_______________
Pascal Edward OLoughlin
Hello, I'm one of the lurkers on your blog. I'm a writer, just finished my first novel and waiting to see what happens next. Maybe I'll just stay at home and listen to The Fall. Forever. Try and My Loose Thread rocked my world. And continue to do so. Er... Anyway, here's one of my poems:
Grooming
Your eyes, comprising the same
brushed silvers as the drinks tray,
size up the barman who, I suspect,
is more than a touch homophobic,
while, simultaneously, you’re reminding
me where the money’s come from
for the cocktails I’ve ordered.
I’m thinking about the dog
you practised on last night,
licking your hand even as it died,
while, simultaneously, I’m anticipating
the intimacy we will enjoy later,
when you’ve finished work and I’ve got
you out of that loathsome Armani suit.
________________
Joseph Mills
'Joe M'
I've had published/produced:
Towards the End (novel, Polygon, Edinburgh)
Obsessions (short story collection, Millivres first edition, and GMP, London, the second)
Borderline (Anthology of Scottish Gay Writing, Mainstream, Edinburgh)
Edie's POV (Short film, BBC Scotland, shown at Edinburgh Film Festival)
Also short stories and non-fiction in various books and magazines.
Currently working on a variety of things, slowly. Including 'The Secret Diary of Edna Welthorpe (aged 113 3/4). As discovered and annotated by FakejoeM'.
Here's a link to my not often used blog, which has some stories not in Obsessions, a bit from an unpublished novel and an interview with Thomas Moronic of me and me of him on our writing influences etc.
http://josephmills.blogspot.com/
Towards the End (Excerpt)
On the way to the swimming pool I popped into the city museum: I hadn’t visited it since I was a child at school. After all those years, my favourate exhibit was still there, and still my favourate. While all the other children were cluttering round the prehistoric remains of the once rulers of the earth, I was gazing at the glass case containing the letters written from the battlefront by soldiers in the First World War. To my mind those letters were more awe-inspiring than any old dinosaur bones. Prehistoric remains created no image in my mind, but as I gazed at the yellowed letters, I gave their unknown authors faces and bodies and backgrounds: they were all young and handsome; they all died in battle; and they all had a lover waiting for them back home. I attempted to shine up the dull glass that separated me from the hazy words, but they remained, like the past itself, as Alex had said, vivid but untouchable.
The swimming pool was very busy, packed out with noisy kids from the local school. Tall, broad-shouldered fourteen-year-olds were wearing thin white football shorts with nothing beneath them but fully developed penises, which thrashed about obscenely as they spurted up and down the pool unpredictably – in marked contrast to the older swimmers, who were methodically paddling across from side to side, counting the laps patiently in their heads as they did so.
Because the boys had been making such a commotion at the deep end, the girls had drifted down to the other side of the pool. Whenever a pair of boys or girls did venture outside their own territory, there was a tense, silent challenge exchanged between invader and invaded, then a sudden rush back to safety. It was exactly like the scene at the beginning of the school dances, when all the boys were lined up against one wall and all the girls against another, each side too dependent on the other to risk humiliation by making the first move. Here, by their nakedness, the sexes were distinguished even more: barefoot, the females walked extra daintily, while the boys’ masculine clumsiness was emphasised by the way they padded along, chests stuck out to maintain balance, arms dangling loosely by their sides, like monkeys.
I had been in the pool for about twenty minutes, picking up speed as I travelled from side to side counting the laps, when I realised that one of the schoolboys was pacing himself with me. I found this quite flattering, and made it obvious that I knew what he was doing. The pacing eventually became racing: the loser would be he who had to wait too long at the side to rest. The boy was a skinhead with tattoos on each shoulder. And black mascara, which was running down his cheeks in tribal streaks.
‘I was just about to give in,’ he said, when he finally won the race; we were both floating at the edge of the pool, both breathing in and out deeply, exhilarated.
‘Are you with the school party?’ I asked him. He nodded, obviously embarrassed.
‘The big man’s coming to take us back, I think,’ he said, looking up towards a tall burly man who was glancing frequently at his watch.
‘He looks quite human for a teacher,’ I said, remembering the sadistic gym teacher from St.James.
‘Oh he’s all right,’ the boy said. ‘Apart from the fact he’s queer.’
With that, he dived off to join his friends at the deep end.
Thoroughly depressed, I headed for the showers before the school kids took them over. A boy smelling of fresh apples (soap or shampoo) was pissing furtively against the wall.
‘Ouch!’ he yelped, glancing round at me embarrassed. ‘Soap in ma nob.’
There were two other people there: a man in his late twenties and his five-year-old son. The man was washing the boy’s hair with bubbly shampoo, the boy squealing with delight every time his head was rinsed out under the jet of water.
‘Can we have chicken curry tonight, daddy, can we?’ the boy asked as the two of them left.
‘You like that, don’t you?’ the father said, trying to catch my eye proudly as he passed. But I turned away. A wave of black depression engulfed me as I thought of Alex and Diane and the baby, and how useless my hopeless little affair with Alex was compared to that.
I walked home in a daze, staring at the ground, trying to think of nothing, only beginning to register my surroundings again when I reached home. It suddenly occurred to me as I climbed the stairs that the two boys who had passed by me were carrying Pat’s record player and my radio. When I appeared in the hallway, a horde of teenagers and small children swarmed out off every room, like bees escaping an invaded nest. They flew down the stairs, still clutching whatever possessions of mine and Pat’s they had managed to grab on the way.
I sat in the middle of the ruins, sipping at the bottle of gin that one of them had already been at, to calm my nerves. An hour later I left to report the break-in to the police. There was no way I could re-secure the lock on the door which had been smashed - but they had left nothing of value for anyone to steal now anyway: the house had been defiled – it wasn’t ours anymore.
On the way to the police station I saw the two boys who had stolen the record player and radio.
‘I want them back,’ I said, bravely drunk enough to confront them. ‘I want them back right now!’
They both looked at each other in mock, amused ignorance.
‘What is it you want’, one of them said, raising a fist which had N.E.A.L tattooed on the fingers. ‘Is it this?’
_______________
Hi, I'm Blair. I live in Portland, Oregon. I like to write but sometimes the actual process of writing makes me wish I had chosen (and spent my time perfecting) another form of artistic expression. Like I really should have picked up guitar again. I started at 15 and went to like 18 and then stopped. Anyway, I like to write about people who are lost and searching for identity and purpose.
Excerpt from "Exteriors," a novel I'm writing now.
---Elliot sits in the guy’s room on his bed, waiting for him to get out of the shower or something. He doesn’t know where the guy went, but he took his shirt off before he left the room, so he figures probably the shower. He’s in an apartment on the top floor of a huge Victorian house, just down the tree-lined street from the camping store.
---It’s hot and muggy inside the house – no air conditioning and no breeze. The three windows in the bay are closed, their white fabric shades shut, but Elliot can still feel the sun’s heat radiating through them.
---He looks around.
---The room is scattered with shit. Books – Catcher in the Rye, some other novels of equal reputation, nothing risky, and magazines — Outdoor, Men’s Health with some guy flexing his abs on the front, Sierra Club, National Geographic on the floor opened to a story about global warming. The guy’s shirt is flung over a chair in front of a messy desk, where a PowerBook’s screen saver flashes with scenes of nature—a babbling brook fading into a white sandy beach, then a dirt road cutting through a mossy forest.
---Elliot leans down to look under the bed. He sees a metal toolbox full of technical-looking equipment, like wires and little circuit boxes and battery packs, some fuse type string, a professional-looking stainless steel lighter. He stops looking when he hears a door close somewhere in the hall and he falls back on the bed, sick of waiting for this fucking weirdo to come out from wherever he is. He wants to take a shower and sleep on a comfortable bed. Fuck, he thinks, why can’t I just be like this dude? I want my own room. I want my own bed, my things scattered around it.
---There’s a map of the United States tacked to the ceiling. Colored thumbtacks mark certain locations—Vail, Eugene, Marin County.
---He looks at big photos tacked on the walls in neat rows of local kids and friends of this guy, he figures. Some girls wearing plastic leis at a party, a teenager wearing a king’s crown and no shirt, three guys lined up next to each other on customized, lowered bicycles.
---This is the kind of life that Elliot wants but can’t have. He’s not capable of stillness, of keeping friends long enough to have well-composed photos of them. He can’t stay somewhere long enough for the floor to be scattered with familiar and regular things, and this depresses him. He wants to stay here forever, even in this heat, he feels completely at home.
---He pulls one of the guy’s pillows over his head. It smells like dirty hair, but he likes the smell and the pillowcase is cool. He takes long slow breaths, trying to calm himself down. He’s nervous. He doesn’t know what he’ll be doing with this guy. Now that he’s here, he just wants to fall asleep.
________________
This is an excerpt from a new play I'm writing. I've been working on it since my last play, "33 To Nothing", finished its Off-Broadway run in October 2007. Its (tentatively) called "Accidentally Like A Martyr" and takes place in a tiny, almost-forgotten-about gay bar in the East Village, NYC.
"Mark" is in his mid 30's. Edmund is in his mid 50's.
I'm humbled and terrified to share this with all of you. I hope you like it.
http://www.myspace.com/33tonothingband
---It’s hot and muggy inside the house – no air conditioning and no breeze. The three windows in the bay are closed, their white fabric shades shut, but Elliot can still feel the sun’s heat radiating through them.
---He looks around.
---The room is scattered with shit. Books – Catcher in the Rye, some other novels of equal reputation, nothing risky, and magazines — Outdoor, Men’s Health with some guy flexing his abs on the front, Sierra Club, National Geographic on the floor opened to a story about global warming. The guy’s shirt is flung over a chair in front of a messy desk, where a PowerBook’s screen saver flashes with scenes of nature—a babbling brook fading into a white sandy beach, then a dirt road cutting through a mossy forest.
---Elliot leans down to look under the bed. He sees a metal toolbox full of technical-looking equipment, like wires and little circuit boxes and battery packs, some fuse type string, a professional-looking stainless steel lighter. He stops looking when he hears a door close somewhere in the hall and he falls back on the bed, sick of waiting for this fucking weirdo to come out from wherever he is. He wants to take a shower and sleep on a comfortable bed. Fuck, he thinks, why can’t I just be like this dude? I want my own room. I want my own bed, my things scattered around it.
---There’s a map of the United States tacked to the ceiling. Colored thumbtacks mark certain locations—Vail, Eugene, Marin County.
---He looks at big photos tacked on the walls in neat rows of local kids and friends of this guy, he figures. Some girls wearing plastic leis at a party, a teenager wearing a king’s crown and no shirt, three guys lined up next to each other on customized, lowered bicycles.
---This is the kind of life that Elliot wants but can’t have. He’s not capable of stillness, of keeping friends long enough to have well-composed photos of them. He can’t stay somewhere long enough for the floor to be scattered with familiar and regular things, and this depresses him. He wants to stay here forever, even in this heat, he feels completely at home.
---He pulls one of the guy’s pillows over his head. It smells like dirty hair, but he likes the smell and the pillowcase is cool. He takes long slow breaths, trying to calm himself down. He’s nervous. He doesn’t know what he’ll be doing with this guy. Now that he’s here, he just wants to fall asleep.
________________
Grant James Varjas
'gjvnyc'
This is an excerpt from a new play I'm writing. I've been working on it since my last play, "33 To Nothing", finished its Off-Broadway run in October 2007. Its (tentatively) called "Accidentally Like A Martyr" and takes place in a tiny, almost-forgotten-about gay bar in the East Village, NYC.
"Mark" is in his mid 30's. Edmund is in his mid 50's.
I'm humbled and terrified to share this with all of you. I hope you like it.
http://www.myspace.com/33tonothingband
MARK
Well, that sobered me up a little. I can see why Scott loved this bar. And hated it.
TO EDMUND.
Have you been coming here a long time?
EDMUND
How long do you mean?
MARK
Well…
EDMUND
I guess its been…I don’t know. Two years? Two and a half? When I decided it was finally time to go to a bar that acts my age. Was Scott…
MARK
Older? Yeah, not ancient, but…Older than me.
EDMUND
Ah.
MARK
He died a…little over five years ago, though. So I doubt you guys crossed paths.
EDMUND
Most likely not. That’s before even Jeffrey’s time. You never came here with him?
MARK
I don’t think so, no. Scott was much more dedicated to his drinking than I was, contrary to my behavior tonight. And he liked to drink alone. That sounds terrible but its true.
EDMUND
And you didn’t mind?
MARK
No. Well...I don’t know. It just seemed easier not to fight about it.
EDMUND
Famous last words.
MARK
Yeah. Pretty much.
EDMUND
Sorry. That was-
MARK
No. Its okay…its true.
PAUSE.
He…Scott had become friends with all the bartenders. Well, I’m not sure “friends” is the right word, he had become “friendly” with them and…And if he…When he got too drunk they would always call him a cab and make sure he got into it okay. Near the end, they would even call me so I would know his car was on the way, in case he passed out in the back. Sometimes he was already passed out when they put him in the car. They would take money out of his wallet and pay the driver in advance, and when the driver got to our building he would either wake Scott up, or beep the horn so I would come down and get him.
EDMUND
Oh dear.
MARK
Yeah. He took his drinking very seriously.
SHORT PAUSE.
So one night…I was home asleep when I got a call from the bartender. I can’t remember his name right now, but…He wanted me to know that Scott had had a particularly celebratory night and they had found him passed out in the bathroom.
EDMUND
How could they let him get like that?
MARK
It wasn’t their fault. It really wasn’t. Scott held his liquor really well….until he didn’t. He would be, you know, seemingly alert…and he was funny, and…I mean, there wasn’t a lot of slurring, or…And then he’d be out. Face down on the bar, or…
SHORT PAUSE.
So they picked him up off the bathroom floor and called a car for him. They told me they had put him in the back seat and “he was on his way”. In fact, I could hear the driver’s horn just as I was hanging up. I threw on some clothes and ran downstairs, because the drivers would always get pissed if they had to sit there for very long. I get outside and walk up to the car, apologizing to the driver, asking him if he got paid, giving him a little bit more of a tip to make sure he’d do it again if called…
Then I open the back-door and look at Scott ,and…he’s slumped over on his side, kind of hunched over in this weird…And I think, “something’s wrong”. I don’t know why, something about the way his body was…positioned just seemed wrong…
I grab his hand to pull him up straight, and…and I almost drop it. It was so cold, it was like…
And he was dead. He was…No pulse, no…
SHORT PAUSE.
Then I just… I tried to pull him out. But he was so heavy, so…and I thought to myself…I thought, that’s why people say dead weight, and I just…
Finally, I’m not sure how long it was, but…Finally the driver realizes that something is wrong, and he tries to help, and I snapped at him, like, “don’t touch him”, and “can you call an ambulance”, like…Like its his fault or something.
They…The ambulance got there really fast, and they, you know, tried to revive him, but…It was all kind of, like…I can’t think of the word, but…
And that was pretty much it. And, like I said, that was…five years ago. A little more.
EDMUND
I’m so sorry.
MARK
Yeah, no…Thanks, but I mean…you really don’t have to say anything.
_______________
Hi. I'm Justin Taylor. I write fiction, poetry, and some nonfiction—book reviews and essays. The short story is my primary orientation. I was born and raised in Florida. Now I live in Brooklyn. I'm 26 years old. My focus as a fiction-writer has been shifting for a few years now: away from the overtly experimental/fabulist and toward so-called realist modes. (Sidebar: is Dawn Raffel a realist writer? Is our own gracious host?) Lately, I've been interested in structural questions—why stories start and end where they do; how those standards can be upset and/or exploited. In a lot of ways, my poetry is a sort of field laboratory where I test what language can do or what I can do with it. I like making erasures.
---Some much-admired living writers (no order): Barry Hannah, Marilynne Robinson, Campbell McGrath, Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, John Ashbery, Ben Lerner, Gary Lutz, Jim Shepard, Nicholson Baker, Stephen King, Chris Adrian, Chris Bachelder, Brian Evenson, David Gates, Denis Johnson, Ours Truly DC, David Berman, Amy Hempel.
---Gordon Lish gets his own paragraph because he is a superhero. O Captain!
---My latest project is a collection of poems called More Perfect Depictions of Noise. There's more info on my website, which is http://www.justindtaylor.net/ Anyway, here's a poem from the book.
The Museum of Found Art
-----I'm about out of sympathy
for your pinko bullshit, chimed my father
the landscape architect. What else could you
possibly want to know about either of us?
(Oh, my mother's hair had been luxurious.)
Today: the clouds like a bouquet and the bay
carries a good reflection of the sky
along with the last unthawed chunks of
winter, some boats and the stray
bottom of a girl's bikini, implication
being somewhere nearby is a naked girl,
though that's really a lot to assume
on the evidence—a half-dozen yellow
flowers laid out on a red lycra triangle.
The truth about cemeteries is they only
exist because we all keep clapping.
_______________
My name is James. I'm twenty-six. Like most English people, I am uncomfortable writing about myself and will one day manage to write about something else. When I manage to get my act together, I write things or I record songs or I go outside; otherwise I have bad days. I'm a slow learner. I trained as a computer mechanic, not as a writer. Before that I worked in a machine shop. I'm cranky. Despite this, I'm gradually bringing a book together with some very special people. But I have to go now, there is actually a pie in the oven. I have no idea who my favourite writers are. It'll all make sense one day. Thank you for reading.
1.
---There is a mark on the ceiling of my bedroom. The ceiling of my bedroom is white and plastered in stipples with one light fitting in the approximate centre, a blue-green shade hung over it.
I am lying in my bed. I have bolstered the pillows behind me in order to sit up. I have slid one leg out from under the duvet and it lies bare in the cooler air of the room. It is a pleasant feeling, this difference, and I am enjoying it as I read my book. Eventually it will not feel as pleasant as it does now, and then I will slide my leg back under the sheets and feel warm heat rush to engulf it, prickling at the skin, and I will probably sigh out loud.
2.
Do not turn over the examination booklet on your desk until the invigilator asks you to do so.
3.
---The book that I am reading is a Knight paperback, “for children and young adults”. It is almost thirty years old, which is to say that it is older than I am or the man sleeping beside me, and it is The Wizard Of Boland, by “B.B.”. Other books in the series, I am assured, include The Forest Of Boland Light Railway. The paper is browned and feels like sweetshop paper. I turn the pages very carefully, anxious not to part the old glued paperback binding.
---I last read this book, in a hardback edition with illustrations, when I was about eleven years old. That is quite a long time ago, over half as long as I have been alive, and I have just recognised that this is the book that made me fond of steak-and-kidney pudding. The Wizard, who is a miserable wretch, falls on ill-gotten gains and conjures himself one in celebration. The pudding itself is described in ravishing detail, as a less fortunate character looks on hungrily from their hiding-place. Even now I am feeling a little hungry.
It is almost ten-to-six on a Sunday morning, and I am not alone in bed today.
4.
In my head there is a song playing on the radio:
“The school of hate exercising disdain
---Swathed centuries working gentle slope
Study centuries of beardless muscle
---Would you nasty shits have put it I dare say like they do
in everything untouched you must be hate
Bodies hard with illness
American Adonis
---As if you know
---As if you know who they are.”
5.
---I am twenty-six years old and the man sleeping next to me is not. He is twenty-four, and somehow it feels strange to think of him as “a man”. Then, it feels somehow incorrect to think of myself as “a man”, and not simply because I am an invert who a matter of hours ago was thickly tangled with his long supple limbs, biting and clawing at his skin as he pressed himself into my throat, choking me as I tried to pull him deeper. In fact, that has nothing to do with it.
When I lie in bed and have sex, one of two different things will happen. Dutifully: I will grapple and heave against the other, submitting or dominating as required, mind somehow absent as I consider what I am doing, what they are doing. It is like imagining a building, where one might stop to outline a high distant arch, or judge the shade in alcoves. This often happens when the other person wants to have sex more than I do, and because it will make them happy and because I don’t really care I go along with it, and before I know what I’m doing, I am being playful and English. I am a fictional character. I am obliging. I am Jeeves. A faithful retainer.
Afterwards I feel warm and tired, and it’s quite alright.
6.
State everything that you are. Show your working.
7.
---I do my best not to lie to people, even when I am afraid of them. However, I am, of course, a pathological liar. There is no-one lying next to me in this bed.
---I am not afraid of you.
8.
---I changed the radio station in my head. Radio Nordsee International. Medium wave transmission from a maritime vessel, out there alone on the face of the deep. The DJ has given up trying to play his records and is reading the sleeves aloud on air instead. I can hear the squeaks and rumbles of the cabin in the spaces left by his voice. His voice comes to me over the sighing crackle-chorus of the airwaves late at night. I rest my hand on the tuner dial, easing my radio along the band as his signal drifts with the sea.
---“This one is MEAT AND DAIRY TOGETHER ACCUSATION by Deerhoof, and the tracklisting is as follows:
1. CLARIFIED BUTLER (2:58)
2. HANNA-BARBERA GENDER CRISIS (3:09)
3. BREAKFAST IN MORDOR (2:37)
4. HARALD AND CLAUDE (4:11)
5. PORK ALARM (5:36)
6. LITTLE BO PEEP HITS THE EXPRESSWAY (1:42)
7. INTERIOR WITH SAUSAGE (3:04)
8. TREYF ENCOUNTER (2:14)
9. NOWADAYS THE LONG HUGE (12:39)
---"The cover is by Simon Franks, and it is very beautiful. A big intricate inky patchwork. The record was recorded by Kim Flinders. And there are thanks to Oliver Lothian too, who plays saxophone on two of the songs.
---“I have now been listening to this record for two weeks, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. I only wish I could play it to you. However, since I cannot, I will tell you that I particularly enjoy the second side, which is to say the last three of those songs. It is almost as if the band forgets who they are, where they are, and what they are supposed to be doing there, wherever that happens to be.”
9.
This space intentionally left blank.
X.
---Unkind people have called what I do manipulative. When their words and my conscience prick at me, I tell myself that it is all in a good cause. I am often pleased and satisfied to have brought them pleasure, and more besides: so many want to be cracked open just a little, gleaming and vulnerable, to feel someone reach in and scratch the itch at the base of their brainstem. We call this ‘penetration’, but it is difficult. The lion has been standing at the well since the beginning of time, but you must be laid open to the core before he will drop you into the dark cool waters below.
---Eustace, of course, was looking for somewhere to shelter from the rain. He was looking for a way to fight loneliness.
Y.
This space intentionally left blank.
H.
---I am at home on the airwaves.
It is where I belong. Anyone who believes you can’t put down roots in an ocean has never seen the Sargasso Sea. The name I used has not been taken from me: I have abandoned it. Let it serve some other purpose. This is enough. I can feel the currents passing by, and here it is still. The turtles are nearby. I cannot feel them, but I know they are there.
Eventually I will fall to earth. Perhaps it will be in Oregon, or New Mexico, or over the East Coast. Most likely it will be in another ocean. Have you ever flown over the ocean at night, and looked down from your cruising altitude to see the dark face of the sea laid out so far below? The ocean forms into a great still plain, the perfect illusion of calm, and you watch it from your window, waiting for it to move like you wait to see someone you love draw another breath in their sleep. I cannot feel the turtles, but I know they are there.
D.
---Herodotus saw letters forming where the Nile joined the sea without ever taking to the air. Can dead poets talk? Are their dead dreams and unmade lines brought down the great curving channel to the delta, to rise up through those who remain?
I am suffering. Do something to help me. Do something to help yourself.
---Why be a loser when you can be a winner?
---I can remember that I said that when I met him, I would hand him a book that I carried with me for years in the lining of my coat. “Bill,” I would say, “have you ever been to Uffington? Have you stood in the light of the great star by Wayland’s Smithy and buried your face in the earth in terror and awe? I have had this book since I was nine years old. It took me nine years to understand it. I read it on the backseat of nine cars, nine buses, nine benches and hillsides. I would like to give it to you, I would like it to become important in your life, I would like it to be yours.”
---And then I hear, in the airwaves, the deepest ruin of a voice in the whole world, and it is saying:
I love you. I love you. I am talking to you. Hello.
When I did meet him, I didn’t recognise him. He wasn’t clothed in fire, and he didn’t walk with uncommon poise. His feet quite clearly touched the ground. He was another person. I shared the mildest, quietest excuse for a joke with him, and I handed him a note as he handed me a drink.
(The note that I handed him did not say anything. I was attempting to be poetic. The note was only money. Ten pounds. Payable to the bearer. The Queen shrank away from the ball of his thumb, remembering. Dead poets can talk, but I am so alive and tired of poetry. I am alive and I am speaking to you. Hello.)
M.
---He smiled and thanked us, and then he disappeared.
4.
---It is fine. This is only a dream. I realise now that I did not tell you the other thing that will happen when I go to bed and have sex with someone, but I realise that this is no great omission. That I did not need to say what it is. Anything that that I had to say, that I has now said.
This I does not need to say what it is, either.
---From somewhere, half-remembered, another man is screaming: rise up. Rise up. Inside of you.
---In cold fact, the monster does not need to be killed. (The other man may now lower his voice.)
---It would be merciful: he is dying. Put your hand lightly on his brow. Skin hot and thin, like banknotes too worn to remain in circulation. Burnt up in smoke and cinders. It's alright. Don’t cry. This is where you have been. All along. Don’t leave him here alone. This is where you are. It's not a dream. It's alright.
Reach over and hold his hand. This won’t hurt.
3.
---Outside the room where he now lays in rest there is a whole dark world waiting to be lit. There are forests and hills and long dreaming suburbs, there are rivers with deltas and springs. There are wheels and barrows with spokes and handles, there are spires and stormcocks and masts. There are hunters abroad in the patchwork snow. Lost threads of language climb chambers of xylem. Elements and aerials wrung up against the sky. There are pathways through darkness of ionised air. There are stations that broadcast from the stillness of the ocean.
_______________
Paul Curran
I tasted the dried semen on my face and knew that both the semen and the face weren't mine. I was mumbling to a shadow like a character in one of those movies where they address the camera and then go looking for the writer in a metaphorical journey though a godless universe. I hate that kind of movie. I didn't want to walk but I couldn't stop my body from moving. It wasn't really walking. It was falling. The legs kept catching the fall and propelling the body forward. It wasn't really my body. The feet were bleeding and burnt but no longer felt the ground because the broken compass carried them. It melted into my palm and became a part of me. The flesh on my palm opened into a bloody circle and the compass dropped into the wound. The skin lapped up around the edges and held it tight. I ripped my eyeballs from their sockets and felt the roots hang between my fingers. I was stumbling blind into the desert, an outcast from society, looking for a different kind of knowledge, one that only the desert brings, some kind of insight that can't be bought or discovered with the eyes' cold reason, an intuition that can penetrate the facile surface of images. But all I really wanted was for someone to embrace me and tell me they loved me and tell me that these delusions would end. Sand and wind resonated off the skin stretched tight across my bones. My body crumbled and sank into the desert. A regional television news story flickered across my hollow consciousness. UNKNOWN DRUMMER FOUND DEAD IN THE OUTBACK. The title was superimposed above a corny picture of a skeleton hand gripping two drumsticks. Then there came a made-for-television movie and a novelisation spin-off.
Cassie was digging a knife into her stomach. The Drummer grabbed at the handle. She sliced his forearm.
'Take me to the desert and dump me in the sand,' she said.
'I'm taking you to hospital.'
'I'm not sick. It's just this car makes me feel sick.' She glanced at the blanket and pillow on the back seat. 'How many buildings are there in Sydney?'
'More than you can see from here.'
Taxis cued up at the casino by the port on the right-hand side of the mainland. The one set of traffic lights in the central business district blinked orange. The beach curled into darkness beyond the whitewashed hospital.
'That isn't the hospital anymore.' Cassie gritted her teeth and dropped the knife. She pulled up her knees. 'You can fuck my dead body in the desert.'
'We're not going into the desert.'
'We could go anywhere. You could make your own CD.'
'What good is a drummer without a band?'
'I can't take this anymore. You're insane. This place is insane.'
'You'll be fine in Sydney.'
'I'm bleeding. There's too much dust. It's in my blood. You have to kill me now. Come inside my dead body.' She was squirming, fainting, spitting out meaningless words. 'If you take me to hospital I'll curse you forever.'
Dear Paul,
Well, The Drummer has certainly grown viler.
I didn't get the narrative except the sense of extrasensory high voltage of images scraping against each other which would be great if they grabbed me as a thrilling reading experience. But the words that lead from one to the next have eluded me for some reason and the dreamlike light etc, the great rationale, is not solving the problem for me.
So I am very sorry that I can't do anything with The Drummer. And my response may be entirely wrong and this all could be a brilliant piece of new writing and I'm just not getting it. I'm ready to admit that.
I am currently working on a more experimental novel with selective and random editing techniques. The four-part structure resembles an object that has been changed beyond recognition after having been nailed down. In parallel narratives written as instructions a man cuts off his arm after possibly murdering a schoolgirl, and a woman is trapped into rape games in a mysterious tower block. A distorted metanarrative contrasts with the parallel sections but is also subverted by an abstract return to fiction.
_______________
Robert Siek
'Robert-nyc'
Robert Siek is a poet who occasionally writes fiction and works at a large publishing house managing the copy-editing and proofreading of other writers' work. Despite the countless rejections from literary journals throughout the past ten years of his life, he still manages to continue writing and attempting to get published whenever possible. His poems have previously appeared in Dwan, Bay Windows, The Rogue Scholars Collective, The Columbia Poetry Review, Lodestar Quarterly, and Unpleasant Event Schedule. Most recently, his poems appeared on the online journal Velvet Mafia and in the latest issue of Court Green (Issue 5, 2008). In 2001, Wayne Koestenbaum chose his manuscript as the winner of the New School Chapbook Award Series, and the New School published his chapbook Clubbed Kid in the spring of 2003. Four of his poems appear in the anthology Cat Breath: A Rogue Scholars Two-Headed Kitty Anthology (Rogue Scholars Press, 2005). His short story “Sixteen” was published in the fiction anthology Userlands, edited by Dennis Cooper and published by Akashic Books (January 2007). Two of his poems will appear in the next issue of the online literary journal Limp Wrist in the fall 2008. Robert Siek plans on continuing this so-called writing career because there doesn't seem to be anything better to do with his time and he just can't stop doing it. Maybe he'll finish a novel he started over two years ago; maybe he won't.
Coffee in Camelot
The coffee pot fills like funneled chemicals, leftovers from a lab,
classroom experiments, the kind I copy-edit in science textbooks,
dripping faster than last drops shaken off over a urinal,
more like a constant leak from a bathtub faucet,
a fifth week of twisting handles as tight as possible.
The super tells me he’s waiting for the parts he ordered.
I nod and walk away, wondering how fancy the plumbing is,
if the valves consist of bone from heads of slaughtered unicorns,
molded in small villages and cooled in lakes somewhere in Camelot.
I pull a Styrofoam cup from a tower-shaped stack, one cup inside another,
wrapped in plastic on the pantry counter. The coffee maker hums
like a just-flushed toilet refilling, copper pipes vibrating
in hiding, like half-hard erections moving inside briefs,
constrained between folds of too-tight denim, like worn valves shaking
behind bathroom-wall tiles. I rip sugar packets open, hoping a quarter-cup
more coffee might drain. I hear the sink turned on, the sounds of a co-worker
rinsing something. It’s Rod in a black Lycra T-shirt, the kind with sleeves
that grip above biceps, like foreskin pulled back during uncut cock worship,
red tips turning colors with each stroke of a hand. His tan arms move
with each scrub of his favorite mug. I picture him in a shower soaping up,
his skin shines through lather, suds on his ass, shaving cream sliding down
from his just-shaved bald head. I look inside my cup, and the water stops.
He doesn’t dry before grabbing the handle of the not-full coffee pot,
like clamps on a flask held over a Bunsen burner, tilting to a pour
but still catching the stream like a plumber removing a pipe
holding a bucket underneath. He looks up, smiles, and asks if he cut in,
if it bothered me that he took some before the pot was full. I confess
that I planned to do the same. He nods while bending over
and removes a carton of whole milk from the mini-refrigerator.
The coffee maker is silent. It’s 8:37 in the morning,
and I’m dying to dry hump his ass.
______________
JW Veldhoen
I am terrible at mission statements and the truth is I can give no account of myself that I wouldn't rather receive from someone else in response to something that I've written. And I can't very well sum up or categorize what I've said or written since I'm not finished yet. Maybe I am not a writer. Henry Chopin or Kurt Schwitters make more sense as an aesthetic direction, or as an approximate analog for my intentions, and I can't call that writing, necessarily. What I have been writing, I can't parse at all, except to give details about a family novel, and a deictic game of science fiction. Nonetheless, here is a poem I wrote, even though I don't write poetry, with some little bits about writing, as an extempo, where a lyric phrase is repeated and varied, again and again:
"She said you are a hairline, a hair-shirt, a hairline inside of a hair-shirt. A hardhat on a hard-case, she was absolutist in her belief that I was spiny and encircled in red the ad said no experience required.
She said to turn and look
at the wax sculpture of Saint Sebastian,
I think to test me, to see if I knew it
and because she knew that I would know it,
that I had so predictably
seen myself as arrowed.
Archetype is eidos
our affects interpret us
immaculately.
She said she needed my help
to suss the suspect beauty
of ornaments so cheap
as she stood in the sound wave
of the hysterical speaker
a rich and pious girl
the sky her example
and the blinding hews
of the lapis-Christ.
She said the earth,
with its circle of vapor
resembles a great living creature,
constantly breathing in and out.
She said she would cut herself and then she cut herself.
Her name was Linda, she wore low cut shirts
but confessed to me her virginity, and asked me if I would take it
and I shuddered in revulsion, but bought her food and a stereo
for her housewarming in a cold cinder block apartment and she said
that she had wanted to be a nun but that her life rebounded on her doubts
and that the cause for her resignation and chastity was a god that she
wasn't sure existed.
She said she waited for the shahanshah to return.
She said that I should finish my science fiction novel and that Deixis was a good name for it, because of all it pointed to.
She said that she had read my writing on this blog after my friend introduced us, and that she was going to UBC to study cognitive systems, and that she liked Alice Sebold novels and I agreed that she should join me for dinner at another restaurant where she wasn't a waitress.
She said she had a white discharge after he raped her.
I said that I'd kill him but she said it was a Filipino thing,
but I went to the pool hall where she said he hung out
near the casino and the light rail tracks and I found him
right away and stabbed him with a cue in his neck and
his friends just stood there as I made his nose disappear.
She said I was a wandering magus.
She said my heart was sawed out.
She said that the morning is the daughter of the sky.
She said that if I pressed her to my heart my heart would be filled.
She said that the words wild ecstasy infected her, to herself, as they
infected her.
She said that I was not right in my head.
She said that he crawled off his lop-web, and sat down beside her.
She said the streets were to fill in the morning with cobras and I
said that she was trying too hard to be Dada.
She said I was a hairline, a hardhat, a herd, a herring, a hard-on, a
harper, a hazard, a hand.
She said I was too gentle with my inflections and that I needed scraping.
She said that she would starve me.
She said I shouldn't have told everyone that she was dead.
She said she loved my absence of character.
She said that she loved cold dead eyes, or said they can still be eyes.
She said that she wasn't always a man.
She said the early reception of Dutch painting depended greatly on the imposition of the categorical stillness of the image, and imposture against phrase, I said, and left to the Venetian salle, my iPod blasting gyrating music, syncopated and glitch-filled movement, movement.
She said she would go dancing if we danced a Danse Macabre, and I should have said baby, that is the only dance that I do.
She said she never wanted to bore me, and I said I wanted to bore her.
She said a knife, it was a knife.
She said they had it all caught on tape.
She said that she hadn't been warned.
She said it was a crying shame.
She said that after she died Tristan would never be well again.
She said that she hated me and that I ruined her life and that she wished she had never met me and that she would never forgive me before we started fucking out of frustration and boredom and she said she didn't come and couldn't and I knew she wasn't lying so I told her that I couldn't either and she said I was being stupid and finished me in her mouth and swallowed my come.
She said that it occurred to her that since I was a writer she should be careful of what she said to me, because I might take what she said and alter it at a later point to suit my fantasies, and that the stories that I told her, it could be that I was dissembling pathologically, as part of my being what I felt that I needed to be, and that it was obvious to her that I wouldn't care about the consequences, but that I should be aware of the fact that there is always payback, and reversal, and I said eternal recurrence is redundant, and that re-occurrence is only a material consequence of deeper reversal, and resentment. In fact, recurrence is not eternal at all, payback is not always part of the system, entropy does not wear on everything, some lines are not apprehended. I said that I agreed that art is always immature, and that the reality of fact had no place in my life, and it was up to her if she wanted to be fiction, and that that was the only kind of love between someone like herself and somebody like me. I think that she regarded this as an evasion, but I meant to tell the truth about the constancy of lying, and the
consequences of the lines turning into rays, beaming off and irradiating, leaving shadows of watchers on walls. She said I was the shadow of a watcher, and I said that was the best description that she could have arrived at, and I said so out of her view, in the dark spot of her eye.
_______________
George Taylor
'Jheorgge'
I get into things kinda obsessively so, like to the point where I suffer multiple stab wounds off the saturation point and am left for dead in my bed while my inspiring whatever has am-scrayed.
So my writing ends up being inconsistent, or it has so far cause I'm really just sucking up whatever style and content is fascinating me at the time and dropping it down on paper.
I think this makes me feel like a charlatan a little, or mebbes dilettantish but I think it's alright really cause out of all the obsessions writing and all it's opportunities and perversions and dead forests has never grown stale (unlike the corpse in the washing machine).
I've sent in two really recent features I did for the UK based music magazine Plan B, both of which I enjoyed doing a lot.
The other pieces are fragments from a series of poems titled 'Black Metal Hospital' that I'm in the middle of writing. They are based on some recent trips to Ward 8 at the Western General Hospital here in Edinburgh, reimagined through the blunt prism of a fifteen-year old boy who lives only for True Norwegian Black Metal music and silent comedy.
_______________
D-L Alvarez
'Squeaky'
Hi.
More a visual artist than a writer, these are works I think of as sketches:
---Milk and Honey
‘Wild Honey’ was on the jukebox a while back, and it stuck. Likewise, a monologue from the play Kennedy’s Children has resurfaced from a high school speech club recital I gave ten years ago. This is my head on Sunday, rummaging through nostalgia’s yard sale with no intentions of buying.
---I step out of the bar into the shock of bright midday. In front of the Church across the street are the preparations for a parade: tall hats, clown hair, children in leotards in a decorated cart hooked to two decorated horses. The horse costumes match a drawing in a joke book we looked at yesterday at the used bookstore. A trumpet player is warming up by playing ‘Wild Honey’. One of the floats has Kennedy’s Real Estate spelled out on the side in tissue roses. The whole moment is screaming with desire to be called significant, the intersection we’ve been waiting for, which I have to assume is a joke being played on me. Even you are in on the gag with your chestnut-colored hair, belt, and fingernails. I turn to you, but I am speaking to this moment, and to other such moments that have been occurring too often these past two decades, “Please, tone down the matching, it’s giving me a headache.”
---The Match Queen is Mother, and so, though she is away at her volunteer job right now, she also crowds into this moment, another in a multi-car pile up of coincidence. As soon as she gets home, in her white pants suit and gold and white scarf, Mother will pour clear expensive liquor from a glass bottle into a fluted glass with a gold-trimmed rim and drink slowly. The carpet is white, the late afternoon sun will be golden, her words, white, as in blank and about money (the promissory notes of gold), and behind her, her certificates with their arabesque swirls, gold seals, and officially, floor to ceiling.
---Riverside
---for Gwenaël
Another coastal township along the Baltic has joined forces with the sea. The warming tides swallowed her whole, her wooden steeples, her Main Street. Eels, squid, and starfish took residency in the parlor and the corner store, barnacles in the library. Shadows of sharks, slow and heavy blues, pass through classrooms and firehouses. Rivers worldwide have swollen and sent entire populations uphill. Newspapers sit partially read on nightstands and kitchen tables, there beside the unwashed dishes from a last hurried meal. Drawers open ... fancy dresses on the floor.
---At the abandoned amusement park, cranes nest in the rusting Ferris wheel cars. Fiberglass dinosaurs sink into soft earth, their painted eyes cast blankly upwards. The flooded shells became a home to the numerous frogs that teemed the loop. Vandals ripped down the monsters and skeletons from the House of Horrors, and now their body parts are strewn about the woods near by; a plastic eyeball dangles from a broken signpost; real spider webs extend from fake ones.
---Dogs left to the wild and self-appointed vigilantes roam the land: lazy hunters, in it mostly for the sport. A billion narrow escapes every evening go unrecorded. Fences hopped and great risks in the dark. In this planet full of sunken treasures a pirate looks as harmless as you or I.
---Spencer
Camping in neighbor’s backyard: counts cars: the skin of a tree: reading about a medical disorder which makes it impossible to distinguish day from night: a serial rapist who enters through sliding glass doors: spray insecticide directly on an oily brown water bug: the kid who claps when trains pass: electrical storm without rain or thunder: billboard for amusement park overlooks field of nothing where ladybugs fuck. Lazy ghosts: reruns about a musical family: backside of photos: Grandma dead five years now: summer school in Texas: the kid who fell out of a tree/falling out of a tree: parent’s room when they’re not home: eats cookies on garage roof: horsefly on the eye of a dead cat: crying because he hurt someone: hides for hours under clothes at the bottom of closet.
_______________
Jon Leon
Hi Dennis Cooper, here's are selection of vignettes for your call. I'm kind of a lurker on your blog since I read Closer. I can't tell if these poems are too dumb sounding but that was sort of the point. Anyway I hope you find something worthwhile here. And thanks for all the enlightening weird cultural detritus. I can't believe you're able to blog so much. This section is called The Hot Tub from the book The Hot Tub. I think I'm experimenting with sociolect to create the mood here and content is merely an extension of style. Or, the style is the content.
Love Life
THE HOT TUB
Jon Leon
THE HOT TUB
I strip and enter a hot tub. Blue tiles line the walls. I drink some vodka from a vodka bottle. I take a picture of some groupies. I lie back into a lawnchair my head vibrating. Something like a prism shoots up my spine. I see the sun through a tree in the distance. Everywhere I’ve ever been is like this. I spill a Bellini halfway blinded by the glare. Then a stud gets up naked to the waste. He slowly parts with the cloud of immersed bodies. I’m like what the fuck. This is a surprise.
TIMELINER
I’m on a beach in Maui surrounded by hardbodies. So I drive up La Cienega and then go into a warehouse. Some dudes are there. We hang around drinking Landshark. I’m in a tunnel below ground and smell some drugs. I look over and there’s a bum hanging on to the fastest set of wheels in town. So there I am steering a car down a boulevard. In my head I’m thinking I’m thinking. Get a golden torso and twin babes. Do something.
A BEVERLY HILLS OF THE MIND
Listening to a Time-Life cassette on the way to the desert. My attorney is sitting next tome. As we approach a field of windmills he pulls his arm from out the window and flips the cassette. “I Will Always Love You” begins. We’re talking about snow – and the heat. I swirl around in my seat and glance out the back window. There are about a million cars following us and a crop of skyscrapers. It’s dark as hell and I’m wondering how the hell this is going to sound when I try to explain it. So I explain it. Blackberry to my face.
ALPINE DRIVE
I take a pharmaceutical with a glass of punch. For some reason I’m at a ball. 3 babes in Betsey Johnson walk by. So I bow my head. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I know them from Facebook. I’m thinking net asset value as the dj continues to fuck up. I thought this was an opportunity and now I’m bored. Behind a curtain there’s a wall of pay telephones. I check my pockets and clink the curtains closed. Call a guy named Paul and eat my fist as he tells me the open market is drowning. I almost shit a troy ounce. So I walk back to the bar with my wallet in my colon and sneeze my order to the barkeep. He hands me a glass of something gothic looking. I pay the motherfucker in paper dollars.
KOKOMO
The street is lined with shops and trees. A blimp passes by over head. The beach is covered with tanned bodies. A dolphin’s fin flashes by. I walk up to a hot tub and dive in. Some people from Parsons are there. Then we are so hot we go up to the air conditioning unit. It smells like freon and I’m sort of high at this point. I pour an Albarino into some girl’s American Apparel strapless rouched bodysuit and lightly tongue her asshole. Basically we’re drunk. All I see is rainbows until I snap out of it. Electronic cars hanging from the ceiling. We’re in love with steam, sunsets, and deja vu.
_______________
Math Tinder
I'm Math Tinder, a Californian living in Brooklyn. The F train is my guardian angel. I'm mostly a visual artist but I've always had a strong attraction to words. Titles are my favorite thing in all arts and they are pretty much always text.
Dear Steven
By writing your name above, I erase all words previously written about you. I show them to be forged.
Here always, you were haloed, bleached; somewhere over there and in front of me. Ghosts, unlike angels, know the significance of their beauty. Like tables, they are prevented from wholly levitating by cloths draped over them. Upturned, your legs point at the culpable ceiling.
Having nothing and everything to answer for is like having confidence in the path of your own echo. Twins know.
_______________
Bernard Welt
When I was still in college, I started going to weekly open readings at the Community Bookstore in Washington, DC—a series called Mass Transit started by Michael Lally, Terence Winch, and Ed Cox, among others. I became part of a community of writers including Tim Dlugos, Doug Lang, Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Beth Joselow, Diane Ward, who developed connections to New York School poets and others in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Through Doug Lang’s reading series at Folio, and through my friends Tim Dlugos and Donald Britton’s moving to New York, I met a lot of poets who were kind and encouraging, and Kenward Elmslie published my book, Serenade, through his Z Press. Dennis Cooper had me come out to LA when he was doing the Beyond Baroque series in Venice and included me in his Little Caesar poetry anthology, Coming Attractions.
In the ‘90s I wrote a column on popular art, especially film and television, for the Los Angeles art journal Art Issues; the essays were collected in a book called Mythomania: Fables, Fantasies, and Sheer Lies in American Popular Art. I’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to write fiction and poetry rather than essays for art catalogues — something Dennis actually got me started on with a piece for LAICA Journal--including
Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, Ann Temkin and Hamza Walker, eds., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA, 1998 and Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, Valerie Cassel, ed., Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2003.
A poem called “I stopped writing poetry . . .” which more or less truthfully explained why I dropped out of the poetry scene, appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 and has been fairly widely circulated among American poets since. It was posted online at: http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/rockstar/52.html
but the formatting’s all off.
These days I focus a lot on conference presentations, some of which I’ve reported on for Dennis’ blog; and I’ve done some collaborations with the photographer Colby Caldwell. I continue to write essays, especially on film, and occasional poems, and I have a huge amount of unfinished fiction and plays lying around.
My first piece for Art Issues was a commentary on the cancellation of a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC — a scandal that I’d observed at first hand because I worked there (and still do). I wrote in the voice of a 16-year-old named Darren who was submitting his first NEA grant application, to fund the writing of a science-fiction novel called NAIL THIS TO YOUR FOREHEAD!, about “a small band of writers, musicians, and artists—actually, they’re like a real band and they sing sme songs which I’ve already written—who are forced off the earth by repressive policies so they can’t seek self-expression.” Along the way, Darren writes to the “NEA people”:
I am sorry if what I have to say offends anybody, like for instance about the pope, but maybe you can tell me how I can tell the truth abut religion or school or our bodies or life or anything without offending anybody. Or if I write about sex, and please tell me I’m 16 years old and I’m supposed to be thinking about it, it’s not just my gonads talking, it’s just because sex is a powerful force that is used to control ideas like in deodorant commercials but they can’t censor those because there’s real money behind them that supports the military-industrial complex. If people’s ideas about sex weren’t so messed up maybe they wouldn’t be so obsessed with grabbing power like it was an extra dick they could keep handy to fuck someone over with. This is what seems so ridiculous to people my age, that anyone would even try to lie about sex by covering up words and images and be so thick they can’t even see or want to admit it’s all around us all the time but in forms that only serve people in power, which is really why, not the subject matter but the effect on the enslaved populace, that it’s OK with everybody who wants to follow the leaders out of fear or apathy or whatever. Like E. T. is supposed to be this movie that’s all sweet and heart-warming and beloved by the American people and I’m only 16 years old and even I can see that this cute little alien is just a big walking, talking dick, right? I mean, it’s all wrinkled and weird-looking and this kid has just discovered it all by himself and he plays with it and its neck gets all long when it’s excited and he has to hide it from his father and it dies but comes back to life again when he needs it most and what does that all add up t but a dick, right? But they made it all like symbolism so people wouldn’t catch on to how it’s as much about sex as any picture of a guy with a bullwhip up his ass which is what I hate because they’re using it like brainwashing to get people on their side. I think you should just say what you’re really saying and if you’re talking about dick then just show the people dick, if that’s what you’re really talking about. The thing is, now they want to make a mystery out of sex like religions do so they can reserve its power to affect ideas to themselves alone. I mean, I know I’m only 16 years old but even I know that when you put a fig leaf on a statue it can’t be just a guy’s dick that you’re trying to hide, OK?
_______________
Eric Duran (who posts here as Shai Hulud as well as a few other aliases). I live in Houston, TX, where I work as a teacher and naturalist at a small nature center in a city park. I am a poet and have been writing poetry off and on since high school, but have only been doing so in earnest since coming to DC's blog. Most of my poetry involves a rather blatant homoerotic desire and nature imagery. In most of my writing, I am trying to lay myself completely bare, without fear, without restraint. I'm not sure that's a choice really, since I think that part of my brain, which would have me hold back, may be broken or missing. I think maybe I'm at my best when I am reacting or wrestling with another personality. That's why becoming apart of this community of brilliant and perverted minds has been so valuable to my poetry. It would be nice if one day, decades from now, some one mentioned my poetry in a room: a lot of people would curl their lips, and one lone kid dressed in black, back in the corner... smiled.
poem general feelings about space
(a crazed session about JW Veldhoen and Jared Baxter)
if it gets out of my head
its gone forever
its more important you see
me you
the cat or my dad
my job
i live on it like a flea lives
i was listening to the music of
toads screaming fear from a swamp
a chicken gutting an earthworm in a field
with patafores
your dead babies in still in the womb
the music
repetition
ascending patterns of
rhythm guitars massive drum kits vibraphones
building upon
100
1 000
10 000
1 000 000
1 000 000 000
(its important to read every digit in this case)
life persists as scraggly gray weeds holding on in the cracks of concrete being trodden by 100 feet
i tried to tell you i love you but
i bit my fist and the blood filled my mouth and made me mute
and it filled my skull
with 1000 liquid teeth that
filled my eyes
and constant building pressure
burst from my sockets
onto the floor
with 10 000 ringing keys marbles silver knives
black men have it easy you said
the worst crime you could commit
is being ugly
and loveing someone attractive
said the butterfly
and the toad answered
the worst crime you could commit
is being beautiful
and being disgusted
with the ugly ones who love you
thats why i walked
and i walked
and i walked
and i walked
and i walked
and i walked
(its important to read every line in this case)
not until i was dead but until the
sun's concrete mud
devoid of scraggly gray weeds
turned my feet
my bare solemn feet
into stone
into stone
into stones
that beat the breath from
that could take your spines
1 000 000 spines
your claws teeth unbearable heat
that made a path of of you
until i was ready
the waltzes
the 1 000 000 000 walzes
i loved to dance
to waltz with you
with theodore roethke's father
the happiness that each of the bruises you left
the glee of glancing
blows
oh father
so i finish
my love has drilled its way up your unsuspecting anus
and the liquid teeth
the billion liquid teeth
( i cheat so that i assure failure here)
race their scraping
gnawing
screaming way
up your intestines
to your throat
and burst out of your lungs
out of your throat
like
a last angry
heaving
cold breath
exasperation
nulls
everything
i
am
null
set
void
(cliche but yes so is desperation and self loathing in this kind of setting)
thank you
for not
caring
insert (favorite flavor or home town)
this poem should end with the imagery of pond scum
viscous dull green slime
on the edge of mud goo
that
flies accustomed to shit
would avoid
methane
end scene
poem mist
once
in the steam of the jungle
i found the caecilian
an enormous
gorgeous
worm like creature
burrowing into the earth
having lusted for the feel of one
for many a year
i reached down
in great anticipation
of seizing the animal
eyes wild
and panting in a
shallow
beast like breath
however
the will of the animal was too strong
and the viscous coat of slime
on its skin
rendered it
completely resistant to my grasp
no matter
the more force i exerted
the more it slipped into its
subterranean lair
to live a life
i could not comprehend
i was left
in the steam
and the mist of my unrequited lust
alone
and covered
in slime
and sweat
and shame
and
the view
of an endless
hole
nature had an image
for one
brief
flash
poem idealismo
sneezing
the cracks in the earth
release
toxins and perfumed emotions
intertwined
and absorbed in the tissues
of all living things
and
we are forced
to
eat
the didactic flesh
and every breath
becomes
one more release
itself
one bloody fingered
grasping reach
on sharp stone edges
towards
abyssal void
if dogs had voices and opposable thumbs they would tell us what we had been missing
all along
i am just so far
just this far
from touching the grainy skin of
true
beauty
feeling the flakes that dust off
and brush past my skin
devouring it all
breathing it in
in one enormous gasping breath
i
can't quite taste it on the wind
and the feeling
that i'll never know everything
never touch every beautiful
indefinable surface
continues
to kill me
slowly
another fucking poem about continuous dull pain
boy
if i could
if you could just know
some people are cruel
just by being there
even that
you are
untouched
by my perversion
i wish i could
say this to you
in a way that you
at your age
could understand
(look
he wanted
i wanted for
no
he wanted to be more firm
he wanted to be manly
see
axes chopping firewood
five o'clock shadow and
loud bar rooms
but it was
his softness
that drew me to him
what it must be like to bury your face
in that softness
how do you say that
to
a boys who wants
to be)
(does he know
how eviscerating
a smile can be
that
touching a single
strand
of hair
can kill
a man like me
his cruelty lie
in his tender
casual)
i mean fuck
the way you just even sit there
for christsake
fuck
do you not see
how just
just being like that
can destroy people
well
i understand the tendency
towards such
perversion
now
_______________
James Champagne
'SYpHA_69'
My name is James Champagne. I’m 28 years old, live in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I self-published my first book, Confusion, through iUniverse in 2006. I also had a short story named “Kali Yuga” which appeared in the Userlands anthology in 2007. My writing style has changed greatly over the years, from William S. Burroughs/Grant Morrison-style information overload to Bret Easton Ellis-style naturalism. This year I decided to combine these two strains and do my own variation on the style of writing pioneered by certain writers during the French Decadent period of the late 19th century. Like Lovecraft, I am interested in writing literature that refers to a sort of inner mythology, and this excerpt of mine makes references to some aspects of this mythology that I first began to explore in Confusion (such as the Lar-Vi, the Booke of Calthurr, and the Crooked Universe). This excerpt, “Dark Tentacle”, is an experiment in which I attempt to juxtapose hardboiled PI-style noir with the ornate purple prose of the Decadents.
---My name is Runan Daedalus. I’m a private eye, which means that I deal in secrets. But what most people don’t know is that I’ve got a secret of my own. In my free time, I write Decadent novels. Not only that, but I consider myself to be a Decadent, as the term was used in the late 19th-century. And if you don’t believe me, I have the Odilon Redon lithographs hanging up on my walls at home to prove it. In fact, I’m quite possibly the only private eye in the city of Poyzen (to say nothing of North America) who keeps a jewel-encrusted tortoise as a pet.
---Of course, when most people go to a private eye, they expect to meet Sam Spade, not Des Esseintes. Which is why when I’m on the job, I try to dress as casually as possible. After all, it’s hard to trail someone unnoticed when you’re wearing ornate jade rings on each finger. My office, which is located on the 9th floor of a nondescript office building in downtown Poyzen, also adheres to all of the clichés. There’s the door with the frosted glass window decorated with the universal private eye logo along with the name of my business (which is Daedalus Investigations), the coat rack with the rumpled black trench coat, various certificates on the wall to assure clients that I’m the real deal, dented file cabinets, and so on. Located smack dab in the center of the room, in front of my chair, is a disorganized pile of paperwork, pens and pencils, various office supplies, my telephone, and a computer. I think that once upon a time a desk existed under all that strata, and maybe one day I’ll hire a team of archeology students to do some digging and see if they can find it.
---It was a slow afternoon. Business had been bad, and the peeling wallpaper on my office walls were leading a more stimulating existence than I was. I was seated in front of my computer, doing what I always did when business was slow: trying to get some writing done. Yet all I found myself doing was staring at the screen with a dazed expression on my face, as if I were under the influence of opium, in thrall to poppy dreams. The cursor at the top of the page winked on and off like the Eye of Shiva, the blank page was like parched desert land, waiting to be fertilized by a deluge of words, that “Fiat Lux” that all writers aspire to achieve. But this morning, once again, the words eluded me, fluttering beyond my reach and tormenting me, like the ghostly owls of Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. When it comes to writing, I often feel like a lone Christian soldier, battling the enormous machinery of Hell. And I’m not even a Christian!
---I heard a soft buzzing noise. That meant that someone had just entered the tiny waiting room located directly outside my office. One of these days I really need to hire a secretary. I called out, “Come in!”
---A second later the door opened and a man entered. At least, I assumed he was a man, but he was seemed so wispy and quiet that at first I mistook him for some sort of revenant. He was in his forties, short and painfully thin, dressed in an expensive-looking light gray Armani dress suit which exuded more personality than he did. He paused at the threshold of my office and, looking at me, asked, “Mr. Daedalus, I presume?” His voice was a monotonous and banal as the kind of dime-a-dozen abstract art you can find hanging up in any doctor’s waiting room around the country. I’ve seen Warhol silk-screens of Campbell soup cans project more warmth and humanity than this guy.
---“Please, call me Runan,” I said calmly. “I hate when people put a ‘Mr’ before my name. Makes me sound fancy. Come in, have a seat.”
---He nodded and walked stiffly towards the vicinity of my desk, as if the blood in his veins had been replaced by formaldehyde. When he reached my desk, he stared at it warily, as if it were the first step of a steep staircase leading one to the top of an Aztec temple, knife-wielding priests waiting above to cut out his heart and offer it to the Sun. Watching him sit down and get comfortable on the chair in front of my desk was like witnessing the birth of some new form of performance art: it was like watching a man perform an experimental interpretive tango with a cactus. Oh joy, this would be fun. Just watching him trying to get comfortable was putting my nerves on edge.
---“Forgive me if I appear nervous,” the man said in an apologetic tone, as if he had just asked if he could violate my mother’s vaginal cavity with an American penknife. “I’ve never been in an actual private eye’s office before.”
---“Could have fooled me,” I said in a genial voice. “Can I get you a drink? I keep a bottle of absinthe in my desk.”
---“No thanks, I’m not a drinker,” the man said, frowning. Well, no big surprise there. This guy probably thought that drinking Gatorade was hardcore.
---“So, what brings you here?” I asked.
---“I saw your ad in the phone book,” the man said. Then, in a more sheepish voice, he admitted, “I liked the drawing.”
---He was referring to the ad I had placed in the city’s phone book awhile back: like all PIs, I learnt a long time ago that it pays to advertise. I had drawn the ad myself, actually. It had been a black and white sketch of a gargoyle holding a magnifying glass, next to the words DADELUS INVESTIGATIONS (which were done in elaborate Art Nouveau letters). The gargoyle’s model had been the front cover art of the 1985 Current 93 album Dogs Blood Rising, which depicted a black and white photograph of a gargoyle at Notre Dame de Paris.
---“Cool, thanks,” I say. “So, what can I do for you, Mr…?” My voice trailed off when I remembered that the guy hadn’t told me his name yet.
---“Rahab, Daniel Rahab,” the man said, offering his hand, which I shook. “I’m a vice-president at Solomon, Rubenstein, & Cohen, over on Breeze Street.”
---Ah, Breeze Street, the Poyzen equivalent of Wall Street. That would explain the fancy clothes, then. I nodded my head and looked over Mr. Rahab in a non-intrusive manner. There was something about him that bothered me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I looked at his face. He had unruly black hair streaked with lines of gray, chaotic in appearance, as if his hairdresser were David Lynch, and his mouth was a thin line bereft of passion, so straight you could use it as a ruler to plot geometry angles. I decide it was his eyes that troubled me. They didn’t look like they belonged to him, and I was almost tempted to ask him who he had stole them from. They were pale blue yet intense, burning with passion, as if lit from within by the necrotic luminescence of the glowworms of ambition.
---“So, Mr. Rahab, I’m going to assume this isn’t a social visit, I imagine you’ve come to me because you’re in need of my services?” I asked, shaking off my feeling of apprehension.
---“Indeed,” Mr. Rahab said with a nod. “It’s my teenage son, you see. I think he’s become involved with a cult.”
---A cult? In Poyzen? I never knew this city even had a cult. My interest perked up noticeably, like a metaphorical bloodhound. “A cult, huh?” I asked. “So, what kind of cult are we talking about here? Jesus freaks, Satanists, UFO nuts, or…?”
---“Well, I wish it were that simple, but I can’t quite figure out what this cult is about at all,” Mr. Rahab said, frowning. “Tell me, Runan, have you ever heard of the Culte des coquilles? Or, for that matter, the Final Church of the Zumb Zumb Apocalypse?”
---I didn’t, but I knew someone who might…
_______________
Jeff Jackson
'Chilly Jay Chill'
I’m a fiction writer who has mainly published short stories. I also work with The Collapsible Giraffe, an experimental theater collective based in Brooklyn. I’ve written and collaged texts for productions including Damfino, Witch Mountain Black Tarantula, and Pee Pee Maw Maw. As a freelancer, I write about music, books, and film for various magazines and newspapers, including Blender, Jazziz, and The Valley Advocate. I also run Destination-Out, a website dedicated to showcasing out-of-print free jazz. I’m currently working on a book that’s either closely linked stories or a fractured novel, depending on how you squint at it.
Here’s the second section of “Three Untitled Stories About Smoking,” which appeared in Userlands. Hopefully it stands alone. Although my latest work is more fragmented and hallucinatory, this short piece helped nudge me toward that voice.
It’s a stupid thing to do and he does it. He crawls out on the roof carrying a grocery bag with his model airplane collection in one hand and a red can of gasoline in the other. He surveys the yard below. Not smart enough to be worried about falling. There’s nobody underneath and he smiles. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking. Probably just enjoys how the shingles feel warm and scratchy beneath his bare feet.
He rummages through the bag. The idea is to set the planes on fire, then launch them off the roof. See how far they fly before disintegrating into flames. Ha ha ha. But right now the kid seems more fascinated by the plastic pilots. He plucks them from their cockpits and dips them into the gasoline.
He holds the little men at arm’s length and one after another gives them a light. They’re instantly ablaze and he watches as their faces melt. For one quick instant, their features contort as if they’re in unspeakable agony, their whole bodies twisting into a single scream. But the moment passes and everything melts and becomes blank and they’re just smooth lumps of plastic threatening to burn his fingers.
Back to the planes. The kid examines the models— Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Harrier Hawks, other names he probably doesn’t know. To look at him, it’s hard to imagine how he ever assembled these things. Sorting the parts, fitting pieces together just so, applying minuscule dollops of glue, painting insignias, sticking decals. The hours of painstaking effort. No way he could have made them himself. Some parent must have helped.
The kid scans the yard. Still nobody. His eleven-year-old face is perfectly smooth, unscarred by any mark of intelligence. He’s scrawny and shirtless. His tousled crew cut ends in a long rat’s tail that he flicks back and forth across his back. A few more splashes of gasoline. That should do it. He lights the wing of the aircraft and gives it a heave.
The plane does half a loop-de-loop then plummets into a shrub. Nothing happens. Then the bush bursts into flame. The boy hardly takes notice and prepares the next plane. One with another exotic and unrecognized name, but nice, with two gunner turrets near the tail. He gives it a harder throw, almost losing his balance, but it doesn’t go much farther than the first one. Becomes a smoldering black stain on the grass.
Frank appears down below, gawking first at the burning bush and then up at the kid. “Get down,” he says. “This instant.”
A flaming plane lands at his feet and starts to singe the lawn. Frank stamps it out, curses, and marches away. The kid blinks a few times, then hoists the gasoline can and prepares the next plane, the one he probably can’t tell is a Messerschmitt even with its German-looking decals and folded-up wings.
Before the next launch, Frank reappears with a can of tennis balls and starts hurling them at the kid. “Off the roof,” he shouts. “You’re in a world of trouble.” The first two balls miss wide right, ricocheting off the roof and back into the yard.
This gets the kid’s attention. He sneers at Frank. “You’re a lousy drunk,” he says, but not so very loud.
The third tennis ball hits the kid square in his skinny ribcage, like a mallet hitting a xylophone, but without the appropriate sound effect. The kid winces and drops the plane, still unlit. It skids down the roof and sticks tail first in the gutter.
Frank stares up at the kid’s unreadable face. The boy’s expression is as impassive as a goat’s, his eyes glazed and hardened. No way to tell if he’s gotten the message yet. No way to tell anything, really.
The kid kicks the gasoline can off the roof, sending it flying end over end. But something must have gotten through to him, because he doesn’t wait to see if the can hits Frank. Instead, he climbs back inside the house through the nearest window.
Quietly. He tries hard not to make noise. The room is dark. The shades pulled tight as usual. Old magazines are piled in the corners, mostly cooking and detective titles, some of them bound in twine. Everything is perfectly still, except for the soft rattle of the air conditioner and the humming pulse of the respirator.
Only now does the kid notice the sharp tang of the gasoline on his hands. It burns his nostrils, but he doesn’t mind because it masks that other scent. This room always smells like fermenting dishrags. In fact, the whole house is starting to smell. It’s from her. His mother, who lies there on the bed, attached to the respirator, never moving.
The kid perches on the sewing bench at the end of the bed and stares at her. She can’t communicate, but it’s kind of peaceful just to look at her, watch her breathing so regularly. The kid finds himself here often. Traces of sunlight filter through the blue curtains and give everything a peaceful glow.
His twin sister enters without a word. She takes her place on the bench next to him and they watch their mother’s chest rise and fall, the respirator machine steadily working away. The mother’s eyes are closed and her features are smooth, not unlike the plastic pilots after a bit of fire. They don’t linger on her face.
“Frank is pissed at me again,” the boy says.
His twin shrugs.
“She hasn’t got much longer,” the boy says.
Neither of them say anything after that for several minutes. The sister plays with her flip flops. The kid’s bare shoulders twitch from the chill. They both stay seated.
“We’ll wash her tomorrow,” the sister says eventually, as if she’s just made some momentous decision. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from the top of her cut-off shorts.
He reaches for one but she slaps his hand. “Don’t be stupid,” she says. “You’re soaked in gasoline.”
The boy smiles sheepishly. He puts his hands behind his back and sticks out his jaw. His twin lights a cigarette and places it between his lips. She lets him take a long drag, then exhale. Another long drag, exhale. They sit side by side at the foot of the bed, both hopelessly scrawny, their features almost identical. She continues to help him smoke the cigarette and it’s impossible to know whether or not they realize that the rhythm of their breathing is slowly becoming synchronized with the machine.
_______________
'alan'
I'm very glad for the chance to share my writing in this congenial forum. I'm a longtime admirer of Dennis's work. I started following this blog only recently, after re-reading Guide for like the eighteenth time.
I started writing seriously about twelve years ago when I had an idea for a detective novel. I wanted my detective to be a bad guy, so the idea was that he would only take clients who were clinically paranoid and pretend to investigate their delusions in order to defraud them. Amazingly, a week after I came up with this premise I happened to see a xeroxed poster put up by an obvious paranoid offering to send more information about the conspiracy he was involved with to anyone who wrote to his PO box. So I did and got back this thirty-six page letter describing his delusions in fascinating detail, which I got a lot of inspiration from. I kind of plunged into the writing without knowing exactly how the story was going to work out, which is a terrible idea if you're writing anything closely plotted. I kept painting myself into corners and having to go back and rewrite everything. But this process also made me more aware of the mechanics of telling a story, how you have to lead the reader to draw certain conclusions about what's really going on, and therefore how much reading a work of fiction is like being a paranoid schizophrenic, and vice versa. I tried to put this idea in my novel and called it Plot in reference both to fictions and conspiracies. It was originally written in a rather stylized hardboiled style with no subordinate clauses at all, and there were several passages that experimented with point of view. I recently completely rewrote it as a comic novel, keeping only the premise and a few elements of the plot.
The other novel I've written started from the idea that the germ of every moment is contained in every other moment. So the original concept was that the novel would be made up of a series of moments, with each chapter describing in detail everything that was going on in a character's mind at a particular point of time and all of them linked hypertextually to show how those moments grew out of each other. There were going to be fifty chapters of exactly a thousand words each, and to get to a particular one the reader would have to click on one of fifty keywords that I was going to work into every chapter which you could click on in any order. This was obviously a completely mad idea and after a while I dropped the hypertext/keyword
thing because it was cumbersome and because I decided I wanted to impose a particular order on the material after all. It was the story of a relationship and I wanted the point of view of the characters in the relationship to alternate chapter by chapter, every thousand words. This seemed like a good way to emphasize how isolated they were inside their own heads and how little they really knew each other despite apparently being so close. Because how can we really know anyone else from the inside, at least for sure? I called the novel Other Minds after the famous philosophical "problem of other minds." An excerpt from this novel is the only thing I've managed to get published so far (it appeared in Antietam Review).
As a sample of my writing, maybe I'm making a big mistake and should be choosing something really serious and literary, but instead, in the interest of self-containedness, I've gone for one of the very few short stories I've written. I tend to get frustrated by short stories--if they're good I want them to be longer--and the only way I know how to write ones that satisfy me are in the form of extended jokes. This is called "How to Get Rid of Your Boyfriend."
---The first time I shat in the bathtub I had already been thinking about breaking up with Natalie for a couple of months.
---It was a tough decision. Physically she was just my type: long straight hair, big vulnerable eyes, tight ass, long legs. And we had a lot in common. We were even compatible musically, which is important if you're living with someone and you don't want to hear lame R and B or whatever every day.
---I'd been living with her for eight months at that point. It was her place and she kept it very neat. Which was great--who wants to live with a slob?--but also sort of inhibiting. She never said anything, but, living with such a neat person, you do naturally find yourself keeping things a lot neater than you normally would. You don't feel free to leave a cup out. How could you? And clutter up this beautiful bare counter?
---It was like that about everything. She never said a word, but now and then you would see her looking up at you with those big vulnerable eyes and it was like, OK, now what did I do? You didn't want to do anything to hurt her. You had to watch your step. Normally I like to be candid with people, but with Nats....
---That's what I called her. Nats. She called me Nater, for Nathan. That eventually started to grate. Especially after her girlfriend commented on how the names sounded so good together, Nats and Nater. Hint, hint. I was picking up a similar vibe from what I overheard of Nats's phone calls with her mother.
---Long story short, I knew it couldn't last forever, but, then again, ending it seemed like such a hassle I didn't even want to think about it. If only she could be the one to break up with me.
---Yeah, right. Don't hold your breath. She just wasn't the kind to initiate a breakup. I couldn't picture it. She would never dump me, no matter what. I could do anything.
---Anything? That's when I started thinking. Isn't there anything I could do that would horrify or repulse her to the point that she couldn't stand to be with me anymore?
---That's what I was thinking as I was taking a shower that morning. Standing in the bathtub.
---That first time it was just a little turdlet. I didn't want it to look too obvious. The water was still running so it floated down and settled right in front of the drain. Very casual.
---I almost worried it was too inconspicuous, but with her neat streak Nats would zero right in on it. And it was the kind of thing I knew would get right under her skin.
---She always got home before me. I figured she'd come in, see it, freak out, and start composing a little it's-not-you-it's-me speech. The only question was would she wait until after dinner.
---I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. If worst came to worst I was ready to get out that night. I had moved most of my stuff into storage a while ago, when I first started thinking about breaking up with her. I told her I was getting rid of those things for spiritual reasons. I was trying to be less attached, I said. She meditates herself so that made sense to her.
---I was trying to be less attached. I just didn't say to who.
---So I get home. "Hey Nats."
---"Hi Nater."
---She sounds relaxed. Did she miss it? I rush into the bathroom to take a piss and check. It's gone, so obviously she saw it. It didn't just crawl away on its own.
---What went wrong? I didn't necessarily expect her to flush me the second I stepped through the door, but there should have been something in her voice, some tension or sign of something.
---I kept watching and listening all night for the slightest flicker. Of disgust at what I did. Of guilt, for what she was about to
do.
---Finally, after dinner, as she was getting into bed to watch TV and fall asleep, I jumped her. Just as her favorite show was coming on. I figured under the circumstances no way is she going to sleep with me. She'll have to push me off and then it'll all come out.
---Wrong again. She was fine with it. She even did all the stuff I know she hates.
---I'd been too careful. That's what I finally decided. It looked too half-hearted, too accidental. Too forgivable. Anyone can have a bad day.
---The next morning I tried again. This time I didn't fool around. I left a decent-sized turd smack in the middle of the tub, like a cherry on a porcelain sundae. Before I went home that night I called a friend to ask if I could spend the night if necessary.
---It wasn't necessary. She was like nothing had happened. She even rolled over and gave me a kiss when I got into bed that night.
---I knew what I had to do. The whole next day I stuffed myself full of Mexican takeout, and right before bed I downed a handful of herbal laxative capsules.
---Nats leaves for work early, so the next morning I waited in bed until I heard her go out. My stomach was cramping. I got up, took a nice soapy shower, turned off the water, and squatted. It came out in a long, soft coil like Dairy Queen.
---She wouldn't even have to walk into the bathroom to notice. You could smell it from the kitchen area.
---That night I stayed out a little later than usual doing errands on the off chance Nats would call up my cell phone and tell me, you know: "I'll ship your stuff anywhere you say, just please don't come back here."
---When I do come home, it's like any day. She's even cooking. She chats all through dinner. I'm thinking, what is she, some kind of psycho?
---Long story short, as we're clearing up the plates she says, "Nater, can I ask you something?"
---"Yeah?"
---"Are you feeling all right?"
---"Why?"
---"It's just that the last couple days...."
---I could smell it coming. "What?"
---"I found something in the shower."
---I felt bad with her big eyes looking up at me but I stayed with it. "It's those herbal capsules I'm taking."
---She sharpened her look. "Yeah?"
---"I was going to clean it up, but I was in such a rush."
---She swallowed. "I don't want to sound like a bitch, but could you not do that anymore?"
---"Sorry."
---"That's OK." She squeezed my hand.
---Next I tried eating garlic. I said I was trying to boost my immune system.
---I took a whole raw bulb twice a day, increasing to two three times a day. You could smell me coming half a block away. At the end of the day I took off my clothes and they smelled of garlic.
---No wonder they say that stuff is good for your immunity. Take enough of it and no one wants to get close enough to infect you with anything.
---I thought it was going to be tougher for me than for Nats. I never liked the taste of garlic. But after the first couple days I was so used to it I didn't notice anymore.
---Nats didn't seem to notice it either. Passionate, prolonged make-out sessions produced no reaction.
---Everyone else noticed it. People at work hated me. Strangers standing on line with me in stores or waiting beside me on the curb would ask me what was up. That lasted a week.
---Then I started wearing the same shirt day in and day out, changing only for work. I slept in it and never washed it. This was in July.
---I had an explanation ready about its being my lucky shirt, blah blah blah, but I never got to use it. Nats never asked.
---I couldn't tell whether there was something wrong with her sense of smell or what. After three weeks I could clear half a subway car, like those homeless people who are not only homeless but showerless.
---The only one who wasn't fleeing me was Nats. I thought, Jesus, either her self-esteem is even lower than I thought or she's such a total coward.
---My goal was to make it until the end of the month. We were scheduled to go over to her parents' in Long Island for brunch. She had to dump me before then.
---If it was a question of just her own discomfort she might be able to take it, I thought, but she would never have the balls to present me to her parents in that condition. And if she canceled out on her parents she would have to tell me why. It was like a game of chicken.
---At the last minute I was the one who pussied out and changed.
---You might think it's a big step to go from there to becoming a heroin addict. I happened to know a guy from college who had a connection. The original idea was just to borrow some works to leave around the apartment and maybe jab my arm a few times with an empty needle, leave some fake track marks. This guy convinced me to try it once for real, just so I'd know how to nod out convincingly. That made sense to me.
---I don't know if you've ever tried H but when they say it's better than sex, they're not just saying that. So just think of the stupidest, most degrading thing you've ever done for sex. Think about how you got yourself into that. It was easy, wasn't it? That's how easy it is to get hooked. Easier.
---The idea of me actually turning into a junkie was so out-there it didn't occur to me to be scared of it happening. I couldn't take it seriously. It was like: just let me have one last taste before this bizarre chapter of my life is over.
---Before long I was hoping Nats would put up with me a little longer, just a little while longer, so I would have an excuse to shoot up one last time.
---When I lost my job--absenteeism, incoherence, and poor hygiene were cited--I didn't mind because it gave me more time to sit around and look at the couch.
---I didn't miss my paycheck. I just dipped into Nats's pocketbook. When she started hiding it, I made up the loss by selling her stuff. I figured I would save the TV for last. I wasn't sure what I was going to do after that.
---Long story short, I woke up one night at the kitchen table. I'd been on the nod all day.
---The needle was still sticking out of my wrist. I'd already used up the vein all the way up my arm. The wrist was the only place I could get it in.
---Apparently I'd nodded out before I had a chance to pull out the needle. I must have shifted while I was out and driven it in deeper because the vein had bled a lot. The table was sticky with red-black blood. It was all down my arm and all over the front of my t-shirt, plus the side of my face that had been in contact with the table.
---I could hear the TV on in the next room. Nats was home.
---There was a dish in the sink. Macaroni and cheese. Not the kind from the package. Nats won't eat that shit. This was freshly made.
---So she came home from work and found me nodded out at the kitchen table. She boiled a pot of pasta, made a cream sauce, drained the pasta, mixed in the sauce, and set it to bake with me sitting here unconscious, covered in blood, and possibly dead.
---She sat next to me and had her meal, leaving me a portion in the casserole dish just in case I ever woke up. Then she went into the next room and turned on Dancing with the Stars.
---This goes beyond avoiding confrontation, I thought. A whole new gestalt was shaping up before my eyes.
---She wasn't inhibited. She wasn't tortured. She was enjoying this.
---She had figured out what I was doing. Maybe she knew from the very beginning. This was her way of getting back at me.
---She never was going to break up with me. That's how ice-cold, how inhuman this girl was. She wasn't going to dump me until I killed myself.
---I walked into the other room. Staggered, you could say. My legs weren't working well. My face was still caked with dried blood.
---Dancing with the Stars had just gone into commercials. Nats looked up at me with those big eyes.
---I shook my finger. "You," I started to say, slurring a little but still clearly intelligible, I was pretty sure, "are the most incredibly fucking passive-aggressive person I have ever known...."
_______________
Wagner Israel Cilio
Wagner Israel Cilio III is a 22-year old writer who lives in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he rides his bicycle into town to tutor Marcos in English. On Wednesdays and Fridays, he may be found in line at the local casino receiving his gambling stipend of $5 which he uses on gas. He is presently unemployed.
CHAOS OF CLAY
by Wagner Israel Cilio III
---The thing to which a young man is most inclined in the ripeness of his youth, in the dawn of his spirit, is the full exertion of his weight on things that may be crushed. Nothing is more pleasurable than this. Every now and again a young man may be expected to feel a kind of heaviness. This heaviness compels the young man to seek out objects which will give up the least amount of resistance, those which will give easily beneath his weight. The young man goes about testing this weight on tree limbs and door frames; he goes about to destroy. He runs alongside rolling coal trains, he lobs stones at mountains, he leaps into the air simply to feel the brunt of his heaviness come forcefully down upon the earth. He discovers the bicycle, the typewriter; he learns to sketch apple groves. He is led to the rages, which is a delicious drink of violence and love all at once. The young man is led to pace in small rooms, stay up entire nights, and smoke all too many cigarettes. The young man's heaviness is a holy madness and in this madness he is inclined to consolidate his raging, smoking, and pacing into a type of roaming so that, poised with his feet solidly against the ground, he sets out wandering in search of new places to be crushed. He finally discovers the earth and begins to understand its relation to his heaviness upon it and his destiny to forever test his strength against it. He sets out to crush himself and he sets out to crush mankind: taking steps, continuously crushing earth underfoot, until suddenly, he is lost and there is nothing else to crush except for Truth, which is the last thing one can crush but which, the young man will realize, is a very difficult thing to do.
---For all intents and purposes, the young man is quite literally a foaming wide-eyed savage, which was exactly what I was that night sitting in my father's study pulling at my hair after three days of not sleeping, two of not eating, and one of poring over Byron's "Darkness." It was while reading the line "And men forgot their passions in the dread/Of this their desolation" that I felt the need to be crucified, to be sent and to suffer and to be a servant; to redeem the sins of humanity. I felt the need to take care of everyone and I wanted to make sure everyone got home safe: I wanted to make pictures in the sand for all my friends and tell them little stories so they would not have to stumble through the darkness alone. I wanted to sleep with all the girls who were not pretty enough and push myself inside of them gently and quietly and watch their faces. I wanted to play board games with retards and let them win. I wanted to call them retards and then feel bad about it and communicate to them how bad I felt so that they could understand that they were important and deserved many things and despite their mangled features, they were a quilt in the eternal human weave. I wanted to open my veins and pour my beautiful blood all over the sick in Africa and , wander through a leper colony in the Philippines cradling all the lepers one by one in my arms and peeling off slowly and wearing their skin on myself, stroking their hair and whispering to them that they were not disgusting and that they were so famous and everyone loved them. I wanted to extinguish hatred and malice and sadness and the weariness of all the heaviness in the universe. I wanted to do these things that night, that very moment, so that Byron's line that no love was left would ever happen and so that the earth would never be "a lump of death--a chaos of hard clay."
---Being alive was a maddening task. With the urge to save humanity from darkness, from desolation, came a new heaviness into my bones. It was an animal heaviness and as such, a heaviness upon the earth and a gripping and impish desire to go into it. The heaviness was the sudden knowledge of the ground, of my feet being set upon it standing upright, as a human, as a single entity. And with this knowledge of earth and this my heaviness came the urge to give under the full weight of the latter and sink quietly into the former. But the heaviness was not merely weight: it was a lead-bellied magnetic tingle for something at the center of the earth. As a magnet strains for the nearest metal, the earth's magnetic core was straining for my copper tinplate heart. It was this magnetism that was pulling me beneath myself and to a dirt sanctuary asking me to, animal-like, clamber through its tunnel roots and clay clod caves. The urge and impulse grew so intense I was convinced that I stood upright only as the result of some celestial silver string; were I able to clip this string I would collapse and seep through my withered heap of clothes and skin like water slipping from a pot. To test my idea, I suddenly leapt up and began tearing at this string wildly. But in standing, a large amount of blood rushed away from my head and a great amount of madness came to take its place. It was such so that I was plunged into solar flares and comets. When I awoke I was hurtling through the earth, smashing through layers of rock and caverns with my bare teeth and scraping my elbows raw on bedrock; I was piercing through literature and symbology, through the mineral cosmos: just falling and falling, my weight guiding me, quietly leading me through the silence and the emptiness of the ether and the fabric of everything, so that one day, with the muffle of human steps clip-clopping over my head, I would take into my hands the center of the earth and finally be entirely and absolutely crushed.
_______________
Steven Trull
My narrative strategies, for now, are conservative in style. A more common free indirect discourse is employed throughout the text, combining some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. My methods are multiple and provisional: everything becomes available during the writing process. I have accustomed myself to write on a fixed schedule. Nights, after work, three to four times a week.
Nothing, Really.
@ James 88 @
Far removed from the wilderness of hometown Coeur D’Alene, from questions about consanguinity and everything white and beautiful and strong, and from the rape of two small black girls along India Basin near the shipyard, James committed suicide in a self-storage unit off 10th Street. He had been living in the unit for almost six months.
Midnight. The light in the unit still blazed throughout the room, interrupted by things. Disturbed by mirrors. The surface of mirrors surrounded the walls of the entire space. From the ceiling two more mirrors hung at weird angles. Taken together, moving the eyes along the surface of the walls, they reflected the depth of James’s death. They revealed nothing, really. A dead body.
A member of the American Nazi Party, thirty-five years old, James Roister robbed houses in quiet black neighborhoods, mugged an old lady near Lyon Street, and had taken to beating up homeless people at night in the park for pocket change. The homeless beatings ceased when James contracted a stomach virus after he pummeled this one black guy who slept in the doorway of Saint Sebastian’s church on Central.
James Roister stabbed himself several times (nine) with a knife. The first couple of hesitant thrusts barely punctured the skin. After the first deep flush into his guts, James quickened the blows into a frenzy of plunging that left him face down, but twisted, as if he was reaching up, on a bare mattress on the floor of the self-storage unit.
There was also his cat named Pat, short for Patriot. It was left among the things in James’s room. The cat is already in bad shape. It has lost almost all of its hair. And it has worms sticking out of its ass, which at first I confused with a bunch of straw, like the cat was a brick, or something, made out of straw.
The cat ignored us. It haunched on the corner of the mattress, and stared at James’s head, which stunk a little bit and started to look like a piece of meat. It purred, deeply, like a long calm death rattle. The cat moved, cautious, along the stains near the center of the bed. It paused, looked in the air, caught itself in a mirror, stared at itself on the ceiling. Pat was everywhere. There were all these Pats, theses cats that looked like Pat, that surrounded us. One of them stood so close to him that he tried, like a worm, to curl around the cold surface of it as he licked his pussy. There were others, too, spread all around him in the room that were beginning to look less and less like him.
A couple of the cats, red ones like Pat, appeared so close to us, and so weird—their faces stretched and melting, you know, just kind of sliding off the bone—that we moved across the mattress a little bit closer to James. And then, if you were watching it, the cat reflected on the wall behind a box of books marked ‘SATAN’ snapped back into shape again. Another one disappeared into a corner, looked like a mouse, or a frog. Pat didn’t do anything, but lick his pussy. He curled up around James’s face, his ass pressed against James’s ear. When I got hold of him, I kept his ass away from me. The electricity emitting from his stubbly hair produced tiny shocks, made my fingers sting all prickly. Donald had been saying all kinds of stuff, but for some reason, all he needed to say was ‘cat’s mouth’, just say it and—the moment I was stroking him, staring at Patriot’s open legs—I got a hard-on.
This room contains all these things that are, now, just things—now that James is dead. The cat is a thing. Donald jokes about killing it. Donald gazed at James’s pubic hairs totally getting it that James was dead. Then he seemed to emerge from a dream, and he smiled at me. James wasn’t naked. He wore black leather boots and dirty stone-washed jeans. His bare chest glared under the light—solid white—nipples invisible. His hard white belly was bloated, shredded into folds of yellow furrows that magnified the inner shape, and spiral, of his guts. We didn’t know what to do with the belt. The thick coils of leather compressed around the neck had cut-off blood. And it appeared so thick and black and decorated, full of studs. Neither one of us wanted to touch it. Donald, for one, knew that James liked studs.
As if he was making James suck an invisible dick, Donald took hold of James’s hair and unraveled the belt from around his neck one turn at a time. After he had removed it, he sized it up and wrapped the belt around his hips. It was too big for him. But, Donald took it anyway. Cat’s mouth.
We sat among the things in the small storage unit for a while staring at each other.
________________
Rigby101
intro: rigby writes because he gets headaches if he doesn't
bio: born with a tail he has never 'fit in'
Mister's Murderous Adventures in Paris
-------------------------------------------------------------
I
m: what?
r: all i'm saying is.. if it happens again
there will be blood
monsieur 'clunk' monsieur 'clink'
FFS
m grabs ig's still bowed head
smashing it to table
kronenberg and espresso clash as
r runs blade across gulping trachea
collective tabled horror as
m & r move into position
m threads ig onto his hardon
r slides into the still gushing wound
i.. ordered..
the k.. uggh..
he.. ordered..
the.. uggh.. essssssssssss
panic crinks through the seated as
ig shakes to m's rush
r follows to the convulsions
m drops a tip
we done?
yeah.. let's get some freedom
~~
II
r flicks another thousand dollar fine
into the road
m's eyes roll then follow a twink
to the corner
italian?
yeah
they do
not as good as the other night
but dessert is 3 exhausted
from an all night drive
hiro declines the nearby bar
elvis jr and john boy are curious
the place is a demolition site so
they take to darkened stairs and pair
r is thinking 'The Exorcist' stairs
as he rams his cock down elvis's throat
m thinks of unsent postcards and how easy
the welts are forming on jb's arse
jb squeals at the vision of
his boyfriends head colliding
against the rough
walls to r's oblivion
m staples jb over.. mushing his face
into jr's semen drenched pubes
as a cooling crimson pool
pushes it's way through stairway debris
swift switchblade to the throat and
just before his knees give way
m hurls jb down the stairs
his load following its arc
~~
III
r dances on pont neuf ledge
malt in hand
m helps a disorientated tourist
off its edge.. .. ..splash
they slide down the stairs towards the seine
and a hooded gang
you want this.. you want a drink?
r flops out a semi
m his luger.. to shepherd
hood1 protests but kneels
before sweaty crotch
hood2,3,4 are against the wall
m has the 3 undo and drop
r spits into bobbing hair
before slitting its throat to watch
a jissom/blood mix make for the atlantic
m patrols 3 sucking each other
a triangle of tears hit gravel as
barrel sparodically goes up each arse..
shot rings out.. whoops.. two for one
r finds flex and hood2 is bound to a tree
m inserts a sharpend branch
through cunt to exit breast
lighter fluid clothing and a few books
encourage a blaze as r kicks at naked torso
m slices off a portion of back
and throws it into the fire
may get hungry later
~~
IV
to the Catacombs!
deep in and with a stroke to
hello kittys arse
her plastic self
sits glowing in socket (to video record)
m: huh!
r: looks around
somewhere there are moans
a swift investigation
behind piles of bones
reveals a couple at it
raising dust.
femur hits cranium
and then again
and again until brain ooze
splatters cunts face
m gets to work on cocks arse
punching buttock till
he plunges deep
pushing wilting cock further into cunt
r after snipping cunts septum
with femur remains
sits on blood slippery breast
fucking the fresh orifice
glug glug glug
tue-moi..
s'il..
vous..
plai.. glug
m explodes into cock
tit cums through the pain
of penile cranal intrusion..
now for the grand
r takes m's place
sliding into jissom loaded hole
m vomits onto tits face to scratch
absent cyphers within the slick
r sucks at cocks wound
as he jolts against the stiffening rectum
m slides femur through slick
and proceeds to pluck out eyes
kitty has a new home.
_______________
Chris Stamm
(This is the first couple pages of a story I finished about a year ago. I used it as a writing sample in my failed attempt to get into graduate school. Well, not completely failed—I got into some schools, but they didn't give me enough aid. So this is kind of a story that I couldn't get paid enough for.)
Years and Years and Years and Years
The idea infested like lice. Bit into us like ticks. We woke with the plan planted in our brains, as if The Hands had furrowed there overnight and dropped brilliant insect eggs.
---We would build skeletons for our moths. A way to say sorry; we were just kids; fuckdumb and cruel and all-time asses; forgive us? We bound our voices into a single sound that sent word of our vision to the farthest reaches.
---Rare rain greeted and drenched and—we thought—ratified our announcement. The Hands clapped a rhythm into the secret sound of water falling through the trees. Our foths danced, rapt as infants and suggestible as mud, unable to resist the beat.
---The world was a fever of our ambition.
The unforeseen isn't accidentally so. The future hides like the hunted, except it craves our chasing. If we caught it full in our sight we'd disown that rawboned quarry.
We peeled off into our own chanted strands.
--Time will tell that we are good! A broth said.
-----Let's put our hands to working on our dreams! A sist said.
-----Yes yes yes! I said.
But was thinking that some ideas are best left in the skulls that grew them.
A copse became bones. We gave the earth a bald spot for birds to see. Branches, twigs, limbs, sticks, switches, boughs and roots provided the basic shape of what we thought a moth should look like inside. Bird bones, which we picked from our teeth after dinner and snatched from cave crevices where The Hands secreted their stores, were braided to mimic subtler configurations. Chewed bubble gum and spat tree sap played at joints and tendons. We killed our dogs for skulls.
R.I.P. Chester, Bobert, Billiam, Slimy, Cyn, Ozu, Ativan, Noose, Rory, Leia, Hope, Gayboy, C-Dog, Arrow, Stoneface, Scratchy, Scruffy, Pierre, Marie, Stanley, Nance, Dickhead, Loverboy, Virginia.
Not long into collecting essentials, we got how little we grasped and how far we would have to go to learn. One of us had to die.
---No one volunteered. I certainly did not.
---So we drove the stick that would become my moth's arm into the mud and chucked our stones after it. This is how we decided who would cook dinner or wash the moths or beat the foths or compost the shit. Gert's was farthest off. We named the skeletons after him. Brave, unlucky broth.
I made the first cut into him, into his heel, in 'til his bones. My hands had always been fine and steady, with nails smooth as a lake bottom's round rocks. Apparently auspicious, they inaugurated all of our activities.
---Gert squealed in a quite un-Gertlike manner. I once witnessed a panther sillily get a claw stuck in Gert's broad back, and Gert severed the panther's leg and hiked home with the animal's paw dangling from his flesh like a hairy arrow. Not a single sistish yelp through the whole ordeal. Now, though, he was a choir of hissy screams.
I should have swung and sworded his foot in mock honorable battle, which would have steeled his nerves, but I broke in slowly for fear of severing an important lesson. His blood lolled out, reluctant as a newborn runt, then sprayed like firecracker sparks.
-----Do you want me to stop?
-----(Though you know I can't.)
---I whispered, afraid my broths and sists would notice my hesitation. We had promised to be steadfast, cold.
-----Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!
-----(Yes!!!!!!!!! No!!!!!!!!!!)
---Gert was broadcasting from a foreign world already.
-----Ssssssssssshhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrraaaaaa!!!!!!!!
-----(I am still alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
---He was becoming a foth: dumb and rageful with incomprehension.
---I turned from the gushing and crying and spitting and passed the dagger to the next in a line that had gone rippling, drunk. I wasn't the only one feeling sick and torn.
Gert dimmed, his screeches faded. I hiked to my moth. I craved the consolation of cover. I was flattened, stretched, a belt of light on the horizon. A new kind of sad or afraid or angry with each step. I wasn't visible or meaty anymore. I did not trust the balance of the world now that we'd subtracted from it.
_______________
Some Brief Thoughts on the End of Encyclopedias.
Recently in the New York Times there was an article Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias, speculating on the imminent end of the print encyclopedia.
It seems those multi-volume encyclopedias many of us grew up with are about to become extinct, replaced by online sources.
You can imagine my interest in reading this, given that my first novel, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, April 08) is also an encyclopedia -- A to Z — of obsessions and memories and philosophical/homoerotic fixations. It’s my version or perversion of the World Book Encyclopedia, which I was passionate about as a kid. Growing up in Perth, Western Australia -- which the World Book listed as the most isolated, industrialized city in the world — it was my constant companion.
Today I consider myself both a novelist and an encyclopedist, describing and categorizing the contents of my unconscious in a manner after Arthur Rimbaud,=2 0both systematic and deranged.
The End of the World Book can be thought of as warped, twisted, melancholy encyclopedia for this warped, twisted, melancholy century we live in. Unlike the more traditional multi-volume encyclopedia, this is a more portable encyclopedia, one more suitable to these uncertain times.
Two Entries from The End of the World Book: A Novel (University of Wisconsin Press 2008) by Alistair McCartney
_______________
Alistair McCartney
Some Brief Thoughts on the End of Encyclopedias.
Recently in the New York Times there was an article Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias, speculating on the imminent end of the print encyclopedia.
It seems those multi-volume encyclopedias many of us grew up with are about to become extinct, replaced by online sources.
You can imagine my interest in reading this, given that my first novel, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, April 08) is also an encyclopedia -- A to Z — of obsessions and memories and philosophical/homoerotic fixations. It’s my version or perversion of the World Book Encyclopedia, which I was passionate about as a kid. Growing up in Perth, Western Australia -- which the World Book listed as the most isolated, industrialized city in the world — it was my constant companion.
Today I consider myself both a novelist and an encyclopedist, describing and categorizing the contents of my unconscious in a manner after Arthur Rimbaud,=2 0both systematic and deranged.
The End of the World Book can be thought of as warped, twisted, melancholy encyclopedia for this warped, twisted, melancholy century we live in. Unlike the more traditional multi-volume encyclopedia, this is a more portable encyclopedia, one more suitable to these uncertain times.
Two Entries from The End of the World Book: A Novel (University of Wisconsin Press 2008) by Alistair McCartney
BUSH AT WAR
In the headlights of the parked cars. Saw Laura. Drinking peach schnapps and orange juice. Cheeks flushed. Singing. And turning circles. In Midland. Those gravel pits. Those dry hot nights.
Me a child of guns. On the ranch. Hunting quail. Also turkeys. Wild and domestic.
Asked her to the dance. But no. She was going with that other boy. The boy who died.
And this pain in my throat.
Last night saw her crying. Lights off. Blanket to chin. Face to wall. That pretense. So I knew.
I should stop. Writing on these pads. This. And this. But I’m choking. On my snack.
I brought her the card. From the funeral. For the boy who died. She didn’t dare. Show her face. Either this will bring us together. Or destroy us. She said. The whole town destroyed. Or brought together. To be more perfect. Than we were.
She taped postcards. In phonebooks. The newspapers. The flags. And those children. Somewhere. Staring. Somewhere.
Those days I drank. So much. When mom called. Me down to breakfast. I’d hear her voice. At school.
I brought Laura flowers. Books. And little animals. Leapt from pine cones. And pipe cleaners.
She cut picture. From library books. And pasted them.
This pain. Gets so bad. That for fifteen minutes at a time. I forget. Then it comes back. I’m choking. On my snack.
When she drove me. To the clinic. We drank Jack. From cups. She said that’s. It.
And saved me.
I went to war. To destroy the. Creosote bushes. Staked the desert. With kite string. And yardsticks. And burned the oldest. Clonal colony. Then in balloon brigades. On rolling green. Enemy encampments. We dropped. Charges. While men below. Guided. Us with kite string.
I keep blacking out. It’s giving me a. Headache.
She saved me. From the drink. I saved. Her from the boy. The one who died. She was drinking. But only. For the boy. I was drinking. For me.
I hear her. Treading above through. Our home. Find these notes. Love. And again. Save me.
_______________
hi i'm mike. i consider myself a polyartist but most of my work spawns from writing, or language at least. i spent the last year in a couple creative non-fiction workshops, which was a new thing to me, but I kind of like it. i think i still like fiction and poetry better, but i like the idea of eradicating any sort of genre label and being left with nothing but the text. my favorite work tends to be stuff that is somewhat of an "artist book," except not in the literally definition of artist book. it's more like, well, in a podcast arianna reines talks about a literal, printed book as "the physical manifestation of text," and really, THAT is what i find appealing about making books. my latest book (aside from a short poetry zine thing I made) can be seen here. i'm also pretty into hypertext fiction, and i did my first major experiment with that last semester. i'm pretty happy with the result. my most recent finished project was a photocopied 18 page "book" that collects 8 poems and 8 line drawings dedicated to celebrities that I want to have sex with. here's an excerpt. i still have about 20 copies left. my current projects include launching the experimental lit journal LIES/ISLE that was mentioned earlier (nobody's applied yet, but i'm thinking it might be because we haven't put a deadline up yet), and a potential collaboration with a collage artist that i'm pretty excited about.
i'm currently about to start my fifth year of undergrad studies as a photography major/english minor, and i'm still trying to find a graduate program that will allow me to remain whatever utopian idea of a POLYARTIST that i've established myself as in my mind. THE FUTURE WILL TELL.
4.
It's not like something gradual, or something that you know is coming, but all of a sudden, everything disappears. At least, everything that signifies something from reality disappears. You know, the chair you're sitting at; well, you can still feel it under your plush ass, but when you look down, at least, you think you're looking down, you don't see anything. Just white. And maybe some occasional flashes of color.
So you try looking in another direction. At least you think you do, etc, and once again, all you can see is white. To make sure your eyes are open you raise your hands to your face. You hold them directly in front of where you remember your eyes being, but you don't see anything. You wave them around a little. The slight air blows your eyelashes, cool breeze pushes against the white of your eyes. I guess that means your eyes are open.
"Hello?" You call out. You haven't tried to stand up yet, and there's still music playing, coming out of the tiny speakers on your computer. You're not dead, you guess.
"Hello?"
You hear footsteps.
"Are you on the phone?" It's one of your roommates, Lindsay. More proof that you aren't dead yet.
"Uh, I'm not dead am I?"
"What?"
"I mean, are you actually here? Am I awake?"
"Yeah. Mike, are you alright?"
"Well, yeah. I mean, I think so. It's just, well, I can't see anything. I mean, I guess more accurately, all I can see is white and occasionally splashes of colors. It's really disorienting. Are my eyes open?"
You hear more footsteps and your body can sense the presence of somebody else in pretty near proximity. You get the impression that something is approaching your face.
"Uhm, yeah. Mike, this is really weird. Are you fucking with me."
"I don't think so. Try to make my eyes react or something. When I was a kid, in like, grade school, I would occasionally get these weird brown or grey splotches that sort of covered my eyes. Well, I mean, not my eyes, but my vision. It was weird. The doctor said they were migraines, but like, I never got headaches with them or anything. I haven't gotten whatever they are in a while. I mean, I guess I don't see brown or grey right now. So it's not that. Did you try to make me react yet?"
"Yes."
"Are my eyes still open?"
"Mike, you should probably call the hospital or something."
You hear her walk out of the room.
The entire thing can be read here.
_______________
"Untitled"
I want to dig a hole
Deep down.
Throw you in it.
Out of my mind
To the depths
Of my heart.
Often forgotten,
Yet painfully
Reminiscent.
That won't keep you
Away.
Gone.
Forgotten.
I tried it already.
Bluntly Futile.
You plague my mind,
Brighten my heart.
I want you gone for good.
There's one option left.
Dig a hole
Deep down.
Throw myself
In it.
Pray that I don't-
Survive the fall.
Then I'll be
Bleeding burgundy,
Painful love.
At least I can still laugh,
Act like I don't
Want to end this shitty life.
________________
Kevin Killian
I'm a San Francisco based novelist, art writer, poet, playwright, editor and critic. My new book ACTION KYLIE comes out next month, and yet I couldn't let go of Kylie Minogue, and this past spring wrote a whole nother little book of poetry, called "Wow Wow Wow Wow," after a recent single by the Australian-born pop princess. One of the poems in it isn't even by me at all, not really; it's a found piece taken from a recent showing on TCM of "Autumn Leaves," Robert Aldrich's 1956 melodrama about manic men and the women who wipe up after them. Joan Crawford is aging, a typist who lives in a Hollywood bungalow on a cute little strip could be Los Feliz. She meets Cliff Robertson -- much younger -- and he asks her to marry him on their first date. Carpe diem, thinks Joan, and they marry at once, and only later, when the first Mrs. Cliff Robertson comes to her door, does Joan start realizing that Cliff, a Korean War vet, is mentally fragile. Not until (spoilers ahead) the middle of the picture do we find out that the reason Cliff is so mentally unbalanced is that he came back from the war and found his wife (Vera Miles) in bed with his own father (Lorne Greene). Now Vera Miles and Lorne Greene are trying to get Crawford to commit Cliff Robertson, in order to get the money that his late mother left him. I couldn't stop watching this! And I grabbed a pen to write down the dialogue (by Jean Rouverol, Hugo Butler, Lewis Meltzer, Richard Blees) of one tumultuous scene. It's a good setpiece at my readings, and fun to pick people out from the audience and ask them to play Vera Miles and Lorne Greene. In San Francisco, Jocelyn Saidenberg and George Albon did it with me; in Boulder, I had Brian Evenson fiery as Lorne Greene, Joanna Howard insinuating as Vera Miles; in New York Bruce Benderson was a lecherous, Burl Ives sort of Lorne Greene and Wayne Koestenbaum ultra-credible as Vera Miles. Afterwards, Wayne said to me something to the effect of, not only is this the best scene of any Joan Crawford movie, but it is the best scene ever written in Western literature. And so this is, "Autumn Leaves."
Joan Crawford. Emotionally upset! Of course you want me to commit him! Get him out of your life, put him away permanently where he can never again remind either one of you of your horrible guilt! How you, and you, committed the ugliest of all possible sins, so ugly that it drove him into the state he is in.
Lorne Greene. What kind of woman are you to be satisfied with only half a man?
Vera Miles. There must be something wrong with you.
Joan Crawford. Even when he doesn't know what he is doing, he's a saner man than you are. He's decent, and proud. --- Can you say the same for yourselves? Where's your decency? In what garbage dump, Mr. Hansen? And where's yours, you tramp?
Vera Miles. I don't have to listen to that.
Lorne Greene. She's the one who's crazy.
Vera Miles. She'd have to be crazy to put up with that weakling.
Joan Crawford. You: his loving, doting fraud of a father. And you: you slut. You're both so consumed by evil -- so rotten -- your filthy souls are too evil for Hell itself!
_______________
George Wines
'Misanthrope'
George Wines was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Southern Maryland, where he still lives. Currently, he works in marketing for a local publishing company. His goal as a writer is to destroy Western Literature one word at a time.
---The following is an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, Between Two Worlds. This is from the first draft, which hasn’t been edited but for grammar, and was written about 7 or 8 years ago. In this scene, the novel’s main character, Christopher, has his first sexual experience ever with another person — Alex, the boy he’s been obsessed with since middle school.
From Between Two Worlds
---He tried his hardest to make their embrace tighter with all the strength he possessed, hoping, in the far reaches of his mind, to break through skin, bone, muscle so that each could somehow experience the other's essence-
---Until Alex's mouth vaulted to his neck, sucking here and there in quick, twirling- tongue bursts that tickled him. And made him realize he should be offering the same. So he started a series of random pecks and sucks of each side of Alex's neck, as he tried his best to taste Alex's skin fully. And it tasted like… Alex's skin. Really not much different than when he used to kiss the back of his hand -or his bedroom door- to practice for this very day. It was neutral, almost a non-taste, with a hint of salt.
---Alex wiggled free, then up, wiggling Christopher's gasping mouth down his body, which, in its brevity, tasted no different than his neck, until Christopher was nervously level with his penis. Without thinking, he put his mouth around the head and Alex's pre-cum tasted…like his own. And Alex's cock tasted … no different from the rest of his body, like licking a shaved arm. Though it did seem much larger than it had looked now that it was in his mouth-
---He pushed his mouth further down on it, then pulled back. Then went down and up again. And again and again and again- And he could feel his stomach cringe with… disappointment? Or was it … embarrassment? Because it was nothing like he had imagined –he knew he was doing it wrong -it wasn't wet enough -barely wetting at all and he couldn't fit all of it in his mouth and when he did, it made him gag and his teeth kept jagging into it, making Alex jump and he hadn't gotten to spend an hour on Alex's balls, examining his penis in detail and Alex wasn't screaming his name with pleasure and he was about to cry, that knot in his throat not Alex's penis-
---Alex scooted down, scooting his penis out of Christopher's mouth, to the latter's chagrin -and relief. Alex put his hand on Christopher's shoulder and gently pushed him onto his back. And Christopher became a willing pupil for the second time that night-
---His first blowjob! From Alex Musgrave! So wet, so tight, so toothless- But not so wet, not so tight as he'd imagined it would be- And there and there and…wait a minute, there was another meeting of molar and glans, making him jerk just slightly- But, oh boy, it was long -in distance, anyway- as Alex took all of him down to the fist around the base of his penis- then, almost stealthily, the tip of a finger was forced between his buttocks and into his rectum- and it burned as the nail scraped his anus as it twisted in up to the knuckle, then flexed up and wiggled against his prostate and it was all he could do to reconcile the finger in his ass and the throat around the head of his cock- and, suddenly, he felt a too-familiar connected tension in his stomach and perineum- like both parts of a hydraulic piston locking up- and he looked to the top of Alex's bobbing shagged bangs- and cried out, "I'm going to come!"-
---And Alex let go of him orally, freed his finger, and slid his hand to the head of Christopher's penis, which he squeezed with all he had in his skinny, muscled runner's forearm. After 15 seconds of Christopher's numb pelvic jerks, which produced not one iota of semen or orgasm, Alex positioned himself on his knees between Christopher's legs.
---He grabbed Christopher's ankles and thrust his legs in the air. He let go of one ankle, which Christopher thrust further into the air and wiped Christopher's anus with his free wet hand. He lowered his face to Christopher's anus -which Christopher hoped to God didn't stink- and swabbed it with several back and forth whips of his tongue. Raising up, Alex spit into his hand and ran it up and down the length of his penis, which he centered at the opening of Christopher's anus for a brief second before he lunged forward and entered-
---And it was … a penis … pushing through Christopher's anus into his rectum- Pushing, pushing, pushing -Pushing so forceful he couldn't recognize any pulling -In, in, in, in, in, in, in- Stretching this tissue here, breaking that paper-bag-thin tissue there-Then slowing -finally- Retracting here –retracting there- then stretching all over again-
It wasn't painful -which it was, Christopher's penis having gone limp from the penetration, as if anesthetizing itself –as much as it was … hectic?- try as he might -tightening his half-numbed anus, straightening his legs ever so slightly, silently pleading -he couldn't stop the relentless assault of pushes and their afterthoughts of pulls- couldn't slow them down, even stop them at intervals, to experience fully every inch of that cock he'd so dreamed about, he'd so imagined experiencing so slowly, so fully-
---Then the assaults resumed with a heretofore unknown abruptness, Alex's penis remaining at least halfway in his ass with each full thrust -and now somehow flying up towards his prostate -he could see his feet level with his head out the corner of each eye- and his cock began to grow hard again as he watched Alex's silhouette, in the glare from the muted TV just beyond the foot of the bed, ramming towards him with bang-sweaty effort -and he realized the boy he'd been so in love with for so long was inside him, fucking him -and was probably throwing him a good -no, a great- fuck, the greatest he'd ever know –even without a condom -Shit! no condom -but the boy had taken such great care of him that night -he wouldn't- and Alex's hand around his cock, which was hard as ever, jerking him with his own pre-cum -and his asshole now grown used to the assaults, inhaling that cock, so he could feel the last of the penile bombs -yeah, killer bomb shit- against his prostate right before the entire lower half of his body contracted in a collective cramp…and he came-
---And it felt like any other time he'd come, not as he'd imagined it would- Alex pulled out with a plop and rolled onto his back, panting in the silence. The silence! And now he realized how he'd been moaning so loud -And now this silence- He sighed inaudibly, those three little taboo words on the verge of spilling out of his mouth into that silence as he pulled his knees up and…farted.
---Christ! And it was no normal fart, either- No, it was more of a burp, long, drawn-out, bellowing, heightening the smell of sex already soaking the room. Christopher turned his head from Alex, whom he perceived -incorrectly or not, it didn't matter- to giggle. He straightened his legs flat. "Did you come?" he said quickly.
---"Of course," said Alex. "A long time ago."
---"Oh." Jeez, he hadn't even had a chance to taste it-
---Suddenly, he had to take the biggest shit of his life. He got up, his buttocks clenched tight, and shuffled into the master-bathroom, where he was shocked by the door handle. He flipped on the light, sat on the toilet, and strained and … flushed out a small stream of Alex's cum and saliva, which he would have preferred to have absorbed into his body. He looked to his stomach which was chilly and itchy in the sterility of the air-conditioned bathroom. On it was a chaotic map of syrupy semen, dripping and drying.
---He grabbed a towel and wiped recklessly, thoroughly, then lay back against the crisp plastic of the toilet seat behind him. He tried to think about the sex, its details, its…magnificence?
---But he couldn't. His mind was numb with anti-climactic exhaustion. So he wiped his ass and stood up. And had to shit again. He sat back down and forced peristalsis one more time, which resulted in another stream of cum, a small turd -a turd! He became hot, wondering if Alex had felt it digitally or penilely or olfactorily- Ah, he let out another baritone fart which ricocheted off the echoing porcelain of the bowl and finally dissolved into the wate-.
---He looked into the toilet between his legs. To the right of the turd, which was souped in a net of thick semen, were three or four bright red drops. His heart sank at the sight and he looked in the toilet for it. He grabbed some more toilet paper and began to wipe frantically until his fears were allayed by no more evidence of any such detritus after he'd gone through a whole roll of the softest toilet tissue ever to grace the pucker of his asshole.
---He flushed and got up. He flicked off the light. He opened the door and was stopped at the threshold by a broad, screaming, chilling thought which streaked from his brain through his prostate into his socked feet in the warmth of the air-conditioning as he espied Alex's curled, motionless form in the center of the bed -a thought so horrible he was sure he hadn't thought it and was sure he'd never think it again-
_______________
Spunk Meyer
'Spunky'
Writing defers reality, also I'm not really good at anything else. The short stuff I write sounds good read out loud; got rhythm? The long stuff either gets half finished and forgotten about or doesn't live up to my expectations and gets scrapped anyway. I'm working on that. I've just finished a script for a short film called 'Hangers', which I'm going to shoot this Autumn/Winter. Writing isn't all about saying things exactly as they are, it's about using words to say what needs to be said and leaving the rest for everyone to work out themselves.
Delirious with ignorance in a whitewashed box of aspirations. Surrounded by the ones who made it without making it obvious, looking up to walls of faces who know how to hold their pose and places which make what I've seen of this world inadequate and inarticulate. One moment says a thousand words. And so it runs
in reels and stutters, cigarette burns, clicks, claps, the grind of life and what it brings; what will be brought. Snap nicotine stained fingers: tickets to every back row, grinding in the underground, banging hips with screamers, screen workers, believers in threadbare lust riots. Drink up, pink lips, drink up. Up
all night, dancing in bat caves, up with the stars, feeling infinite, up and screwing harder than DIY in '77. Going on into our last hours. To our drawn out ends we get down, dirty in sweat, hot with working down to the ground. Leave the lights off,
that is our last request.
Read more here: baitfortraitors.blogspot.com/
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Hello, my name is Joseph Marcure. As is quite typical of my writing I have waited to beyond the last minute to put something together for this writer day self-portrait. My published writings are almost entirely all out there in that wily world we breathe due to the magnanimity of Dennis Cooper. Anyway, I have a large number of books I'm writing, say twenty or so, which are in varying places along the lines of being finished. I really thought I'd get a chance to share a lot of them here but it seems maybe not - still I wanted to show them off. Perhaps later... Most of my writing is about isolation, alienation, and wide-eyed explorations within that which often turn to looking for friendship, or examinations of that, often with cute cartoon like characters. Each book with its fare share of dream sequences, ghosts or things similar. Well, at least most of my picture books are like that. My other writing is a bit more complicated but I think it makes a logical extension. Surfaces with surfaces beneath them and more beneath that, a sort of focused or purposed wandering. Everything going wrong when you think it's all going right and then the third thing that brings the clarifying confusion needed. Presently I'm working on a series of seven picture books which I hope to have done one by one in the coming weeks, months, year. So for this little space I'll take an average turn and type up something unrelated, something about a few books that will come after that, three books near and dear to my heart.
The Little Odd Postman or the escape from a space tyrant
A mostly green, rotund alien, who happens to be an out of work mail carrier living on the outskirts of Kenya, in a run down shack, finds work via local periodical as a postman for Routerbagge County, USA. His happy go lucky deliveries of junk-mail to the somewhat shut-in but nonetheless kind locals of his new route form the structure of this little picture book, with much allowance for sweet forteana in-jokes. The LOP is a lovable if hard to know character. The book is currently being slowly reworked and is getting closer to what I had always imagined it as.
abandoned 2004 draft's cover (rejected version of book, via three or so publishers)
junkmail from middling draft
watercolor for a now abandoned new draft
photo of original draft I wrote back in '94 with xerox of one of my faked UFO photos
Mitchie, the story of a small mouse
This is the tale of a lonely mouse who gets caught up in the twisted journey of a bag of lost gold. All Mitchie really wants is to find a new friend.
first few pages from first draft (which was about 70pgs written in a rush one long night a few years back)
Julie and the Butterfly Girl
God, this is my first real novel. It started out as a picture book which I wrote, illustrated and tried to find a publisher for starting back in 2003. Eventually the book developed into a novel that anyone, who reads novels, could read – though so far I've shown it to no one as it's not done. This one is something I really care about. I mean I care a lot about all of my books, but this one in particular is extra special to me. I have no idea how to boil it down here at the moment. Basically it's about this girl Julie and her sister who is a writer. The book is told, mostly, from Julie's point of view. It's sort of experimental but all I can say is that I'm really proud of it and can't wait for you all to have a chance to read it, when that time comes, if you're interested. The book should be a little under two-hundred pages but it presently fills numerous notebooks and is highly fragmented.
very early drawings of Julie, Butterfly girl and Rachel Rabbit
What follows is an excerpt from a middling draft, from the fourth chapter or so, typed here for the first time.
At 8 pm it was all the same, moving just like it always does. Sort of dark, quiet too. Okay, definitely dark and very quiet. I was just sitting at my desk, whatever. I heard the phone ring downstairs.
---I find that although I intend to do my homework early the pencil lays there at odds with my notebook. Staring at my desk I feel once more that it's sort of perfect, the space and everything. There's an area on my unfinished, well, barely started, paper that I just zoom in on. I don't move, I just slowly narrow my focus on it. There's some sort of idea coming to me. That's when I pick up my pencil and roll it in a small circle, waiting. It's a process. I don't really feel any desire to write but I do feel an anxiety about not having my homework finished, something like that. My mind starts to shrink. I'm still here but either I'm getting smaller or the world's moving away. I close my eyes to only see a darkness. It's sort of pink. The smallest space, just behind my eyelids. Once when I was little I woke up and I couldn't open my eyes. I panicked. I felt helpless. I was awake but I couldn't do the one thing that I thought meant being awake. I called out for my sister. I was crying. Jenny rushed in and then left. The next thing I knew was this feeling of a hot wet rag on my eyelids. Jenny sat me up and helped me clean off the sleepies that had cemented my eyes shut. Then I could blink and see beyond the smallest space. Jenny told me that sleepies were just dried mucus that came out of the corner of your eyes. Picking at those corners now I don't feel anything beyond my skin and salt on my fingertips which has my eyes suddenly blurring a bit. I'm supposed to write about something. It's very quiet up here, very peaceful. Life feels slow, like anything would have trouble happening. It's all the same. It gets dark, a little chilly and, again, very quiet. Even the slightest noise stands out. My clock says it's 8pm. Downstairs I hear the phone ring.
---I guess I should play Pickle Cloud or finish this homework. Maybe I won't go to school tomorrow, maybe something will happen. Something that takes me away. Or better yet, something that says I can just stay here, in this place. In my home.
---"Julie," mom says, surprising me. "Phone for you."
---I didn't even notice her coming up. Maybe it's not as quiet as I thought. Or maybe mom's really quiet. But, who is it? I don't want to talk. I pretend I don't hear.
---"Phone, Julie." Mom holds it in front of me. Reluctantly, I take it. I try to smile at mom.
---"Hello?" I ask, as mom smiles and leaves.
---"Hey." It's Matsuko. "Are you busy?"
---"No, well, I'm doing homework. Sort of."
---"Do you want to get something to eat?"
---"Eat? It's like eight o'clock."
---"I'm hungry."
---"So eat something."
---"I was thinking we could go to that frozen yogurt place."
---"Right now?"
---"Yeah, Kevin's coming."
---Wow, I have to go. "Okay, let's go. Yeah, I'll go."
---"Can you come?"
---"I think so."
---"I'll wait."
---I ask mom, knowing I shouldn't because if she says no I'll have a harder time sneaking out. I guess. Not that I've ever done that. I mean that's a possibility.
---"Mom?" I call out from the balcony. "Can I go get ice cream with Matsuko?"
---"Right now?" her voice travels from the kitchen.
---"Yeah."
---"I don't know Julie."
---"I know."
---"Okay. But, you have to be home by nine-fifteen."
---"Thanks mom!"
---So that's that. Matsuko will meet me out front in ten minutes. Wow. I have to get ready, get some money and go. I never do stuff like this. I can do this? It seems so easy, but scary too. It's 8:05pm. Maybe my room is like my sleepy sealed eyelids and Matsuko's phone call the wet rag elixir. But for what? I guess because this seems like real life, going and seeing Kevin, wow that's like a dream. It's like how I imagine my life and now here it is. So why do I feel so nervous? I don't understand. It's like that blank page in my desk, missing all the crucial information.
---I wash my face, fix my hair, well comb it, brush my teeth – quickly. I slip my magenta socked feet into my shoes and start for downstairs. Mom gives me six dollars and smiles. I open the door, Matsuko's out front, waiting by the stairs.
________________________
Steven Erickson
'steevee'
I had never given much thought to filmmaking until I turned 30, in 2002. I was inspired by the experience of being an extra on a friend's feature, as well as my unrequited infatuation with an actor I met on the set. I wrote THIS IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH as a way of exploring the potential sadism of photography and filmmaking. I think the monologue stands on its own as a piece of writing, but it's more complex as a film. It's delivered off-screen by an actor whom the camera focuses on for several minutes. Then my voice cuts in to tell him that he was supposed to start crying.
Photography is embarrassing. Film is embarrassing. For me, at least. I can’t speak for anyone else. When you point a camera in my direction (especially a movie camera), I cringe. I have a real knack for making myself look like an idiot. At a July 4th party, I swung my fist at the lens when someone approached me with an R-8 camera. It was a subtle way of suggesting that I didn’t want to be filmed while drenched in sweat. Then I took my glasses off, an act which the camera followed. If I can see the camera, I stare into the lens, get too self-conscious, giggly or whatever and wind up looking mentally challenged.
Later that same party, someone filmed my inane ramblings about how the Middle East was going to explode, as I lay on the tar roof with my shorts drenched in someone else’s beer. A few days later, I saw an actor give a bizarre, pompous speech as an introduction to one of his films. I asked an acquaintance, who was holding a camera, if the guy was joking. Little did I know that it was running at the time. Oops. Spontaneity is a pretty sure way to create a moment which I’d like to forget. The most natural photos of me taken recently are posed ones showing me holding a gun to my head. I can assure you that I’m not suicidal; reality just makes me uncomfortable.
If you can make something meaningful from self-conscious anxiety, go ahead and take my photo. I’ve even been to a club that’s one big surveillance camera. My picture’s up on their website, and I’m sure it made onto their wall of monitors that night. I tried to turn the machine back on itself by filming the wall, the TV screens or other cameras instead of people. Some of these pictures are up on their website too. Feel free to have a look.
________________________
Eli Levén
Oh yes, ooh yes says the man below Alex and jerks his cock with frenetic strokes and soaks it now and then with his mouth. There's a vague tingling in Alex crotch, he’s leaning on a grave stone in the English garden of Uppsala, it's the last of May. He's thinking of his grandfather that died just an hour ago. He used to visit him and they went to a gigantic army surplus store, they were never close but one time he sang a 60's pop song to him in his car which he never did to Alex father.
A singing blue tit is sitting in the tree above Alex and makes him dream, the bird seems like a perfect lover, beautiful, sensitive and with an incredible voice. The bird is tearing a rift in reality, far away from the sheer hell our sexless maiden has gotten him into. Alex is the smell of chewing gum, sloppy red-painted nails and armpits like opened crypts, forever our whore. He hears a voice speak to him, inside of him that must belong to God or something:
Because you're not lovable Alex, one doesn't love your clumsy swinging hips, your smeared lipstick, you look like a whore.
You have to be pruned like an overgrown tree, you are too much, you don't fit in your starving body, your lungs can't breath properly, you can't get any air in them, you suck cock like testicles were filled with oxygen.
You have to be pruned and then resurrect.
Then you’ll finally see you're a....
Then you’ll finally know you're a....
Then you’ll finally discover you're a....seal girl, a seal chick, a seal bride.
You shall jump out of your head fully clad in armour, always close to the knives, your never ceasing schizo laughter, you're a black shining sun.
/
Yesterday they had dressed up to go to a mall to try out clothes. Alex wore a sailor dress in elastane, a real bargain found at a flea market, Sebastian had greased his leather jacket until it blazed. They went off with Sebastian's moped and put it in the garage, continued to the perfume department and walked around in the light, it smelled good. They tried on different make-ups and threw down a pair of evening gloves in Sebastian's bag (covered with aluminium foil on the inside to prevent the alarm from going off). Alex put on a lipstick that Sebastian kissed away in the dressing room on the fifth floor. Alex wet his finger and made him clean again. They snorted some ecstasy and took a coffee in the cafeteria to wait for it to kick in. When they had finished the coffee they went to the men's room to pick up anybody that who were there. They found an old man with loafers and a semi hard dick and went into a booth. Alex pulled his dress up and spread his ass cheeks for the man and took Sebastian in his mouth. The man fucked him while making out with Sebastian. To be treated like dead or as a whore meant for Alex love and no lies. When I fuck it is like all these men surround my soul or something, he thought, squeezes it together in my chest and drains my body, all that stuff makes me extracted. Compressed. Stronger.
At that very moment when the man grabs Alex hair and pulls it back, he comes into existence, at a mall this time. In the space that opens up between him and the man he creates his own daydream nation and turns into something else than Alex, Ellie. The pain is a promise of fulfillment and rapture, not in the present but after when now becomes then, when he lies in his bed and remembers it or when he sees that look in another face or in the street: The astonished eyes of some passive guy in a porn movie, a look that tells that he knows more than the person that for the moment is putting himself into his body. Consequently Alex’s strongest urge becomes longing and more longing, for other hands, other chances.
When Sebastian's pubic hair was this close it made him feel safe. He came after only a couple of minutes and couldn't keep an "Uhh" from coming out of his mouth. When the man and Sebastian came in his face he thought of snow flakes. I must look like someone in deep prayer he thought with his face turned to the sky with eyes closed. The old man gave Sebastian his card, who tore it, Alex picked it up to save it for the collection at home, in a metallic box his grandmother gave him, in which he also kept a freezer bag with a napkin soaked with Sebastian's cum and blood.
They went to the glass department, Alex liked the red glasses, he looked at Sebastian through a vase. They needed curtains, and touched some made of velvet. Sebastian rolled his eyes, he doesn't want curtains he would rather have a bread baking machine. Making your own bread becomes easy and dirt cheap. But I don't want the neighbors to spy through our windows! You're like an old lady Sebastian. Mom will give us new curtains as a wedding gift and then we'll have to hang them. I think that dad will hang himself as a wedding gift.
They descended a floor, somewhere on the way Alex lost Sebastian and went into his otherworld and split in two. Alex became his own little brother and Ellie his big sister. The mannequins looked down on them, but they didn't notice. Ellie was everything Alex never succeeded to be. She never bend her back, she took what she wanted on the dining table of life instead of the crumbs and leftovers. She wasn't always on the way to hell at the speed of comets, losing in some kind of triumph. He hoped she would take care of her. They went into a changing room, Alex whispered to himself staring at his boy breasts:
To win becomes you: beautiful.
The swinging hip. The wide aorta. The blushing cheek.
Sister in crime. Rabid boy-girl, not anymore.
Winning, winning E!
Alex put on a dress worthy of Ellie, it fitted prefectly and didn't acquire hips or breasts, green checked. Sebastian sticked his head in, continued into his lover's palate, took the dress off, put it in his bag and went out.
(translated from Swedish)
________________________
Hey … I’m Mark Stephens … a old friend of Dennis’… hopefully my sending this to him doesn’t seem to be begging for nepotism … so this is from yet another short one buried under yet another stack of papers in yet another room. I write … but I’m not a writer … so be gentle.
Excerpt from “A Sculpture At Dawn”
---I talk to my dog. I talk to my coffee. I talk to hear myself talk. I am heard by my scratched vinyl heroes who hold my hand when I ask. I am dismissed by mortality. Ghosts refuse to enter into a discussion. Period. They curl around my skin and sit mute. Scraping doesn't work. Ritual doesn't work. Ignoring them simply swells their peripheral egos. So I mold myself with blind alleys, false doors, and hidden passages. They are smart and know me. I am too afraid to fire myself. Afraid of the kiln. To remain plastic is my only hope against them. Maybe I was meant to be easily seen through. Maybe I was meant to cling and curl around skin myself. I talk to memories. I talk to memorize the way out of the maze I create in slip slick clay. My dog merely looks at the puddle created in my fits of sculpting. My coffee becomes cold and turns an inattentive ear to my monologue. But my feet remain megalithically planted beneath the cuts and tears with which I wound myself. Maybe I should have talked to my shoes. I used to be very good at that. I talk to musical phantoms, but they always just sing the same songs to me. Even if I clean the dust from between their grooves. I transpose myself into lyrics, "Andy walking, Andy tired, Andy takes a little snooze..." I talk to my dog. But she just doesn't understand.
---Touch. Sixteen times. Touch. Now I feel just right. I touch. Eyes. Sixteen times. Touch. Corners of my mouth. Now I feel just right. I touch. I am revolted. There is no order. Sixteen times. I touch ordered eyes and mouth. I curl around order. My skin has dried. Cracked. The cells are defective. They are out of order. I don't want to touch them. Touching sixteen times. Now I am better. I talk to myself. But I just don't understand. My dog is my hero because of this.
---I told you that his eyes betrayed him. I told you they were blanks. Something makes him afraid. I talk to him. He is the Birdman. Somewhere inside he understands. But he remains blank and moves in quick bird-like ways. He is prey. So am I. Just not the same kind. I am predatory when I hunt down things within myself. I kill them with sixteen blows. I kill my ability to see them or speak of them sixteen times over. And over. I would kill his blankness with a swipe. Same as I kill dust in grooves. I feel covered in new sunlight when I scrape away the lack of order in my soft clay-like flesh. He has order but it is alien to me. It is cold and frightened and blank and I am revolted. I would touch his eyes and mouth, but he has no self to be revived into predatory salvation. Salvation is like dawn. Hunting darkness like Diana. Shooting up, nodding out, and following the tracks down. I want him to wake up and stop being such a disappointment. He is akin to the false light from mercury lamps at midnight polluting the pure hunting ground of darkness. I dream. I talk to my skin and ask why I must hunt it. But it doesn't understand. It is weak and blank. Revolting as this is, I touch it sixteen times. I told you about his eyes. But you just scratched, stretched, and lay down in a puddle of sunshine.
---The Other One, the one who is draped with the trappings of power, thinks he is cool. He is blind. He is new. He thinks he knows things. He thinks he sees things. But he is just talking to the camera that he thinks is recording his greatness for posterity. Puffed up beneath his expensive clothes, he imagines himself placing the black cloth of judgment on his head. He looks at you as yet another inconsequential piece of an inherited jigsaw puzzle that must be remade. He spews self-righteousness. His scripted arrogance seeps into your hard won safety. To make you do what he says without question. Chosen as an example, he will make you cry. As bullies do, he will beat you up without witnesses. Spotless due to being inured to himself, he will eat you. He believes that his table manners are so refined that the bits of gristle won't show from behind his tailored teeth. But he forgets that his breath already reeks with the pleas of past innocents.
---I don't know him. I know his kind though. I saw him once. I saw that the corners of his mouth were tight. His lips were conscious of the image he had carefully imagined into existence. He thinks he is a very important man. I want to touch his eyes. They sparkle. They hold fast to mine as a narcissist's would. I want to place sixteen motes in each of them. I want to make him feel the revulsion that I feel. And I feel that he is without order despite his loud proclamations that he is order incarnate. That he, unlike his prey, embodies order. I want to talk to his expensive watch, his expensive clothes, his expensive coldness. I want to unveil the ghosts that curl around his eyes and mouth. If I were a Bishop I would capture him. I would make a penitent of him. I would become him when he looks at me. I would not brush my teeth after I ate him. I would bless the corners of his mouth as I made him stand naked before my sixteen benedictions. I would anoint his eyes with just right touches. Instead, I have to wash my hands until they bleed. One washing per each of the sixteen bars of soap sitting by my sink. My dog laughs when I think these things. I know she understands not brushing her teeth.
________________________
I guess most regulars here know that most of my writing, professionally at any rate, is for theatre and performance: most conspicuously, of late, a play called Speed Death of the Radiant Child which had its own day here last summer. I've also published three chapbooks of poetry with Barque Press, and a few other bits and pieces, including a couple of extended critical articles (one on the category of "information" in postmodern American poetry, and one on the concept of the printed voice in relation to the poetry of Geraldine Monk). Last year I was one of four poets, along with Andrea Brady, Peter Manson and Keston Sutherland, featured and discussed in a special British Poetry issue of Chicago Review. Actually I'm a much less interesting and capable poet than those other three, and I barely think of myself as a poet at all any more, though I'd like to turn my attention back to it before too long. In common with probably quite a few people here, most of my best writing -- or at least, most of my energy for writing -- gets poured into my blog: which is weird, in a way, but then, that also gets much bigger audiences than anything else I do.
The poem below is from my third and most recent collection, No Son House.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Cot death link to womb dream
: I am so scared
of the work ahead the hands turn into silt
& steal away recall abyssal reach recovery plan
goes Challenger Deep & nearly vertical
how I will hold up here until the rain bumps
speed lights skidding abed a lying night
a supine brain stem sand map manganese
fields the echo life map of the breath routine
susceptible gait in a blue technology
swirl spot kin speak utterly hopelessly
loveliness spiral brotherly I came down
an infant pigtail macaque compares
two mother surrogates: one is covered
in cloth, the other is a bare wire cage
soundless wreckage the living cut gay
twins conjoined at the atlas prejudicial
seamounts mouthed in retrospect news of
beagle failure cats on the artificial
prowl the bow wave what do they mean by
window of communication? millions of
dinoflagellates mechanically excited by the
sailors i’m speaking of before they tidied up
shortwave possibly shadow of the weathercock
what turns round in the mind’s eye
even her names for me now are spurious
leading to functional abnormality
mummy’s brave soldier as the day is long
to go without milk as a token of love
a dream of a dream of neural fire the
monstrous seahorse cut alive cut away
cut with remorse or baby formula
glucose oxyluciferin mute
the alarm a plan for homeland security
eaten by facial bacteria you
unsinkable then extinct it turns
the organ inward or it shrouds in black
the lanterneye seems to blink befell
my image recognition wetware &
I came down into the morning
roll up the sleeve of his long-sleeve t-shirt
several new cuts this is how we fucking
talk to each other when the music’s too loud
interrupted cadence trauma intercept
cloak of night ransacked parietal
bone for liquor Olympiad recess
storage facility down to the wire I
sleepstalk loss Jeff Buckley dead at
30 spurious lossless format
vivisect crowd scene seed in the palm of the
fist little distorted Churchill
gremlin crept in colonise the foetal
breathing pathways roadmap kept
with the water locked in the glovebox sleepyhead
two more surrogates: cardboard & fabric:
two fake mothers on fluoxetine payroll
one is swinging & the other is still
regular disruption to the landscape here’s a
message from the Taikong Corporation
bloodshot and snot-streaked city lights sideways
bled Jeff Buckley dead at 24
Hollywood dream of night pearl life cut
Philip Morris NPD gets firebombed
no sex check on the signal components
beagles on ice after lights-out eerie
calm on the milk-white sea
Jeff Buckley dead at 22 which
bewept to the grave did not go
a bonnet macaque slips out to the cinema
adverts for zoomzoom & auto-fellatio
lights up in the toilets where the usherettes aren’t
rain band vivisect fortune brought
an electric son to pick up & hug
& tight hold dear Trieste submersible
miracle pre-emptive forgiveness deep
encoded sleepstalk courtship failure
flash-train distant we are experiencing
problems with sound somebody spells out
M-U-M with carnations vivisect
lossless sucking on cloth for nutrients
‘Dracula in Memphis’ wound is bleeding
day & night no commercial use
silent drizzle on the incubator plane I’m
breeding a sheer pre-Christian syndrome
wake up at midnight desperate for water
less like the womb a nation of cold-seep
tubeworms we watched Tremors II: Aftershocks
(S.S. Wilson, 1995)
Big worm horror starring Michael Gross
city never sleeps its aposematic
son et lumière we don’t even know we’re
born Jeff Buckley dead at 15
gang-raped by soldiers vivisect the anomal-
opidae is that Intel inside?
remedial intervention an exploratory
surgical procedure wasted on you
say how will you then Mark Laudenslager
know when your children struggle and tear?
the duck stops dancing when the candle goes out
the real-mother apparatus rendered in foxfire
a spurious kiss dead air down the spurious
waveband shredded on spurious methyl-
amphetamine babysit detriment blast
one’s name is the least of it one in a thousand
succumbs it says here suddenly withdrawn
into soundless nightlessness great unlearning
vivisect the splitfin flashlight fish
determine its smokeless fuel no word
from the beagle rewired cat on the sleepstalk
scared child moonless asleep at the wheel
__________________________
from Letters to Ghosts
________________________
Mark Stephens
'heliotrope05'
Hey … I’m Mark Stephens … a old friend of Dennis’… hopefully my sending this to him doesn’t seem to be begging for nepotism … so this is from yet another short one buried under yet another stack of papers in yet another room. I write … but I’m not a writer … so be gentle.
Excerpt from “A Sculpture At Dawn”
---I talk to my dog. I talk to my coffee. I talk to hear myself talk. I am heard by my scratched vinyl heroes who hold my hand when I ask. I am dismissed by mortality. Ghosts refuse to enter into a discussion. Period. They curl around my skin and sit mute. Scraping doesn't work. Ritual doesn't work. Ignoring them simply swells their peripheral egos. So I mold myself with blind alleys, false doors, and hidden passages. They are smart and know me. I am too afraid to fire myself. Afraid of the kiln. To remain plastic is my only hope against them. Maybe I was meant to be easily seen through. Maybe I was meant to cling and curl around skin myself. I talk to memories. I talk to memorize the way out of the maze I create in slip slick clay. My dog merely looks at the puddle created in my fits of sculpting. My coffee becomes cold and turns an inattentive ear to my monologue. But my feet remain megalithically planted beneath the cuts and tears with which I wound myself. Maybe I should have talked to my shoes. I used to be very good at that. I talk to musical phantoms, but they always just sing the same songs to me. Even if I clean the dust from between their grooves. I transpose myself into lyrics, "Andy walking, Andy tired, Andy takes a little snooze..." I talk to my dog. But she just doesn't understand.
---Touch. Sixteen times. Touch. Now I feel just right. I touch. Eyes. Sixteen times. Touch. Corners of my mouth. Now I feel just right. I touch. I am revolted. There is no order. Sixteen times. I touch ordered eyes and mouth. I curl around order. My skin has dried. Cracked. The cells are defective. They are out of order. I don't want to touch them. Touching sixteen times. Now I am better. I talk to myself. But I just don't understand. My dog is my hero because of this.
---I told you that his eyes betrayed him. I told you they were blanks. Something makes him afraid. I talk to him. He is the Birdman. Somewhere inside he understands. But he remains blank and moves in quick bird-like ways. He is prey. So am I. Just not the same kind. I am predatory when I hunt down things within myself. I kill them with sixteen blows. I kill my ability to see them or speak of them sixteen times over. And over. I would kill his blankness with a swipe. Same as I kill dust in grooves. I feel covered in new sunlight when I scrape away the lack of order in my soft clay-like flesh. He has order but it is alien to me. It is cold and frightened and blank and I am revolted. I would touch his eyes and mouth, but he has no self to be revived into predatory salvation. Salvation is like dawn. Hunting darkness like Diana. Shooting up, nodding out, and following the tracks down. I want him to wake up and stop being such a disappointment. He is akin to the false light from mercury lamps at midnight polluting the pure hunting ground of darkness. I dream. I talk to my skin and ask why I must hunt it. But it doesn't understand. It is weak and blank. Revolting as this is, I touch it sixteen times. I told you about his eyes. But you just scratched, stretched, and lay down in a puddle of sunshine.
---The Other One, the one who is draped with the trappings of power, thinks he is cool. He is blind. He is new. He thinks he knows things. He thinks he sees things. But he is just talking to the camera that he thinks is recording his greatness for posterity. Puffed up beneath his expensive clothes, he imagines himself placing the black cloth of judgment on his head. He looks at you as yet another inconsequential piece of an inherited jigsaw puzzle that must be remade. He spews self-righteousness. His scripted arrogance seeps into your hard won safety. To make you do what he says without question. Chosen as an example, he will make you cry. As bullies do, he will beat you up without witnesses. Spotless due to being inured to himself, he will eat you. He believes that his table manners are so refined that the bits of gristle won't show from behind his tailored teeth. But he forgets that his breath already reeks with the pleas of past innocents.
---I don't know him. I know his kind though. I saw him once. I saw that the corners of his mouth were tight. His lips were conscious of the image he had carefully imagined into existence. He thinks he is a very important man. I want to touch his eyes. They sparkle. They hold fast to mine as a narcissist's would. I want to place sixteen motes in each of them. I want to make him feel the revulsion that I feel. And I feel that he is without order despite his loud proclamations that he is order incarnate. That he, unlike his prey, embodies order. I want to talk to his expensive watch, his expensive clothes, his expensive coldness. I want to unveil the ghosts that curl around his eyes and mouth. If I were a Bishop I would capture him. I would make a penitent of him. I would become him when he looks at me. I would not brush my teeth after I ate him. I would bless the corners of his mouth as I made him stand naked before my sixteen benedictions. I would anoint his eyes with just right touches. Instead, I have to wash my hands until they bleed. One washing per each of the sixteen bars of soap sitting by my sink. My dog laughs when I think these things. I know she understands not brushing her teeth.
________________________
Chris Goode
I guess most regulars here know that most of my writing, professionally at any rate, is for theatre and performance: most conspicuously, of late, a play called Speed Death of the Radiant Child which had its own day here last summer. I've also published three chapbooks of poetry with Barque Press, and a few other bits and pieces, including a couple of extended critical articles (one on the category of "information" in postmodern American poetry, and one on the concept of the printed voice in relation to the poetry of Geraldine Monk). Last year I was one of four poets, along with Andrea Brady, Peter Manson and Keston Sutherland, featured and discussed in a special British Poetry issue of Chicago Review. Actually I'm a much less interesting and capable poet than those other three, and I barely think of myself as a poet at all any more, though I'd like to turn my attention back to it before too long. In common with probably quite a few people here, most of my best writing -- or at least, most of my energy for writing -- gets poured into my blog: which is weird, in a way, but then, that also gets much bigger audiences than anything else I do.
The poem below is from my third and most recent collection, No Son House.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Cot death link to womb dream
: I am so scared
of the work ahead the hands turn into silt
& steal away recall abyssal reach recovery plan
goes Challenger Deep & nearly vertical
how I will hold up here until the rain bumps
speed lights skidding abed a lying night
a supine brain stem sand map manganese
fields the echo life map of the breath routine
susceptible gait in a blue technology
swirl spot kin speak utterly hopelessly
loveliness spiral brotherly I came down
an infant pigtail macaque compares
two mother surrogates: one is covered
in cloth, the other is a bare wire cage
soundless wreckage the living cut gay
twins conjoined at the atlas prejudicial
seamounts mouthed in retrospect news of
beagle failure cats on the artificial
prowl the bow wave what do they mean by
window of communication? millions of
dinoflagellates mechanically excited by the
sailors i’m speaking of before they tidied up
shortwave possibly shadow of the weathercock
what turns round in the mind’s eye
even her names for me now are spurious
leading to functional abnormality
mummy’s brave soldier as the day is long
to go without milk as a token of love
a dream of a dream of neural fire the
monstrous seahorse cut alive cut away
cut with remorse or baby formula
glucose oxyluciferin mute
the alarm a plan for homeland security
eaten by facial bacteria you
unsinkable then extinct it turns
the organ inward or it shrouds in black
the lanterneye seems to blink befell
my image recognition wetware &
I came down into the morning
roll up the sleeve of his long-sleeve t-shirt
several new cuts this is how we fucking
talk to each other when the music’s too loud
interrupted cadence trauma intercept
cloak of night ransacked parietal
bone for liquor Olympiad recess
storage facility down to the wire I
sleepstalk loss Jeff Buckley dead at
30 spurious lossless format
vivisect crowd scene seed in the palm of the
fist little distorted Churchill
gremlin crept in colonise the foetal
breathing pathways roadmap kept
with the water locked in the glovebox sleepyhead
two more surrogates: cardboard & fabric:
two fake mothers on fluoxetine payroll
one is swinging & the other is still
regular disruption to the landscape here’s a
message from the Taikong Corporation
bloodshot and snot-streaked city lights sideways
bled Jeff Buckley dead at 24
Hollywood dream of night pearl life cut
Philip Morris NPD gets firebombed
no sex check on the signal components
beagles on ice after lights-out eerie
calm on the milk-white sea
Jeff Buckley dead at 22 which
bewept to the grave did not go
a bonnet macaque slips out to the cinema
adverts for zoomzoom & auto-fellatio
lights up in the toilets where the usherettes aren’t
rain band vivisect fortune brought
an electric son to pick up & hug
& tight hold dear Trieste submersible
miracle pre-emptive forgiveness deep
encoded sleepstalk courtship failure
flash-train distant we are experiencing
problems with sound somebody spells out
M-U-M with carnations vivisect
lossless sucking on cloth for nutrients
‘Dracula in Memphis’ wound is bleeding
day & night no commercial use
silent drizzle on the incubator plane I’m
breeding a sheer pre-Christian syndrome
wake up at midnight desperate for water
less like the womb a nation of cold-seep
tubeworms we watched Tremors II: Aftershocks
(S.S. Wilson, 1995)
Big worm horror starring Michael Gross
city never sleeps its aposematic
son et lumière we don’t even know we’re
born Jeff Buckley dead at 15
gang-raped by soldiers vivisect the anomal-
opidae is that Intel inside?
remedial intervention an exploratory
surgical procedure wasted on you
say how will you then Mark Laudenslager
know when your children struggle and tear?
the duck stops dancing when the candle goes out
the real-mother apparatus rendered in foxfire
a spurious kiss dead air down the spurious
waveband shredded on spurious methyl-
amphetamine babysit detriment blast
one’s name is the least of it one in a thousand
succumbs it says here suddenly withdrawn
into soundless nightlessness great unlearning
vivisect the splitfin flashlight fish
determine its smokeless fuel no word
from the beagle rewired cat on the sleepstalk
scared child moonless asleep at the wheel
__________________________
Matthew Suss
'vomitingghosts'
from Letters to Ghosts
4.
Dear ghost, you who live in a world already destroyed, do not forget
your body, its weight, nothing more whelms. Remember your flesh
once swam with the fish, burned in summer, was smooth and wrinkled
and wriggling free, delicate yet resilient through years of neglect
and indifference, infallible in the moonlight, and always just right
to the woman whose touch saved you again and again from the end
of the world. But do not forget we are still alive; have mercy on us.
Continue only as impressions of our terrified imaginations. Grief does
not need a sheet thrown over it. Because despite however we might try,
nobody can exorcise you from memory grown passionate with longing.
Dear ghost, you who live in a world already destroyed, do not forget
your body, its weight, nothing more whelms. Remember your flesh
once swam with the fish, burned in summer, was smooth and wrinkled
and wriggling free, delicate yet resilient through years of neglect
and indifference, infallible in the moonlight, and always just right
to the woman whose touch saved you again and again from the end
of the world. But do not forget we are still alive; have mercy on us.
Continue only as impressions of our terrified imaginations. Grief does
not need a sheet thrown over it. Because despite however we might try,
nobody can exorcise you from memory grown passionate with longing.
13.
Dear ghost, it could have been the acid but I swear how the dogs
sounded and the bedroom shadows converged, you’d returned.
And I’ve been finding dimes everywhere. I thought nothing of it
until I saw a TV psychic say the dead leave dimes in their wake,
and when I complained I was poor, I found a quarter on the floor.
Why must you specters deal exclusively in signs and metaphors?
Just this afternoon I woke to complete silence and no electricity.
The phone rang but no one was on the other end. And outside
a morbidly obese woman was holding a radio to the sky, trying
for a frequency. She nodded to me like we shared an understanding.
18.
Dear ghost, is coming back to life like finding treasure buried beneath
a palm tree? Or rubbing a magic lamp and a genie grants you three
wishes? Have you made the other two yet? I don’t really blame you
for being dead but you can’t have your sweater back… but nothing.
One can learn a lot from a ghost and vice versa, so here is some advice:
go home. Like a UFO, there’s no explaining you. If we try, people will
think things. We cannot live with your secret buried in the basements
of our hearts or we start to rot, and suddenly we’re at the wrong island,
the bones of a corpse planted inside us. We might as well be you then:
every morning, the open pain of heaven hanging listless from the ceiling.
19.
Dear ghost, these are letters written by someone who has never known
someone who has died. They’re all lies: ideas trudged from books, scooped
from horror movies, from listening to loud music and people possessed
by grief. But death’s so boring… gore’s all the same; it’s not hard to
imagine. He knows he’s wrong but will never admit knowing nothing
about something so important. Sure, his grandparents are dead but no
boys he’s been in love with, no girls. The cemeteries are full, though
of other people. Maybe his mouth seems idiotic blathering about whatever,
but teenagers love this ghost/death shit. But now that he’s older it’s time:
someone has to die. His parents, his friends, please let them be the ones.
23.
Dear ghost, here is my theory: there are so many of you longing to return
from whatever pit of imagination you grace—maybe you want to fuck
the cool girl or visit San Francisco, finally spook the brainless cows who
wronged you—transportation is needed and UFOs are the best explanation.
Yes, those metaphysical parasites communing between each boundless
galaxy: ghost keys to ghost worlds. I’m curious, so tell me: are we in fact
extraterrestrial? Yes, metaphorically, we are alien after we die to everyone
including ourselves. But literally: are we transformed into some sleek,
black jelly-eyed, skeletal emaciation? And even if no one believes me,
it’s only logical. Longing, we say because desire is full of endless distances.
_________________________
Nicholas Rhoades
'Statictick'
I have been a writer all my life. I have a deal with multimedia these days, meaning my work ends up having visual components as well as performance demands.
Food: I read this in coffee houses when that was cool.
----
5 comments:
dennis, thanks a lot again for making Writers Day possible, to read the actual work of the people posting here adds such a complex and fascinating dimension to the personas i get from them... like a Serious Fake Day, if you know what i mean
re: the "hidden intention" i mentioned the other day regarding the posting of Warm, i was just wondering (very vaguely, sure) if the posting was some way of calling the attention of the co-writer of the script towards the fact that this is some piece of work you appreciate and would like to know what´s happening with it. anyway, forget about it, it doesn´t really matter
you shall call me Rog then -reading the enjoyable comments about Try i recalled i kind of identified with some of Roger´s attitudes in the novel -only to a certain extent, i´m not so manipulative, at least that i´m aware of, haha
talking of names, i think the election of "dennis" for the star in Frisk is pure genius
hope you overcome that morning feeling and have a great weekend!!
BTW, i´m listening to a Joy Division bootleg i downloaded some time ago called Remains, which contains some pretty raw versions of a handful of early songs -apart from the habitual pack of renditions of Transmission, Love will tear us apart and the like, but anyway i mentioned in case you´re interested
and this is something i wanted to ask long ago: why you never mention New Order? not into them? did it all end with Ian´s death?
So much amazing work. Thanks for not only giving us all a spot to do this, but for also introducing me to Shai Hulud's work--it's amazing.
Hey Dennis, everyone
thanks so much for this - these writers' weekends have been really special. It's an incredible treat to be able to browse everyone's work in one place as it's so hard to keep up when dropping in and out and following separate links.
I'm pacing myself reading through as with the intensity of each individual voice it's too much to take in at once. But I've read a fair chunk / cross section and am just blown away. Which is no surprise, knowing what I already do of quite a few of the people's work here, but there's so much that's new to me too.
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