Blood And Breakfast [9.28.2014]

         The Boxelder across the street is the first volunteer on the block to make the switch from green to orange, and allow it’s tiny leaves to fall. Littering the street with its sacrifice in this most unwanted Indian summer. Another in a sequence that seems so prevalent these days. Fluttering down to the asphalt, almost mockingly, as if knowing just how desperately a change of venue is desired.  
The front of the house is like a broken face. Brutalized and beaten down by the fists of abject poverty. Bruises left to fester, introducing black mold and rot, like an abscess tooth in its structural jaw. Tiles in the bathroom peeling up like diseased skin.  It’s had a cheap make-over or two, over the years, but the diabolical duo of Time and Use have proven much more detrimentally adversarial than initially expected. 
“This house is sinking.” said the Lord of The Manor one particularly dismal day.
“Never buy”, answered his trusty jester, “always rent.”

The sun, with its superior infiltration strategies, always manages to maneuver its way through the curtains. As if my eyelids were a tomb, and the rays were a cadre of natives prying them apart with pickaxes. Keeping it under the mountain, so the right ones fail to comprehend.  
Make breakfast while you bleed. Construct reason while the sovereignty forges absurd mandates. 
       
       Accept.

jittersmirk {part 2: the unexpected note} [9.17.2014]

one night, maybe two days or two weeks later, while the nurses were drawing straws for their rounds, a young addition to the fold drew the short straw, and was charged with doing his rounds in the section set aside for the drunks and the junkies. a small length of hallway, dim and neglected. 

ignored mostly because this town had no drunks or junkies or any such undesirable thing.

so this young nurse, we’ll call him “Kevin”, was slowly, carefully, doing his duty. slowly moving down the hallway, using a small battery-powered penlight he was given, in order to read the charts hung, almost cruelly, by ugly brown clipboards outside the rooms. 

what they failed(?) to tell him was the fact that there were very few rooms and charts in which he needed to check. he realized soon enough that it was a sort of hazing prank the more senior nurses were playing on him. since he was the first male nurse to be hired by this, admittedly provincial, hospital, he stuck out his chin and sallied forth down the wing, defiantly shining his meager light at the walls where the charts should be hanging. 

he did so, not expecting to find any charts hanging in their expected places, until he came to room #19. 

the door to the room was buffeting against the frame slightly, as if a window had been left open inside and the wind was breathing through the small cracks in the frame. knowing that the doors of such rooms in a relatively modern hospital such as this are fairly air-tight, barring that the windows inside are shut, “Kevin” knew that something was amiss. so he raised his penlight up to the requisite place on the wall beside the door where the clipboard was, clutching the chart, and what he saw was something less than frightening. 

after he read the small note, scrawled upon a Zoloft notepad and clipped innocuously to the ugly brown clipboard and, written in a slight hand of all capital letters, he realized that the prank they played upon him had backfired. 

 

jittersmirk {part 1: the grateful wretched} [9/2014]

he began life as something between a leech and a skid mark. leaving a murky tar-hued trail from the womb, horrid and obvious in its designed mordancy, leading all the way down the motherfucking middle of Main St.  streams of shit-viscous loneliness inducing comically eruptive gastric reactions in his wake. none of those prissy cunts knew what hit them. and so, his trajectory of sorrow and stench and vomit continued for several weeks, criss-crossing town like an ignored plague. until fate interjected one bleached-out fall afternoon. when the air smelled like an electrical fire that went sour due to neglect.

a few weeks later, while he was punching in at the local [insert material] mine, he met resistance. the kind that was requisite. it was easy, like pouring honey from a plastic bear, for those around him to recoil from his dissimilarity. and, because he didn’t speak, he wondered if it was his difference that garnered their reticence, or their reticence which garnered his difference.

between three and ten fellow miners cornered him and commenced with the act of bashing him with an amalgamation of words and tools and fists and boots. the specific number of assailants was impossible to discern because discerning such is impossible when one is being beaten to near death. yet, much to the perpetrators’ chagrin, near death was all those cocksuckers got from him. 

a month later he woke in the drunk-tank of the local hospital, his wounds barely held together by Powerpuff Girls band-aids, and his dick floating in a mason jar of amber colored liquid on the table next to his bed. it was only later, when nobody was watching and he could move his arm again, did he discover that the jar was filled with apple juice. not piss, as he was expecting, so he spent the next few weeks both wondering who afforded him such a kindness, and using his good arm to write his epitaph. you see, he was able to find a pad of paper (a Zoloft advertisement crowning the top), and a skinny ballpoint pen apparently forgotten by one of the few nurses in charge of his care. 

oubliette blues: 5.15.2013 (1.)

it is gravity that wants me now. summer has fought the good fight and the sun has won me over. the green in the trees outside is nigh overwhelming, in lieu of its long hiatus. the very air in the house reeks of green, now. a welcome reek. the gravity of which I speak. I will continue, for I have no choice. this sublime torturous momentum. this insurrection of will. this love and this motherfucking living. this gravity.

they say, “don’t live in the past.” they say, “don’t feel regret.” they say, “live for now and be grateful for what you have.” 

I say: I live everywhere and I am everything all at once. I am drunken fucking omnipresent. I just might be god. and if so, I am a terrible excuse for a god. but, then, aren’t they all? but I digress, because that’s what I do best when I’m growing middle-fingers where my fucking brain used to be, and I’m steadily, rapidly losing my humanity. because it’s becoming steadily, rapidly clear that being human is a fucking malignancy. a tumor in need of a scalpel. 

now I call the frost from the ducts, because I want to be cold. I want to shiver. I want my blood to be changed. I want to be chemically altered from the inside out & remade into another form of life. crystallized and blown apart like your god intended. broken the fuck down. I want to be ‘star stuff’ again. broken. and remade by tears and stars. that is fucking heaven. my faith for a paradise beyond this fragile cage of flesh and bone and mind and intention. bliss, in its purest, most horrifying form.

oubliette blues [9.2.2014]

funny how I always hear the sounds of animals snarling and seeming to tear each other apart outside my window, yet my window looks out over a normal, albeit poor, American neighborhood. I could close my eyes and pretend I was in some jungle, and it wouldn’t make a fucking difference.

I must’ve been mistaken. it’s not insomnia, it’s evasion. I’m avoiding my dreams. because my subconscious hates me. it’s all disjointed pain and faces I’d rather not see. places that either don’t exist, or are some surrealistic mockery of those I’ve known. 

assured membranous destruction?  

who’s to tell?  

just shards. lunatic fringes of half-light vignettes. as if my eyes were in some involuntary perpetual squint, and my limbs were relegated to a similar fate, only muscular. some sort of punishment for transgressions of which I am ignorant in the commission. honest to the very last fault; I have no secrets left. I am a skinned tome. flayed down to the fucking bone. 

“What you see is what you get.” is the cruelest, most inept cliché. 

the faces I want to see are never present. the places I want to see remain absent from such a torturous reality. and the scenarios, well…

further fucking grist for the lunacy mill.