$65.00
A Martian Folio of **DION QUERN “1”**
*A one-side picture lathe LP that glows like a red oath beneath the thin-breathed sky*
**PROLOGUE (spoken by a helmeted chorus of dunes):**
O thou thin air, that bit’st the lung with frost,
And whisper’st secrets through the iron sand—
Attend! For here upon this rusted sphere
A record spins that hath but **one** true side,
Yet many tongues within its spiral dwell,
And gnaw upon the names that would be said.
---
### ACT I — *Testlab of Scales and Shattered Dreams*
O weightless weight! O measure made of sighs!
Where balances do tip at phantom grains,
And scales are fed with fragments of old suns.
Here stood the lab, now half-remembered dust,
Where dreams were weighed and found too light to keep,
Then cast below, where rootless creatures feed.
Take heed, good keeper of the garden’s floor:
Not every poison finds the hidden mouth.
For some, though fierce upon the blade above,
Lie bound in loam, unmoving as regret.
They kiss the surface, yet descend no more,
And thus the burrow’d hunger laughs beneath.
> “Use not the single-binded sting,” quoth one,
> “Whose spirit clings to soil and travels not—
> For grubs do dine below, not on the leaf.”
---
### ACT II — *Charly the Kid and the Gaping Reptile Realm*
Young Charly, helmet cracked with Martian mirth,
Did wander past the dunes that breathe like beasts
And found a maw that yawn’d in reptile time—
A realm where teeth were seasons, sharp and slow.
“O child,” spake jaws that never fully closed,
“Thou seek’st to cure the hunger of the ground?
Then know: what strikes the air shall fail the root,
And what binds fast shall never journey down.”
He held two sacks of promise in his grip—
One whisper’d “permethrin,” one “bifenthrin”—
Yet neither bore the sigil of the grub,
Nor spoke its name upon their printed skin.
Thus Charly cast them to the reptile winds,
And fed instead the soil with wiser draught.
---
### GRAPH OF THE BURROW'D TRUTH
```id="mars-shake-1"
Effectiveness (%)
|
| 100 | ██████████ (Deep-reaching remedies)
| 80 | ███████
| 60 | █████
| 40 | ███
| 20 | ██ (Surface-bound agents)
| 0 |_
Soil Depth →
```
What walks above is not what feeds below.
---
### ACT III — *Escaping the Point Where Teeth Sink into Dusk*
Lo! There’s a point where evening grows a mouth,
And all horizons clench with silent bite.
The record hums—its single-sided truth
Unspools in backward vows and molten rhyme.
“Escape,” it sings, “ere dusk devours thy tread,
And bind thy cure to motion, not to clay.”
For stagnant things, though potent in their claim,
Shall linger vainly where the roots are not.
Thus must the healer choose the wandering kind,
That seeps and slips and finds the secret feast.
---
### ACT IV — *Rainbirds with Teeth Moving Through the Mist*
Strange birds of rain, with beaks of ivory storm,
Did glide through vapor thick as softened glass.
Each drop they shed became a silver thought
That sank beneath the surface of the world.
“O water well,” they cried in choral drift,
“For half an inch doth wake the hidden paths—
Let liquid memory carry down the cure
Unto the feast where unseen jaws reside.”
---
### GRAPH OF IRRIGATION NECESSITY
```id="mars-shake-2"
Cure Activation
|
| 100 | ███████████ (0.5 inches—perfect descent)
| 80 | ████████
| 60 | █████
| 40 | ███
| 20 | ██
| 0 |_
Water (inches of remembrance) →
```
Without the rain, the remedy is dream alone.
---
### ACT V — *Burning Force of the Reptilian Heart*
Deep ‘neath the soil, where Martian roots take hold,
There beats a heart of scale and ember’d will—
A reptile core that feeds on tender threads
And laughs at surface storms that never reach.
“Return,” it hisses, “each revolving year,
And tend thy ground lest I resume my feast.
For if thou slack’st, I bloom in autumn’s hush,
Or rise anew when spring recalls my name.”
The record slows. The needle lifts itself.
The single side hath sung its many truths.
---
**EPILOGUE**
So mark thee well, thou gardener of red dust:
What binds too tight shall never journey deep,
And what is nam’d must bear the proper sign.
Seek not the surface for the hidden foe—
But water thought, and let it downward go.
Numbered Edition of 1 copy