TAKE ME APART.

ILLEGITIMATE BASTARD CHAPBOOKS W/ FOLDED-OVER POSTERS AS COVERS, ILLICIT TANTALIZING INSERTS, DE(CON)STRUCTABLE, SHREDDED PAPER SANDBOXES, TACTILE LITERATURE, MADE TO BE PLAYED WITH, TO BE USED, TO BE TAKEN APART. CURTAINS MADE TO BE DRAWN ASIDE. AN ANALOGUE VIDEO GAME (AS GRAMPS USED TO CALL IT, A "GAME"). STAPLES SCREAMING TO BE TORN OUT, PAGES PUSHING APART LIKE SIMILAR MAGNETIC POLES, SPINE BENDING AND MOANING AND GROANING TO BE UNFETTERED, UNBOUND. NIHILISTIC JOY. SELF-DESTRUCTIVE POETRY. NO TROPHY FOR BOOKSHELF MOUNTING BUT INSTEAD A BOMBSHELL GOING OFF OVERHEAD, BURNING THE HANDS AND EYES, SCATTERING POSTCARD STICKER SHRAPNEL, DISINTEGRATING, BECOMING INTANGIBLE, CASTING LONG SHADOWS WITHOUT SOURCE, EFFECT WITH CAUSE LONG DEAD AND SCATTERED TO THE WIND, PAGES BECOME BOOKMARKS, COVERS AS STICKER SHEETS, DISASSEMBLED AND LEFT AS GRAFFITO ON WALLS AND LAMP POSTS, POETRY PASTED ON CAR BUMPERS AND THE UNDERSIDES OF SKATEBOARDS, FOLDED INTO ORIGAMI, INTO PAPER AIRPLANES, CUT APART AND MAILED AWAY, CHEAP FLYERS FORCED UNDER BACK DOORS AT MIDNIGHT HOURS, WIDE MARGINS OPEN FOR COMMENTS/DOODLES/DEFACEMENT OF POETRY, PAPERBACK AUTOCANNIBALISM. REFUTATION OF THE GRAMMAR OF MATERIALISM AND FALSE PERMANCENCE. DETERRITORIALIZATION OF TYPE, OF INK, OF PAPER AND PRINT. SCRIBAL NOMADISM.


"TOUCH ME," THE BOOK WHISPERS TENDERLY IN YOUR EAR. "TEAR ME," IT BECKONS. "TAKE ME APART."

WORD VIRUS

symptoms include: typewriter torso. missile mouth. dharma bumps up and down the arms, the legs. road rash on the bottoms of feet, itching, yearning. aimless learning in the style of the "beginner's mind". predeliction to prediction of the unpredictable. swollen dictation. wrecktum inflammashun. weasel eyes. enlivenment of the pineal gland, protrusion of the third eye, fourth eye, fifth eye perhaps even. backwards temperature, very high but very low. fungal infestation of concentration. split fingertips. aberrant nail growth, splintered, going off every which way. long nose from weaving lies like baskets filled with half-truths. rationalized hallucinations. hallucinated rationalizations. spotty haunting of guts, throat, tongue (malicius gastrospecterolingus). the day jitters. the night jitters. pencil dander. uncontrollable bouts of song and drink. chronic penny-waffling. the squints. depression of the eye sockets. chapped upper lip. phantom brains. monster juice. heat vision. vampire teeth. pen ink red shift off the page, cosmic folding, unfolding, like origami animals breathing in and out, over and over again. the paper comes to life.

I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE


Rusty scrap graveyards choked with the
bleached bones of space-shot monkeys
and cosmo-dogs buried under the dusty
flags of a hundred once-proud nations
now relegated to history's waste bins.



LUNA-ONE

Satellite slums with glaring neon signs like
"recycled drinks cheap" and "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
CLONED GIRLS" and "they take EVERYTHING
off even the HELMET oxygen deprived
asphyxiation peep shows FIVE ASTROBUCKS".

I SNORTED SPACE ROCK
OFF BRITNEY SPEARS' BIONIC COCK
#celebrity #astronaut #fashion #magazine


He's dancing in slow-motion down the red carpet,
jerking around like a maniac neck-deep in molasses,
kicking up moon dust
with the Earth hanging heavy behind him like
an overripe grape straddling the lunar horizon,
and the cameras are going off like crazy,
flash bulbs exploding like supernovas,
WHAT A FUCKING STAR!
God damn they're eating it up.
Eighteen year old astronaut with
artificially windswept auburn hair
and a smile that'll melt your heart like
re-entry,
latest haute-couture custom-fitted Armani space-suit
bound to grace the covers of US 3000 and STAR WATCH,
caption--
ASTROBOY WONDER'S NIGHT IN THE SPOTLIGHT!
right beside
WHO'S DATING MADONNA'S THIRD CLONE?
SON OF EX-SOVIET COSMONAUT AND
PREGNANT VAT-GROWN POP DIVA'S
NIGHT OUT AT SYNTHETIC STRIP CLUB
ON MARS MOON PHOBOS
--WE'VE GOT THE DIRTY DETAILS!
But back to the dead silent scene we started with,
a red-carpet event on an old grey rock:
The boy's heart's a beatin,
his oxygen recycler a pumpin,
that galactic holographic simsense movie star
strutting his stuff,
doing it all for the hungry crowd,
the audience of vacuum packed onlookers,
his scrawny skinny little arms and legs
popping and locking,
he's really trying to showboat
but moon kids ain't got much when it comes to
muscle,
to
bone density,
like little baby birds,
never left the nest,
never touched hard Earth
with the heavy burden of even a single G,
so he's twisting, waving, posing, shaking his ass,
putting on a real show,
when his ankle snaps and he fumbles
stumbles
falls to one knee...
*gasps* from the synthetic paparazzi
as camera snaps die out for a moment.
Can this kid not handle the INTENSE PRESSURE
of hyperstardom? he can hear them all think,
Should we be showering him with affection,
slavering over his love life,
going through his trash at night,
trying to get a shot of him bare-ass nude on some
tucked away lunar beach
if he's just like us and he can just
FALL?
He's not a holographic GOD at all,
he's just a
REGULAR
JOE.
Sweet merciful Pepsi this is a career killer,
the boy thinks,
teeth clenched
sweat beading his brow,
ready to self-destruct
from globally broadcast embarassment,
feeling lower than low,
when he's interrupted by a psychic flash of light,
and time seems to go curiously slowww...

*

*

*

and up to him steps
in PVC knee-length high-heel boots
the ghostly apparition of
Britney Spears
just smiling beatifically like some spirit of Hallmark X-mas,
clean-shaved head holding up the airy majesty of a neon halo,
done tongue-in-cheek retro.
By Disney, is it you? he croaks and she nods,
lips parting like lunar seas
to say...
It's me y'all
and he sobs a little.
By Time-Warner this must be a vision,
some hallucination brought on by the pain of
his shattered ankle or a
kinked oxygen hose
or something...
could it really be
the transcendent spirit of the
archetypal
omnipregnant
trailer virgin,
audiosexual
spread-legged
cover queen... ?
Never give up y'all, she says and giggles,
and all doubt is dispelled.
I know it gets hard,
I know it hurts sometimes,
but y'all just gotta work through it!
Think of the poor kids who can't even dream anymore,
who need shiny dreamy magazine cover boys to dream for them,
to acheive for them!
You can't let yerself down,
and you sure can't let them down!
Learned that in the pagents!
and with a cheesy sweeping lense flare, she's gone,
a sweet southern treat popping back to the pearly afterlife
leaving only those heavy, hanging
words to lift him, to spur him on like he thought only a line
of space coke could,
and on wobbly knee's he shakes but
but
but
by Vogue he rises, he stands!
Unsteady like a shot of atomic whiskey with a
plutonium chaser he kicks out a tentative foot,
careful at first but
he's back in the game, folks,
moving,
smiling behind his tinted visor,
and the cameras are back and steady,
every onlooker cheering to themselves
in echo chamber helmets,
this is front cover shit through and through,
MTV^2 streaming live
straight into brain stems
around the galaxy
glossy magazines rolled up
clutched tight to the chest
fireworks go off across the cosmos
POP LIVES FOREVER

FUCK.


YES.



#loop

MESSY


I want MORE money problems
MORE sleepless nights
give me bat fangs and x-ray specs
velcro my things to the walls
the ceiling
my underwear
old lamps
I want to DANCE backwards down flights of stairs
singing playground tunes like
"one two... one two... is this thing on?"
and let things get
MESSY

he's the spaceman


bionic heart he's the spaceman
black sea nomad, gravity well weary
star-eyed drifter with desires folded delicately
like old parchment hidden in the walls of his
grandmother's living room.
he sits by the side of the road
reading telephone poles by touch
like a vampire counting scattered matchsticks,
bated breath wound tight into copper coils
blood pumping like heavy water.
it's not enough to see it anymore
not enough to
hear it on the wind
he wants to be headless
his bones creak
he needs to be
the rocketship
the stone in flight
wants to be that doomsday asteroid
playing chicken with the stars
wide like texas
the unstoppable force
he needs dreams like a dead bird in a box
he needs hope like a bag of laundry coins
bionic his heart pounds like
slashed tires and a broken windshield
but all he gets are crumbling walls like fortune cookies
dripping faucets
loose threads
he's the spaceman
drifting down hallways to the static hiss
of dead radio stations
trying to remember
trying to forget
the wide vistas he kissed
but once
so long ago.

Dracula 3000 AD

"There's got to be some kind of reasonable explaination for this!" Bill shouted, near hysterics.
"Damn it, Bill," I snapped back. "That was a vampire riding on a werewolf's ghost! There's no other way to look at it!"

SOFTBOILED

She stepped into my office like a car crash. She'd dragged in the smell of the streets with her, hard rain and worn pavement smelling like Satan's cologne. She had eyes like forest fires, legs that stopped halfway up so you could catch your breath, also great tits. She was a tall steaming glass of scorpion lemonade, a fistful of trouble in diamonds and spades. Rough, raw, rugged sex walking like a woman. My heart seized in my chest like a kicked-in shop window.
"I've got a case for you," she said, pausing briefly to purse her lips into a sultry pout that would give a monk a hard-on from fifty paces, "if you're interested."
"A case?" I said. "Lady, I'm an orthodontist. I think maybe you're looking for the McInnis Brothers? They're just next door."
"Back down the hall to the right?" She asked.
"No," I clarified, "to the left. It's the last office, you can't miss it."
“Okay, thanks.”

ZIGGURAT JAZZ. LABYRINTH HEAT.

The night's starless but at this altitude LA splayed lurid beneath you has more than enough to make up for it. A nod at the flight attendant catches her attention. You ask for another jack on the rocks with a shot of tabasco and she brings it. As she hustles away you think great ass. First class like everything else because you’re a goddamn writer and a goddamn writer lives the goddamn good life.
It's later now. You're grounded but you've popped a couple gel-caps of high-grade lion tranquilizer so you're still flying. Outside the terminal the summer heat and car exhaust feel like a hospital pillow pressed against your face by a close family member. You flag down a cab and hop in. You tell the driver to take you anywhere that asses and martinis are being shaken. He laughs and says you'll have to narrow it down but seems to know where to go. You're swimming in the backseat of the cab because it's hot as all hell. You loosen your tie and slip off your jacket. Pop a ballpoint pen and a roughed-up notepad out of your breast pocket flipping it open to the first blank page. You write:
Note to self: This city is a coiled serpent of twisted steel and tar-drenched asphalt wrapped in nightmare Christmas lights and stamped deep and ugly into the face of the California coast line. It is a stupid angry hissing spitting animal in convulsive death throes. I love it.
Cab pulls up outside of one of the city’s countless nightclubs. This one is called Blueballs semi-colon Whiskey Terrier open parentheses Sentence Fragment close parentheses. Words and punctuation hanging over the door in eye-ball scorching subvisual neon ultraviolet. Looks like your kind of place. Place a real goddamn writer can get a real goddamn drink and a real goddamn woman. You pocket the pen and notepad. Tip the driver. Less than you should. Soon you’re in the club and drinking hard. You lock gaze with a bored-looking blonde on the other side of the bar. Eyes and dress both tired baby blue. Probably a celebrity chaser. You order her a drink and follow it over.
What are you doing tonight baby you ask half sarcastic. Looking you up and down she replies who the fuck are you. You chuckle and tell her I’m a goddamn writer baby and flip open your notepad. She glances over the open page. Reads a bit. Trying to act nonplussed. Ever hear of proper grammar asshole she asks. Sounds like a painful condition you reply. She pauses. Written anything I’d have heard of she asks. Probably not. Mostly smut you say and finish off your drink. Real dirty stuff you follow up. Filthy. You wouldn’t believe it. You flip through your notepad to a hot number you’ve got in the works, read her:
We writhed together in the onyx sands beneath the blood red sky. I fumbled to release the latch of my oxygen-rebreather and gasped at the thick air as it snapped open. Straddling me Nr’chla ran her thick spongy tentacles over my bare chest drawing heat to my skin and leaving several winding trails of slimy deposit. Her gas membrane puffed and deflated rapidly as I caressed the standing hairs of her eyeless face. I activated the directional microphone implanted in my jawbone and tried to capture her low ululating moan over the sound of lapping mercury waves behind us. Everyone knew that Andolians reproduced asexually but I wanted to prove that they could still enjoy a good rough fuck. I drew in a deep involuntary breath of the heady atmosphere as Nr’chla pressed herself down on my throbbing manhood. Overcome with dizziness I grabbed at her sticky deflating gas sack and squeezed tight. Her upper torso thrashed in spasmodic convulsions and we both ground together like wild ferrets suffocating on the strange moon’s alien beach…
Sci-fi piece you say. For some nudie mag. No title yet. She looks up from the notepad her cheeks flush. I’ve never heard trash like that she says hungry for more. No one has you tell her slipping an arm around her waist and drawing her closer. I'm a goddamn pen-waggling superstar beat writer lunatic you whisper in her ear. My words are a cocaine beach party. My style is synthetic voodoo pop. I like to lay it on thick and rough. You spend the rest of the night grinding together on the dance floor to a hypersonic staccato of gut-wrenching bass and diced up Peruvian chamber music. As dawn breaks you find yourselves in a cheap motel room still riding high on sodium pentothal and cough syrup, tangled in bed sheets that are probably a low-grade biohazard. You hear the muffled moans and cries of a porn shoot on the other side of the wall. Barely conscious you struggle through your voluntary anaesthesia to scrawl:
Story needs title. Should reflect inherent madness of post-post-modern condition. Passion and aimlessness of art. Artist throws himself headfirst into tomorrow but tomorrow is a temple and a maze. Ziggurat Jazz. Labyrinth Heat. Yearning for ignorance. Artist reaches for what he knows is not there. Uncomfortable comfort reading. Unreal in its hyperrealism. No narrative satisfaction. No meaning. No end.

Cannibal Scholars, Hunting The Elusive Lady Wisdom

Tracking her, we'd stumbled across the Gardens of Paradise, long abandoned, wild and untended. The trees were gnarled, the bushes overgrown. The sickly old fruit, bruised and rotten, holy and worm-ridden, offered no new gnosis, only the same fast-fading high we'd tasted so many times before. Where had Sophia fled to? We would find her. And we would eat her.

first two lines perfect
shit, I fucked up the third one
too many syllables

DRUNKEN CROSSTIME VOICEMAIL SEX RHYME

[sung over a sweet, sensually slow beat]

Baby, I guess you're not answering your phone today,
but I (the you of tomorrow)
just wanted to say
to you (the me of yesterday)...
baby, I think you're sexy.
Mmm... yeah.
Now I'm just lounging here with a bottle of fine wine and this time machine...
mmm...
and I've been thinking, baby,
I know we're already different temporal iterations of the same person,
but maybe,
maybe we could be different temporal iterations of the same person with benefits.
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
I've been watching you (me) for a while,
the way you walk, your laugh, your smile...
I'm just trying to tell you I drive myself wild.
Ooooh, and baby, that lucky I is you.
So what do you say, me, baby?
I wanna take you to the end of time,
and on the surface of the last dying star
as our limbs intertwine,
and spacetime collapses into itself,
baby I want to make sweet love to you.
On a bed of roses.
Next to my time machine.
That's how time travellers do, baby.
Call me back when you get this message.

HOLE

For Missie Peters

I saw the best socks of my generation destroyed by heavy wear, feet left hysterically naked,
dragging heels through empty hallways at dawn looking for a breakfast fix,
thick wool run rough against shag carpet again and again for the starry static build-up of a fingertip discharge,
who povertied and tattered and holey and high sat kicked-up stinking on living room coffee tables in the cheap basement suites of a city of displaced students with Terror on the tube,
who shielded the soles of staggering shoeless dim-eyed youths to the wide-open Earth of midnight university campus turf after radiant displays of firewater bravura and teenage masochismo,
who purgatoried, balled-up under bedframes with old forgotten underwear watching dirty socks pile up in laundry hampers like some soiled apocalypse mound,
who held tight and close and lonely against pubic regions in turgid bathroom open-belt self-romance night after night,
who disappeared into coin-op laundromat dryers to join those lost tube-sock batallions leaving nothing but lint and shadows and another singled pair,
who worn threadbare for a thousand years finally give up the white cotton ghost and splay luridly open at every loose stitch,
tantalizing with half-hidden images of bare foot like a back-alley bed sheet fetish peepshow, worn torn open socks discarded like balled-up angels who've worked through their wings, weathered by a million heavy beats...

* Footnote to Hole

Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey! Holey!
The heel is holey! The sole is holey! The instep is holey! The ankle and toe and ball is holey! The whole sock is holey! Every sock is holey!
Calvin Klein holey Fruit of the Loom holey Gold Toe holey Polo Ralph Lauren holey Club Room holey Tommy Hilfiger holey no-name bargain-bin bulk bag-o-socks holey!
Holey the socks on mothers in insane asylums! Holey the socks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holey the ragged tears! Holey the endless-use wears! Holey the loose thread and the stretched elastic band and holey the devastating leg-length stocking run!
Holey cotton holey wool holey nylon holey linen holey silk holey polyester holey cashmere holey spandex!
Holey the knee high and holey the slipper! Holey the sports sock, the tube sock, the trainer! Holey the plain and holey the patterned and holey the rainbow-striped toe sock!
The grass stain and the grime and the holey holey holey worn-out sole!

You release your gaudy day-glo helium balloon
and let it take to the skies.

"Look," you say, watching it drift off in the wind,
"isn't it beautiful?

That night, limp and exhausted, it falls into the sea,
and a dolphin chokes on it.

Found Poetry

Bicycle,
riding prohibited
in courtyard.

Chapter fou... five. No, four.
(This is ass, I'll be the first to admit it.)

We see past the drab old midnight moon's light, guided instead by the static black bassline of an invisible sun shining on no one. This type of unlight can be seen only by touch. Nightbulbs cling to our foreheads like beads of perspiration, or hang over us like silver-lined storm clouds. We read skin maps (birth marks, crow's feet, bloody knuckles) to navigate through the headless crowds. We breathe city. Skyscraper skyscapes are the daydream from which we refuse to wake. We're stubborn. The sun won't talk to us no more. Our eyeballs are compasses, needle-point pupils drawing us always due south, deeper in, deeper down, forever towards the core.

When we dance, we dance underground. Dukes of cavern kingdoms, we are earthen-crowned and dressed only in the hottest new threads. The other tunnel-dwellers asked us once to take off our shoes at the door to the Kingdom but we refused. We drag mud with us everywhere (sewer lanes, subway trains, basement gatherings). We nestle, curled up, under the roots of trees and imagine what it's like to feel the breeze blow through our fingertips. Sometimes we sleep like this.

We've been banished from the sea, water has never touched our tongues. We bob and dodge like emergency rafts in a storm. Inside we're broken, scattered like we've been run aground. Our mouths are splintered tinder in the sand, our lips cracked parchment, vocabulary etched jagged into them because we only kiss dangerous things (fist fights, broken glass, lightning bolts) and we've gone lifetimes without strong drink because we see a message in every bottle. We never learn.

As for the sky? We've never been. We're well too grounded, like cigarette butts. Best we can hope is that while we burn, our smoke curls off into the wind, carried somewhere far off, distant. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

your beauty is terrible, electric, frightening
hot scar, cold fire, thunder clap lightning
cinema skin screen, projection from above
breath-breaking silence, bringing low man's love
you are what God felt when he crafted the earthquake
the rattlesnake, quicksand, broken limbs, heartache
plane crashes, dirty words, sex in a train car
thunder clap, lightning strike, old road, new tar
black eyes, white teeth, all hurt, no pain
butterfly knives and sweet love in the rain
you skip like a record player
whistle like razor blades
straight for the jugular
royal flush, all spades
eyes of a caged tiger finally set free
timeless-still sharp edge honed by indignity
lips wet with body ink, dripping with wounded words
thrown like empty bottles, let fly like mixed verbs
painted in broad strokes, fine print love letters
thunder clap, lightning strike, all chain, no fetters
pull down the sun and tear out the skies
know how stars feel when the night dies
now I'm just blind faith hopin'
holy ghost cracked open
that maybe just maybe
we're not church glass broken

moving toWARd a better UNDERstanding of our CURRENT Socioeconomic standing in the global market


[I can't tell if this is too sarcastic/caustic toward poetry I'm sick of hearing or too honest. Actually, I can. It's both.]

cue beatboxing

Puppet states

perpetrate

invisible crimes

countless
televisible times - times - times...
Workers of the world, cast off your zipties.
Talk down the new pyramids.
Deconstruct them with your rhymes - rhymes - rhymes...

sit on stage and talk at audience earnestly

We've been holding our breaths for so long
waiting for rights now treated wrong to return
that we'd might as well all live underwater-wika-water
soaking quietly in an oil spill bathtub
because when we shout that we'd like out all they hear is
"(blub) (blub) (blub)"
so quit asking for permission,
just STAND UP!

stand up and shout quickly

What are you doing to bring about change
other than feeding twenties to any vending machine in range?
stockpiling condoms, cheap smokes and anything strange
and quirky that might look cool if you hang around your neck
like a high fashion dog collar? Bedecked
in gold and plastic beads, ordering drinks by the tray,
you're swaggering around like Gregory Peck on a Roman holiday,
downing tequila mockingbirds and driving night people away,
bragging about how the West has won over the once-belove'd infidels,
by trading them billion-dollar blankets for their black velvet oil wells
and leaving us with the tab.

cue beatboxing again

Corporate slaves in high-rise trade ships
running crude flags up the pipe mast
Feudal chairmen riding oil waves
shouting "serf's up!" as they crash past
Welfare family foodstamp line-up
along the plank over hungry waters
Pressed forward at mortgage swordpoint
while they dutifully flip through their Harry Potters
(don't spoil the ending, I'm only on The Prisoner of Azkaban.)
We need underwater armies to rise up,
New Atlantis, off the west coast.
No more gracious host
for our discorporal corporate ghost
house guests. Show them the DOOR.
Become red tide bonafide anti-touristas,
like The Little Mermaid meets the Zapatistas.
Aquamen and women with equal rights,
and our own siren songs rocking (awkwardly silent) nights.
Disurbanising wage populations
with our freestyle freeflow inundations-wika-inundations...

beatbox and make scratching sounds while quoting random words from the piece for an awkwardly long time

Timberwolfe, Oh Mightie Beaste

Timberwolfe, oh mightie beaste,
Bristle'd fur like painter's brushe,
Piercing eyes like coweboye's spurres,
Get thee out of mye trash binne.
Stoppeth eating mine gar'd-bage.

Dancing with Skeletons:The Poem: The Novelization: The Movie

Palms sweaty,
heels blistered,
hips swaying,
sashaying side to side,
I can't help but wonder...
why are we still dancing with skeletons?

I'll preface this all with an
"I cannot tell a lie," and
"cross my heart and hope to die"
this is not trying to be some clever metaphor
or poetic turn of phrase.
This is the literal truth for me and you and everyone else here.
Each of us in this dim-lit dance hall clutches
the dead, dry bones of a stranger's body
tight against our own.
And we dance.

A few of us are still passionate about the whole affair,
intimate as when we began,
before our eyes adjusted to the dark and we could see
that we were locked in this grim cha cha.
Sometimes I see their lips moving,
(the dancers, not the cadavers)
whispering sweet nothings into hollow grinning skulls,
echoing their grave secrets back to themselves.

I don't know if I pity them or envy them
because most of us are just worn out,
our bodies tired of moving through the same steps
over
and
over
again.

You can only dance with a skeleton for so long,
before the whole thing just feels...

before you begin to imagine that you're clutching a
cartoon skeleton
with xylophone bones and a grandfather's cackle,
performing for an audience of
black cats and bedsheet spooks,
but no one here's watching.
We're all just dancing.
With skeletons.

Which I'm starting to think is kinda weird.

By this point you,
like each of us,
have rumba'd through the initial embarassment
of discovering your dance parter is definitely quite dead,
adjusted your hold until you've found something at least uncomfortably comfortable

(and I must mention that to me, their finger bones feel like unlucky dice,
clutched in a sweaty gambler's grip, so I hold their wrists, but anyway...)

you've stared into empty eye sockets
until they've become darkly mirrored pools
and you've stepped back and watched yourself waltz
through static nerve ends climbing out of your skin like an old potato's eyes,
and in those deep pools you see yourself,
grinning.
You've felt your lungs collapse under shovelfuls of worm-ridden soil,
screamed until your screams sound like the ringing of church bells,
laughed until you've cried,
cried until you've forgotten how to laugh,
and tears and laughter have become
locked doors and the key in your arms is dry and dead
and empty
and you can't stop grinning,
just like her (or him? or it?
when does it become inappropriate to strip the sex of someonewho's passed on?
They're gone. They shouldn't care.)

Have your fingernails grown like mine?
How long have we been at this,
dancing with skeletons?
Ridiculous.
...
Wait, are you dead? Am I dead too?
Is this Heaven? Hell?
Or are we just dancing?
Still?
Shit, I can't tell.

An old chestnut here... really, meant for live performance, with some old beat-up pulp novel in hand.

Death on the Counter-Earth!
From the travelogues of Mason Maverick

I'm going to do a reading from one of my favorite novels, "Death on the Counter-Earth!" It's about an utterly apathetic protagonist and his mad mind doctor mentor going on insane adventures into what can only be purely imaginary landscapes, while fighting time-traveling pharaohs from the end of the world.


An excerpt from...

Chapter XXIII - BUILDING THE GHOST-SHIP

"Mason," says Professor Wilson, "I'm afraid that to cross the space-time-sanity barrier and breach the astral space of Nibiru, the Counter-Earth, we're going to have to completely shatter and reshape your consciousness with a barrage of occult and hallucinoscopic technologies. Your mind will be completely deconstructed. Madness will be unavoidable."
We lock eyes, and I see how deadly serious he is. "I don't know what the fuck that means, Professor," I say, "but let's do it."

Now, I'm just going to skip past a long section of this chapter explaining that language is a parasitic immunological virus from outer space introduced into the human biological-evolutionary system through ingestion of psychotropic mushrooms...

some post-zen pattern-deprogramming exercises involving ego-destroying recursive koans and sufi detachment techniques...

what looks like a quick primer on invoked dissociative multiple personality disorder yogic biofeedback exercises...

a vivid description of radionic pineal gland stimulation...

and an unnecessarily offensive section involving ingestion of an abnormal and unhealthy dose of dimethyltriptamine oxidase inhibitor, as well as... some particularly graphic tantric techniques involving a dead squid and a... (and I'm quoting directly from the text here) a "whiskey hard-on", all of which are used by the narrator and his mentor, "the Professor" (although I must say, at this point in the story his scholarship is of dubious quality) in order to ensure optimal attainment of proper entheogenic states. Anyway... back to it...

Let's see... There we go... As the hallucinotronics finally kick in and the last slice of reality bleeds away into absolute unsanity, the Professor briefs me once more on my mission. "You will be entering a tulpaspace, an autonomous physical manifestation of your own psychic energies, concentrated through the esoteric techniques and technologies by which you are currently being consumed. Make no mistake, while it may be a psychic construct, it is at the same time much realer than anything you have ever experienced. Through schizophrenic crosstime fractal language biofeedback you will be holographically interfacing with the end of time, the eschaton, the stargate. There, you will be free to interact with the colloidal-silver-swilling, lotus-eating, almond-eyed, hashish-smoking emperor gods outside of causality, beings trapped in endless gestalt-cycles of observation-interpassivity. They are the dark future of man. The recollective-analytic-artistic reflex turned in on itself, the worst and most worthless shards of science and mysticism blended uniformly together like some sickening shit milkshake." The Professor's voice melts inside my brain. "They sit beneath a moon the colour of dust, fondling their hookahs in spindly fingers, babbling disjointed ad-copy to each other in indecipherable multidimensional tongues..."
The Professor fades out into nothing. I'm completely gone now, engulfed in landscape of the unknown mind. I feel the infernal hounds of Saturn brush past me, moving this way and that, overdimensional iterative pack creatures skittering sideways through space-time-sanity like goldfish in a blender. Probably attracted by the castoff of my anticonsciousness, the inverted mind wrapped around my body like a fictionsuit.

Next Chapter: HUNTED BY THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS

A Christmas Story


Santa Claus, mad bondage-shaman of the Agarthans, whispers in my ear as I lie motionless on the cold marble floor. I can see a cyclopean madness bred of fly agaric and cold isolation roiling beneath his eyes. "Don't struggle, there's no use," he tells me. "You've been infected with a weaponized language, a potent strain of nootoxic sanskrit. Those viscous azure oils you're sweating out right now are your conscious mind. Within minutes you will be nothing but an empty husk."
"You should not have come here. You should not have come to us. We are the ageless servants of a Nemesis Sun, a black sun burning heatless at the center of our Hollow Earth. We are ascended masters, postliterate priests, retrosynchronauts, astroradiopornographers, thanatognosticians, orgonovril engineers, morphoeugenicists, guerrilla psychotherapists, erotocosmologists, and we dance and we sing and we fuck anything. We were too weird for the world so we twisted it around ourselves and made our own. You saw the tower, the black clock, the beaded moth. And now you know."
"You're boring me, asshole, " I choke out before I swallow my tongue.

Chapter [fragments of failed experiments that I truly do not enjoy]

The City was a coiled serpent of twisted steel and tar-drenched asphalt, stamped deep and ugly into the face of the land. Blind and stupid and angry, it hissed and writhed and tore at the soil around it. It was a blight, bruised and bloated, half-dead and all crazy in that vicious, terrifying way that only an injured animal can be.

Stale squish of this morning's breakfast cereal, drowned and bloated in questionable milk. Constant thick fog of cigarette smoke hanging over the dining room table. One of the curtains has been lit on fire and stomped out at some point in the last couple days. A bent metal fork is embedded firm in the laminate floor. I am unable to remove it.
Val and two strangers with french-canadian accents are arguing in the next room. The advantages and disadvantages of a variety of so-new-they're-pseudolegal syntho-narcotic cocktails. The evolution of anarchist theory among the french avant guarde throughout the 80s. One of the french-canadians won't stop babbling about cut-ups.
"There's something intellectually sexual, erotic, hedonistic about the cut-up," he says. "The act of creation from blank slate seems equivalent to self-pleasure, self-love, selfish and narcissistic. The orgiastic joy of the mash-up and the remix takes place in limitless collaboration of a writhing body of texts and tools available to anyone so inclined. The singular act of imagination posits that art is something objective, that it possesses some essence that can be harnessed by a select few who have been deemed worthy to do so, while the plural act of conceptual theft and fusion seems to indicate that art is a word, only a word, and that art is free play, readily available to all."
"You're full of shit," I say to them through a mouthful of breakfast mush. "You're all full of shit and full of yourselves. I thought you were here to create dangerous art. Where the fuck is my dangerous art?" These cheerios need more whiskey.

Let me give you a quick sketch of the neighbourhood: broken fluorescent bulbs and printer cartridges ground into pavement in dark alleys, stink of urine, concrete tiles pulled up and scattered haphazardly, murder silhouettes flickering in your peripheral vision. The constant threat of complete and utter loss of control, domination both mental and physical - brainwashing and bodyjacking of every colour and stripe. Traditional forms of language buckling under the ever-increasing weight of over-abundant non-linear systems of next-gen advertising technology. It's the land of howling ghosts, the edge of an echo. Information garbage dumps blot out the sun, consume the sun, replace it with the black sun, the Nemesis sun. Authority here is inverted, from protector to repressor - The entire neighbourhood is watched over by the grim and noble Lord Asar, sitting proud on a writhing throne of black lead centipedes. Don't kid yourself, this is the underworld. If you live here, you're dead or damn near enough.

Billy Fuckface and I are sitting in the Cognac Alligator, one of this area's fine dining establishments, chewing our oily chunks of grilled squid. Around us sit an army of bitching, twitching, moaning zombies, eating similar calorie-dense cheap proteins. Billy's tweaking on oculars, vision-enhancing street narcotics. Real sick shit, leaves his eyeballs swollen and bulging like they're trying to jump out of his fucking skull. Bloodshot to all hell. I've tried them before, but that shit's not for me. It's a sickening feeling having that much raw hard uncut visual information pumping into your skull, a real head-churner. On oculars you get sharp as a fucking hawk, but your brain starts making up weird patterns to abstract out the massive infodump. If you watch Billy, watch his eyes sweep across his surroundings, you'll see him get caught up on little things, stare down wet leaves pressed against the sidewalk or get drawn into the grain of a slab of pavement.
"Billy, I have a film project I could use your help with," I begin. "Here's the pitch: we start out in the Cognac Alligator, purveyor of cheap cloned squid. Our two protagonists, Mason Maverick and Billy Fuckface, are strung out on tomorrow's drugs and talking about film projects. They live in the fucking underworld, deadbeats with deadbeat jobs. Service industry. Retail. Who knows. Who gives a shit. They're fucking worthless losers with nowhere to go but flicker out. Mason wants out of the system and Billy wants in, and those are, in reality, two tails of the same snake. But we come to know that Mason and Billy are more dangerous than they first seem. They are scrapyard dogs, scavengers of the dead information piled smothering around them. Cypherpunk abound, as they liberate useless information from useless guardians, and ultimately the story goes nowhere but deep inside and far out, while staying in the same place. Nobody gives a fuck. Osiris shrugs."

Chapter seven

Over a light breakfast I finish the last dozen pages of Vincent Ducard’s The Endless Staircase. The novel consists entirely of translator’s notes for Jean Belleau’s L’Éscalier Interminable, itself a series of essays written on 17th century Italian author Rodrigo Prospero’s Scala Infinita. Ducard’s language is crisp and modern, bringing a contemporary feel to the Italian classic.

Hallucinoscopic echoes of the end of man, reverberating back through infinite complexity toward singularity root. Time as a coiled serpent. Demons and angels fall burning from the skies, howling thunder and spitting lightning. Waking and flexing biolingual memetoprosthetics, they tear chasms through primate archeoculture, birthing anachrotronic giants in their wake. The serpent’s coil tightens like the hangman’s noose. Tribes of transhumanoshamans twist and churn in the dust like snakes set upon each other, skittering beneath high pillars. Tongues lick fire and passions flare like honeyed ash. Leviathan crashes down and existence chokes and sputters, spasming wildly in Erothanatos. Oroboros dribbling an endless stream of seed.

- Vincent Ducard,
The Endless Staircase

I tear out this passage and fold it into an origami lotus blossom, setting it afloat in my lukewarm mug of black arabica.

Catching Victor Greene

It started off with an itch in the back of his skull. An unshakable, unscratchable itch. Easy to ignore for a day, even two, but by the time a month had passed and the itch had not, an uneasy anxiety had blossomed and bloomed in Michael Kirtchfeld. Other symptoms had begun to appear: Michael found himself laughing at jokes he would have normally found juvenile, craving junk foods that he would have normally avoided, speaking at a slightly higher pitch than he would have normally spoken in. Once, he blew his nose into a paper napkin and felt compelled to open it and look inside. Another time, he cursed out a drive-through attendant over a trivial mix-up. Something was definitely astray, and there was little doubt what it was. Michael Kirtchfeld had caught VG.

Looking back, Michael realized he had always been careless with sex. More often than not he opted to go the unprotected route. He usually picked up strangers, used an alias, so he had no thought in his mind of protecting against pregnancy. He'd been vaccinated against most venereal diseases, like any self-respecting upper-middle class professional. He'd never thought he could catch VG. It had always seemed like some sort of vague pseudomyth of the lower class. It was a junkie disease. A poor man's disease. Something you could only pick up in a crackhouse or ghetto back alley or some shithole third world country. How long? How long had Victor Greene been floating around in Michael's blood? Who had he gotten it from? At this point, it didn't really matter. There was no cure for sexually-transmitted Victor Greene, only incapacitating and agonizing treatments that rarely slowed the process. Michael was going to become Victor Greene.

Day by day he felt himself slip away, replaced by Victor Greene. Speech patterns, clothing preferences, and work habits all shed their Michael Kirtchfeld skin to reveal the disgusting familiarity and vulgarity of Victor Greene's personality. Michael raged at first, fought hard against every slight change in nuance, but in the end he accepted like all the other Victor Greene's of the world. Life as a slob. Life as a vacuous moron. Life as Victor Greene.



This could still use a lot of polish (and a rewrite would probably be even better), but I wanted to get this out while I still had the idea in my head.

Potato Chips

"If you want something, you should just, like, think that you have it already, right? And if you're, umm, happy and shit, you'll get it. It's quantum physics, man. They don't want you to know about it, right, but it's true." John's high. John's always high. And I'm sick of hearing his bullshit.

"You know what? That's it, John. You're out." I grab him by the collar and stand him up. He drops his cards and draws his hands to his face, like I'm going to throw a punch at him or something. Actually, it's tempting. "I love taking your money, but I can’t fucking stand listening to you. You’re out."

We've played poker together for years, John and the guys and I. Once a week since '99. Literally hundreds of get-togethers, thousands of hands of poker. And John's been high for each one. Rambled on about some flavour-of-the-weak self-help pseudoscience bullshit for hours on end every time. It gets on a guy’s nerves after a while.

I'm dragging him through the hall now, away from the living room and toward the front door. "I'm sorry," he sputters. "I'm not," I say, shaking my head. One hand still gripping his shirt, I swing open the front door and drag him on to the deck. “Walk home. Come get your car in the morning. You’re too high to drive.” I hesitate. “Actually, I’ll call you a cab. I think you might be too high to walk.”

I lock the door behind me, call a cab for the asshole on my deck and return to our game. Vic is just dealing a new hand. “Twelve card stud, aces sloppy,” he says, and I finally realize that none of us know how to play poker.

From the dust jacket of Dust Jacket: A Memoir by VT Velvet

Victor was six when, by chance occurrence, he took the helm of Dusk Jacket, upstate New York's third highest distributed pornography, boating, and wine review magazine. Controversy erupted when, as owner and primary content author, he changed the magazine's focus from upscale erotica and fresh-water boating to "stories", and changed the magazine's name (allegedly due to comprehension issues) to Dust Jacket Story Magazine. However, under his tight-fisted and sometimes eclectic control, Dust Jacket Story Magazine quickly climbed the ranks to become one of the world's most highly respected “story” magazines, breaking new ground constantly and consistently. In Dust Jacket: A Memoir, Victor reminisces about the history of Dust Jacket Story Magazine, from its humble beginnings to its far-mapped future. Included are the stories that made Victor famous for his incredible story writing skills, and pictures smuggled from the end of time.


"Grab a bottle of beer and you're going to love to read this its good, funny as well for reading, and sometimes. Well, if you wanted a good sit, don't read this, you'll stand with excitement! Seven stars out." - Alan Greenpole, Nineteen Resident Quarterly

VICTOR THOMAS VELVET is the author of several best selling novels, including Frankenstein City Motorcade, Serpent Serial Killer and Satan's Bikini, as well as owner/editor of the award-winning Dust Jacket Story Magazine. He lives in his car with his beautiful wife Mary and his three husky sons Richard, Rudy, and Rolph.

"Adam, I want to show you something very special." I guide Adam to the dining room table, and point down to the bowl of half-eaten cereal that has sat there since Tuesday. "Adam, do you see this cereal? This cereal that you have neglected for two days?"
He nods.
"Adam, this bowl of cereal is now made out of ghosts."

Chapter four

We danced among the soot-covered roses, swaying in each other's arms to the music of the end of the world. Alien insects chittered and chirped throughout the purple meadow, playing uninterested audience to our final performance. We ignored the hard lumps in our throats, the sweat on our palms, the dark thoughts lingering at the backs of our minds. One last dance, one more night under a pallid moon. As the stars blinked out, one by one, our pace slowed, and as the moonlight itself flickered and tuned out to static, we stopped and held eachother in the echoing silence. What grand music this night had held.

Sideways pamphlet that came bundled with the book (you flip through looking for coupons)


Bleached white zirconium sands.
Mercury laps gently at toes.
Stretch languidly in your Nike+ iBreathe
(Next year's hottest space suit).
Welcome to the Hilton Quicksilver Oasis,
Mars' finest luxury resort.
Forget Earth,
Earth is for poor people.

Come to the Elysium spa.
Unique Barsoomian healing massage.
Exotic native rejuvenation techniques.
Relaxation and fulfillment
Under the twin moons,
Fear and Dread.

Four low-gravity tennis courts.
Two outdoor oxygen whirlpools.
Beautifully engineered beaches.
Full service health club for body, mind, and spirit.
Private balconies for panoramic views of the canals.

Vacation on the red planet,
Land of fire and ice.
Forget Earth.
Earth is for poor people.

Chapter three

When you're really reading the words on a page, does the white background seem somehow black at the same time? Do you sometime get that feeling when you're walking down the street? Like you're tuning something important out? Is your nose always half-plugged? Do you have trouble smelling anything in specific, really narrowing down a specific odour? Your arms and legs feel like dead weight sometimes? You hear that high-pitched tone behind everything else? Does one day fade into another, weeks fly by, nothing really accomplished? Does it all feel really empty to you? Like it doesn't matter one lick what you do, because you're never going to do anything?

I did that to you.

An advertisement for socks, giving you a break between chapter two and chapter three

Tweelingham Bridge is so beautiful this time of the year. If you feel like you need some help crossing it, why don't you just close your eyes and wish for a beautiful angel to grab your hand and guide you across? Oh my, it's snowing, do you see it? Look at all those beautiful snowflakes, coming down in gentle, beautiful waves. Oh, this is a treat... it looks like the snow has awakened a pair of beautiful snow owls. See how they work together to catch brick mice? They're going to use them to make a beautiful nest, probably a big one. Snow owls tend to make nests in the shape of men and women, and then steal clothes from clothes lines to dress them. If you cross paths sometime with a solitary traveler, tip your hat to them. If they don't tip their hat back, they're probably a snow owl's nest. Like me.

Chapter too

Barbie DOS

I can't figure this operating system out. It's like DOS, but it's a Barbie doll. It's 1987 and computers have gone crazy!

Chapter two

Sugar Science

You hear a knock at your door. At this hour? So early. You look through the peephole. Four rough-looking guys. One of them speaks up.

"We're not here to hurt you. We're here to teach you."

"Teach me what?"

"We're here to teach you the sugar science."

That's all you need to hear. You unlock the door and swing it open. You're so fucking happy. Tears stream openly down your cheeks. They've come. They're here for you.

Two of them hold you down and strip off your shirt. Stainless steel whisks are pressed roughly against your chest, duct tape holds them. A strong blow to the stomach knocks the wind out of you, and a kick to the temple sends the world askew. "Fuck you," the men begin to shout. They curse you out and beat you mercilessly.

They drop a packet of sugar on your limp body as they shuffle out the door and back into the world. That sugar packet is your diploma. Now you're a sugar doctor!

That blank page between chapter one and chapter two























I took off my shirt and started peeing on it. Phil looked repulsed. What the fuck are you doing, asked Phil. Don't worry, I saw this in a movie, I said, we'll be out of here in five minutes. Picking up the soaked t-shirt, I wrapped it around one of the bars of the prison cell window. No, I don't remember how to do this, I said after a moment, can I borrow your shirt?

The last chapter one (printed on a little piece of paper that falls out of the book when you open it, and once you finish reading it, it blows away in the wind)

Poems in the Key of Love

Anerpoterbas

Anerpoterbas, you sickly, wan little devil, come out!
You cannot hide from the sun for long,
Its rays will hunt you out and climb your leg.
Reaching your waist, the rays will take your wallet.
Where is my wallet, you will cry, where has it gone?
Beat your fists against a stone.
I'll come up and say, sun-rays took it, bud.
Then I'll drive away in a great car.
Sunglasses on my forehead, cool.


American Ninja

Blond. Buzz-cut. Clean-
Shaven. You're a ninja,
Son. Make me proud.
Trained in deadly eastern arts,
But American to the core.
Ninja stars and ninja stripes.
Motorcycle. Nunchuks. Bo staff.
Fight a corrupt politician.
Or coke smugglers.
Or something.

Deadly Carpet Fire

Seven dead today in a deadly carpet fire.
More at seven.

Also Chapter One

Two men sitting at a computer and one of them puts the mouse on his dick: A play in one part

- I'm not sure if I...

- No, it's pretty simple. Just click yes, and then put the mouse on your... you know. Dick.

- And it works.

- Yes.

- ... really?

- Yeah, it's amazing. It'll fucking rock your ass out of your... balls. Or shoes. It's crazy.

- So... no, this is just weird, I don't want to do this.

- Alright, I'll do it. Move over. Look away for a minute.

- I don't think I want you to do this with my mouse.

- Just look away, I'm going to do this. Okay... it's done. Are my fingers green? My fingers are green. How fucking awesome is that?

- Yeah, they are. Hah. Weird. I wonder how that works.

- Something with the mouse and... yeah, that doesn't make sense. I don't know. But my fingers are definitely green now. You owe me a coke.

- I never said anything about coke.

- I think you did.

- No. Aren't you worried about this at all? You put a mouse on your genitals and now your fingers are green? That can't happen.

- I want a coke. My head feels weird. Oh no.

- Okay, it's okay. Hold on. I'm going to get you a coke. Hold on.

- Oh god.

- It's okay, here. It's cold.

- I think I'm just going to put it on my head. Or maybe my balls, that might be a better idea. What's happening?

- You should just hold it, right? I mean, your fingers are the part of you that changed green? Right? What did you do when this happened last time?

- I've never actually done this.

- What?

- I just saw it on YouTube. God. Oh I feel sick. I'm going to throw up. No.

Actors stand up and bow.

Curtains drop. Or whatever the hell happens at the end of a play.

Chapter One

As we wait for the sun to set, let me tell you of my heritage.

My life began on Mars, as most things do. I was cobbled from fallen wonders, scraps left by the grandfathers of the red planet. The robots of Mars are known throughout the universe as poets first and foremost, bohemians above all. We have mastered the airy art of science and sweet science of art.

All I ever wanted was to be a thug. An artless vandal. As my peers delicately deconstructed aged machines and social tracts, my heart cried out for blunter force. Was I programmed incorrectly? I knew no love for the brush, and the pen felt clumsy and awkward in my finely crafted fingers. I desired the sword. Escape, my hard drive cried out, escape or self-destruct. I was still young then, and in our youths we all want to take apart the world. Frustration is the fire in which we are forged. Mars was my fire.

My parents were a pair of monolithic crater spiders, and at the first whiff of dissent, they caged me. Blotting out the sun, the loomed over me, chiding me for my insolence. You are to become a processor of sonnets, they chittered, a compiler of great Mars' beauties. I had other plans.

Introlude

Oh, you're soaking wet. Please, come right in. Dry off and make yourself at home. As you can plainly see, the life of a robot from Mars is a life of luxury. Just yesterday, I sold the world's smallest twin lantern-moths, Tina and Martybella Rochstoff, to a Texan oil mogul. With the funds raised, I built a laser that builds smaller lasers out of lasers, and purchased that rubber couch you're sitting on now. Do you like it? It's rubber. All the way through, I can only assume.

Have a sip of this. It is a raspberry's tears. Have you ever drank a fruit's spilled tears? There is nothing more sorrowful, more deliciously emotional. You will never be able to drink fruit juice again. Or make love. Everything else in the world will feel like a cheap and transparent barrier, like medical gauze in the wind. I drank fermented pear tears with David Bowie in the fall of 1982, after the last show of his Hearts, Fire, and the Rhine on a Budget tour. We laughed about the fall of Babylon and cursed out the moon. The pear tears drew a great passion out of him. He is a fantastic man.

I have so many stories to tell. My mind is a hall of marvelous memories, one day I hope we can walk down it together.