers of a tropical future, ozoneless, humid, or the birds which decline to fly south for the winter, the risks being too great now the British winter's mild enough to weather."

"The beastmen we engineered for physical labour. The beastmen we found to be superior to the robots, being cheaper to run and more efficient in their work. They are born not manufactured, they do not need computer progrmmes, liable to malfunction to operate and there is no mantinence required. They need only food and periodic rest. They have far greater manual dexterity and are more adept at problem solving and pre-empting the wishes of their masters."

"This leaves the population at large employed in the act of illusion and artifice. the creation of the world as it was. stage-managed street science, roleplaying, tablaeus for tourists, historical reenactments played out by actors paid by the state, we are all actors now, what you see is, in some sense, no longer real. the beggar in blankets beneath the ATM, the bawling barrow boys, the newspaper vendor blowing warmth into frozen hands (no one reads newspapers anymore, there is no news) the prostitutes in doorways, that huddle of teenagers, slender and beautiful, dressed in the latest fashions, the busker with his ukulele, the marching city workers in tailored suits, the pickpockets, muggers and drug pushers, conversing in impenetrable criminal slang, all of this is makebelieve, while the beastmen toil out of sight, concealed in windowless factories, in subterranean fields lit with electric suns, minotaurs labouring in the labyrinths."
Luka