Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story
(a found and a cut-up poem)
I.
X.’s home was a shambles:
piles of amber eyes,
clouds of fleas and other debris,
the ritual heads against our legs;
red bodies were discovered –
strong and sharp –
in the refrigerator’s freezer
relying on a stethoscope,
crowbar and chisel to make a hole
beyond salvation
II.
Has anyone seen
I could eat your heart
for dinner
with such conviction…
you?
probably be scared
photo courtesy 100 word story.
Sangfroid I-IV
i. The Ashen Landscape
“He’s got what? Days left? I don’t want to be there when he dies.”
“Sangfroid.”
“I’m cold-blooded?”
“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”
“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations. My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”
“You see wasteland?”
“I see ghosts. I was eleven. My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine. He abandoned me here.”
ii. A Song for the Plague Year
I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple. Gorgeous.
The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me. I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot. Suffering. Wait. Wait. Suffering. I’m in the heart of darkness. I’m in the heart of the work now. Shiver. Fertile. Gorgeous.
iii. Molecular Organic Nano-machines
I’m at the morphine station.
I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk. I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.
I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside. My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.
“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life. Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”
A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty. The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat. Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night…
“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP. STOP. Press the eject…”
Blood, on the tip of my tongue. Where is it coming from? Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me. The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic — and then the loss of control.
iv. missing STOP
im not who i was once was STOP aposiopesis STOP STOP im a perfectionist im obedient get away from here get away from that gun STOP STOP STOP dr x said im not my thoughts im not my feelings dont relive it dont rehash it and if it finds you then embrace it embrace the thoughts embrace the feelings be one with it and then release it youre not your memories youre not your feelings be one with the thoughts be one with the feelings and then release them STOP
punk rock changed my life no punk rock saved my life the songs of the minutemen no not that memory STOP STOP dont touch him there dont touch me stop it put down that gun 38 snubnose it weighs a ton STOP STOP STOP embrace this memory embrace this emotion im not my memories not my emotions STOP aposiopesis apoplexies apophatic and aphasic STOP STOP dr x said whatever happens its ok whatever happens is ok im ok whatever happens im not my thoughts im not my feelings youre doing the best that you can im doing the best that i can STOP STOP STOP
it’s not today anymore
a bruised child
in yellow terry cloth
flew past my window
windblown barn bits
and green cornfield detritus
speckled the turbid sky
it opened up and spat out brittle
lightning and cow
sized hail
roiled in that dark funnel
were the bodies i planted
with the corn seed
last spring
The oscitant oscillator was stuck at the 4 o’clock position, and the fan head was feeling unruly. But it was the constant breeze on his bald pate that got his attention.
“What the…“
The fan head was stationary but the base shook, then it wobbled violently and shattered in to five pieces. The fan ring rolled off in a drunken arc down the hallway, the blade rotor shot out at great speed embedded itself in the wall. The back cage remained on the base, but the front half of the cage hit him squarely on the bridge of his nose, and a rich trickle of blood was made its way down his chin, and dripped onto his new polo shirt.
“My God, what the hell?”
The electrical chord crackled at the outlet, sparked, and set the curtain ablaze. The television was next to go. Before he could take a step toward the extinguisher in the kitchen, the building fire alarm went off sounding like a thousand amplified cicadas.
Then sprinklers shot off in all the common areas of the building: in the hallways, the laundry room, the gym, the lobby, the nursery. But inside his apartment the blaze went on, blocking his access to the kitchen, and eating its way through the east wing of the 22nd floor. His only way out was the balcony.
He stepped into the now pleasant sunshine. The fire teethed at his heels.
He climbed over the railing and alighted into that rarified air that so few inhabit.
(diagram courtesy of the carl sagan institute)
I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier. I vow to never sleep again…
Then the memory drops in again:
Violence flares out of the peripheries, where it resides at all times, in the small apartment. Rage roils in the bathroom nearby. There is the familiar screaming followed by a dull thud, and then the sound of what I take to be my mother ricocheting off the bathroom wall and falling into the tub. Finally, an otherworldly caterwaul.
I will be the color pink soon enough…
The bedroom walls inhale, gibbous and red; and with every exhalation they groan a white dwarf drab. I’ve learned the Sun is a forgery — a shrill simulacrum.
I’m in the midst of eating 40 chocolate bars — the contents of two boxes of chocolate bar bricks from the fourth grade school chocolate sale — in an altered state of consciousness. I’m unable to sate the lower brain impulse that compels me. I’m not hungry, far from it, I just need to keep eating to feel better somehow. And the book that has changed my life is propped up in front of my small black and white TV, in stark relief, imbued with a cathode green nimbus. Yesterday, I dispensed with the notion God. I was shocked into a sense of mortality and existential void that hadn’t existed before.
I step out of my room to see the aftermath: I see my father hiding a revolver under their bedroom mattress. I call for my mother, but she locks the bathroom door.
I feel irradiated as if the air is scrubbing the skin off of my body. The fibers of shag carpet reach out and lock my feet in place as the hydrogen burns around our contracting family core.
I’ve learned from the Time-Life Book of the Universe that 5 billion years from now the sun will swell in to a fiery giant and engulf most of the solar system. The earth will be third in line for immolation. Everything will cease to exist. It’ll be the end of my parents, my grandmother and uncle, and everything else I care about: baseball, the Miami Dolphins, and Arlene and the Farrah Fawcett poster she gave me for Christmas exchange.
What kind of God is that? There can’t be a God that perverse, to create us and then inexplicably destroy everything we know. That’s insane…
… god is nothing…
The beatings, often uncontrolled and brutal, have grown in frequency, lately, as my parents’ marriage burns to its inexorable and violent end. The welts on my arms pulse in purple and black from the belt buckle end of my father’s belt.
The scope of it all confounds me. It seems as the sun is exploding now in our hallway, and I am consumed. I’m reduced to a primordial gas and float into my shriveling room.
I’m at the foot of the bed, reaching beyond the shoebox where Hank Aaron stands forever frozen, smiling, in his batting stance and somewhere near are the Oakland A’s sitting on a bleacher above the 1972 World Series Champions banner — and three-quarters of the league lays buried in flattened stacks under the remaining 10 chocolate bar bricks that weigh the equivalent of a one ton meteorite on the 30 empty chocolate bar wrappers. I eat 3 more chocolate bar bricks to the point of sickened exhaustion. My mother’s sobbing, down the hall, punctuates every bite I take.
I spend half an hour or so daily staring at the same two pages in The Book. I’m obsessed with the four monochromatic diagrams at the bottom of pages 103 and 104.
The first diagram depicts the earth’s position in the solar system. The second illustrates the increased activity and swelling of the sun — solar flares extending outward millions of miles. The third diagram reveals the earth and most of the planets consumed by the expanding sun as it flares into a red giant.
The fourth reveals a dead solar system, only a dense white dwarf remains…
let’s give thanks for love that misses its mark. this is one of my films (above)… and this:
is my hero, giving thanks the way we should give thanks this thanksgiving…
(please do not watch the above if you are easy to offend)
happy turkey!
(continued from 11/25/19)
(xxvi – xxvii)
On the last day of the month, on the news:
Miners discover a baby 700 feet below ground with a Sun Ra tattoo on its back. No one inspects it to note its sex — had they checked they would have found that it was the baby who fell to earth. Truly sexless. There was a skronk of improvisational horns and syncopated percussion and rapid fire snares. One miner pictured himself mating with the hydra and producing this child. The foreman miner imagined this being his and Medusa’s love child. While yet another thought it his own immaculate conception.
But the baby was a blatherskite — its senseless volubility, a logorrhea without words, shaking the earth to its core. There was one full minute of confusion while a horn sounded, and the miners ran pell mell leaving the child to its own devices — which were very specific and well-calibrated devices: Geiger counters and magnetometers dating back to 1973.
“Space Is The Place” played on a continuous loop for 114 hours, until the fissure that split the earth sent the stereo console and the baby flying off into the murk.
***
Post-mortem:
There is no story — only peonage and pauperism. But there is a moral here.
I once dreamt I was eleven and elevated onto the precipice of a tall building. I was asked to carefully look over the edge at the street, 62 floors below. Why I was asked to do this and not just thrown over beats me, because whomever was asking touched me ever so gently, just tenderly enough for me to lose my balance when I was looking over the edge.
Why’d you ask me to look, I thought, as I passed the 48th floor. What were all the histrionics about? Just do what you gotta do and push. But now what I had to do was find a way out of smashing my skull open on the street below. I quickly angled my body to the right, but that only caused me to tumble head over feet past the 26th floor — oh, jeez, control yourself because you ain’t got that much time or space left, boy.
This was all so surreal, as if I fell into that Frida Kahlo painting on the same subject — you know the one, you’ve seen it: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale — except there’s not even the slightest hint of cerulean or cumuli in the sky — above, it’s all a leaden gray mass smeared with charcoal gray corrugations.
I flap and flap again, and lo, I flutter up a few feet and arrest the fall briefly. I’m surprised, and then I’m falling again, down by the 5th floor. Flap flap flap. Hey, this works. Flap flap flap flap flap flap flap, and I smash through The Plymouth Assurance and Annuity, LLP., office window on the 9th floor. Glass, typing paper, an upended typewriter and phone all discombobulated on the floor. I landed on top of this pile. The lady that was at the desk is now on her back spread eagle beyond me and the pile of her work. The boss man peaks his head out of his office and says: “Ms. Haversham, please clean up that mess, and show our guest to the claims forms and pray, tell us the moral to this.”
“Is there one?”
Just then cheering is heard from the street below. It started to snow for the first time this year.
***
(“Hey?! There are four pieces of the auto-sedition quilt missing!”
“Ay, I’an sorry con ‘escuse me.”
That’s it for this one.
The End.)
(continued from 11/24/19)
(xxii — xxv)
Cool handbills posted in Maria’s neighborhood say:
Every first Thursday Jesus Drinks Free: free Soul, R n B, Country, and Gospel starting at 8pm at the Jeannie Johnson Pub and Grill, 144 South Street, Jamaica Plain.
Another says:
“Baby Born with Sun Ra Tattoo…”
Bubbling brain cells at the bar, the corner pub without right angles or corners, and she’s back in flesh, back in flesh and you can’t tell her what to do. No, you can’t tell her what to do. Well, fuck you!
I’m not waxing nostalgic for punk, post-punk, new wave, or no wave; I’m seething with abstemiousness, rankled by random name generators and somewhere beyond broadcasting at 7am with breaks every hour on the hour and half.
There is nothing I desire but a desire that eats the heart down to its left ventricle, and then hatches out a clutch of stink bugs in synchronicity in a swale near a swag at the foot of a spur. I’m not writing this for nothing. I’m serious here. I’m the writer here.
***
Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk. It has something to do with the wiring in her head.
I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru. She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco. Her alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves. I should know, I saw the vacation photos. Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.
She can’t stop chewing the leaves. I make tea out of them. She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.
I’m a just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning. They were spry then. Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold. Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood borne illness from said beasties.”
She says this thing between us will never work. “Let’s forget this all altogether and just fuck,” she says.
“Wha—”
“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.
“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting — ”
“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”
***
Near the end of the month Maria tells me:
I’m not your cheap factotum. I’m a sex engineer, and I service you in a highly skilled manner. Don’t speak to me of trashy whores and floozies. And furthermore this is not a flophouse. It’s a proper Limehouse, and only the most discriminating junkies crash and score here. So readjust. And reacquaint yourself with me and where you are. This is not a place that panders to dilettantes. This is a fine house of the illest repute. Check yourself. Leave your privilege at the door, swoon, and adore me, and bask in my agency. The music will start shortly. The young boys will be here to wash you at six. The heroin will arrive in fifteen minutes. Enjoy your cisgendered stay. It won’t be long.
She meant I wasn’t long for the place. She played The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on repeat for the better part of the day.
***
On the penultimate day of the month:
Love. It can’t help but bloom.
***
(continued tomorrow)
(continued from 11/23/19)
(xvii — xxi)
On 19 January 2020 Maria wrote in her journal:
It’s been six days since I fell through the crack. I’m spiraling down depression way again. The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure! This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced-out and lost.
Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next? Which way do I move? What direction? How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again. Is it fair enough to start like this again? The only option really. How did I get here again? How do I avoid ending up here again? I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation. And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required. The only other option isn’t really an option. Is it? No.
So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again. This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward. It had to begin somewhere. Why not right here?
***
The next day, the 20th, she wrote:
I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse. I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to. I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view. I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself. This signifies nothing within nothing.
But Thoreau said: “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping. To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet.
***
21 January 2020
The tincture of blood, an anodyne for the misery of the loveless. How does one evaluate the loneliness she feels with her pain? How does one put a price on relief?
***
The last week of the month started dismally.
The boy, nouveau riche and Booker-Prized now, went through freshman year tossing humblebrags until the day he didn’t anymore. That was during spring break, which that year just happened to coincide with Mardi Gras — and in those rare years when they coincided Loyola University became a madhouse, despite its Jesuit veneer. It was in that hothouse-madhouse that the boy — his name (why deprive?) was Maurice — came upon Derrick.
Derrick did not suffer humblebrags in his New Orleans — especially when the humblebrag was dismissing his mother’s insistence that he accept a Porsche 911 instead of the Porsche Cayenne that he drove about campus with ABC, The Fixx, or Haircut 100 blaring from the Blaukpunt radio in the car. Derrick hated 1980’s synth-new wave — the worst epoch for music! — he claimed in a drunken stupor once. Derrick befriended the friendless boy Maurice that day, a smile and a raised thumb worked its magic.
***
Subhuman, Subhuman…
The boy Maurice was surprised by the abrasive quality of the music he heard before he opened his eyes. To what? What was this place? Why was he tied up? The first half minute sounded like a squall of detuned guitars strummed wildly. He was told the lead singer was named Genesis P. Orridge, the band called Throbbing Gristle. Derrick was screaming along to the song: “subhuman… subhuman… drinking dirty water… you’re a disease…” and so much else the boy Maurice didn’t understand. Couldn’t.
Then the music shifted as if it fell off a precipice. The singer modulated to a lower register at a fraction of the volume he was singing before. Derrick went silent. It scared the boy Maurice. Then a ball attached to leather mask was foisted over his mouth and face, and all went dark for the boy Maurice. It never became light again.
***
(continued tomorrow)
(continued from 11/22/19)
(xiii — xvi)
“I’m from the northern part of the state, and we don’t see this kind of nonsense up there. It’s just not done this way where I’m from.”
Milton Sosquade, the boy’s father, removed his hand from inside the cow’s rectum, and turned to look at Alan Tenter. “Well, Alan,” Milton said removing his arm’s length glove cover, “you do what you like to your cows, and I’ll treat mine my way.”
“My friend, your notion of what is correct is sheer madness,” Alan said. “You can’t go rummaging up in your cow’s intestines and pull out appetizers for the evening. You can’t feed us that. We don’t do that upstate, mid-state, or downstate. Friend, it’s just not done.” Alan took off his glasses and placed them in their clip-on case and clipped the case into his left breast pocket and raised his fists. Milton picked up a cow chip and tossed it at Alan’s face. The chip grazed Alan’s chin and careened off his ear.
“Listen, bub,” Milton said, “what I do in my seraglio is my business. These girls here love me, especially this one,” he said pointing at the guernsey he’d just inseminated with his stuff of life. “I am god. Here in the southern highlands of the state: I. Am. God.”
***
Milton’s wife, Lucrecia, had her eyes checked and the man told her she had mycobacterium leprae of the retina. She said her eyes started feeling “flammable” sometime in the past month and she wanted to have her left eye removed and replaced with a ball bearing painted with an iris and pupil. The doctor said, once replaced, the eye had to be patched during the day, and then manipulated and slanted into her nose in the evenings, for 30 to 45 days. He told her she would see wonders after the convalescence. Her eyesight would improve, and she’d woo an army of suitors with her new look.
She told him she was newly married.
It was avant-garde now, sure, but it would soon become the trend and eventually everyone would be clamoring for this look. He granted her that her vision would suffer initially, but with time her sense of smell and hearing would improve.
“It sounds a bit extreme, Dr. Sobrenada,” Lucrecia said, never taking her eye off herself in the consult office mirror. “Is it reversible, Doctor?”
“Hell no, it’s not reversible!” he said. He sat behind his desk and threw a paper clip at the eye chart. “Who ever heard of replacing an eye with a ball bearing and then putting the eye back in at a later time? Are you insane, woman?” He pounded his desk with an open hand.
“You’re an Ojonaut! An astronaut of the eye. The first and the foremost. You make me envious of the path you are about to blaze. Come here and be my bride.”
“I’m married,” she said.
She decided that in his dotage he’d not only become genius, but more attractive to her. The loose skin on his arms, his wattle shaking like badly set jello, his drooping earlobes — he made her think prurient thoughts.
“Milton the cuckold,” she whispered.
She felt as if she were ovulating, for the first time in fifteen years — some sebaceous moisture in that place below.
She said, “yes.”
***
The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: “Ta da la ta da la dao,” was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes. Midnight. Thursday morning. Applause. Thunderous.
Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.
I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply. Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide, convection current surfing, loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.
Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.
***
On the thirteenth day Maria wrote this poem:
Mauve and meager tendrils of the morning
Roaming in your eyes and in your suitcase,
Something supple this way washes
Over my consciousness and yours,
Atavistic and Paleolithic.
What if a nocturnal sprint across the sky caused panic?
What price peregrinations and pantomime?
What does the pilgrim do for succor?
Where the lightning divides the sky in jagged shards
You check the reliquaries for theft.
The evidence provides no solace, only a lack thereof.
This excresence, an abscess of a rising sun maugre
Rain and intermittent meteor showers render
Media towers mute.
Inoperable inoffensive inconclusive incendiary.
Try to frame this feeling and hang it on
Yourself, as you hang yourself —
On this tendril of your family tree —
On another morning of meager maudlin mauve.
She titled it Writing 39, and copied it into her notes application on her phone; her thumbs unhinged pistons, stabbing furiously at gorilla glass.
She was spiraling again, unhappy to have written the worst poem in this worst of all possible worlds. Pangloss had nothing on Martin. Fuck ‘em both anyway, she wrote.
***
(continued tomorrow)
thee istsfor manity reader 