Umbilical
04-28-2008, 03:44 AM
WARNING: THIS PIECE IS VULGAR AND MAY BE CONFRONTING FOR MANY.
This is a piece of poetic prose.
I'm posting this here because I believe that it belongs here...
I wrote this when I was 17, last year of school, for an english ext 2 piece. Wrote it in 1.5 days...
As per usual, I leave things last minute.
But it payed off.
I was rather happy when I wrote it, but I believe that I can do MUCH, MUCH better... Sometimes it's very frustrating to feel like you just can't get there in your mind.
So, to the future, I say.
Thanks for reading... I hope it brings you much pleasure.
PS: I stole
"copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cu.nt"
from Jack Kerouac... It just worked so well and I couldn't take it out once I'd committed the crime.
COLD HARD SAVIOR.
I. Charles’s story:
Some would claim it ‘self-glorifying’ to transmogrify and project grandiose illusions of oneself into ones past – a romanticized notion of a wonderful world, a refraction of the present into a past, in hopes of not changing that past, but resurrecting the present. It’s an anomaly that can’t exist, yet cultivates a sardonic and destructive hope. To live in the past is to live in an abyss of reflections-of-reflections… reflections of darkness? It depends what you put there. Mould that darkness into a gun and let your mind penetrate itself. Leap into an abyss of Peyote, dancing the Charleston while thoughts cascade from trees above. Phallic dreams lining up, like men waiting to earn the job, in building’s comparing size, naked with billowing smoke. The gun you caress with each twirling remembrance of a time when you poetically skedaddled, flailing arms reaching up to heaven in Swan Lake grace, as bawdy jokes vacillated between my-sweet-pumpkin-pie and you-wretched-scarlet-woman.
A ‘fancy lady’ my mother used to like to call herself. It seemed to water down what she truly was, is; a euphemism for the slut she was debased to. The modern woman of kitchen appliances, of servile commodities; the woman who used herself in the kitchen to beat the cake mix, and mix it up occasionally if father was in a randy mood. Father in a randy mood was a rare occurrence, as he normally liked his chicken cooked the same way, the gravy on the right of the chicken, with five potatoes placed on the left. This way, everything was kept in order and everyone was happy. Everything was clean and purified with an immaculately dressed table. Any tears shed were washed out with Clorox ‘colour safe’ bleach. Red wine fights and foibles that ejaculated from repressed sexuality and shame were erased with one washing cycle, and time moved on like a hungry recidivist. When everything remains the same, it’s easy to live in the past. Living in the past is embracing the future. And embracing the future is living in the now. I find myself stumbling along corridors, walking into rooms of despotic memory, which dictates my life in re-enactments of re-enactments. Somewhat like the ‘Helter Skelter’ movie; dressing a Charles Manson up in beard and psychedelic, darting eyes, looking for their next prey. Eyes that beckon the responder to feed into Prosecutor Bugliosi’s little game; to slide down snakes of fear and climb ladders of money. I saw that movie and found myself wishing that it was my house the Family crawled into to reposition the furniture (an habitual exercise for them), creating surreal shapes that counter any notion of normality and any principle of this-is-how-life-should-be. Maybe if it were my house, Manson and his girls could open the windows and let through a breeze, and draw pictures of boys kissing boys with red crayon on the wall. They could draw blood from my anamnesis as I sleep, and reform everything I understand about myself. That would be a treat. To others it may seem strange and disturbing that I have these dreams, but a kind destruction of the mind would allow for me to piece back some sense of sanity again. Insanity heals sanity. This is a paradoxical notion that I have found to be indicative of every calamitous experience in my life. I feel myself losing the plot, losing myself, and I awaken still on the same road, yet seeing this road slightly clearer; filling in pot-holes and smelling the tar! You be careful not to ride over that tar. It sticks to your wheels and leaves a track, for God to follow your Mustang as it rides to the edge of a precipice and contemplates death. I do not mean the God that stands on his precipice-altar and looks down on the little lady-bug cars beeping and hooting below, wondering what gets them to blow. Not the God that guides and loves, his beard of cloud softening his invisible face. Nor the God that, like a tow-truck, when your run-down lady-bug Mustang speck breaks down like a decrepit old lady, carries you home to salvation. No, this is the God of oppression. The one that ties down your hands and says; “hey, bi.tch, you’ll do what I say.” Media gospel and fictitious reality.
It is this God that smacked me and called me a naughty Devilish boy, when I drew a picture of two green men holding hands, standing in a field of purple daisies. I was just young; malleable and palpable in my tender innocence, untainted by life, living as the Son of God. I was a mimic of the autocratic American government, neatly packaged and prepared for adult-hood. My act of ‘defiance’ in drawing two men holding hands was ‘heretic’, and so my Father saw fit to tear the paper in half, and report to Saint James’ Catholic Boy’s Elementary of my sacrilegious rebellion. Oh, a sweet child I was, and as Father, purple as the daisies in rage, tore a line through stick four-fingered hands grasping each other, he tore the father and child institution in half… in three, five, six, eight, twelve, fifteen pieces. Later, I assisted my father in further tearing the pieces into more little pieces, whilst he muttered and maundered about Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s ‘exploitation’ of ‘little children’ and his annihilation of all ‘morality’ and the ‘sanctity’ and ‘chastity’ of human life through, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, his investigation into sexual behaviour, and his subsequent publishing of the revolutionary Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Father saw his supporters as “dissolute libertines”, and feared that his little boy would be corrupted by the coercive nature of Kinsey’s publications.
I sit here, half-awake, but mainly dormant. I fear myself as a replica of my father. I have a wife, I have three children. My wife is wonderful, sensual, and perfect. I have perfection in the form of a woman. However, I crave ego, and I crave fulfillment. A replica of the ego-Fascist system of patriarchal control has been handed down to me; a legacy. But this system has not manifested itself in my family unit, but in my mind; a world of self-flagellation and chastising thought. I sit watching my life as my own Devil and God; a paradox of abhorrent desire and contained love. My wife, I bathe in admiration, and I love her, but not a love I instinctively feel, nor a passion I intrinsically hold, but a love curtailed by guilt. I walk as a man carrying sin; a monstrous burden I hide beneath the guise of normality and the mundane to-work and back-to-work routine I follow. I sometimes pray for my guilt to be lifted off of me, however, I don’t know whether I’m praying to the God that encumbered me with this imprisoning servitude or to the God of freedom that I perceive peripherally. I wish to flee to the arms of freedom, and for them to wrap their warmth around me, to blanket me in security. I open my arms, and embrace air: a vacuous impotence that mocks my attempt to find some semblance of truth and sanity in a life pretending both. I wish to be able to grasp man in my hand; brawny and tenacious masculinity.
In times of sporadic aberrance, I find myself searching for a hole to jump in; a hole to fill. I tucked my pen that was positioned behind my ear, into the pocket of my pants, as I said good-bye to the ‘big boys’ of Goss Magazine Corporation. As Assistant Editor, my eyes travel through lascivious exhibitions of beautiful women; images that inspire carnal desire in the ‘average’ male. However, my eyes deform these pictures, like a Rubic Cube, shuffling the anatomical parts around. It’s an uncontrollable habit, and at the end of this process, out of the woman emerges a man. I become my own Picasso, limbs flailing just as my mother, sedated and unaware, fled from my father’s battery of words. The people I see; women on the street, on their way to work, grocery shopping, chatting merrily amongst themselves, become my Picasso paintings as I mix and match their anatomical structure, sticky-taping penis to pussy and pinning moustache above lip. I’ve come to find man in woman and woman in man, as my repression is cured through self-deception. Leaving work, I found myself calling my wife: “I’ll be late home today, darling. I have… have to work over-time today.” I knew I wasn’t returning home, though I wasn’t aware of where I was going. A dingy bar would parallel my aphotic depths of damnation. Contemplation. In this bar sat Seven Deadly Sins. Men, all hunched over barrels of Wild Turkey, dismayed yet content in their fornication; fornication with the relenting Bourbon, a partner that listens and never asks. A partner that, oh… yes, a stool welcoming me. Father always said “say no to temptation”, but a stool cannot hurt me. Its round, smooth surface will placate me; it has no rough edges. A stool is straight! It would dulcify my desire, and with a little holy water – “Yes, Bud Weiser please.” A great place. No, I’m from Denver, Colorado. Republican. Clinton. Fornication. Copulation. Yes. I like my wife. She pro-creates good. Hanky-panky. Cuckoldry. Fu.cking kids. Fu.ck your kids. No. Yes. Promiscuous. Oh, you bad boy. My boy was bad. I bad my boy. I badded my boy. I battered my boy. I battered my toy. I battered my harlot. I hard-on my scarlet woman. I scarlet-ed my woman. Worshiped my bosom. Dickied with my dreamboat. Dallied with the dirty… Devilrays down by six. “Fu.ck, I had my money on them.” In them. Devilrays down by sex. Sex-pence. Sex-pants. I had my bet on them. I bet they would touch base, six times. I betted they would touch base, sex times. Second base. Second debased. Debase, degenerate, in time minus talk, straight. Straight before-playing-the pokies. Betting for lucky. Baseball. Ball-base. Basic-ball-babe. “Twenty-five minutes to go…” “I’m Clint.” “No, not Clinton.” “Good to meet you.” “You here often?” “Whenever.” “Oh…”
Score! We were in the mood for another whisky, another beer, a bit of bourbon, some cold-hard jokes. We discussed the price of milk, and the injustice of waiting for love. “I will invest my time elsewhere”, said a man of barren and arid emasculation. …Unsullied and superannuated youth; a man of wasted vigor, eyes of alcohol… Oh, I’ll buy this boy a beer. Beer casket eyes, he looked at me like I looked, as a little boy, to Pastor Jonathan; “Why is everything I touch sin? Where can I go to strip myself of this?” I didn’t have answers for this man. I just looked to my father, and said “Why did you do it, boy?” This boy was me (although he sported a demented goatee and an incandescent, shaved head); sexually meek and ashamed; drowning in the depths of a hostile and homophobic world. His emaciated spirit needed nourishment, and as I looked at this innocent boy, the hard liquor he consumed did nothing but give him the half-thought of – why am I sitting here, drinking with men who only speak to me in the futile hope of meeting some profound moment amidst booze and the distant hum of television.
Maybe this time it will be different.
Television was all we were listening to. I thought about this man once more. He wasn’t engaging in conversation; a term given to the back-and-forth throwing of can’t-be-bothered-saying and not-darn-drunk-enough words. So I looked at this boy, and blaming it on the alcohol, said, “How’s life for you?”
He was rough with words, but how I liked it. Our thoughts collided in silent reform. I enjoyed the collusion and thought; maybe if they sell it half-price at Wal-Mart, I might have a chance. He was sweet and reminded me of BIG and LARGE. Every word was somewhat silent yet more profound than the beer I was drinking, and I thought… that was enough.
Immaculate Conception Mary had a little
Lame - I came out of her a.ss too fast, to the womb of bi.tch and lies of wealth… parched death upon this ochre grave, entrapment of trees and foliage… BEHAVE, big boy!
I wasn’t allowed to look.
I see beyond YONDER the younger hook, my teeth into her, thigh high, boots and boobs aren’t my style. They said he’s a pretty fly for a… fly on the wall, inconsequential and no
-more than the croutons in my s
oup. In a pool of rest
itute I paid my final dues! (Jews)[Mother said they’re an awful well-off lot]… renounce my religion, see it
to.
To Christianity I find my faith, the Holy War God of hate and distaste. Take my co.ck, make it waste, in stews of food, feed it to the ego-child, his molecules abide… by… his… bed… but.
A bible drawn with silk tape. Gutton lamb cut going to waste. In a bowl on a bed post, Salvador Dali toast. I find my clock dripping LOST. And my woman tied up TOAST…y d--
reams and far-away comings. I come to fairy land and there I find
A man. A woman contorted to own co.ck. Face in lap and lap in hock. Hick-hock dingy-do… I wrap my savings and off I go. To bar in Merry lands monster ride, here I reside-zide in the lack/lake… I piss in it, sh.it in it. You never did nothing to me. In the Holy War, I am God, and such and such and such and free.
I just wanted the touch…
They said I wasn’t good enough…
Now I’ve found you, it is enough.
Love, I’m looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick in June.
I’m looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick in
looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick
for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon
that cold hard saviour… ego
cold hard saviour
cold hard
“…Budweiser. Want another Budweiser?”
“I’ll take two.”
Out the door
Gotta get it out the back door. Forever. Never gonna look back, they said, we said, we all… together (forever) said.
So this fellow… (nice and young and lovely) and I… we got going and going get.
Away from this habitual spot.
Decided it was high time after low time, and low-down we went (first). High time after time apart in our minds, feeding an ego that didn’t exist; a desire that
was
not
(continually
told myself)
for
the same
as
ME.
But for the rosy cheeked
Goddess
Of
Love.
Dionysos
Aphrodite
Hestia (Hernia?)
Athena
That-Woman-On-Telivisiona.
Suffocating me with gender. Does it matter which way points the nipple? My compass towards a different. And so… we decided.
Out the door
Forever, together.
Find a new life, away from this weather
Whether you be this or that or this or that, it’ll be okay…
Sorry, Love… sorry, Like.
Sorry the “woman of my dreams”
Whose children lie with her… feed from her
To never see you again.
Desperation as the protagonist of the biblical aberration and debasement
of Foul distaste.
And so we must…
Run
Away.
I never thought
Run away.
Run away - always for the losers who had another day to waste. They hadn’t family and the grace of Holy Matrimony. They hadn’t a fulfilling job. Maybe they stacked boxes, cartons, livers, lovers. Maybe they threw things in the basement and wondered if they’d ever surface. That wasn’t me. But de-basement, I was committing the crime of adultery. I was trading in my passport to Heaven, free with soft bosom clouds and wonderful, elongated, long legs: as far as earth is from Heaven (as long as love). I was cutting that ribbon. That lace string that sexed secular to spiritual. I was purging of secular dirt, only to bathe in it; to bathe in the Red Sea of purgatorial damnation. My Exodus; a parting of values I spat upon in my inebriated red-wine craze. I had never felt saner.
Out the back door.
And from the servility of mind-numbing repression and the ‘protection’ of self-deception, through a maze of depression and self-rejection, I carved my weapon. Jonathan, the boy in the bar, and I, decided to not waste any time: “I will invest my time elsewhere.” Amorously we grasped each others hands, and our stick green figures set off into the picaresque world of purple daisies. Here, my father had not the power to pull us apart; his mind of rip-rid-rend could not tear cleavage into our dreams. Here, all was eutopic and grand. His hand was like a petal in mine. Its soft and delicate structure moaned to be cared for by a learnt and strong male; a man equipped to take REDEMPTION into his own hands. Into my hands. REDEMPTION. As I looked at my boy I saw him surrounded in the muck and mutter of condescending grip (drooling letters) – “…don’t go there, don’t do this.” I thought it high-hard time I free this boy. FREE. Into worlds unknown; biblical transition to don’t-choke-on-it home. So I carried him, I bent my body way down-town, and I lifted him. “You will be coming with me, I will set you free”. I saw in his eyes – those beer barrel eyes – drained drink, and I thought, and knew (and prophesied) that this drained boy would thank me later. I took my little Moses in my arms, and bundled him up with a flocculent armor of holy-water-Jesus-flesh; his spirit sweating out impurity. Pellucid Parent, make my young body unadulterated and uncontaminated. Dip me in the river, place me in the river. Let me flow down the river, and if I diverge from my path, bend me back; bend my back. Deflect my form, deviate my bones, to reflect the light you shine upon me. Minute self-sacrifice, I’m sorry I’m not so large (the rancid aggravation of the placid). Maybe you can teach me to be JUST like you. Justice comes from retracting back into the self, finding the boy that you never knew in the face of an innocent child. Reclaiming your youth, and embracing the never-had-Never-land. Out the back door. Those drunken booze faces never saw me take him away. I suppose they thought – oh, father and son, they’ll be okay.
Once we arrived outside of reality, out lie-on-your-side of any permeating phallic sovereignty, I tied him down, to me. We lay beneath stars in the desert – my dessert right next to me; the sweet and quiet rancor of my mind projected upon an able and disabled body. Between flattery and flagellation, he paid his religious penance, and prayed for no more grievances. I let him lie awhile, and contemplated leaving him there. But to leave him bare would be a sin; always give the child your blessings, I was taught. And so I never left him, and he will never leave me. He came into my temple, and on his knees, with an orgasm of guilt… released. We ascended together. And the culmination of our divine liberation was sweet and pure, and all the more so for I knew I had helped out the young John who screamed for mercy and yet couldn’t afford it at the corner store. The howling cut-up poetry of his sweet tenor voice trust itself, like a beam of light, into my abyss of promise. His wavering hymn resonated into silence; no-one was there to rejoice in our symphony. But that was okay for me; I knew my role and I knew how it should be done. I knew how to draw the stick figures (and as a little boy I did too!), and I knew where to stick it. I knew how to puppet their limbs and through a crafted palpitation of sound with the dance of my hands, to pulsate their modulating bodies. I was the care-taker and the performer, whose tribal hand-movements dictated the rising and falling of bodies, like the rising and falling of the sun. The fluctuation between compliance and rigidity reminded me of my own anomaly; to follow the word of father – “bad boy, do not look at him that way”, or to follow my own word, my own desire – “it’s natural, it’s beautiful”. For myself and John, my word was absolute, consummate, and we would consummate this union of inner-truth with reality. No longer would my world; vast planes of illusion, with phantom scriptures and grotesque gospel, haunt my every move. I was the haunter, the stalker, the phantom, tangible only in memory. In John’s memory I would lie forever, as the man who made him a real man. And in my memory I reside, as a man who was once raped of identity, yet raped his identity back. I remained as a young boy, virginal and chaste, until my incursion into the territory of adulthood upon stealing myself back and ravaging my past. As a boy I was Daddy’s, and now, for the first time since my inception, I am a bastard and I am bastardized. When I took his body, and left him lying there, I knew that I had taken myself back, and now, all would be alright. How glorious it is.
Mother never wanted us to love her. Father always stood up tall. I wonder if he ever bent his back…
I wonder if he’ll ever know. They took the donkey to the supermarket.
They said it’s super that you know…
How a donkey blows the game and the game don’t go.
And if you’re going down-town, you better tell me so…
For I’ll join you there with a riff-raff-row.
And I’ll join you there with a riff-raff-row.
(Except not as polite). Not as lovely. What a darling site…
Can I look up your dress?
That’s a euphemism for - can I get your number?
I wonder if Mother ever knew to stir the pot right.
Break the handle and use her fist.
Stir the meat and give it all
You got.
The supermarket opens at Seven
She’s lost the plot.
The drink, drive man
Saw your husband with a lot! of
Chicken breast. He’s going to the bakery at the corner. The corner store offers more love
-ly packages than what’s at home.
Oh darling, you run out every once and a while.
And she, she run, run, run,
My mother did
OUT
Into the road
Arms flailing, wishing, saying
“I want my husband back!”
I want the pack of meat and the love attached
I don’t want no cold oven pot dreams
I like it when he’s lying next to me
And no-one came.
But the big red drunk did.
To take her away
Insane?
No, more like just… unlucky.
And a real bi.tch pain in the a.ss.
And a real bi.tch pain.
So the story ends the same. Just like it started, I am my Daddy’s boy, toy-thing. I am the strings, the dance of the puppet.
Perpetration patterns, perceiving sadistic phantoms.
Patterns that puppet the mind.
I am my toy-thing, as my Daddy-thought embodiment
Pulls pressure to pain. Projects desire to re-gain.
And when our emaciation met,
We nourished
On
The
Child.
On
Top
Of
The
Child.
II. John’s story:
I always thought I had it. Everyone told me I had it good. I told me I had it good. I thought, yeah, I have it good. Real good. Good enough to make something out of myself and for that to be nothing. Nothing because, when someone’s got it good, and they make it good, it’s just all… good. Good; the desolation of melancholy happiness. How so? How does one become melancholy in happiness? Well, they just become pensive and ruminating, searching through the routine of happiness for a jolt of ****ed-up-ness. Comatose and useless, you soon turn to alcohol: “make me an inebriated fiend!” Alcohol for happiness? You could just find a lady, settle down, buy a three-bedroom brick house, die old, and return to play the game again. Fermenting within my mind was the bloodthirsty yet self-liberating desire to inebriate my happiness with vast amounts of alcohol. Nothing had gotten me to this point. Nothing was going to spiral my sane, boring, sane, boring, boring, sane, sane, boring self… into insanity. My mother was a Saint; the embodiment of nurturance and care. My father seemed to like her a lot, and shut-up-you’re-going-to-wake-the-kids noises came out of every quaint room in our childhood Dolls House. Surely, such an archaic house wouldn’t make such rambunctious sounds. Its old doors wouldn’t squeak and squeal, and it would whisper ever so softly. Our little old lady of a house was surrounded by trees that leaned in on us, always peeping and checking to see if my sister and I were being good little children. The gin and beer I consumed sedated my numbness; a mild contentment that fawned for complete annihilation. I was an artist, sculpting an aesthetic aberration from the norm, yet fluctuating between sanity and insanity; between self-expectation and the expectations of others. The avant-garde Beat poetry with its deliberate flouting of convention, obscenity and “insidious” pornography, gave me a real kick; I knew it was mocking the staid middle-class that I was of, but when I celebrated its “vulgarity” I felt above and beyond any class-structure, I was the ultimate, I was the all. As a poet, my liquor rhymed and the excess pile-up of scatological words would vomit itself when satisfaction was gained. However, satisfaction was rarely gained, and I rarely vomited; I knew when to stop. My liquor left me cold, hard, stale and barren, lying in left-over on floor. And I liked it.
copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cu.nt
There wasn’t always a bed, or a wall, or a hall. Sometimes there was just an old bar, and a lot of no-bodies; no-bodies like me. We didn’t talk, we didn’t feed, and if we did talk and eat it was the same thing – peanuts and work. Why always work? I once recited a poem of mine to them, and they didn’t listen. But I listened, so that was okay. As okay as okay can be. Good and okay are practically the same.
I was on my way to a bar; one not so local. Local is too close to home. Another place. A drunken escape. Merrylands. Fantasies of Merrylands made for merry music. My shi.t-box car carried me, like a baby in its arms, to a shi.t-box box of smoke and beer-burp. Its free-verse congestion of sighs, unbuttoning of pants, baseball bats and balls on the idiot-box, and the sloppy ingestion of alcohol, was music to my ears - the familiar cadence that made any dingy bar and hell-hole a hide-away of hope. Hell, if it’s real smoky in there, I won’t even have to see myself. Won’t even know what drink I’m drinking and whose it is. That could be a mistake though, as everyone keeps to themselves in these bars (no matter where you go it’s always the same) and having a swag of someone else’s escape and sabotaging their abdication of life to the Holy broth, just ain’t on. The President could be sitting down next to you, dazed and gone, and you don’t snap that mother fuc.ker out of it. It’s his job. We all got our job. Mine was to do what I always do. Drink.
“Pass the peanuts, boy.”
“What?”
“Pass the peanuts.”
“Oh.”
“Pass them.”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“What you doing here?”
“Here. Doing. Uhm… You?”
“I’m just getting away from things.”
“Uh, I am away.”
“I see.”
“Yesterday.”
“C-o-m-e.”
“Where?”
“No-where.”
“Am. Already.”
“What doing you, you come me with here now.”
“Where. Here. S-p-e-a-k. Are you is who?”
“Listen.”
“Up.”
“Stop…”
“…Touching my up, backwards, forwards, around, down.”
“Push…”
“…Not me down. No. No-yes. Is… Why?”
“I’m help-ing to…”
“…escape through the back door.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s go.”
“COME.”
“NOW.”
Through the back door.
In mangled smoke limbs, I was taken, as part of this gin-shroud, out the back door. A savior came by the name of Charles. Offers nuts and peanuts, and coated crisp… “Come with me.” In fragmentary thought and handicapped awareness, I walked humpbacked and incapacitated from the urine-shelter of stale spit cups. I didn’t own myself, and I was open and willing; as open and willing as one without a clock is. If I walked, I needed no time, and no time needed me. I could die tomorrow, today or yesterday. Or maybe I already was. We drove for “Miles. Charles Miles is the name.” “You look lovely liquored up”, I said to myself. What an indiscriminate, promiscuous Buick he had; it had that sort of wanton, easy feel about it – papers messed, thrown about, a cold burger reminding me of liquor, a shoe. Its seats were lubricous. A new polish job? He sounded educated, a real somebody; slick and easy to talk to, ‘though I hardly heard a word he said. His words sounded abandoned and clustered; casual sounds and sexing syllables. With careless music in the background, somewhat like the baseball match I quarter-watched in the bar, I tried to stay upright and proud; it’s rude to ignore another’s music, especially when traveling in their car. I thought so. I wondered if, in my stupor, his car was nicer than it really was. I wondered. Is this a traffic light or a dead end? Left or right? Was that a Seven-Eleven? I… Something cold. The spirit changed, and a peculiarity that alcohol judged as alcohol-judgment arose. Perverse or peculiar. Alcohol makes everything peculiar, you stupid drunkard. Discordant thoughts barely entered my mind and culminated in insensate feeling. I felt with alcohol, and alcohol only desires more alcohol; a hungry recidivist, a wild blood-lust god dog god. He felt like a woman. Sexual seduction used as a propagandistic tool. The authoritarian male; coercive and loving with his quick-talk and banter. No time to get away; word fore-play touches your most sensitive parts, exposes every vulnerability. Maybe I led him on. Maybe he led me on but I let him lead me on so I led him on by leading him on through accepting the lead on and leading us… further. Foliage, bush, loam. Fate. God. Easy. Your. Fault. Ouch. Press. Degradation. Castration. Be a real man. You asked for this. Uncut. All inclusive. Unmitigated. Flat out. Flat tire? He had a flat tire. Excuse. Poor man. He had a flat tire. Did I flatten his tire? Rip. Rawr. Rock. Ravage. No. He would heal me, and bring me a sense of absolution. His act would be one of kind restitution; punishment for my life of crime, and forgiveness for “always saying yes and never saying no. You gave in, boy, to a system of repression, and the tyranny of deception. And now, with my weapon, I will take back what you took away, when you bent over (bend over!) and let him have his way – let him tell you what to do and say, and let him imprison you for being gay.”
W o r d s don’tmakeCents.
He told me I’m MADETOBE bEnt.
Never thought other ways, I gave my soul to God, like he said
For penance and protection there, entrance, soft and moist, a spare…
dime to take time from me.
I never thought this was all I could be.
But now, to find the solution, watch the tree grow into absolution. Didactic **** and fanciful fare…
Ride the donkey, ride the Hare…
And so, it seems, my money was lost. I bid my life, my life was tossed. An angry imbecile, innocent boy-man. Still the marks of childhood, plannednot
Never to TAkEiTback. Only wanted symbol (tokenPartPassed) IN tackBack.
Thought of himself as a vacuous space… the husband, the father, the never-a-face
a-face-your-chance-to-be-one-with-me
he stuck it in, I got my card for free! Clancy’s, supermarket, docket, drop-it-
pants and clothes, and a blue top… covered car (still playing “We Are, We Are”)
Music says
We are we are we are we are.
Drunken booze bit.ches breasts, bottle of whisky, touch my chest.
Father, Father where art thou
Never away son, never a cow
ard you are.
d-r-u-n-t-i-t-i-m-a-g-i-n-e
what I can bring you.
And without permission
Without a pass-out-in-the-back-before-I-had-time-to-whack
YOU off (in the head)
[it] seems unzipped and unzipped seams.
I wasn’t ready,
Master please!
I guess now booze is all I’ll ever be
Back to normal, back to see,
That l if e is a g-a-m-b-l-e
Debt, no free!
I continue to drink. I think it is best, for me and for everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, if I get off the booze
I might
meAt
you for a drink too.
II. Charles, upon reflection:
The world is a reflection of oneself, and when one does not exist, they are left hanging in an abyss of nothingness. In nothingness repression goes unregistered; there’s no longer anything there to repress. Thoughts hang like underpants from a clothing line above. God promises one thing; underpants on clothing lines fall. But they don’t. If they do, they are clipped up again; the child is put back in her bed, five potatoes are placed beside the roast chicken, bathing time is six-o’clock, mother reads me my Pinocchio book, Wall-Mart sells Barbie dolls half price. When lynched underpants fail to fall, their lifeless limbs remain hanging, pegged to their wire frame. Self-sacrifice is selfless until it festers and forces itself upon another body. Self-sacrifice is selfless until morality bends and self-indulgence consumes you. My decision to go to the dingy Merrylands bar was an aberration from convention; routine disguised itself as morality, and integrity was repetition, and when I deviated from same old, same old, the underpants fell… down, off, around the ankles. John was on the cusp of reality; the inflection point where incongruous thought turns to either belligerence or submission. Submit to the gun. I projected myself onto John; I thought he needed me, but I needed him. If I could touch him, maybe I could feel myself, to feel alive. If he could drop his underpants, thought could cascade from clothing lines, and I could resurrect the boneless form that came to me. He came to me. I was a receptive force who could save the poor boy from himself.
Father told me to sit up straight, and pin pin-up bit.ches on my wall; Julie Newmar, Tina Louise, Claudine Auger, Dawn Wells, Penelope Tree, Yvonne Craige, Angie Dickinson, Raquel Welch, Susannah York… Father would wait outside of my bedroom door for the release of his neurosis through the affirmation of my heterosexuality. It felt as though I were copulating with my father, as I didn’t do it for those “lady loves” on the wall, but to accrete evidence in a divine union with my Holy Father. Though I stood at the altar, I never ejaculated of sin, nor reached the empyreal heavens. My voluntary servitude fed my father’s Capitalist regime and developed my orgastic impotence. I feared John would suffer the same; complete incompetence. His rag-doll body was the release of neurotic energy that kept me rigid and hard; I pinned myself to my wall and if ever I faltered, I blue-tacked myself back up. When I saw John submit, his fearful eyes, a sign of awareness, I knew that I had began something good; my gift to humanity. And when I go for a piss; the casual flow of beer, I look about and around, and in a shroud of sameness (and saneness) I pick a partner to piss with.
Pull your pants down little boy, sigh some more
Make some noise!
If Christ comes to you in the fall
Remember, its underpants!
Pegged, pinned to the wall
In pin-up practice, and phallic sovereignty
Impotent statue
Manic awareness
Peyote carnal
Dreams, desires
Sick robust, quivering idol
Master of life and death
Singer of songs, dissonance
Drugs of mal-performance
Reach their sonata climax
Purification of holy water
Contaminated baths slaughter
Red-wine love menstruation
Take me above, take me to heaven.
This is a piece of poetic prose.
I'm posting this here because I believe that it belongs here...
I wrote this when I was 17, last year of school, for an english ext 2 piece. Wrote it in 1.5 days...
As per usual, I leave things last minute.
But it payed off.
I was rather happy when I wrote it, but I believe that I can do MUCH, MUCH better... Sometimes it's very frustrating to feel like you just can't get there in your mind.
So, to the future, I say.
Thanks for reading... I hope it brings you much pleasure.
PS: I stole
"copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cu.nt"
from Jack Kerouac... It just worked so well and I couldn't take it out once I'd committed the crime.
COLD HARD SAVIOR.
I. Charles’s story:
Some would claim it ‘self-glorifying’ to transmogrify and project grandiose illusions of oneself into ones past – a romanticized notion of a wonderful world, a refraction of the present into a past, in hopes of not changing that past, but resurrecting the present. It’s an anomaly that can’t exist, yet cultivates a sardonic and destructive hope. To live in the past is to live in an abyss of reflections-of-reflections… reflections of darkness? It depends what you put there. Mould that darkness into a gun and let your mind penetrate itself. Leap into an abyss of Peyote, dancing the Charleston while thoughts cascade from trees above. Phallic dreams lining up, like men waiting to earn the job, in building’s comparing size, naked with billowing smoke. The gun you caress with each twirling remembrance of a time when you poetically skedaddled, flailing arms reaching up to heaven in Swan Lake grace, as bawdy jokes vacillated between my-sweet-pumpkin-pie and you-wretched-scarlet-woman.
A ‘fancy lady’ my mother used to like to call herself. It seemed to water down what she truly was, is; a euphemism for the slut she was debased to. The modern woman of kitchen appliances, of servile commodities; the woman who used herself in the kitchen to beat the cake mix, and mix it up occasionally if father was in a randy mood. Father in a randy mood was a rare occurrence, as he normally liked his chicken cooked the same way, the gravy on the right of the chicken, with five potatoes placed on the left. This way, everything was kept in order and everyone was happy. Everything was clean and purified with an immaculately dressed table. Any tears shed were washed out with Clorox ‘colour safe’ bleach. Red wine fights and foibles that ejaculated from repressed sexuality and shame were erased with one washing cycle, and time moved on like a hungry recidivist. When everything remains the same, it’s easy to live in the past. Living in the past is embracing the future. And embracing the future is living in the now. I find myself stumbling along corridors, walking into rooms of despotic memory, which dictates my life in re-enactments of re-enactments. Somewhat like the ‘Helter Skelter’ movie; dressing a Charles Manson up in beard and psychedelic, darting eyes, looking for their next prey. Eyes that beckon the responder to feed into Prosecutor Bugliosi’s little game; to slide down snakes of fear and climb ladders of money. I saw that movie and found myself wishing that it was my house the Family crawled into to reposition the furniture (an habitual exercise for them), creating surreal shapes that counter any notion of normality and any principle of this-is-how-life-should-be. Maybe if it were my house, Manson and his girls could open the windows and let through a breeze, and draw pictures of boys kissing boys with red crayon on the wall. They could draw blood from my anamnesis as I sleep, and reform everything I understand about myself. That would be a treat. To others it may seem strange and disturbing that I have these dreams, but a kind destruction of the mind would allow for me to piece back some sense of sanity again. Insanity heals sanity. This is a paradoxical notion that I have found to be indicative of every calamitous experience in my life. I feel myself losing the plot, losing myself, and I awaken still on the same road, yet seeing this road slightly clearer; filling in pot-holes and smelling the tar! You be careful not to ride over that tar. It sticks to your wheels and leaves a track, for God to follow your Mustang as it rides to the edge of a precipice and contemplates death. I do not mean the God that stands on his precipice-altar and looks down on the little lady-bug cars beeping and hooting below, wondering what gets them to blow. Not the God that guides and loves, his beard of cloud softening his invisible face. Nor the God that, like a tow-truck, when your run-down lady-bug Mustang speck breaks down like a decrepit old lady, carries you home to salvation. No, this is the God of oppression. The one that ties down your hands and says; “hey, bi.tch, you’ll do what I say.” Media gospel and fictitious reality.
It is this God that smacked me and called me a naughty Devilish boy, when I drew a picture of two green men holding hands, standing in a field of purple daisies. I was just young; malleable and palpable in my tender innocence, untainted by life, living as the Son of God. I was a mimic of the autocratic American government, neatly packaged and prepared for adult-hood. My act of ‘defiance’ in drawing two men holding hands was ‘heretic’, and so my Father saw fit to tear the paper in half, and report to Saint James’ Catholic Boy’s Elementary of my sacrilegious rebellion. Oh, a sweet child I was, and as Father, purple as the daisies in rage, tore a line through stick four-fingered hands grasping each other, he tore the father and child institution in half… in three, five, six, eight, twelve, fifteen pieces. Later, I assisted my father in further tearing the pieces into more little pieces, whilst he muttered and maundered about Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s ‘exploitation’ of ‘little children’ and his annihilation of all ‘morality’ and the ‘sanctity’ and ‘chastity’ of human life through, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, his investigation into sexual behaviour, and his subsequent publishing of the revolutionary Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Father saw his supporters as “dissolute libertines”, and feared that his little boy would be corrupted by the coercive nature of Kinsey’s publications.
I sit here, half-awake, but mainly dormant. I fear myself as a replica of my father. I have a wife, I have three children. My wife is wonderful, sensual, and perfect. I have perfection in the form of a woman. However, I crave ego, and I crave fulfillment. A replica of the ego-Fascist system of patriarchal control has been handed down to me; a legacy. But this system has not manifested itself in my family unit, but in my mind; a world of self-flagellation and chastising thought. I sit watching my life as my own Devil and God; a paradox of abhorrent desire and contained love. My wife, I bathe in admiration, and I love her, but not a love I instinctively feel, nor a passion I intrinsically hold, but a love curtailed by guilt. I walk as a man carrying sin; a monstrous burden I hide beneath the guise of normality and the mundane to-work and back-to-work routine I follow. I sometimes pray for my guilt to be lifted off of me, however, I don’t know whether I’m praying to the God that encumbered me with this imprisoning servitude or to the God of freedom that I perceive peripherally. I wish to flee to the arms of freedom, and for them to wrap their warmth around me, to blanket me in security. I open my arms, and embrace air: a vacuous impotence that mocks my attempt to find some semblance of truth and sanity in a life pretending both. I wish to be able to grasp man in my hand; brawny and tenacious masculinity.
In times of sporadic aberrance, I find myself searching for a hole to jump in; a hole to fill. I tucked my pen that was positioned behind my ear, into the pocket of my pants, as I said good-bye to the ‘big boys’ of Goss Magazine Corporation. As Assistant Editor, my eyes travel through lascivious exhibitions of beautiful women; images that inspire carnal desire in the ‘average’ male. However, my eyes deform these pictures, like a Rubic Cube, shuffling the anatomical parts around. It’s an uncontrollable habit, and at the end of this process, out of the woman emerges a man. I become my own Picasso, limbs flailing just as my mother, sedated and unaware, fled from my father’s battery of words. The people I see; women on the street, on their way to work, grocery shopping, chatting merrily amongst themselves, become my Picasso paintings as I mix and match their anatomical structure, sticky-taping penis to pussy and pinning moustache above lip. I’ve come to find man in woman and woman in man, as my repression is cured through self-deception. Leaving work, I found myself calling my wife: “I’ll be late home today, darling. I have… have to work over-time today.” I knew I wasn’t returning home, though I wasn’t aware of where I was going. A dingy bar would parallel my aphotic depths of damnation. Contemplation. In this bar sat Seven Deadly Sins. Men, all hunched over barrels of Wild Turkey, dismayed yet content in their fornication; fornication with the relenting Bourbon, a partner that listens and never asks. A partner that, oh… yes, a stool welcoming me. Father always said “say no to temptation”, but a stool cannot hurt me. Its round, smooth surface will placate me; it has no rough edges. A stool is straight! It would dulcify my desire, and with a little holy water – “Yes, Bud Weiser please.” A great place. No, I’m from Denver, Colorado. Republican. Clinton. Fornication. Copulation. Yes. I like my wife. She pro-creates good. Hanky-panky. Cuckoldry. Fu.cking kids. Fu.ck your kids. No. Yes. Promiscuous. Oh, you bad boy. My boy was bad. I bad my boy. I badded my boy. I battered my boy. I battered my toy. I battered my harlot. I hard-on my scarlet woman. I scarlet-ed my woman. Worshiped my bosom. Dickied with my dreamboat. Dallied with the dirty… Devilrays down by six. “Fu.ck, I had my money on them.” In them. Devilrays down by sex. Sex-pence. Sex-pants. I had my bet on them. I bet they would touch base, six times. I betted they would touch base, sex times. Second base. Second debased. Debase, degenerate, in time minus talk, straight. Straight before-playing-the pokies. Betting for lucky. Baseball. Ball-base. Basic-ball-babe. “Twenty-five minutes to go…” “I’m Clint.” “No, not Clinton.” “Good to meet you.” “You here often?” “Whenever.” “Oh…”
Score! We were in the mood for another whisky, another beer, a bit of bourbon, some cold-hard jokes. We discussed the price of milk, and the injustice of waiting for love. “I will invest my time elsewhere”, said a man of barren and arid emasculation. …Unsullied and superannuated youth; a man of wasted vigor, eyes of alcohol… Oh, I’ll buy this boy a beer. Beer casket eyes, he looked at me like I looked, as a little boy, to Pastor Jonathan; “Why is everything I touch sin? Where can I go to strip myself of this?” I didn’t have answers for this man. I just looked to my father, and said “Why did you do it, boy?” This boy was me (although he sported a demented goatee and an incandescent, shaved head); sexually meek and ashamed; drowning in the depths of a hostile and homophobic world. His emaciated spirit needed nourishment, and as I looked at this innocent boy, the hard liquor he consumed did nothing but give him the half-thought of – why am I sitting here, drinking with men who only speak to me in the futile hope of meeting some profound moment amidst booze and the distant hum of television.
Maybe this time it will be different.
Television was all we were listening to. I thought about this man once more. He wasn’t engaging in conversation; a term given to the back-and-forth throwing of can’t-be-bothered-saying and not-darn-drunk-enough words. So I looked at this boy, and blaming it on the alcohol, said, “How’s life for you?”
He was rough with words, but how I liked it. Our thoughts collided in silent reform. I enjoyed the collusion and thought; maybe if they sell it half-price at Wal-Mart, I might have a chance. He was sweet and reminded me of BIG and LARGE. Every word was somewhat silent yet more profound than the beer I was drinking, and I thought… that was enough.
Immaculate Conception Mary had a little
Lame - I came out of her a.ss too fast, to the womb of bi.tch and lies of wealth… parched death upon this ochre grave, entrapment of trees and foliage… BEHAVE, big boy!
I wasn’t allowed to look.
I see beyond YONDER the younger hook, my teeth into her, thigh high, boots and boobs aren’t my style. They said he’s a pretty fly for a… fly on the wall, inconsequential and no
-more than the croutons in my s
oup. In a pool of rest
itute I paid my final dues! (Jews)[Mother said they’re an awful well-off lot]… renounce my religion, see it
to.
To Christianity I find my faith, the Holy War God of hate and distaste. Take my co.ck, make it waste, in stews of food, feed it to the ego-child, his molecules abide… by… his… bed… but.
A bible drawn with silk tape. Gutton lamb cut going to waste. In a bowl on a bed post, Salvador Dali toast. I find my clock dripping LOST. And my woman tied up TOAST…y d--
reams and far-away comings. I come to fairy land and there I find
A man. A woman contorted to own co.ck. Face in lap and lap in hock. Hick-hock dingy-do… I wrap my savings and off I go. To bar in Merry lands monster ride, here I reside-zide in the lack/lake… I piss in it, sh.it in it. You never did nothing to me. In the Holy War, I am God, and such and such and such and free.
I just wanted the touch…
They said I wasn’t good enough…
Now I’ve found you, it is enough.
Love, I’m looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick in June.
I’m looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick in
looking for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon, stick
for that cold hard saviour… ego lampoon
that cold hard saviour… ego
cold hard saviour
cold hard
“…Budweiser. Want another Budweiser?”
“I’ll take two.”
Out the door
Gotta get it out the back door. Forever. Never gonna look back, they said, we said, we all… together (forever) said.
So this fellow… (nice and young and lovely) and I… we got going and going get.
Away from this habitual spot.
Decided it was high time after low time, and low-down we went (first). High time after time apart in our minds, feeding an ego that didn’t exist; a desire that
was
not
(continually
told myself)
for
the same
as
ME.
But for the rosy cheeked
Goddess
Of
Love.
Dionysos
Aphrodite
Hestia (Hernia?)
Athena
That-Woman-On-Telivisiona.
Suffocating me with gender. Does it matter which way points the nipple? My compass towards a different. And so… we decided.
Out the door
Forever, together.
Find a new life, away from this weather
Whether you be this or that or this or that, it’ll be okay…
Sorry, Love… sorry, Like.
Sorry the “woman of my dreams”
Whose children lie with her… feed from her
To never see you again.
Desperation as the protagonist of the biblical aberration and debasement
of Foul distaste.
And so we must…
Run
Away.
I never thought
Run away.
Run away - always for the losers who had another day to waste. They hadn’t family and the grace of Holy Matrimony. They hadn’t a fulfilling job. Maybe they stacked boxes, cartons, livers, lovers. Maybe they threw things in the basement and wondered if they’d ever surface. That wasn’t me. But de-basement, I was committing the crime of adultery. I was trading in my passport to Heaven, free with soft bosom clouds and wonderful, elongated, long legs: as far as earth is from Heaven (as long as love). I was cutting that ribbon. That lace string that sexed secular to spiritual. I was purging of secular dirt, only to bathe in it; to bathe in the Red Sea of purgatorial damnation. My Exodus; a parting of values I spat upon in my inebriated red-wine craze. I had never felt saner.
Out the back door.
And from the servility of mind-numbing repression and the ‘protection’ of self-deception, through a maze of depression and self-rejection, I carved my weapon. Jonathan, the boy in the bar, and I, decided to not waste any time: “I will invest my time elsewhere.” Amorously we grasped each others hands, and our stick green figures set off into the picaresque world of purple daisies. Here, my father had not the power to pull us apart; his mind of rip-rid-rend could not tear cleavage into our dreams. Here, all was eutopic and grand. His hand was like a petal in mine. Its soft and delicate structure moaned to be cared for by a learnt and strong male; a man equipped to take REDEMPTION into his own hands. Into my hands. REDEMPTION. As I looked at my boy I saw him surrounded in the muck and mutter of condescending grip (drooling letters) – “…don’t go there, don’t do this.” I thought it high-hard time I free this boy. FREE. Into worlds unknown; biblical transition to don’t-choke-on-it home. So I carried him, I bent my body way down-town, and I lifted him. “You will be coming with me, I will set you free”. I saw in his eyes – those beer barrel eyes – drained drink, and I thought, and knew (and prophesied) that this drained boy would thank me later. I took my little Moses in my arms, and bundled him up with a flocculent armor of holy-water-Jesus-flesh; his spirit sweating out impurity. Pellucid Parent, make my young body unadulterated and uncontaminated. Dip me in the river, place me in the river. Let me flow down the river, and if I diverge from my path, bend me back; bend my back. Deflect my form, deviate my bones, to reflect the light you shine upon me. Minute self-sacrifice, I’m sorry I’m not so large (the rancid aggravation of the placid). Maybe you can teach me to be JUST like you. Justice comes from retracting back into the self, finding the boy that you never knew in the face of an innocent child. Reclaiming your youth, and embracing the never-had-Never-land. Out the back door. Those drunken booze faces never saw me take him away. I suppose they thought – oh, father and son, they’ll be okay.
Once we arrived outside of reality, out lie-on-your-side of any permeating phallic sovereignty, I tied him down, to me. We lay beneath stars in the desert – my dessert right next to me; the sweet and quiet rancor of my mind projected upon an able and disabled body. Between flattery and flagellation, he paid his religious penance, and prayed for no more grievances. I let him lie awhile, and contemplated leaving him there. But to leave him bare would be a sin; always give the child your blessings, I was taught. And so I never left him, and he will never leave me. He came into my temple, and on his knees, with an orgasm of guilt… released. We ascended together. And the culmination of our divine liberation was sweet and pure, and all the more so for I knew I had helped out the young John who screamed for mercy and yet couldn’t afford it at the corner store. The howling cut-up poetry of his sweet tenor voice trust itself, like a beam of light, into my abyss of promise. His wavering hymn resonated into silence; no-one was there to rejoice in our symphony. But that was okay for me; I knew my role and I knew how it should be done. I knew how to draw the stick figures (and as a little boy I did too!), and I knew where to stick it. I knew how to puppet their limbs and through a crafted palpitation of sound with the dance of my hands, to pulsate their modulating bodies. I was the care-taker and the performer, whose tribal hand-movements dictated the rising and falling of bodies, like the rising and falling of the sun. The fluctuation between compliance and rigidity reminded me of my own anomaly; to follow the word of father – “bad boy, do not look at him that way”, or to follow my own word, my own desire – “it’s natural, it’s beautiful”. For myself and John, my word was absolute, consummate, and we would consummate this union of inner-truth with reality. No longer would my world; vast planes of illusion, with phantom scriptures and grotesque gospel, haunt my every move. I was the haunter, the stalker, the phantom, tangible only in memory. In John’s memory I would lie forever, as the man who made him a real man. And in my memory I reside, as a man who was once raped of identity, yet raped his identity back. I remained as a young boy, virginal and chaste, until my incursion into the territory of adulthood upon stealing myself back and ravaging my past. As a boy I was Daddy’s, and now, for the first time since my inception, I am a bastard and I am bastardized. When I took his body, and left him lying there, I knew that I had taken myself back, and now, all would be alright. How glorious it is.
Mother never wanted us to love her. Father always stood up tall. I wonder if he ever bent his back…
I wonder if he’ll ever know. They took the donkey to the supermarket.
They said it’s super that you know…
How a donkey blows the game and the game don’t go.
And if you’re going down-town, you better tell me so…
For I’ll join you there with a riff-raff-row.
And I’ll join you there with a riff-raff-row.
(Except not as polite). Not as lovely. What a darling site…
Can I look up your dress?
That’s a euphemism for - can I get your number?
I wonder if Mother ever knew to stir the pot right.
Break the handle and use her fist.
Stir the meat and give it all
You got.
The supermarket opens at Seven
She’s lost the plot.
The drink, drive man
Saw your husband with a lot! of
Chicken breast. He’s going to the bakery at the corner. The corner store offers more love
-ly packages than what’s at home.
Oh darling, you run out every once and a while.
And she, she run, run, run,
My mother did
OUT
Into the road
Arms flailing, wishing, saying
“I want my husband back!”
I want the pack of meat and the love attached
I don’t want no cold oven pot dreams
I like it when he’s lying next to me
And no-one came.
But the big red drunk did.
To take her away
Insane?
No, more like just… unlucky.
And a real bi.tch pain in the a.ss.
And a real bi.tch pain.
So the story ends the same. Just like it started, I am my Daddy’s boy, toy-thing. I am the strings, the dance of the puppet.
Perpetration patterns, perceiving sadistic phantoms.
Patterns that puppet the mind.
I am my toy-thing, as my Daddy-thought embodiment
Pulls pressure to pain. Projects desire to re-gain.
And when our emaciation met,
We nourished
On
The
Child.
On
Top
Of
The
Child.
II. John’s story:
I always thought I had it. Everyone told me I had it good. I told me I had it good. I thought, yeah, I have it good. Real good. Good enough to make something out of myself and for that to be nothing. Nothing because, when someone’s got it good, and they make it good, it’s just all… good. Good; the desolation of melancholy happiness. How so? How does one become melancholy in happiness? Well, they just become pensive and ruminating, searching through the routine of happiness for a jolt of ****ed-up-ness. Comatose and useless, you soon turn to alcohol: “make me an inebriated fiend!” Alcohol for happiness? You could just find a lady, settle down, buy a three-bedroom brick house, die old, and return to play the game again. Fermenting within my mind was the bloodthirsty yet self-liberating desire to inebriate my happiness with vast amounts of alcohol. Nothing had gotten me to this point. Nothing was going to spiral my sane, boring, sane, boring, boring, sane, sane, boring self… into insanity. My mother was a Saint; the embodiment of nurturance and care. My father seemed to like her a lot, and shut-up-you’re-going-to-wake-the-kids noises came out of every quaint room in our childhood Dolls House. Surely, such an archaic house wouldn’t make such rambunctious sounds. Its old doors wouldn’t squeak and squeal, and it would whisper ever so softly. Our little old lady of a house was surrounded by trees that leaned in on us, always peeping and checking to see if my sister and I were being good little children. The gin and beer I consumed sedated my numbness; a mild contentment that fawned for complete annihilation. I was an artist, sculpting an aesthetic aberration from the norm, yet fluctuating between sanity and insanity; between self-expectation and the expectations of others. The avant-garde Beat poetry with its deliberate flouting of convention, obscenity and “insidious” pornography, gave me a real kick; I knew it was mocking the staid middle-class that I was of, but when I celebrated its “vulgarity” I felt above and beyond any class-structure, I was the ultimate, I was the all. As a poet, my liquor rhymed and the excess pile-up of scatological words would vomit itself when satisfaction was gained. However, satisfaction was rarely gained, and I rarely vomited; I knew when to stop. My liquor left me cold, hard, stale and barren, lying in left-over on floor. And I liked it.
copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cu.nt
There wasn’t always a bed, or a wall, or a hall. Sometimes there was just an old bar, and a lot of no-bodies; no-bodies like me. We didn’t talk, we didn’t feed, and if we did talk and eat it was the same thing – peanuts and work. Why always work? I once recited a poem of mine to them, and they didn’t listen. But I listened, so that was okay. As okay as okay can be. Good and okay are practically the same.
I was on my way to a bar; one not so local. Local is too close to home. Another place. A drunken escape. Merrylands. Fantasies of Merrylands made for merry music. My shi.t-box car carried me, like a baby in its arms, to a shi.t-box box of smoke and beer-burp. Its free-verse congestion of sighs, unbuttoning of pants, baseball bats and balls on the idiot-box, and the sloppy ingestion of alcohol, was music to my ears - the familiar cadence that made any dingy bar and hell-hole a hide-away of hope. Hell, if it’s real smoky in there, I won’t even have to see myself. Won’t even know what drink I’m drinking and whose it is. That could be a mistake though, as everyone keeps to themselves in these bars (no matter where you go it’s always the same) and having a swag of someone else’s escape and sabotaging their abdication of life to the Holy broth, just ain’t on. The President could be sitting down next to you, dazed and gone, and you don’t snap that mother fuc.ker out of it. It’s his job. We all got our job. Mine was to do what I always do. Drink.
“Pass the peanuts, boy.”
“What?”
“Pass the peanuts.”
“Oh.”
“Pass them.”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“What you doing here?”
“Here. Doing. Uhm… You?”
“I’m just getting away from things.”
“Uh, I am away.”
“I see.”
“Yesterday.”
“C-o-m-e.”
“Where?”
“No-where.”
“Am. Already.”
“What doing you, you come me with here now.”
“Where. Here. S-p-e-a-k. Are you is who?”
“Listen.”
“Up.”
“Stop…”
“…Touching my up, backwards, forwards, around, down.”
“Push…”
“…Not me down. No. No-yes. Is… Why?”
“I’m help-ing to…”
“…escape through the back door.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s go.”
“COME.”
“NOW.”
Through the back door.
In mangled smoke limbs, I was taken, as part of this gin-shroud, out the back door. A savior came by the name of Charles. Offers nuts and peanuts, and coated crisp… “Come with me.” In fragmentary thought and handicapped awareness, I walked humpbacked and incapacitated from the urine-shelter of stale spit cups. I didn’t own myself, and I was open and willing; as open and willing as one without a clock is. If I walked, I needed no time, and no time needed me. I could die tomorrow, today or yesterday. Or maybe I already was. We drove for “Miles. Charles Miles is the name.” “You look lovely liquored up”, I said to myself. What an indiscriminate, promiscuous Buick he had; it had that sort of wanton, easy feel about it – papers messed, thrown about, a cold burger reminding me of liquor, a shoe. Its seats were lubricous. A new polish job? He sounded educated, a real somebody; slick and easy to talk to, ‘though I hardly heard a word he said. His words sounded abandoned and clustered; casual sounds and sexing syllables. With careless music in the background, somewhat like the baseball match I quarter-watched in the bar, I tried to stay upright and proud; it’s rude to ignore another’s music, especially when traveling in their car. I thought so. I wondered if, in my stupor, his car was nicer than it really was. I wondered. Is this a traffic light or a dead end? Left or right? Was that a Seven-Eleven? I… Something cold. The spirit changed, and a peculiarity that alcohol judged as alcohol-judgment arose. Perverse or peculiar. Alcohol makes everything peculiar, you stupid drunkard. Discordant thoughts barely entered my mind and culminated in insensate feeling. I felt with alcohol, and alcohol only desires more alcohol; a hungry recidivist, a wild blood-lust god dog god. He felt like a woman. Sexual seduction used as a propagandistic tool. The authoritarian male; coercive and loving with his quick-talk and banter. No time to get away; word fore-play touches your most sensitive parts, exposes every vulnerability. Maybe I led him on. Maybe he led me on but I let him lead me on so I led him on by leading him on through accepting the lead on and leading us… further. Foliage, bush, loam. Fate. God. Easy. Your. Fault. Ouch. Press. Degradation. Castration. Be a real man. You asked for this. Uncut. All inclusive. Unmitigated. Flat out. Flat tire? He had a flat tire. Excuse. Poor man. He had a flat tire. Did I flatten his tire? Rip. Rawr. Rock. Ravage. No. He would heal me, and bring me a sense of absolution. His act would be one of kind restitution; punishment for my life of crime, and forgiveness for “always saying yes and never saying no. You gave in, boy, to a system of repression, and the tyranny of deception. And now, with my weapon, I will take back what you took away, when you bent over (bend over!) and let him have his way – let him tell you what to do and say, and let him imprison you for being gay.”
W o r d s don’tmakeCents.
He told me I’m MADETOBE bEnt.
Never thought other ways, I gave my soul to God, like he said
For penance and protection there, entrance, soft and moist, a spare…
dime to take time from me.
I never thought this was all I could be.
But now, to find the solution, watch the tree grow into absolution. Didactic **** and fanciful fare…
Ride the donkey, ride the Hare…
And so, it seems, my money was lost. I bid my life, my life was tossed. An angry imbecile, innocent boy-man. Still the marks of childhood, plannednot
Never to TAkEiTback. Only wanted symbol (tokenPartPassed) IN tackBack.
Thought of himself as a vacuous space… the husband, the father, the never-a-face
a-face-your-chance-to-be-one-with-me
he stuck it in, I got my card for free! Clancy’s, supermarket, docket, drop-it-
pants and clothes, and a blue top… covered car (still playing “We Are, We Are”)
Music says
We are we are we are we are.
Drunken booze bit.ches breasts, bottle of whisky, touch my chest.
Father, Father where art thou
Never away son, never a cow
ard you are.
d-r-u-n-t-i-t-i-m-a-g-i-n-e
what I can bring you.
And without permission
Without a pass-out-in-the-back-before-I-had-time-to-whack
YOU off (in the head)
[it] seems unzipped and unzipped seams.
I wasn’t ready,
Master please!
I guess now booze is all I’ll ever be
Back to normal, back to see,
That l if e is a g-a-m-b-l-e
Debt, no free!
I continue to drink. I think it is best, for me and for everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, if I get off the booze
I might
meAt
you for a drink too.
II. Charles, upon reflection:
The world is a reflection of oneself, and when one does not exist, they are left hanging in an abyss of nothingness. In nothingness repression goes unregistered; there’s no longer anything there to repress. Thoughts hang like underpants from a clothing line above. God promises one thing; underpants on clothing lines fall. But they don’t. If they do, they are clipped up again; the child is put back in her bed, five potatoes are placed beside the roast chicken, bathing time is six-o’clock, mother reads me my Pinocchio book, Wall-Mart sells Barbie dolls half price. When lynched underpants fail to fall, their lifeless limbs remain hanging, pegged to their wire frame. Self-sacrifice is selfless until it festers and forces itself upon another body. Self-sacrifice is selfless until morality bends and self-indulgence consumes you. My decision to go to the dingy Merrylands bar was an aberration from convention; routine disguised itself as morality, and integrity was repetition, and when I deviated from same old, same old, the underpants fell… down, off, around the ankles. John was on the cusp of reality; the inflection point where incongruous thought turns to either belligerence or submission. Submit to the gun. I projected myself onto John; I thought he needed me, but I needed him. If I could touch him, maybe I could feel myself, to feel alive. If he could drop his underpants, thought could cascade from clothing lines, and I could resurrect the boneless form that came to me. He came to me. I was a receptive force who could save the poor boy from himself.
Father told me to sit up straight, and pin pin-up bit.ches on my wall; Julie Newmar, Tina Louise, Claudine Auger, Dawn Wells, Penelope Tree, Yvonne Craige, Angie Dickinson, Raquel Welch, Susannah York… Father would wait outside of my bedroom door for the release of his neurosis through the affirmation of my heterosexuality. It felt as though I were copulating with my father, as I didn’t do it for those “lady loves” on the wall, but to accrete evidence in a divine union with my Holy Father. Though I stood at the altar, I never ejaculated of sin, nor reached the empyreal heavens. My voluntary servitude fed my father’s Capitalist regime and developed my orgastic impotence. I feared John would suffer the same; complete incompetence. His rag-doll body was the release of neurotic energy that kept me rigid and hard; I pinned myself to my wall and if ever I faltered, I blue-tacked myself back up. When I saw John submit, his fearful eyes, a sign of awareness, I knew that I had began something good; my gift to humanity. And when I go for a piss; the casual flow of beer, I look about and around, and in a shroud of sameness (and saneness) I pick a partner to piss with.
Pull your pants down little boy, sigh some more
Make some noise!
If Christ comes to you in the fall
Remember, its underpants!
Pegged, pinned to the wall
In pin-up practice, and phallic sovereignty
Impotent statue
Manic awareness
Peyote carnal
Dreams, desires
Sick robust, quivering idol
Master of life and death
Singer of songs, dissonance
Drugs of mal-performance
Reach their sonata climax
Purification of holy water
Contaminated baths slaughter
Red-wine love menstruation
Take me above, take me to heaven.