the bell tolled six

She hid in the garden. They knew she was hiding – she always did. Supper went on when the bell tolled five. When the bell tolled six she was gone. A lady with a boy had been seen on the grounds that day whom no one had seen before. She lied to the girl and tricked her away. The boy was used to lend verity to the fable. They did not know she was loved and missed and desperately needed. They only had to have her to mend a broken circle, at the center of which was a terrible secret needed guarding.

bowling at the Inferno

The geometry of the room calmed me until i saw the centrifuge which caused me to eat the entire seedless watermelon. The bitter rind, typically dyssed, soothed my soul. My body double, once released, was able to free itself and form its own identity. Which pleased me, her initiative. The brazenness. No one has a body double quite like mine. The trick she used was separating sandwiches we made for the party, from their crusts. Tomorrow arrived with a name sewn to a shirt pocket, in North Dakota, and my old friend (now) Dante, was entrusted to play under the hoods of late model cars. I saw myself in her, by the choice of her name. It was our birthday today. We went bowling in the Inferno. In separate states. They made it easy into a chain. All the balls were round.

darkness awaits

The day, suffocated by clouds.  I slept into a steady rain, clawing at the glass. I would open the door for no one.

No one could rest for long. Nor could I. They wanted my life, behind  terrible smiles. Eyes, watching the breath in my chest.

Only my graveyard obligations would get me, far, far from home. I wore black, to blend in the night. Carried the iron cast lantern.

I walked with purpose, concealing my fear behind silver buttons. My life. Steeled to the ritual task.

self-helpless was i

i saw you before you were born. the interview went well. you were optimistic towards the opportunity ahead.

although all the suffering baked into this cake was unappealing,  wholeness of being beckoned.

despite western ways to be forced on an eastern soul, despite aggravated assault in the capitalist moshpit, despite countless insipid efforts towards persona redux, and begging martyrs of grave emotional toxicity, you would not resist the call.

you bravely went under the spell of your god, and i watched on edge as they cleared your cache and robbed your memory bank, ritual washing you.

then they dressed you in snow white linens as your affect went flat. baby powder and the shaving of head.

you will do well in America, they told you. you looked at them blank. confused but so willing. tears suddenly welled up my eyes and placed you safely inside

one saltwater drop. after you left me, my love, i carefully swept up your off-color locks. with my hands.

tearful i took up the salt and pepper remnants of my one true love of this life. on my knees now.sweeping.

weeping. i held you soft in my hands there, and ritually cursed the insipid god who i believed at that moment, responsible for this.

our unchained tragedy.
my uprooted life.
unmoored heart.
broken.
again.

thus played out my own true story of so-called personal growth, and self-hepless was i. amen

Neptune. god of sea

Neptune
god of sea
worshipped
at the altar

for years
we knew
the rock
Gibraltar

made of masthead
sheets and sailors
songs

crosses
bones
precious
stones

bankrolled by
imperial loans

prayers carried far
from heavy hearts
ashore

on backs of breathless
gales and whales
the salty groans
the rusty nails

out
beneath  the slender cut of
moon beneath the silent shimmering
waters
eye

beneath it all in
solvent lye

Neptune fills
an invert
sky

People work better when driven (insane) -vii)

We stayed in the Motel Seven Deluxe Suite, you know, the one with the hydrogen bed and the nitrous oxide satellite feed? We fastened one another into the zero def chambres, where we felt HBO and TellTime into the night. Tactile feedback chambers were all the new rage. Supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, all visuals. Transcended temporal limits. The future! Was it really with us? In accordance with the present. Uhh…wow?

Wicked! was the exclamation all over Boston, when MIT held an open house to showcase the event. Of course, two billion watched at home. Only five or six thousand bipeds actually crossed the Charles River. Most of those took the Redline. Some took the bus. A few trifling souls, actually swam and never made it. The river was being sanitized, but the project yet to completion. Not everyone apparently knew. The Boston Harbor was much cleaner. Chalk it up to universal solvent. The Harvard crew team sculled right into one of the gas filled corpses, the next day on the river. It hardly made the news. What with the breaking of the tactile chamber phenomenom. What with the not-so-far-fetched claims that our human undertaking had finally brought the two into alignment, present and future. Despite the predictably unwelcome intelligentsia criticism. Which came back across the dirty Charles in elastic and immediate response. Faster than an EMT to an heart-stopping event.

The problem, the small world of most educated braintrust informed, was that said invention professing temporal re-alignment, if not a hype (which many knew right away, probably was), occasioned the grave consequence of leaving the consumer with no apparent future. But this was all shuttered into the past. Our emotional scales of distress smoothed out over and into the world, like the skips of skipping stones, behind us. The braintrust was archived. We could only remember how we virtually cried our carbon tears into the deluxe thick wet darkness of the light. At the moment of passing of the longest virtual night. How the tomatoes rolled off of their vines, and planted themselves in West Hollywood sauce vats. Sloughing off their celebrity skins. Their seeds and juices bubbling up effervescently, acid-mannered offspring of the rich and the famous. We could see red, again. Without having to immediately experience the frightening momentum of our great cultural furies. A safe and projective identification was no longer impossible. Standing on the sidelines of the regular though tawdry self-mortification which comes of a reacting-out upon the fingered source.

So was the way of the world, in the past. The common tale of intentions, paving the paths to hell. Now hollow and insensate, paved over in the gloss of primary colors, dutifully lacquered by some diligent postmodern botomaton. The thread of today, diving into the embroidery of tomorrow. So much for the phrase; to beg, steal, or borrow.