The Volcano, the Tornado, & the Hourglass

Mista Ant looked into Ostrich’s dark and golden eyes as he continued. And while the pace of change may at first seem glacial... do you not intend to form new continents? The sea brings everything together faster than you think.
Would the author of Go Ask Alice ever have guessed that her words would lie on the same shelf as Aurelius in my library? I doubt it. She never would have dreamed.
Does not an intelligent one fail to feel the precipice behind the mirage?
If a butterfly’s wings might cause a tornado in Texas, so might the turning pages of a book?
The sound of people— lovers or roommates— trying to be quiet in the middle of the night or in the morning. The way that when you kill a moth in your hand it leaves gold and iridescences.
The excess clouds what is, until the excess is the thing that is. Murphy’s law & the 2nd of thermodynamics.
Suddenly the postmortem became postpartum: from the man’s body— everywhere bursting with & disappearing behind flowers— crawled a child.
And there’s the bumper sticker that dumbfounds with its truth & its cadence: never have so few taken so much from so many for so long.
The idea of the closeted believer-in-humanity; for the world hides behind a persona of itself?
At that rate, do you know how much a 55-yard roll of tape would cost? Two-hundred and forty-seven dollars and fifty cents. $247.50. That’s ridiculous. For a roll of tape, that is completely absurd.
The lonely, lonely puddle knew / high heels liked him less for being deep; / so sullenly the lonely, lonely puddle watched / shallow puddles get all the high-heeled feet.
The madman’s hand in his hair, the philosopher’s hand in his. Always as if trying to pull something out— madness and idea, respectively. Or also, perhaps just ripping the soil for the planting of new seed?
It struck him as what very well might be one of the fabled horses of the Apocalypse. Mista Ant made to move himself a bit higher up so as to get a better look.
A fortune cookie once told me: The problem is that you think you have the time.
Whereupon Mista Ant heard a thunderous KROOSHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! from on high — and then the tunnel he traveled in was bathed in the eternal white light of day.
The flat black of smoke. Smoke hurrying out of gaping black holes. And the intricacies of the façade, exposed, broken. The smoke taking to the air. Rushing out, then relaxed.
[The] notion of how all of us are, & everything is— quite literally— embers.
His name in white letters, plastic, on a black board, the kind churches and restaurants use; they are designed to be changed frequently.
A painting is the fluid become solid, like a person is. Perhaps this is part of why I feel so connected to paintings and to painting.
I want to live! (it comes to mind as: when Bowie sings it).
“Tattoo where lays in a blotted blotch this blood. Make permanent in ink beneath my skin where now resteth above it the dry blood of a supposedly holy man.”
This book has some premises. One is as follows: to know the eschatological, one must know the scatological— the latter word being literally as well as metaphorically contained within the former.
In certain matters, whether a subject’s understood metaphorically or literally makes all the difference between a manured field & a crock of shit. “The end of the world” is one such subject.
Between the two sayings Live each day as if your life had just begun and Live life as if you were going to die tomorrow is the fact of an exceedingly slight space.
[As] we presently approach the tip, the imminence of — and anxiety over — its final crack is collectively felt. With intensity increasing within ever-shortening spans of time: what if the conclusive crack only sounds like an eggshell’s?
The hourglass best illustrates how change […] is barely, then gradually, & finally quite suddenly seen: while the sand’s pace persists nearly unchangingly for most of the duration of the grains’ falling, when close to the end, and as the final grains fall, its speed appears to increase.
Chameleon was a spy & saboteur — a sort of letter opener, as it were, if you will: one who slips into the fold only so as to tear it apart. He worked in the public interest.
What unjust governments seem to forget is that to every tear gas cloud, there’s a silver lining: the irrefutable reinforcement of a people’s resolve for justice.
There was something about in the air; you could see it in the water. With lips as pursed as an oyster’s, from beyond the glass wall Mista Ant heard music: from somewhere not far off, a human played a saxophone.
The ants could feel their antvoices crashing, whirling, and building in the closed space of the petri dish. Flowers could be seen on the other side of the glass, […] all the while their collective voice ramping all the more.
And with another verse that was it: the petri dish’s walls around all of the ants shattered, fell to pieces & shards. What the ants had previously thought possible only by a hammer’s force had been achieved by their voice in song.

This first edition of The Volcano, The Tornado, & The Hourglass has been printed in a softbound edition of 500 hand-numbered copies, as well as made available in digital format on a pay-as-you-wish basis.

To purchase the softbound, download the e-book,
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To order in bulk (more than five books) please contact tvttandth@gmail.com.

Adrien Casey is an artist & writer who lives in New York City. The Volcano, The Tornado, & The Hourglass is his first written book.