P4 Theater began with its founder’s fascination with how to capture what is true. Theatre serves as a vessel, photography as a method, inscribing real existence. From the early photographic practice of Real Image to the eventual filming of Shoot Self with You, we have always summoned that dense Real, which cannot be erased or repressed, onto the stage, then inscribed the record of its exposure onto digital negatives.
From beginning to build P4 Theater in 2015 to moving from Tiantongyuan to the office on Wanghua Road in 2021, P4 has been through many ups and downs. Our ideas, awareness and attitudes have continually shifted and changed through practice.
The following articles introduce P4 Theater (underlined titles link to the articles):
P4 Theater
What Is Real Image?
P4 Theater — Past · Present · Future · 510
P4 Chronicle | The Salon of the Rejected and the League of Losers
P4 Theater: A University in the Making, a Winding Labyrinth, a Hard Drive Inscribed with Life
01
Over years of practice, P4 Theater has brought forth many theatrical forms, works and ways of creating, all of them arising from open calls to the public. The experience accumulated through so many experiments with recruitment has enabled P4 to sustain its vitality.
The following articles set out some of these recruitment arrangements (underlined titles link to the articles):
Come Plant Your Seed at P4 Theater | A Journey from Mystery to History
P4U Recruitment Programme
P4 Theater’s Real Image Recruitment Programme
P4X Challenge: Open Call
P4 Theater’s Real Image Recruitment Programme
P4X Challenge: Open Call
Theatre and Fear | Personal Chronicle — Offering Up Our Future
To You, Me, Him and Her, Who Spent Sunday Nights at the Screenings
Recruitment | P4U Programme — Howlers on the Rooftop
P4 Screenings — Hearts Projecting onto One Another
Real Image — Theatre for Two, Just to See You Again
P4U Performance: Audience Call! | Be the Torch That Ignites the Fireworks of Chance Sequences!
Recruitment | P4U Programme — A Centrist’s Self-Help Guide after Failed Love
Recruitment | P4U Programme — Kill the Rose
Recruitment | 3P Group Creators: Witnessing and Recording the Eighth P4U Event, Kill the Rose
Refined in the Experimental Theatre of The Final Solution: Celebrating Life through a Staged Death!
Actors and Players Wanted | Recruitment Begins for Duel Club!
Purple Action: Open Call | Join a Revolution That Brings Itself into Being!
Draw Your Most Beautiful “Line of Flight” within “Battle Royale”
Purple Action: Players Wanted | You Will Pass Away, I Will Pass Away, but We Will Live Forever
North Wind Theatre Recruitment | Wenhao from the Theatrical Desert, and Me
Dialectical Theatre: Open Call | Bring Theatre Back to Life; Bring It into Being through Practice
Off to Hangzhou! To The World Question Center
Actors Wanted | Stake Your Life on a Gamble: Porphyria Is Underway!
Actors Wanted | Romance Theatre Sets Love and Theatre Right Again
Recruitment | This February, Chengfeng Polang Sets Sail
Recruitment | Desperate to Leave? Let’s Step Out of the Everyday Together!
Players Wanted | Happiness Kingdom’s Seven Princes and the Strawberry Princess
This Is a Recruitment Notice for Shoot Self with You
Bringing strangers quickly into a close community has always been P4’s mission. Rather than talking about immersive theatre or environmental theatre, we might simply say that you enter the play the moment you step into P4 Theater. Play and becoming are at P4’s core. A script need not be the only text: what P4 cherishes and protects most are the latent texts hidden deep within each person.
02
P4 Theater has produced dozens of plays, large and small, which have taken shape in all kinds of spaces. Especially after 2021, when various circumstances prevented us from performing in our original large theatre, we began moving among parks, boxing rings, offices, office buildings, dance halls, lawns, bookshops, abandoned ruins and more. These varied environments created ever more singular experiences and ways of perceiving. We thank the generous people and partners who offered us their spaces.
The following works emerged from this process (underlined titles link to the articles):
P4 Theater | Shadow Counterpoint | GIF Edition
P4 Theater | Pixel Echo XIII
P4 Theater | Hamlet Mirror | GIF Edition
Come to P4 Theater! Don’t Be Afraid! Gaze into That Dark, Abyssal Mirror! Encounter Once More the Self You Have Never Met!
31 October: P4 Theater’s Cocoon Performs for the Public!
Cocoon, a Dance Theatre Work — When Flesh Turns to Ash, an Unrepeatable Soul Remains
Sixteen Days and Nights of Anticipation at P4 Theater — Cocoon Performs for the Public!
Carving a Window into the Void
“Performing the Cocoon within Each of Us”: How Cocoon Takes Shape through Encounters at P4 Theater
Cocoon, a Dance Theatre Work: One-Minute Edit
Howlers on the Rooftop Advertisement: Ru Meng Battles the Retina
P4U | A Mysterious Public Performance of Howlers on the Rooftop: A New Year’s Celebration! Performed Only Once in a Lifetime!
2 January! The P4U Programme Presents Howlers on the Rooftop!
P4U Programme | Playing after Reflecting on Direct Action
Harm, Trust, Respect, Suicide: P4U and the 3P Group
P4 Theater | P4U Programme
P4U Public Performance | Who Is the Centrist? A Centrist’s Self-Help Guide after Failed Love, an Interactive, Immersive Play, Opens on 1 May!
P4U | The Immersive Play A Centrist’s Self-Help Guide after Failed Love
A Future That Seems True but Is Not
P4U | Remaking the Self through the Master–Slave Dialectic: A Centrist’s Confession — Traces of Excitement and Sadness amid Polished Roguery and Naive Compromises, Mixed with Anticipation and Unease
Tickets Now on Sale! The Wild, Interactive Musical Kill the Rose Is Coming!
Divine Revelation Is Too Dull; Entertainment Reigns Supreme | Four Hours of Duel Club This Saturday
I Will Remember You Forever for This Night! See You in the Ring!
Tomorrow, Let the Person You Love Most “Live”
The First Hour | Duel Club, 23 October
The Second Hour | Duel Club, 23 October
The Third Hour | Duel Club, 23 October
The Fourth Hour | Duel Club, 23 October
The Theatre of Cruelty | First Manifesto | Artaud
North Wind Theatre | Disgusting! Will You Come on New Year’s Day?
North Wind Theatre | Iceberg Preview
North Wind Theatre | Mousetrap — An Exercise in Catching Everything We Can and Reflecting on It with Utmost Seriousness
North Wind Theatre | Can a Butterfly’s Flutter Set Off Another Tornado?
Players Wanted | Fools! Can You Still Afford a Deadly Joke? On 1 April, the Final Puzzle Awaits Your Answer!
North Wind Theatre in Hangzhou | Never Give Up Reclaiming the Power to See within the Spectacle
Hangzhou Performance | On 4 May, Let’s Fall into Alice Lake Together at Tianmuli
A Response for the Ages | Wang Xiang of Penghao Theatre! Come On! Fire at Me! If You Have Anything to Fire
Premiere Tickets on Sale | The Countdown to Porphyria… Will You Run the Dungeon That Could Change Your Fate?
Porphyria’s Monologue | Here She Comes. She Is My Moon. I Thought I Would Escape, but I Did Not. I Am Infatuated with Her. Let Me Become a Single Strand of Her Yellow Hair.
New Play | Kiss You, Kill Me — Jiang Haizhu and His Solo Performance
Global Private Screenings | The Voyeur and the Documentary — Yun Jianhui and Rediscovering the Compass (《重寻指南针》)
Reshaping Social Practice
The Last Rehearsal | The Last Rehearsal from Shoot Self with You
P4’s Final Chapter | The Last Rehearsal Performs for the Public | Love, Death, Shoot Self with You
Zhou You’s Universe | Becoming Your Double and Mine in a Single Second
Shi Jiating’s Solo Exhibition | Aberrant Reproduction (《孽生繁殖》) — An Abandoned Boy from Tangshan
The audiences who come to P4 Theater move us most. They can see what is different about the plays that emerge here. In contrast to the polished staging and lavish casts of productions at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, what they see here are the lives behind these performers who are not professional actors, and their courage to exist as human beings. Many audience members gradually become participants, taking on more important roles in the next play.
03
P4 has continually worked out its own methodology, drawing out further possibilities through practice after practice. Methodology is the foundation of every action. Bringing psychoanalytic theory into our theatrical practice can release even greater force.
The following articles set out some of the methods we have developed (underlined titles link to the articles):
P4 Theater | Discovering Inspiration
Love and Theatre | A Love Letter to the Future
How Can You Know What You Really Look Like?
Recruitment | Theatre Is the Best and Only Way Out for the Proletariat
You Must Forge Your Own Path in Psychoanalytic Practice
P4 Theater: A University in the Making, a Winding Labyrinth, a Hard Drive Inscribed with Life
04
Throughout P4’s practice and creation, we have remained absolutely committed to creating together. Each participant arrives with their own story, speaking and acting. P4 is a stage for collective creation, a force belonging to the collective. People can freely initiate projects, gather, tell their stories, and use all kinds of workshops to communicate and grow closer to one another.
The following articles are by some of the participants (underlined titles link to the articles):
Real Image Stories | In Their Words
Here, There Is a Group of Cinderellas
To P4 Theater, to the Eternal, Omnipresent Photon
Behind the Scenes of Cocoon, Part One — Recording the Existence of “Me” with P4 Theater
Behind the Scenes of Cocoon, Part Two — Recording the Existence of “Me” with P4 Theater
Behind the Scenes of Cocoon, Part Three — Recording the Existence of “Me” with P4 Theater
Behind the Scenes of Cocoon, Part Four — Recording the Existence of “Me” with P4 Theater
Let the Self Return to Itself — Feel the Nerve Impulses Connecting You and Me
Let Us Enter the Dream Together
Why I Hate Howlers on the Rooftop
Am I a Journalist? (1) | A Record of Howlers on the Rooftop
Am I a Journalist? (2) | A Record of Howlers on the Rooftop
The Defence of Suffering — The “Liu Du” in My Mind
P4 Theater | When Mary Shelley Meets the Howlers on the Rooftop
Little Red Deer and Her Red Rose
Their Words — On Howlers on the Rooftop
I Have Nothing to Say about the “Howlers”
Am I a Journalist? (3) | Actor Training Records from Howlers on the Rooftop
P4U Interview | This “Play” Was Born Because of Every Person Involved
P4U Interview | “When We Got the Script, No One Could Have Imagined What It Would Ultimately Become”
P4U Interview | “Only Today Did I Think: It’s Over. Do You Understand?”
P4U Interview | Happening, Experiencing, Having
P4U Interview | “What the Audience Could Not Expect, What the Actors Could Not Expect, What No One Could Expect”
P4U Interview | A Seventy-Seven-Year-Old Little Girl
P4U Interview | “Without a Record, It Really Would Disappear”
Talking at Cross-Purposes — A “Conversation” among the Creators of Howlers on the Rooftop
My Story | Diaries and Nosebleeds
P4 Sunday Screening Discussion | Three People Discuss Milo Rau’s The Repetition: A Murder on the Street Corner
Three Days to Go | About Those Things: Monologues
Life behind the Scenes | How Does a Play Come into Being?
3P Group | Kill! Kill! Kill! The Rose!
3P Group | I’ll Wait for You on the Road to the Underworld
3P Group | On Projecting onto and Portraying Professor C
210605 | A Farewell Letter: My Reflection Looks Beautiful in the Red Light
North Wind Theatre | Parking: 30 Yuan. Tolls: 20 Yuan.
North Wind Theatre | Even the Road to the Underworld Has Traffic Jams
North Wind Theatre | Hippies and 🪣
North Wind Theatre | I Violated His Dignity as a Character
North Wind Editorial | Tear Off My Name — Never Waking from a Dream Is More Frightening than Having It Shattered
North Wind Editorial | Notes on the Company and Iceberg
Audience Criticism | Love Concrete People; Truth Belongs to All Humanity
North Wind Editorial | How Could the Clever Understand the Fire in a Fool’s Bones…
Audience Criticism | Audience Member No. 15 Critiques Iceberg
A Piece Long Left Unsent
North Wind Theatre | All the Frameworks Have Collapsed
Dialogue 02 | April Fools’ Night
Observation Diary | The Light and Darkness of Iceberg’s Male Lead
Anonymous Submission | On Cheap Struggles and Powerless Groans
510 Notes | Just Like Your Dad!!!
Communal Script | A Straight Line
Communal Script | The Male Photographer
Communal Script | Virgin
Communal Script | Philomela Is a Girl
Communal Script | Private Diary
Chengfeng Polang | I Cannot Clear It Away, See Clearly, or Move
A Rejected Submission | Types of Anxiety That Grow in Neurosis and Psychosis
Lines of Flight | Please Look into My Eyes; Do Not Change Direction — For Compass
Communal Script | An Anti-ChatGPT Manifesto
Asylum | Refuge / Psychiatric Hospital / Shelter / Home
What Is a “School”? | A Polemic Addressed to the EPS Psychoanalytic Xingzhi School
Out of the Consulting Room | The Sublimity of Psychoanalysis
Art Performance | Shoot Self with You from Beginning to End — Will the Aliens Return?
Shoot Self with You | This Is the Last Rehearsal! It’s Real! It’s All Real!
Shoot Self with You | Let Me Become a Whale Fall; I Have So Little, So Little
Shoot Self with You A | …Then You Become a Little Girl Again…
Shoot Self with You R | “Beijing’s First Experiment”
Shoot Self with You S | Everything Is a New Dimension
Shoot Self with You K | Eardrum Ripper
Shoot Self with You D | Once Again
The Last Rehearsal: A Review | Beginning to Speak — Wang Yanan
Shoot Self with You | I Disappeared — After Performing in The Last Rehearsal
Communal Script | A Diary of Paying for Sex — The Answer
A Solitary Manifesto | Come On, Once More: “Fire at Me, and at You Too”
Some Interviews from the Pandemic
Self-Material Project | A Dream That Cannot Be Castrated
Self-Material Project | A Tangshan Boy: A History of Violence, 01
Self-Material Project | A Tangshan Boy: A History of Family Suffering, 02
Communal Script | The Song of Zhou You
Self-Material Project | A Tangshan Boy: A Dream about Mother, 03
Self-Material Project | A Tangshan Boy: The Artist’s Final Chapter, 04
The Meaning of Aberrant Reproduction: There Has Never Been “Drawing from Life” Faithful to Its Object; Only the Infinite Replication of Narcissism Endures
P4 Submission | Fanged Poetics: A Preliminary Account of Dark Conceptualism | Jacob Reber
The idea of the participant is fluid. A participant might be an audience member, an actor, a critic, a director, a playwright, an organizer, someone providing meals, a photographer, someone posting on-screen comments, someone venting on Weibo, and so on. All are caught up in this collective event, mixing and fermenting, waiting for still more people to join and enter.
05
Without false modesty, P4 Theater is an incubator for Beijing’s underground theatre. Especially during our most closed-off years, from 2019 to 2023, P4 continued to support and encourage people who wanted to make theatre but had neither resources nor space. P4 showed everyone that making theatre is not difficult, and that it need not take place in a grand, luxurious hall. Theatre belongs to everyone. Creating together on the basis of equality and mutual respect is the source of creation itself. Wherever we are, we can speak freely and call our future into being.
The following plays were initiated by some of the participants (underlined titles link to the articles):
Help Build a Theatre Public Toilet — Creators Wanted for Spiral Staircase
Xiuxiu’s First Invitation | A Grand Get-Together on the Eve of Qingming!
Actors Wanted | The Glass Menagerie Is Here!
“We’re Already So Down and Out. Why Are We Still Making Independent Theatre?”
Be Ready at Any Moment | Animal Farm at 510 Café
A Common Festival | Run Wild on the Big Lawn on 4 May!
Recruitment | An Invitation from the 510 Community
Theatre Recruitment | Cast and Crew Wanted for Let Time Pass!
101 Theatre Company: Actors Wanted | Crash Headlong until You Bleed, Break through the Labyrinth of Meaning, Burn All the Bodies!
Script Reading: Open Call | Creative and Rehearsal Encounters for the Synesthetic Theatre Work Meeting — Session One, In Person
Recruitment | Meat Grinder Is Here
Theatre Taster Event | A Hub of Time and Space
Meat Grinder Performs for the Public | The Party Has Begun; Come Dressed for the Occasion
Come See the Performance | How Should I Be with You All?
Recruitment | A Plan — Four Eyes, a Play in Four Acts
Theatre Workshop: Open Call | The Eurydice Project
Co-Creators Wanted | The “Solo and Theatre” Workshop
Co-Creators Wanted | Let’s Compile Two Thousand Years of Ordinary People’s Daily Lives in China
Tickets on Sale | A Sharing Session for the Experimental Play Four Eyes
Recruitment | The Killing Mother Theatre Salon
New Play Sharing Session | The Old Sun Rises on a New Day
Happiness Kingdom | This Saturday’s Sculpture Activity: Destroying the Big Mask
On Burning the Moon, or on What Love Is, or on the Illusions of Brokenness and Wholeness
Tickets on Sale for Broken Moon
Broken Moon Performs for the Public | Theatre of Life? Open Relationships? You and Me? Did We Break an Illusion, or Burn That Damned Moon?
Performance Art | Octagonal Counter | Male Performers Wanted
2–4 February: Night-Time Construction Site, Octagonal Counter — Glorious Infrastructure Project @Groundless Factory
Performance Tickets on Sale / After I Smash My Brain to Pieces…
Salon Opening | 4.48 Psychosis
More and more independent theatre companies have emerged over these years, each holding to its own temperament and letting its own light shine. Theatre is part of life, a means of freeing people, rather than locking ourselves into cages and becoming prisoners.
06
A workshop is theatre’s smallest unit. Five or six people can begin to enact a space of their own. P4 encourages everyone to run their own workshops and try doing something together with those who come. Simple, relaxed, improvised, serious: workshops are soil in which creativity comes alive, and bridges through which people communicate.
The following workshops were organized by some of the participants:
The “Recovering Lost Feelings” Workshop Is Recruiting!
Embrace Your Imagination | Improvisation Workshop: Open Call
Jump out of a Plane without a Parachute | Improvisation Workshop: Open Call
The Magical Girls’ Tea Party | Spiritual Awakening Workshop: Open Call
P4 Sunday Screenings: Healing through Painting — Screening on Paper
P4 Art Therapy | Healing through Art Begins When the Pen Touches Paper; Answers Are Unexpectedly Projected onto the Page
Let’s Use Art to Draw the Poison out of Life | P4 Screenings: Screening on Paper, Art Therapy
P4 Screenings | Winter Special — A Screening of Fire
The Little Red Deer Series | Night-Time Conversations on Stage: Open Call
Who Says a Salon Is Just Idle Chat?
We Are All “Friday” | Workshop: Open Call
An Introduction to Improvisational Acting
How Do You Eat a Banana? | P4X Workshop, Sunday
Meeting You, Seeing Myself | Salon: Open Call
Offending the Audience | Theatre Reading Group: Open Call
Anything Can Dance | Workshop: Open Call
Breaking the Fourth Wall | Forum Theatre: Actors Wanted
2 May | Join an Exciting Last Judgement!
Workshop: Open Call | Bring Your Story and Perform Your Story
Nexus Theatre Creation Laboratory × P4 Theater | Words and Bodies Collide Freely in the Theatre, Breaking the Shackles on Creation
Audience Call | Purple Action | In the Afterworld, Is Giving Birth My Freedom?!
North Wind Theatre | Play Reading: Ten Participants Wanted
Purple Action | This Sunday, the Wormhole Is Open: Meet Your Other Self
Purple Action | This Sunday’s WeChat Group Theatre: Let’s Become Women Together!
Purple Action | This Sunday’s WeChat Group Theatre: The Confessional
Theatre Recruitment | A Final Rally before Death, and the Suffocation of Being Unable to Meet Death Boldly
Improvised Theatre | Let’s Break Up One More Time!
Improvised Theatre | Love as Though Your Life Depends on It! The Unknown Will Always Break through You!
Purple Action | This Sunday, Become the Twelve People of Mad County
Improvised Theatre | Love More Fiercely! How Far You Go Depends on the Strength of Your Drive and the Depth of Your Exploration
Talk with Me | Here Is Rhodes; Jump Here
Online Street Dance on Friday | We Still Dance in Quarantine! An OG Will Get You Flying!
Close-Up Magic | This Saturday, Let Your Eyes Pierce the Mind’s Defences
4 August, Lovers’ Day | Let a Performance Art Work Commemorate Our Love Once More — Outward Monologue
Classic Theatre Workshop | Let Love Perform Us Anew
Sleep at Ten × P4 Theater | The Seventh Chapter of Dreams Workshop
Saturday Party | Join the Rally for One-Ear’s Raid on Black Cat Detective’s Airship!
In-Person Seminar | Schizo–Guattari Seminar, Session Two: The Territorialized and Deterritorialized Subject
Sunday Event | A Mini Market: Mystery Boxes of Second-Hand Goods at 90% Off, a Pretend High-End Market with Real Practical Uses. Admission: 1 Yuan; Stall Fee: 0.
Thursday Seminar | Third Seminar on Guattari and Psychoanalysis: The Body without Organs (BwO) — Flows
Thursday Seminar | The Mother in Psychoanalysis — A Clinical Supplement to the Guattari and Psychoanalysis Series
Thursday Seminar | La Borde and the Ideal Person — Fourth Session of the Guattari and Psychoanalysis Series
Thursday Seminar | Mother! Psychoanalysis in Chengdu
Saturday Open Salon | Feel the Wind of the Unconscious Together
Happiness Kingdom | Seven Days of May Day Fun: Let’s Make Dolls Together!
Thursday Seminar | Body and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis — In Dialogue with Lacan, Derrida and Guattari
Film Screening and Discussion | Sátántangó: Registration Is Open
Tuesday Reading Group | Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: Group Members Wanted
Live on Christmas Eve | Come Experience a Blindfolded Dream in Person!
Live on New Year’s Day | A Sixteen-Year-Old Noise Prodigy Takes You into a New Dimension
P4 Exhibition | “Shit Family” — An Abandoned Boy from Tangshan
P4 has held more than a hundred workshops of all sizes. People filled each of these spaces with love. We can become who we want to be. Freely, without being defined by others: become.
P4 Theater’s ten years exist because more than ten thousand people have visited. Without these friends, the name would be a castle in the air. Through our own actions, we built a passage towards the impossible: towards love, towards being lost, towards pain, towards all the reasons that leave us no choice but to go on living.
Recording is the reason P4 Theater exists. We have recorded almost every story that has unfolded here: the nervous anticipation of first stepping through the door, the arguments during rehearsal that left faces flushed, the laughter, revelry and tears after performances. Theatre has always been happening offstage as well as on.
P4 turns the camera into a ghost, roaming and freezing the moments when lives collide.
The trinity of film, theatre and documentary is P4’s ultimate direction. In the practice of Shoot Self with You, truth and fiction began to blur and slip free; actors, characters and desires intertwined and coupled. The camera operator was no longer a detached third-party observer, and the relationship between watching and performing had already shattered the position of the object through repeated acts of distancing. I call it impasse cinema: an emotional tremor that must be faced at close range; a truth beneath theatrical performance; a simple, unadorned, pure presentation; a release made possible by absolute trust. This is also what P4 Theater has taught me over these years, rehearsal after rehearsal: the truest thing.
Ten years: I went from twenty-five to thirty-five. Because of theatre, my life was thrown onto a roller coaster that soared into the sky and plunged into the earth—jolting, spinning, sinking, taking flight. It forced me from an INTP into an ENFP. I began learning to cry, to roar, to become hysterical, to express myself bravely. Real life is full of predicaments that demand compromise or evasion. Perhaps, placed within a play, even the fate that leaves me humiliated can have its moment of brilliance. I long for these fragments of images to be witnessed in the future.
Finally, here is the link to the complete film Shoot Self with You (a VPN is required). Thank you to everyone who has supported P4 Theater along the way. Let’s keep going together and fight to the end for our dreams and our love.
https://vimeo.com/934438119
Password: 1234
Impasse Cinema Manifesto — Towards a Self-Recursive Life
When I,
I,
must let out one final sound, at the threshold of life and death, point the camera at my forehead and press record.
I must put everything I have lived through, imagined, experienced, felt and perceived into the film, without reserve.
I neither know nor direct what will happen in the next second. We rehearse, anticipate and drill for that day that is bound to come.
I love you as I hate you.
The universe, time and space, you and me.
Films, making films,
retina, detached,
left behind, forgotten,
sound, so noisy,
beside you, breathing,
whispers, in the dark.
What I loathe most is objectivity, the pretence that everything is under control.
Crossing that extreme point, the pupil has turned the world upside down. I am falling, trembling with you.
Vanishing into the horizon and the falling meteor; artificial fireworks imitate an eternal trace.
It will always rise from the cracks, letting every expectation fall into the air.
Tossed up, or cast aside; gathered into an embrace to hear the abyss echo.
I cannot remain steadfast amid the bizarre, yet I lament the calm.
Short circuits and idle spinning, ease or perhaps escape,
being, nothingness, madmen and idiots,
now, you and I are etched onto eternal film;
forcing out the soul, wringing dry the flesh, flowing into the world.