The Sinners Choir

The Sinners Choir was begun in the Summer of 1998 by the trio of the Reverend Dale Butterworth, Mr. Aleph Null and I, Mssr. Bondurant in my rooming house on a dead end road. Though only the first three corpses were penned with Mr. Null, the Reverend and I continued onwards with in the same spirit many a night in the kitchen over #90 James Street. It was to become a 13 story series of losers, murderers, hitmen, ne'er-do-wells and comedic and tragic heroes. A modern day history lesson set in time periods a thousand years apart that links all of the sinners in the choir by one common thread. They are all tragic losers who could have cut their losses while they were ahead, but instead, chose to go on past the breaking point and try for the ineluctable infinite.
Begun and finished on my manual Royal typewriter with a fading ribbon, The Sinners Choir was finished up March 2001. The entirety of the Sinner's Choir was written using the same method as was used at the beginning. The first writer would sit and write a line or two or three and then pass off the seat for the next writer, who would read only the last line or so of what the previous writer had written. Using that line for a jumping off point, the writer would let his imagination and ingenuity and instinct guide him to where he believed the writer before was going. It was a method that was amazingly capable of producing self-contained and somewhat linear stories that held a theme of whatever was in our subconscious. Only once did we redo a previous story that we had rejected, "The Smoking Priest."
The Reverend and I went back a final time for another story possibly to begin a new Choir in December 2002, but it was as far as the second series was to go. I have presented it in the purposes of memorialising the Reverend, who passed away in September 2006. While it was a far rougher story than we had previously written, I believe that it was the start of a new form of corpses... longer and more involved. I have taken the liberty of finishing it in the spirit that I think that both the Reverend and I were thinking about that night at his new house and on his manual typewriter. If we had continued in this vein, there would have been another series, but there was not. Perhaps, this is fitting that there could only be so many sinners in the world all singing a similiar song, hesitatingly, slightly off key, but all finishing together.
B.P. Bondurant October 8, 2006

Mary Ellen (Summer 1998)

In the Summer 1998, the very first exquisite corpse in "The Sinners Choir" was written by the three of us. It was a hot day and influenced the general feeling of malice, murder and animal buggery. Little did we know what were truly beginning that late summer afternoon with the story of "Mary Ellen."

Mary Ellen

The afternoon was hot and sultry. The boys decided to go for a ride. They drove out past the river. It stank in the late afternoon too much run off sewage from the nearby trailer parks and pig farms. The methane made the boys a bit testy. They drove by a slack jawed man carrying a pig underneath his arm. He chewed slowly on a hunk of chewing tobacco. He spit and a long quivering drop hung from his lip and he wiped it off with the corner of his red flannel workshirt.
Decidedly, an appropriate thing to do. After long bouts of dizzying memories, he attempted to forget; to forget the blood, the cigarettes, the expense of his LL Bean red flannel shirt (that he had gotten at a bargain actually) the whole thing. As his thoughts welled in him so did the realization that the body was still propped up on the chaise lounge. he would have to go back and clean up a lot of loose ends, especially with Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen was a problem, because her name wasn’t mary ellen. It was something else entirely. Regardless of what you may think, his name is svengali mustafa amal. The erroneously named mary ellen was in reality a sheep. he fingered the blade of the knife almost sensually. Svengali had quite a blade fetish. Yes. Baaaaa baa mary ellen, daisy fuelgado the lolita sheep. Underaged, soiled and a smooth lay. Svengali had been buggering livestock for many years. Mary -ellen-daisy had to go: it was this simple. Baaa baaa baaawhat is the cause of thunder? His name changed chiast cakky. Herga. His name was chiasm uttered upon chiasm. He fingered the blade of the knife almost sensually.
It glinted. He twisted it between the two pressed edges of his thumb and forefinger. He drew forth a bead of blood. It trickled down his finger. He lifted the finger to his lips. It wasn’t like blood should taste like he thought. Still he wanted some more. The clock in the hall struck eleven and he walked to the front door. It was almost time. Out in the street the air was very dry and tasted of wood when he licked his lips. Why did he want to lick his lips? He remembered the blood when it ran down his fingertip. The street led straight ahead and he walked by the window of a butcher’s shop.
An assortment of meats hung in the window and he looked down to his fiungertip. he raised it to the glass and smeared it down the front as he stared at the meats hanging by hooks.
He finished the last of his beer. He walked through the butcher shop, toyed with the idea of one last dance with those fine cuts of meat and closed the door behind him. His name was no longer “Metzger.” Walking past the alleys of his youth on the dingy and bleak expanse of this meat packing town, he began to weep.
“No longer anything” was his new moniker he thought. At the bus station he prepared once again for the ritual.
He was tired at this point. The murder/ buggery drained and pained. Something in him popped. Tarbubble. The strains of a mariachi band yawned painlessly into the outside air. The stench of bums and piss will remind us, he thought. Gravity will always remind us always.
slash
slash
slash
Polly anna the sheep is long gone, maybe. Maybe svengali the lonely word that follows us from bus to bus and calls to us from the baggage holds from city to city like a mocking sexual spectre carved by the teeth of a sadistic angel killed no noe no no no one we can’t be sure of a damn thing can we is myrtle dead, buggered, all three?
Blood on the floor and sweat too choke. bill the rapist of livestock and thresher of pastoral virtue is indeed dying his atonement is made and true.
TRUE. TRUE.
He rots in the station, muttering, mary ellen, waltz with me.

carlo (Summer/Fall 1998)

Summer/Fall 1998. Yep, another corpse influenced by the heat. This was written at night time if I recall. Perhaps the reason for the even more sinister carlo. Written with the Reverend and Mr. Null.

carlo

Carlo took to murder like a guinea takes to cadillacs. And cadillacs didn’t float he thought. The coast went by in big blue blur as he thought of sea horses that did float over the waves, perhaps the cadillac would be floating with them by now along the bottom. The corpulent fellows desired exploded moments of awe. Several of the witnesses to the event learned in time to resist the desire to be scunnered when approached by missionary elders of Mormon. It was in the obese action that the problem lay, how could one ever forget three telepathic anuses chanting out, “succumb to the clap, clap, clap.”
boop boo ppboop! the anuses eeeee went. boop.
He thought of cartoons. garters. bosco. ah god get them out of my fucking head. bzzzz. Taunting anuses. What a couple a fucking assholes. The talking asshole duh d booop is de rigeur in this fucked-up krazy kat landscape. Everyone’s got an asshole. here in the land of nod, carlo duly noted, everyone has an opinionated asshole. You ofay muthafuck, they gurgled. get the fuck out of nod. Assholes.
Assholes, now all at the bottom of the sea, Carlo knew. He had sent them there. Sent them there with apopapopapop from his .38 and then severed the brake line. no way now to keep 3200 lbs. of the finest Detroit steel that was ever shit out of the bowels of some godforsaken Pittsburgh refinery from meeting with Neptune at the bottom of the sparkling bay. Yeah, GET out of nod you fucking yuppie touristy fucks. When they had laughed at his broken nose in the simple white diner that morning they weren’t expecting his bandaged blood stained nose to lead the way to their BelAire mansion on the hill. Were they laughing now? No, he thought. He laughed, danced,, did a jig, frolicked through the twelve foot square 25 cent a night flophouse, laughed some more, nearly tripping over his own feet, nearly pissing himself with the thought that you can’t laugh with your lungs full of salt water brine.
Violence time, violence mind, laugh. Good day for a run he thought. I seem to remember a man who was hiding by a tree yesterday as I was strolling along eating that dill pickle. I’m going to go back and look again. I despise being spied as I’m in thoughts. It is like eves droppers, sneaky, brazen dirty things that they are, destroy what is beautiful by design. I want to be alone in my dragonian glory, flogging the slaves so proudly upon my floating gallows heading into the past, my destiny time. Laugh with me and we will travel across those seas. To far off distant lands where the maidens sing and cavort through golden waving lines of wheat and corn singing of our exploits. Yes, oh how I will laugh, laugh even now while thinking of the many men’s torsos that have been split wide by point blank ten gauge solid slug shotgun rounds as wide as those milky thighs will spread before us as we march through those golden waves of grain and then of the blood spilt before us on our hands and faces, to lick it from our lips, the salty sweetness of the colour of red, the colour of conquest, desire, fear and lust, blood and sweat, love and cleaving.
The color of white, forget. blank. tabula rasa. carte blanch, the promise of violence with no hangover. rewards. no risk. blue, blew, bloo, massa bloo. like the road maps on the mealy and milky backs of a thrice-dead corpse. days. empty vein. bleached dough. gutters of reddy red red gore.
Even in his perversions, carlo wasa sa sa a a patriot.
A patriot. But what does that mean? remaining true and faithful to one larger idea and remain true and unswerving he did. Fuck me over and I will fuck you twice. He fingered the carved wooden handle of his .38 that snuggled neatly within the breast pocket of a salvation army suit. At least I will put two solid neat slugs in your skull... the only two things that would faithfully remain in service to Carlo. Spinning truly and faithfully...

THE RAT’S HALO (Fall 1998/Winter 1999)

From the Fall of 1998/Winter 1999. A third in an installement of corpses that the Reverend, Mr. Null and I wrote together. The series was initially almost to be called "The Rat's Halo" before "The Sinner's Choir" was agreed upon. This was also created with the help of a mysterious unnamed female accomplice of Mr. Null's. She fit in perfectly with the Choir.

THE RAT’S HALO

Plock. Plock. Tennis shoes made plock sounds. kids ran through the swollen gutters unaware of the rat in the storm drain. Not a bad place to be he thought. Not bad. For the three months he lived on second street the only thing to come down the gutter that was even slightly alarming were bicycles. he didn’t like bicycles. They were quiet. Their silence reminded him of the smug solitude that people, two legged people, seemed to carry about them. They didn’t talk he thought, they just hum. A weird sing-songy hum that was mesmerizing, deceptive. Their achievements must be a bi-product of some telepathic form of talking. He despised their silence, their ways. They wear their smug telepathic smiles like pretty halos.
Like the pretty halos that he once saw as a child, young, virginal, glowing yellow, gold gilted heroes frozen in a stance of pious humility and strength. He had walked hand in hand with his father down the cathedral hallway leading towards the altar, his father with a finger put to his lips and a shush not quite escaping his pursed lips. He walked neck craned upwards and he heard the strains of choirs, an organ moving upward the sounds seemed to travel to space, like the launch of the Sputnik rocket he had watched on tv, but instead of the roar and exploding destroying rush of combusting liquid oxygen careening downwards in scarlet clouds (he imagined, for the tv was a black and white set, the clouds were grey like the clouds of his dreams) but instead of the rocket plumes he now imagined the high low rumbling filling his ears propelled by the gold of haloes, concentric circles each emanating from one another spiraling downwards to the altar.
Too bad that was all over. I had moved on, moved away, went back home to see little Ricky. Oh ricky, poor little kid. After the accident I couldn’t bear to look at his face, his bandages, his scars, those awful dark hollows of his eyes, like that kid on the subway I saw with no eyes, just smooth skin where his eyes should have been. Yeah, I could ha, yeah I gave him a dollar, but ricky, for fucks sake, that was my flesh and blood. I gave him more than a dollar, sometimes. Most of the time I just gave him the back of my hand. And that two dollar whore who claimed I was his father, who knows, fucked my share of women. Ricky could’ve been the bastard child of more than a dozen men. me and my old man could both be the brat’s father, that would’ve been the only thing we had in common.
I remember a little talk, that’s what the old pervy called them, from my youth:
“Quit slouching stand up stand up you sad sacked shadow of a man. Let me tell you a little something. I want you to stop stuffing those little faggot cadburys into your portly sinning little slack mouth!”
I stared at the brass buttons on his uniform. crunchies.
“I’ll have you know that they were analyzed, son. They were analyzed- chemically, and it’s common knowledge among politicos and scientists that cadbury chocolate has been specifically and ingeniously engineered to turn people into fags. If you don’t believe me, go ask an Englishman.”
I almost choked on my can of Tab- did he know?
The French Revolution made strange dead bed fellows, after all, it was a long time ago. He knew, and he always knew for he was my ghostly doppelganger. I called him ‘Geoerg.’ On that day I dropped my can of saccharin beverage when I realised that Georg, that filthy rat had been skulking about in the gutter, the deep filled curb of my mind...AGAIN. We go back, way back. In 1805, I was a statue maker trying to make it into the big time of Parisian Craft society. The trick, the big splash into the upper echelon of this life was in defeating the impossible. Impossibility in my trade was the halo. you see, the halo was the one component of the angelic sculpture genre that has mystified the artisan and annoyed the patron. It never looked and still doesn’t look right. It’s that stupid stem. The suspension of disbelief fails at that point. Geoerg. Geoerg Pschorr was a hack Germanian bowl maker and seven years old. He does, as he did in the past steal. He brewed beer for awhile but was such an ultra-nationalist that his countrymen killed him. He lives life now as a ghost, sometimes as a seven year old ghost, but still a ghost. In his time he has robbed me of ideas, secrets, aged friends, every fifth beer from the six-pack. he is a rat, a dirty child, a dead rat.
A sudden clatter of wood against a linoleum floor. Clack. He paused. Stopped in his tracks. The sound of chainsaws reverberated off the aluminum of the trailer walls. While his father was out running a skidder for the pulp mill he was home alone. Now eight was not young for being home alone watching the on again, off again reception of the tv, its static bouncing like a nervous fly off a lamp shade in the living room, being only eight was at a point in his life that being alone gave him a deja-vu feeling sitting on the threadbare sea-green carpet that made him need to visit the bathroom often.
He was padding down the hallway of the trailer when he heard the clack of wood. it was like someone had slapped the end of a two by four against the floor. His father? Too early for him to be home yet. He ran back to the kitchen. looked up at the clock. 11.42. In the A.M.
He slowly walked back, bare footed, to the hallway. Again. It came from the far end of the hallway. he had to pee. He ignored it. Walked past the bathroom. Walked past his father’s bedroom. The door was closed. The clatter came again as though someone had thrown dominoes upon the floor, like the old man down at Dailey’s one day before he arose unsteadily from his chair and began to curse at first slowly and then increasingly incoherently in another language. The dominoes lay at his feet like dead insects, feet up, scrambling like hands to heaven asking, pleading.
He pushed open the door. It was light, made of plywood. A deer’s head hung on the wall. Glass eyes. The clatter came from the corner, behind the dresser. he pressed his hand on the upper drawer and looked around its corner.
A rat trap. A rat, neck crushed in the steel bar. Glass eyes. Blood spittling in the corners of its mouth. bright red. Spittle. Yellow haloes appearing over its head, struggling, clattering, wood on linoleum.
Poor fucking rodent, fucking rodent, little rat, harbinger of death, furry grey sewer rat. No sense, no thought, dying on my tiles and all I can think of is you, uh, your innocence, and yet, there you are. I’m drinking the last of my montezuma tequila, gotta go to the liquor store. Ray should be there tonight. Ray back in the day we’d sit for hours in the jungle waiting, wit, waiting for the ambush that never came, off in the copter to safety. I never saw combat, saw men better than me have their limbs blown off. Kerplow... Blood and they had the honor. I had the story to tell, while they went home to distant, apathetic families. Yeah so, this rat, this nothing, I can’t stand to see think anymore, grey greasy. I’m eating sausage and this rat trapped, neck snapped, glassy-eyed, tongue protruding, invading my senses. I’ve had enough, too much of the sauce, too much of this small town, so rat, you’re lucky, even though you can’t see it... Blood on the floor, bitch Yvonne is gonna kill me. “Can’t do anything, good for nothing.” yeah, I’m a fucking neer do weelll, neerdowell, naarwaal. arctic one horned fish.
lazy whore.
And that’s pretty much and more or less what it’s all about isn’t it? Fishing nets and the carving of live tuna. sorry charlie. we needed a scapegoat.
I could say that I’m sorry, but I’d be lying. You will be known as a sad fuck who couldn’t grasp the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Dative and nominative. I’m a native. sssad fucker. hahahahahahahaha. heheheheheeee. you and me. he and she. I will head home and lie. know one will know. I alone will smile and dine upon the image of you panting and bubbling blood from your blowhole. I lick, I’m thirsty. Sometimes I’m sad. No one will know, or estimate the gnawing of conscience that may eventually put me down. disguise the limit.
sorry charlie.
we neededs
we need ed
we needed a scapegoat.
it’s sunny outside in hel l.

leather gloves (Fall 1999)

The very first exquisite corpse that the Reverend and I wrote as a duo without the help of Mr. Null. The two unnamed brothers form a core for later characters in the sinners choir.

leather gloves

leather gloves!
(an X-file of sorts)
19:27 PM Two men talk of the disparate relationship between laundry lists, magnetic poetry and films. they were brothers once and called the city of hamburg their home. But, that was a long time ago. Now they talk about beer, silently across the space of their semi-conscious fetal stirrings, crouched in cheap truck stop shower stalls or dingy bathtubs quite apart but so close in that moment... eyes closed, backs hunched and head tucked to the chest awaiting the moment of sleep, together they transmit the time. How does one know that the other was thinking of the fire storm the day the tornado rumbled through his house like an unholy flock of B-29s on a milk run of revenge... a time they knew once as children is repeated again and they just know? They haven’t seen each other in about thirty one years. the tornado happened two and a half months ago. Last night in their dreams, they were in a cobbled stone street. At 6:27 AM, this morning they wet their pants, simultaneously.
And looked down to one another, the dark stain already gaining ground like a pre and post-world war one map of europe. This was nothing new to them for they had gone through their father’s leaving every morning for work duty obligation in the fatherland’s steel and munitions tooling factory. Every morning off and out the door into the rose coloured sunrise of a booming northern european city. It was true. everything was increasing in size, including their world and the world around them. One day it was Hans and his marbles in der Strasse and the next it was finding the copy of le monde strewn in their father’s morning trash or was it the local socialist haymaker? Whatever it was it was increasing their world exponentially even as they still found the need to release by running helter-skelter down the street and upsetting the cafe tables spilling espresso on the laps of patrons.
It was electricity in their pants, it was bim-skala-bim every night on benzedrine down the pally, it was silly hats and two days sleepless on cross-state drop-offs. Tom Foolery was the wag of the moment, the rapscallion who punctuated the night air like pungent root vegetables falling asleep in the shower on hot summer nights after forgetting to jump from the lush foliated banks by the old bridge once again.
The other day he threw it (you know, IT!) under Tom’s reaper in the field when no one was looking. He remembered bed soars and the paint peeling off the walls of the old farmhouse bedroom. It must be some malady, he thought, some god- forsaking thing he had picked up in Panama. he delivered, foolishly, a firestorm of his own devise on some unsuspecting peasants and it made him weep. Sorrowful friend of old Tom, now a regretful vegetable of a different sort. he was speculating on some land in the mid-west, tornados aside he thought he could make a fresh start of it there. London in his late teens, covert ops in Central America, and now a permanent vacation, retirement back in the states. a land he had never known, so very close to that brother. More stupid dreams?
More dreams of the Sahara? More dreams of a sun drenched second resort in the heart of the Algerian desert where cousins lived among the arabs and the foreign born foreigners who spoke the french language naturally as though it were not in actuality a fremdsprache to them, who were actually strangers to the brothers. But they were far away. In dreams of stone grey concrete and the freshly poured dreams of thousands, hundreds of thousands of, millions of Germans were being poured fresh into a new mold that was not based upon a foreign ideal, whether it be of art or land, property, patriotism. Except, “von Swing bis Bebop.” Those were some exhilarating exceptions. The plan went awry somehow. In the Kunst of the time we saw ushered in the degeneracy of warhol and “Punk” of the insane! Postponepost-punk dilemma boys are wary now and all I can say is This, “plan sibt kindern eine Chance?” for when forget it is after all, a silly Akte X. A file labeled x for forgiveness.

nasa (Fall 1999-Spring 2000)

Probably another Fall 1999 story. The first prototypical space agency story that blossomed off others. George another hapless innocent sinner involved in more than he should have been.

nasa

a panel glowed before him blinking lights on and off like the stars above him that he was watching. The nasa control systems asked him to submit to their blinking and screeching. That was the insane part, the screeching. And what it asked him to do. Sometimes as he sat and blinked he could hear the lights. Just like the lights of the stars above him on early summer nights laying out on the pilings of the piers, they sounded like seagulls in the the maine nights screaming as he watched the stars above him swimming in the tarlike roof of heaven slowly rising and sinking, submit to us, submit to the sea, to the endless pull and ebb upon marionette strings up and down before in slow motion endless bicycle pedaling of the feet and then a cartwheeling downwards. or was it up? Sideways? Don’t know. Mapless endless cartographies that even he, one of the best stellar cartographers of the northern hemisphere in the 20th century could fathom. Hmmm... fathom a nautical connection again, submit to us and our endless fathoms, sixteen nautical miles was it? Something like that far enough out of reach to be lost forever amidst the screeching blue, red green, yellow, white lights, blinking on and off. Was that a siren?
Squelched... from deep within this capsule, its all muffled and the silence isn’t really silent, its a labor. The insulating properties of cardboard have always interested me. Cardboard emits light from without, so its important to wrap it in aluminum and hook up the light-brights on the inside... its a SPACESHIP! Emit and admit. Admit the remittance. Kill the Kaiser and put robert goddard on the surface of antarctica. lets dispossess some polarbears of their charity and good cheer. let me squelch you in sympathetic steamrollers on your bed when you are sick with the influenza. Me and the polar (bi-polar it turns out) bears are taking a ride to Werner vonBraun’s house in rustic Bavaria for tea and the final stages of the litebrite journey into tomorrows front parlor for mums love and biscuits. I wonder if Mrs. vonBraun will have marmalade and good biscuits and will tell us stories of her twin spinster sisters in far off South Africa, the news by dispatch can surely dispatch these rainy day play day blues, and chip away the dissatisfaction of wearing Buster-Browns for another year.
Even if they did get wet and soggy, AND sandy as his often did walking along the shore and kicking stones with a ploop into the water that he barely heard over the crash of waves and then he was looking far, far away over the water to lands that he had barely heard of much less imagined. But as he couldn’t imagine such lands as mauritania and checko-slovakia he turned increasingly to the depths of inner and outer space which he could well imagine. And to this day, George had a time with Phyllis at a cocktail party because he could not always imagine what those strangers did with their common time. Did they drink screwdrivers on a Sunday morning in bedsheets of silk and ruffled baby blue to remind them, if even unconsciously of Truman Capote? Was that it? If he put these wannabe immaculately dressed pooftahs into context then he could put up with their hahahas and blahblahblahs but now he could not imagine and the sound of the screeching lights came to him from a great outer world, a world that always caught him its claws into his mind as he dreamt and now the sirens (sirens?) erupted around him. Odysseus and his sirens fresh back from the underworld and the strange unknowable worlds around him as he half dreamt of his dead spirit guide and then he soared off into the sky, black all around him as black as the souls of the dead around him. the dead and the weightless in outer space. He was nasa. Nasa, nasa, it was all beginning to sound like a childhood rhyme.
The weight of my thought here on this lip of metal, the glass between me and forever nirvana is like saturnsday lint from the Fez of an Algerian market man on my tongue, the red of it in the eye of an envious greedy Ghost named Bill Lee. He laughs at me as I wee this time to the line and I caress this metal lip of mine, of wet perspiration, like captain Nemo’s ever plunging Nautilus of despair and shame down righteous leagues, twenty thousand or so. A zither broke its strings, a glass broke, my poppa kissed the mule and the locals were aghast in this: Mrs. V and an unholy host of the filthiest beggar mendicants, Cobblers, Egyptian Coptic assassins. Green jacketed napes stained and rambunctious, and her native astronaughts, we the boys, plunged from that depth to arrive on the cobbled street afar in this we were fifty years or so past and all at once ahead of that string she so laughingly calls TIME, she calls...
into the past and into the wholeness of the stars transcendence into that past. that was what was represented in that prescience of knowing how things would look like in our future and their past. It was an act of mind reading and strange insight. yes, George, his mother had said, we can see into the past and future if you look hard enough. George squinted and looked plenty hard. Until his eyes hurt from the strain and then he believed that he could see. yes, actually see on that hard wooded state of Maine pilings of the pier. And he was catapulted through those fathoms, those light years, those spaces, the fathoms of space and sea to stand on the edge of the pier and look into the black of the Atlantic splashing up and onto his Dr. Dentons, his toes squishing mightily inside as he could walk anywhere now. If there were an invisible staircase he could walk up into the heavens (and to God?) as surely as now he could walk into the mind of most of those party guests, his own landlord, his children and his own wife and perhaps most frighteningly of all, his own head and stand there on the piers and look into the blackness of his own unexplored mind as surely as Odysseus had looked into the looked into the land of the blind writhing wraithful dead and find Tiresus, the blind spirit guide awaiting him, albeit hesitatingly, not wanting to give him further insight into that black fathomless and unchartable area.
And then George understood the meaning of the secret word, nasa.

angus (Fall 1999-Spring 2000)

From probably the Fall of 1999, as it seems a fall time story. One of the many illustrious ancestors belonging in the sinner's choir, "angus" was one of the longer ones that just the Reverend and I wrote, but one that fit together seamlessly.

angus

Corn and full moon bloom. It is a disparaging cry in the shadow of the manor house the servants aroused by scent and sound of an unfamiliar mass across the wooded lots and still farms. A light bristling across the stalk tops and the lowing of the cows changed to a plaintive lonely cry. The revelry, the mass was in honor of the passing of one of their kinsman. The unholiest of the rebel clans were mourning the loss of one of their own.
He was a man without fear nor hostility within his heart. He was the most feared and hostile man within the clan, on the battlefield or in the fields of corn. To every man he knew, he was not to be crossed for he would cross words as well as sword. he had no hatred within his heart, it did not gather soot as a dirty chimney would to one day betray its owner and catch fire in an attempt to burn itself clean. His was a clean burning fire that burned white hot white heat that burned away everything leaving no traces of whatsoever that began the original spark.
It reminded one of the spark oft considered the terminus for thought, for all his remaining thoughts, the spark of the flint that would light the fire from which the brand was heated and placed upon his face marking him the criminal. The criminal heir, a bastard would survive the torturer’s craft to spawn his own hapless brood of connivers. It is from this lineage that we find the unfortunate countryman, tethered about the ankle of their lord, hiding from the dark revenge. Hidden within the faces of their gods, their hatred lurked within the shadowy crevasses of their scowls and within this hatred lay a dark smouldering coal. it was within this coal that lay the dark recesses of charcoal black resentment. But like the white flax of corn silk, Angus’ anger burned far brighter. He first took flight from the land at the age of fourteen and was later branded for the cause of it. It burned him far deeper than a subcutaneous scar might the ordinary man. The next time that Angus left, he left for good. For good, without any resentment towards his fellow Norman villager displayed upon the surface excepting the scar left upon his forehead.
He would roam for a time and upon his visage he would bare the brunt of the scorn from that rune shaped mark, that scar, that hoary symbol of Kane, of shame. The living embodiment of torn flesh, angus allowed the world to form him anew as the savage man of arms. He knew now to kill. Not only to sow and reap corn and other living things, but flesh as well, in a harvest of warm, cut and scythed down life. Where was it that he had heard of that analogy before? Death as a reaper? The Roman bent of his Norman forefathers that he now so willingly cut down before him? It was in this heaving mound of cut down flesh that Angus heaped up the burning embers of the bellows driven raging hell fire that successfully camouflaged and burned out his succeeding hatred of all that lay before him in later years. Angus, was, in short, beyond reason and conquest/ contempt.
Cast down one full fathom from the lighted surface, Angus’ despair like the measure down that hidden well, hid the misdeeds he had undertook. It was with a guilty joy that he ate the hearts from his prey, roasted their toes and wore their bones about his neck like the talisman of the soiled ancients who tended the woods of his youth. He became that which he had once feared and proffered in secret their mysteries revealed. Part Shaman and part villain. But, where to find a boat? Under the earth. Angus turned, and there- a boat. A skiff sat moored on a shrouded coast. A man stood beneath robe and hood. He beckoned with finger. Angus shifted against his will, but what, then, was his will? His head shook. He clenched his enormous jawbone setting his red beard in determination. And then, turned. Towards the boatman he took a step. And another. The boatsman waited. And Angus moved towards him, what was the impetus that drove him forwards? There was something on the other side. That Angus knew. But what lay on the other side of the body of water? Distant bodies writhed, white shapes that moved within the blackness, but Angus could not see them, but from his peripheral vision.
In this peripheral view he caught the glimpse of something else, something squirming, a worm. There appeared, a worm, a vaguely set parasite affirmed quite plainly on the cat’s bottom. From this, his natural revulsions brought him back to the moment he had confided in the bearded man, the man from which his personal sense of fealty and obeisance is derived. the bearded man knew of the twisting axis on which these devotions lay. The laying down of the carcasses was the habit and they knew to conspire with him, for the food, the venison. The longevity of the foodstuffs had always been a point of contention amongst the sailors and Angus was now experiencing this anew, for he had come from so many generations before in the sea faring tradition. In this Vineland, Angus found the primitive man nurturing themselves upon the skeins of the seal and mistakenly took them for simpletons. In this moment of folly, he would prove no better than his descendants in categorizing these noble and benevolent aborigine as meely mouthed savage misbreds. So is the shame.
And it was with this shame that Angus hung his head. Hung his head, for he knew that he cast aspertions upon his fellow human beings and now they were as damned as he. he found that he could never hate and he still did not. It was merely black and white, right and wrong within Angus’ heart, but now he had cast sides and come up somewhere in between. And for having sat on the fence, Angus was damned. The boatsman turned his back upon him. In his head, his thoughts began to way heavily as so many gathering stones in a riverbed. Those stones began pulling his head and likewise, his body, ever forward. He was sinking now in that heavy feeling. He realized at last the frigid water upon his face through the hairs of face, across and over his breechings through to his bones. He was sinking now in the palish blue and icy surh beneath the departing keel of the boat. Down deeper and deeper, bubbles rose around his head and he watched it all in slow motion. He felt as though he were falling in slow motion, diving as he had watched hawks do as a child, rearing and then dropping like a stone into the field towards an unseen target. A stone in the field. How often had he watched his father tilling the fields and come across stones only to throw them angrily away with a curse and spit? The hawks had come down flying like a ragged dirty arrow let loose from a bow stained with age. The Northern men had done that to his father, split his face open while tilling the field for stone. he ran, he dove, he tried to curse, found that he could not, no breath, no air, no mind, nothing, blue, air, sky, no air.
Angus opened his eyes. He looked around. His hand darted to his forehead and found the scar. Fire burnt. But he had been beneath water? Fire vs. water?
Fire is as transient as water. They very often are symbols. They, like Angus have presented themselves as mysteries and are fleeting elements in change. His transformation is as natural as the kenan, as natural as the northern scream. It is unmistakenly primordial. And what better to do than scream? It was within these pale places that men learned how to scream. He had witnessed many men do it within his presence, forced others, and now without fear of repudiation, consequence or punishment he did scream himself. He could no longer hold himself to be fair, he had judged and was in the middle of atonement. He screamed and water poured in. Fire poured upon hot coals turns to steam and it was like that that Angus witnessed his soul? leave his body. It drifted away into the night sky, coal black and soot stained. His body was left behind to stare dumbly into the night sky. He stood within a cold, night fallen field. the wheat had been harvested. Stubs only remained. He shivered and heard horsehooves coming. He looked up and could see them, the horsemen were approaching. Angus stood calmly in field stubble and awaited them, as had his father before him, calmly, patiently and without any resentment nor judgment. He awaited.

Ivor (Spring 2000)

From probably the Spring of 2000. Another great name in the sinner's choir and one that completely befit the little mathematician. Devils, demons and shadowy Air Force Masonic cabals and all. A personal favorite of mine and the Reverend's.

Ivor

Simpering over the extinguished candle, Ivor try to remember again, why it came to be that for as long as could be seen, the appearance, his appearance again would preclude the death of the mister and the misses.
The victims were as usual lacking at the time of their demise those things that they cherished the most, be it hair, genitals, a fully complete larder of meat for the winter months, a pair of shoes, in reality, those things that enhanced their vile triptychs of want, their vanity and hungers. He had the habit of taking employment with his master and mistress always at the opportune moment of blending into the wealth-scape of anonymity. he was a pervasive drifter from time itself that obliged his singular persona, “Ivor” into the blaisse sense of the moment-decade-eon that would serve his crusades and forays into those meaningless possessions. Life in transition without anomalous events acted as the loadstone talisman cry that demanded Ivor and his murderous lack of propiety. He killed that which lacked nothing and yet desired more. They take from want, he took from habit. A reciprocating relationship has developed in this activity that eschews our common delineation of PROVENANCE. Ivor is time immemorial! The very spirit of the man waits patiently at your mirror glancing out at your comfortable visage glancing out in anticipation of that moment... of breakthrough. He always sat at his wife’s vanity awaiting that sudden clarity when his hands jittered over the paper scribbling with a nub of a pencil the inscriptions, equations, formulas, chemical symbols, all more thricely folded in upon one another and hidden from sight in the ledger when he had finished. And he had finished when he had finished with the sheet of paper, the one sheet of paper allowed himself each night as he sat at his dead wife’s vanity with the small hairline crack in the corner that sliced his image in crooked halves when he craned his head up towards it. Memorious reflection, could not mankind see itself in one collective unconscious mirror? And judge itself? Every night in bed, in dreams? In guilty acquiescence with one another? consorting with thine enemy? Or as he did in front of a broken pane of glass, Judging himself and being judged? Was this not normal?
Man’s vanity and his selfish concerns for his hedonistic desires, the satisfaction of his demand is undoubtedly a basic sin, is it not? Ivor liked to arrive hidden in the melancholic fiber of self pleasure and from there, nimbly maneuver to take away that which physically announces a man’s emotions as true as the barometer, his penis. Ivor’s nocturnal tasks required that he make careful study off the thing that brought him from such low depths, the place beyond that which man can simply equate, hell. In hell, Ivor learned his craft under the tutelage of only the fowlest and notorious demi-satans. On earth, Ivor now plyies his skill in the hell in which man has spent nearly an eternity in search of, a satisfaction that he perhaps will never know, and that places name is as deceptive as the creature that created it. As Satan is known as the devil, beezebub, Lucifer, so too does his creation go by a myriad of deceptive names: the shitter, the toilet, the john, crapper, outhouse and the innocuous term, the watercloset. Down the privy and beneath the rim, Ivor studies his prey very carefully. From the base of the scrotum, to the tip of the member, the plan is set. ivor must now find the most opportune moment that would enable him to the prize that he seeks, the utter humiliation of his victim, the death of his pride, the soul of that sorrow that motivates his very waking breath. Seen ever so briefly as the tell tale fogging on the mirror surface, when the heart was too pale and feeble to betray its true intentions struggling to keep up in a 26 year marathon that would only now bring it to its knees when it was assiduously consigned to traitorous fool hardy bravado and will and yes, oh yes, intention, once again. The path to hell is paved in good intentions. The heart had nothing but good intentions and begging was all but part of a hard day’s work near the final months. And there as if to find St. Peter barring the way it gave up and (forgive the expression) turned away broken (hearted). Ivor was not a bad man, merely turned away and excommunicated from the gates of heaven from whereupon he walked like Adam and Eve into the land of Nod, the land of bland forgiveness found only in forgetfulness of He who no longer saw ivor from the periphery of his vision even. Into the land of Nod, to be forgotten and forgiven. Hell, he wasn’t even a Jocasta set to some task, large or small, until now, sitting in front of this woman’s, this landmark, milepost, signpost, marker, rock, this pole, of north or south, he knew not, but now he sat before this cracked mirror and scribbled pathetic mathematical equations that bore down upon him. And though Ivor was drifting from sight, the demon watched. He watched and was perplexed at how his situation had changed, the seemingly inevitable conclusion, of the splayed and mutilated penis, the theft of his master’s mistresses hair and the renewed vigor for his crusade against man fading.
The master of the dynamic was not Ivor after all, but that sorrow that he felt he knew how to capitalise on, but failed to understand, proved to be the more cruel enumerator of his earthly masters fate. In his sorrow he allowed for the man’s dissipation to take place at his own doing, in its own way and for this, Ivor’s reward was multiplied.
It is back in the substance of things that he must retreat, into the fog and vaguery of the shadow, the fogged edge of a mirror with its silver turning into dust, the ancient glass as turns from one form to another, the scaly patina, are the things that return Ivor to his place-in-wait, to hell. Illusions of perversity and abomination before the vengeful one on high are those things that the mortal must be aware of when he makes love to the beautiful visage, the facade of the bleakest of souls. And do the visages actually have souls? Who knows? As Joseph Heller may have said once. He only met them, worked for them, thought for them, and yes it was dangerous, dangerous to fuck them as he knew so well how to do when you play ball. When you pay ball with the devil, he drives and throws a mean fastball. Don’t want to get beaned by that one, he chuckled. That one met out in California, hell... the ones he met in White Sands, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, all of them, with the black rites and those signet rings that they never let you see as they so generously shook, pumped your hand in implicit understanding that you never were meant to see the symbols inscribed in that tacit connection. But, hell... Ivor was making himself smile all over tonite, he became conscious of his reflection, but hell, all of those fuckers were not to be crossed. And so he crossed another “x,” went back to the equation that was soon to be filed again in the expanding paper file, and crossed out cancelling parts of the equation until he was left with next to nothing. Next to nothing, christus on the cross. XOS the number one 1... himself, his dead wife, twenty six years lain, those faggots in the air force who didn’t know what they meddled with, Him and his twin brother, gabriel, who had visited him in the night, his one piece of paper before him, his nub of a pencil and his reflection.

the 13th disciple (4/11/00)

From April 11 2000. "The 13th Disciple" is a perfect example of a misunderstood element of chance that fit the end of the story. It orinally read (as penned by the Reverend...) "In this, in his Sunday ablutions laying prostrate, obeissantly he puked." I misread it out loud the first time as "obeissantly in peat." and the Reverend liked it so much that we changed the final line to that giving it a whole new meaning that fit the storyline.

the 13th disciple

He felt certain that his heart must be splayed open. From one end of the land to another, cut wide open and spread like the heavens all over God’s green earth. The heavens like his heart, are falling. An imperative falling. falling. Falling. Falling from God’s infinite grace, yes, there is a space beyond the infinite where even his Almighty cannot glimpse into. It is the land where there exists the ripe green possibilities of contradictions, where hope, chance and fate coexist and now that his heart had been ripped asunder, that land was where he must trod like a giant in verdant fields, not knowing where his feet would fall next. Where would his voice break into and split open the air, a streak of carbon on an ivory white bedsheet? The golden tresses of a fifteenth century magyar princess being as much an anomaly here as it was there, this was Seamus’ shame and mercy to his fellow human beings. And now on a cobbled stone street, he kicked a stone against a whitewashed wall to kill time, his hands in his pockets, his head down and a constantly searching hand in the breast pocket for the next nonexistent fag.
Seamus had embarrassingly forgotten his manners as well as the fact that he had given up smoking. His tom-foolery had brought about the undo attentions of the landlord and the lazy kiter that seemed to only appear as the impetus of trouble on any given morning of the depraved sabbath breaking Sunday morning bender. In another way, the man was an unbearable angel of treachery who kept his debauched condition within the confines of his own digs. Seamus, ah Seamus, was a public spectacle, an impassioned imbecile masking that which had hurt him the most, the pain of the compassionless man.
Ah, and yet, it was the compassion that he lacked that drove Seamus to his utmost skill. To understand God Himself. And in that he gave his fullest level of coming face to face with God for it was within himself to be at a momentary impasse with the rest of humanity. A great divide that can never be crossed, at any given moment he could find himself on the other side.
He could very often loose himself in a timeless escape, one that he had imagined in his young time. Ever so often, Seamus would imagine himself in an alternate time, lost in the reflection world of shiny or polished cars. On the surface of automobiles, his world would diverge, melded into that of his reflection. This availed a manner of reality where he could provide the other fiction of his burgeoning interest in God well, into that of his imagination. He would often wonder where his alternate would go to after the fruition of the “spotting.” Would the thin grotesquely spotted and elongated Seamus of the reflective wheel well go careening off the bumper and into the rear view emotion-instant he had just left a moment ago?
And then. And then it slid by with a silent glowing silkiness that left afterimages on his retina. A holy ghost of red spinning by, careening upwards that spun by his sight and left him right where he had started on the street corner. Seamus hurried and ran. His coat flopped against his thighs, his flat feet pounded the pavement. He ran. He ran without regard for compassion or pity or for his fellow human being. It was a flight without wings to find his God. To find his own Godliness. Each footfall upon skin stretched tight calling out, falling down, gaining momentum, slackening, rending his heart, tearing it in two between Man and god. Where would he fall? He spun around the corner and nearly slipped upon the wet street. He tumbled and spun around to his hands upon the ground in a puddle. He looked up, panting.
Clearing his mind in a familiar ablution, he arose from the muck of his mind and carried on, dizzy in his thoughts. A smile broke across his jowl as he thought to himself, “what a beautiful day for a stroll,” when he was struck dumb in the next moment by what stood before him. He stood upon a high street promontory over looking the entire city. He was looking into his own heart spread out before him. A pigeon alighted near his feet and began pecking. He kicked it away. It gargled back at him in protest. The city gurgled and belched smoke before him. People hung out the wash and he could hear the familiar, but altogether new sound of the zip of the clotheslines afore him. Singing songs, fighting, cursing, spitting words and washing it all away with the water from the garden hose or bucket sprayed into the streets. The caucophany of people came to him riding upon the fetid wave of greasy heat that was within his heart. It stuck there, quivering, like an arrow newly released into the trunk of a tree from its makers bow. Seamus could scarcely believe what he saw. He was looking into his very being, his heart, his soul. And he loved them, he loved his own heart, he loved himself, he loved god, Man, all of it and none. he fell for it like he had young Shelley, heart palpitations, (there was that word again!)(heart, heart, heart.) sweaty hands, clumsy words and more. He loved, he loved, he , Seamus, could love again, against his better intentions, he loved. In this, in his Sunday ablutions laying prostrate, obeissantly in peat.

The Smoking Priest (originally 9/22/00)

The first smoking priest story that fell flat with us both. It held the promise of something far greater and we revisited it and revealed the gem (even without the secret of how bad Brut 33 is...). The notes at the bottom of the page are enlightening: "9.22.00 After a long hiatus... 2/3 bottle of wine and four Labatt's, tragically, tragically we went wrong, May God have mercy upon our souls."

The Smoking Priest (original)

I am a smoking priest. I proffer up my body as a temple. And, when the mysterys of my temple are forgotten, the devotees will be left with nothing more than the resinous smoke and scent of that unusual sacrement.
It was in the sorrow of my youth and the unmistakable pathos of pubescent schizophrenia that I became aware of my love for God, and of the perverse love he felt for me.
For if God did not feel any love for me than who would? Certainly not the padres dressed entirely in black swathes of mystery. In those black mysteries were the kernels of a light that I would feel to begin to grow and cover me with its soiled unctious folds that like compost rotted and released heat. It was heat that I felt, but not love. Perhaps love can be described as “hot” much like the heat of passion or the warmth that one feels for a loved one, but this heat burned my bare flesh. When I realized what I had done, I quickly dowsed the source of my pain and the affected area with the soothing jet of the shower head. As a mantra, I began to repeat the sensible phrase, “Brut 33 on my genitals and asshole is a bad idea, a bad bad idea.” The heat of this moment left me and I began to concentrate on this mystery of the disappearing sacrement, the deficient faith of my peers and of God’s ill and burgeoning disrespect for my body.
For my body and myself were both involved here as dissatisfied spectators in this play that began to unfold upon these steps. There was no separation between body, soul, spirit, faith, body, blood, holy ghost... It was wrapped into one burning scar upon my forehead and conscience. I began to see a white spot gradually arising, ascending, unfolding into itself and then in steps, to unfold once more into ever greater depths of whiteness, blankness and completeness. I began to understand.
White molded plastic... liberation found in the molded plastic dreams of an omniscient engineer. It broke the other day and as I stood there holding it, it formed an uncomfortable abrasion on my palm. liberation! God hurts. God hurts me no, no, unlike any other he wounds me. He. The wounds, and I travel and feel and breath and love in insipient tone and Gestures. I can lie. I can swim, and make love to my fantasy here in the formation of the number eight, the eighth molded plastic me created by the perverse DEI of disproportionate reach. The space between my reach and the intended goals are the objects upon which these fantasies are lain their bases. But it is due to these differences in what I want and can achieve that I find my greatest pleasures. When the black hooded men of yore told me to want, then to not want God’s love, Man’s love, to be selfless and at the same time confident in the ardour of your distinct ego and identity was Jesus’ paradox. His paradox being brought upon this earth as in perfect Man was to find the Son of God suddenly thrust into the role of flawed Man created after his own image, to bring others to him but without desire, want, need, nor identity, for He was just like any other. It is within these hidden riddles that I find my greatest searches for truth and shame revealed, laid bare, laid naked. Are we not all secretly pleased at being discovered immodest? That He would bare forth profets, would deliver us faith in the worlds words the voice of his most devoted and that those words should fall so flat is the greatest rub. In the rest and in the fallow deliverence is in stasis. And what is a stasis except for the lack of differences? As in a state of entropy, there is a lack of differences that serve to bring seemingly unreachable differences and flaws to an alarming conclusion of rest...

The Smoking Priest (2/02/01)

From 2/02/01. The revised version. Both the Reverend and I knew that we had had something very special with the first attempt, but that it needed to be refocused. This was our very proud moment of success. Everyone should fall occasionally, even Reverends, some just never get back up.

The Smoking Priest

I am a smoking priest. I proffer my body up as a temple within where to burn the sacrificial fires and let the smoke rise to the heavens. The smoke heavily scented by the burning embers burns blue, the true colour of heat and envy. Let it rise a signal fire to be seen anon far, for the few true believer who dwell in the countryside. Let them glimpse it through the refined gaze of my looking glasses perched upon my nose.
Through this my mocking shroud and down the nary traveled path into the bursting capillary rot that is my soul. Therein lays my life of deception. In fourteen-hundred and ninety three the devil bid you dance with thee and in this slavers merriment stared my vacant orbs lament. I did this to you and you to me out upon the papal see. And from that time to this the nature of my predation was always the conquest of your faith. You may ask if I ever believed in God, but in a glance you already know.
For in glances only are we allowed to believe in the great Almighty, one day, we are atheists for the smoke has not risen and consumed the fires within, billowing in and around like some ancient ancient and vengeful deity, angry with the fact that we have forsaken him. Yes, I believe in God, but His aspect changes daily, on an hour to hour basis. I see him standing upon a street corner smoking a pipe with a listless insouciance that borders upon apathy just before he vanishes behind the oncoming streetcar, not to be seen again until next Thursday, when I have forgotten my vows, so far from Sundays and I see him again in the crossed legs of the plaid skirted woman so far from my consuming hands on the other side of the train. Yes, He is all around us, in our blood, our fiery blood and in our serene pacification, like the venerable gods of the Babylonians and Assyrians and Egyptians, slipping into an unknown and unknowable silent fate. They rage within the fires within our souls yet, though. I light the candles every night. God, shut out the black. God, cut off the black parts.
I gathered succour in the forgiveness, the good grace of my lord, the very grace of my virtue. My lord you see is that virtue: that which I have gathered like the wealth of a noble, in my own greatness I grant absolution. Take comfort in this fact. With the advent of catholicism, the singular and universal faith, the one Church, the fallen one- third of the holy host reigns victorious here in the temporal realm of Satan, and proudly (and defiantly) I count myself as one. You are absolved of your sin in this world by the forsaken servants of God, aren’t you happy, don’t you feel better?
You should after all, after all a forgotten servant and fallen one deserves himself to be heard as well. Do you hear me, ancient ones, young ones? For you dwell within my heart, like djinnis within a bottle. When I had touched her breast I felt the smoke begin to rise and I parted in the wind, torn apart by the stronger, more decisive tack of the current of the day. The Day, this Day, we have seated ourselves here to redress the sins that are borne with us from our very day of birth. Afterwards, I took her hand. I took her hand and with everything else within it. Sin, doubt, repression, fear and death.
She opened her hand, it spilled into mine and became my possession as well. I seek my gods in the winds now. Azrael, come visit me. I have been granted the gifts of the prince of the air, I have been staid that constant stench of the putrefied flesh in this moment the stench of my living atrophy. I have been dying for millennia and also very alive. My presence is seen all about you, I am the living embodiment of the shadow of darkness, I am THE smoking priest.

doremefasolatedo (Winter 2000-01)

"doremefasolatedo" from Winter 2000-01. Yet again another fevered languid southern tale of death and despair. I think that both the Reverend and I had been southern gentlemen in another life.

doremefasolatedo

his last thoughts were fevered for sure

do re me fa so late do! doughray! meso fahti dough. woomp it will, it will. flip you, flip you for real. She poisoned them for real you simpleton. And you’ll be dying real soon. Apply some reason, she’s a dolt, a real silly cow. Except in this case, you have eaten the poison while I, I have been afforded the luxury of deciding the fate of your stinking corpse. I think I will feed you to the Birds. now, if I can only figure out how to make this silly thing contract, make the whole thing contract, give me uppercase punctuation,,:.;???
uppercase punctuation? why whatever for? then you would only have to give things proper names. and in naming things and giving them proper names you have to acknowledge their existence and in acknowledging their existence you have to give them the faith that they actually exist. such things are actually un-things. they do not exist. as ghosts do not stalk the halls of a resort snowbound colorado hotel in the middle of november. they do not track snow into and onto the runners in the grand foyer and thus, do not exist.
for something to exist, it first has to cause an irritation. much like a flea.
the only true reason that you acknowledge the existence of a flea is the very fact that it bites and stings you. once it causes your nerve center to pick up its stimuli and bring it back to you on world weary legs means it exists. otherwise, like small creatures of this world, they do not exist, for all intents and purposes.
It’s like remedial vibraphone or suckling at the teat of human love. Can one really love? We can fix the objects with a glance, we can wish them away, we can make merriment in endless days of gladiator dreams waiting for Spartacus to strut his stuff and belligerently drag his cutlass like the dilapidated dreams of some wanton harlot on a dreary night in search of that all too pervasive warmth on the wharfs in the shadows of fog and gas lights in a cold November berth. The sea is the real topic that is as fleeting as the bank accounts of mega merger children living out their uninspired days of megalopolis mayonnaise fisher price bigwheel days. Go careening down the big sloap in a daze of pixie sticks from Rease’s Deli silly one. the days of the fatted calf and all the gin one can drink are over. On cruise ships to far off lands to postings care of her majesty’s government you once suggested that we could truly be free. Now we are nothing more than sidewalk scriveners in search of self respect and a warm place that reminds us of our wanton mothers and their prideless cowering in that bed of hay. What now brown cows?
indeed, what now brown cows? stupid beasts, not even of burden, because they cannot even bear a burden. except a burden possibly of shame. but not even then. poor stupid lazy beasts chewing on their cud. was there perhaps a sudden burst of inspiration there somewhere? a thoughtless remembrance? a chewing over of old thoughts? who knew what went on in the mind of cows? or of anything that happened on an old farm house?
I tried to fathom the absolute by hiding in the thistle, saddling up to the ice crystals there, the snot freezing to my beard. It had been a long time in the making, this frozen demise, this frost bitten dementia-by-the-field in or near the homestead of my youth. The old stone wall has come undone now and the house is empty, and I lay hear dying.
As Faulkner had said once and then he was talking about a woman dying in the back of a horse drawn wagon being taken god knows where? to the undertakers? to the great beyond? was that where we were now going? the room may have moved just then, unsettled on its hinges it seemed to spin ever the slightest on a single pivot point. just as the world swirled once beneath my feet when i danced, but who can remember any of that now? what good is remembrance when you have only the here and now and the hereafter?
It’s like my old man use to say when he would clean the oily grains from under his claws, “Like this buckknife here, life can be sharp, but only as useful a thing as the man who uses it.” The old man thought he was a pariah Will Rogers too if anyone ever bothered listening to his prattle. he killed the family dog here by this old wall the day my brother ran away. He could manipulate people as well as that buckknife. Under his finger nail or in the dog’s throat it seems to be the same thing, a botched up and belligerently languid activity, that all seems meaningless.

chopper (winter 2000-01)

"chopper", from Winter 2000-01. No specific date, but thank you and forgive me George Orwell for the old English children's rhyme reference.

chopper

Quick raindrops fell like waves onto his head as he looked all around him and damn if he didn’t know where in the hell he was, or wasn’t. Could it really be that he had come full circle to the shore again? After a long sleepless night on the beat in the forest senselessly beating his head full force into tree branches and thorns, he stumbled out onto the quaking sand and tide beneath his feet. But now he had a bigger problem. No shelter and rain falling all around him exploding on his shoulders. Well better get used to it. Yes, better get used to it since it was all that he had ever known. After all it wasn’t so unlike anything else he had ever experienced. getting rained upon, getting wet as something formless and soft flowed over him conforming itself to his shapes and contours like a drapery of knowledge falling over his shoulders. You know when you first get to know something, how it conforms itself to you filling in alot of little creases and crevasses in you.
A hinky little creepy little drinky dink! A little something to quench the foreboding way of thoughts when they become most pervasive and persuasive in the little crevices of ideas ensconced in what you know. Sometimes a man can keep on looking and yet shows no sign of ever finding, sometimes he doesn’t realize that he found it long ago. “You can eat small potatoes, but try on a heaping portion of rinky-dink.”
“A blue blue day in all this light,” he thought, “and I couldn’t drive a submarine to the fish market.” Sometimes his thoughts betrayed the instant of confusion that shrouded him in his waking life. he had known for a long time that he had serious problems, but when he really tried to concentrate on this fact, he came only to the same inconclusive disassociation with his environment. A grey dog on the front lawn was viewed in his convoluted mental meandering as a “greg-mound pacing that portculus,” a car wreck was a “wicked creck-up,” and on and on he would go like this until the time he drifted in the grey of his squalid little shack night slumber. Until the very preface of sleepiness precluded sanity and reality coming to steal upon him as the dreams of little nemo meant an escape from the everyday doldrums of early twentieth century paris. And then he would toss and turn upon the salvation army mattress and fret as Achilles in his tent was roused by the god’s multifaceted desire to retain his honour and both fight the enemy within the stone walls. Who was the enemy now he wondered often in sweat drenched cramps, his stomach doubling in upon itself as he rolled on the sea bottom. Questions- should he curse and spit upon passers by or secretly sulk and pessimistically foretell their coming writhing upon the fire basted in blood pits of hell? To hell now or in the future? One way or the other, it was forever and silent, complete. Sometimes busses come by and sometimes children run down my street of framed-out blinking.
His yard was torn away at the edges and the dry fine dirt of the weakened humus would blow up into the shadeless mid-day heat in little sciroccos across the neighbors own dirt patch here in the deserted summer of the end ways around his once... one-time town. Not really a place on the map, nor in the story but somewhere in between whats honest and whats the trash of so lowly a thought that flits about from time to time, threatening to be real again. His neighbors, perhaps, are reason and virtue and like ilk, maybe they are the Truth and Honor, sort of holed up like hermits in an overbread dead- town who look out from behind drawn shades, but never materialise except in his imagination like insubstantial dead poets memorised within the confines of dusty pine boxes and miserable three pence operas, he is a boy chanting “kill them...” in the devastated blitz streets and the broken lorries. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemons, here comes a candle to light your way to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. chop, chop, chop, kung fooey and siamese cats, fu manchoo, achoo, plaster dust in the nose, chop, chop, chop, pork chops and american apple sauce, saucisson, the maginot line, wurst, german sauerkraut, sour krauts, come on and kill them all. here comes a candle, here comes a chopper. chop.

relevatory sightings (2/18/01)

From February 18, 2001. A return to a familiar theme. While we writing the exquisite corpsi, we frequently had governmental black ops, Area 51 and Project Bluebook losers in mind. It ends with walking through snow, setting up the next corpse, "in snow."

relevatory sightings

Relavatory evidence of any 741 sightings remained unexplained.
Unexplained in the normal sense of humanly observed phenomenae, there exists a thousand and one such cases, frogs falling from the skies, will o’ the wisps, lights reported by pilots during relatively normal flight patterns... hey, what can be explained, can be boring. The voices found in Alfred’s head went unexplained, random syapse firings? Audio and visual hallucinations of the most disturbing fashions illuminated his studies; fired his imagination, made his fingers dance. And a study of what? Through screens of the foreground of his habitual silence encumbered drabbled and failed him upon sleep. A humble and pardon drafts. Shaking hands, evidence, jostled man... he flailed in his sleep and talked with me. we are talking in the car, we stop beside the falling down house in time for his jitter dance of feeling. How does one pull up beside a downdraft in the mist of vapor upon the windscreen. Air is rare these days.
As is the knowlege that we that we vanquish daily, when the devil dances upon our doorsteps, how are we to know? These vapours and breaths and tell tale signs are vanished to obscurity. While the great unknown entertains our bedside and inserts dreams of horses and fiends we lie in oblivion. Alfred breathed unnoticed these very same fallings of water upon his windscreen. They were swept away as he drove across the mountainside by the steady flailings of the cars wipers. The snow coalesced as it hit the road. So much left unsaid and better still unknown. It forms unseen patterns that strike us as we travel the paths. His tires left tracks up the mountain.
Do the tires leave a trace several moments before the retraction? Do his tires retract? Can he retract his previous statements? Can we go away tonight on the hope of the looming highway in the gathering darkness? My car travels faster in the off-note right hand lane often and I cannot read the signs. He went away, that way, dot. dot. peculiar that you should still dot.. that I am still lost dot... after the service nothing was spared dot.... a screaching retraction of all the lies and suddenly it was dot.... there, dot. Dash... his tires went screeching this way and that across the barren snow and invisible patterns that he cast into them. patterns and formations that are our longevity and prolongations of the human race. Was he almost there? He did not know. The air made screaming patterns of his breath that went careening this way. The radio picked up merely AM stations this high in the mountains. Garbled and bassed out notes of the fraility of the human voice. Was that a star? The radio shut down. Black. Was that the universe? An infinite jest, a far cry from what he had known as a boy staring through a telescope. Imagining pattern in the pinpoints and random? patterns to be found in constellations.
Finite in a random yawn. The wain and fruitful wandering in the flick of his wrist was a grace that none had ever seen. He had unmade his machine from a thing of grace into that so many movements of an unkempt habit. The pardon from the nervous pointing of the compass... comes once it points inward. This moral compass bends oddly once it enters the fantastic and is so easily adjusted in a gesture. This he imagined as the take off of his imagination. He took his hand from the radio dial. He exited the car. The snow fell upon his head. He listened. Silent. The snow drifted and cast off light that illuminated and simultaneously blotted out the stars and the future. Cast off light crossed his thoughts and twisted his thoughts into knots. What was his reason? Why was he here? Why had he driven eight thousand feet? To see the snows and elevation? To dream out amongst the skies and constellations, to walk the remaining distance towards light, civilisation, patterns and the skies.

in snow (3/08/01)

From March 8, 2001. As far as I can tell, this was the last of the regular Sinner's Choir that the Reverend and I wrote together in our kitchen at #90 James Street. It was the spring before he moved in with Mrs. Ichero. It completed our 13th exquisite corpse and The Sinner's Choir. We were high on watching the film "Run, Lola, Run." German phrases from the movie were running through our heads as is evidenced by the writing on the back of the corpse in pencil.

in snow

Swift white lightning dreams of nightfalls and in the middle of it, I, falling, through an open expanse to the ground below, bringing destruction to all who fall within my sphere. In the midst of falling, my body attains the near zero weight of a mass in freefall. I am reminded of sliding down hills at winter, in the children’s playgrounds at Herbergstrasse, of dreams. Balls of light, just light, open in slow motion around me. Spilled sacks of laundry when the women wailed.
One man posed for us in the flickering light that was cinema; bereft of soulful musings, the bland man as junkie, the dour face of the Capital. It was Mr. Lee as the prankster Lord of the camouflage of free market tyranny and from his countenance, one could just decipher his utmost sorrow and joy of the repetition of our fate. In snow one wonders about Germany. The camera rolling, the flicker of light is controlled by this dream- this dream in anothers eye. It will shadow as catch can.
For in snow, we have a momentary pause of remembrance, when we look to the skies and think of childhood when we looked upward in vain for that understanding that would never quite come to us. In flickering, momentary images, we are drawn to the larger part of what we cannot truly ever understand. I thought that I saw a falling star and it was then that I joined the stars, it was then that I joined the new Luftwaffe. It, at first, was all training, exercises on the ground, physical conditioning, Leni Riefenstahl and blind acceptance. I grew to love the air around me, the more that I flew into the skies with the roar of 400 horsepower engines on both sides of me, they were my wings and my hopes, my barebacked horses that I jumped on daily. They were a part of my arms, my fists. With rage sometimes and with the challenge of the almighty heft that is power, I believed I could sail with power over, even over black noon sky.
When a man dies by firing squad, there must be a moment when in the second before the gun fire takes his life, a flicker of light is the preface to the eternity of darkness that he is anticipating. That brief moment is like the second before the choir begins, the moment before we understand the mark of Cain.
I am blinking and as the eye gathers its first sight in a defiant pool of saline, I am cognizant that again I have awoken in selfish concern over the Minister’s camera. Am I on parade or in the plane? Can I reach self realisation? I am awash in a flood of memory, of the here and now, of the clinking of steel parts against one another, rubbing and running over one another effortlessly, climbing over one another and pushing the tail end of the last action over its brother in a piggybacking of motion. The pistons push forward fuel and air to mix and run the turbines of air and lift over my wings. It is a necessary evil: the mix of man and machine to combine in the skies over Tunis or London or Moscow to propel myself and my crew to necessary destruction, so that we may bring about inaction.
Inaction brings about the dream of what I took for granted: home, hearth and family. I never dreamed of anything other than to look at the stars at night and teach my children of the constellations. They, the stars are so far away from us. I wanted to be able to look up to the stars and hear nothing other than the crickets, the smell of grass freshly cut in the Bavarian noir. Now, I have the sense pounding smell of burnt and scorched motor oil, commands from distant and scratchy wing commanders, NCOs like myself preparing young crews and flight squadrons for the inevitable. It is anything but silent.
I hear the engines pounding their signatures into the night air, heavy with salt, moisture, unburned fuel. Fuel to make things excel, so much wasted, unburnt, dreams of potential and sparkplugs. Give me a signal, give me a moment. Yes, there it is! As the rune passing before my weary eyes, I am famished and the heat of the fire in the cockpit fuels my memory. That blinking light is the rapid strobe of fire lighting the floor beneath me. The rune is my hunger to evacuate, to abort, to jettison. It is the symbol for door, my release. In the the swift pull the straps of my harness I know I’ll be a creature in flight. My hunger is the desire to live.
It is this that sucks me as I take my first good deep draft of the night air. I take it in and let it take me within itself into its maw. I am within it as it is within me. I am falling. I am to leave my duty as I fall into it. What is my duty? It is to swim into the darkness as I have so many nights afore, but this night, this night, as I see the city lights fast approaching, I will take them within me, not to merely snuff them out, but to take them within me and make them one with my heart, my devotion, my soul.
I can hear the roaring cascade above me. A hurumph like an old man clearing his throat comes through the clean blankness above me. My grandfather, always with a handkerchief to sanitise his cough. Now it is revealed to me. Flames, light the stars. A small scattering of pebbles upon the asphalt. I threw stones in the streets with my friends, casting lots, who shall enter the baker’s shop? I run, my feet in motion, feeling as though I go nowhere, bread beneath arm, hobnailed shoes on the streets, built for the snows, a tug underneath my arms. I am lifted. Upwards. Towards the embracing hot breath of ministerial recompense and admonishment. I am falling away from those heights that I was once lifted towards, falling into mine own love, hate, judgment. The lights are beneath me. I fall towards them.

The 'missing' corpse (12/03-04/02)

The following is a previously 'undiscovered' exquisite corpse once again composed by the Rev. Dale Butterworth and I Dec 3/4 2002. It was begun after a long hiatus one night at the Reverand and Mrs. Butterworth's home. It was a very fair effort, but we were tired and out of practice and the effort did not meet up to either of our scrutinies. So, we put it away and forgot about it until last month. I found it again shortly after the Rev.'s death. Perhaps he meant for me to find it again. It was the beginning of another auspicious chapter in the history of the Sinner's Choir.
Mssr. Bondurant

Loop-d-loop

Loop-d-loop
When it has ended, it has ended. To liken it to a Luiz Bunuel creation is probably being too generous. Constructive degeneracy and absurdity phantoms conclusions silently . . . asleep?
(Squelch sound . . .) a knob turns and then there is Morse code . . . the knob turns and 410376 checking in and then there is code . . . is that a go? roger on the approach, over . . . this knob turns and then there is silence.
for the knob was well greased by the best intentions of both men.
The original intent was never to harm, but rather to inform. But like many other well intentioned projects, this was never well received. Instead the sky seemed to open up over both of their heads and the gracious and engulfing insults came straight away like the buttered cobbles that they threw at the rubbish men on Sundays after church clattered from the rooves. With a swift descent, the implications of their plans fell into quick disarray. First, the vicars wife became violently ill in the midst of his sermon. Many eyebrows were raised. Then, old Tom, the cat came screeching around the corner with his tail on fire and howling like the wind in March.
What was happening, but the deal with the devil that was met without the slightest scruples nor supervision of the details involved. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but they knew that they were screwed over, suckered and screwed thricely, punched in the kidneys and then spat upon.
But when the devil drives a deal, he does it without any compunction to do it with fairness nor obligation to his actions.
And, back again, over. good niht . . . nigh the total sum of this rest might carry me over, over. An emergency, when I am awake my legs I’ve thrown above the hole miraculously, I can run. A brief light appears there and I feel I can reach it in a sprint. Bounding out now, fleeing from the radio set, into the waiting arms of a well trodden path. I have been here before and latral punching revives the blood flow to my hands. A shot (squelch sound . . .) Alpha four- six- one- seven- nine- zero- there should be rescue vehicles there now (belch noise) come in over the wire at point- eight o. Oh. Oh yeah there has been or was a deal made I think.. . a rain of fire and punch drunk with the mistake, why did I forget the pulse of your viscious mound of venus, your rich folds of flesh in their violent symmetry. Oh guilt, my heads on fire but the rest is going numb. Foul eyes, I can’t see.
My feet are so near hell that they are growing cold. My feet are on a footpath to the nether regions in my cold, cold mind and soul. It is a trip that I never thought that I would make in its entirety. Oh, and look, there is Judas so far away from me, but like the light that reaches from so far away in the coldness of space from distant galaxies nebula and pulsing areas of so much infinite sadness and fear that we as human cannot ever know what lies beyond our brows.
If the circles of hell are concentric, then so too are the descending paths towards the tightening lassoo of the weight on my mind. The deeper I go, the farther from the sphere of knowing what I will think of next lies. Look at that. Was that my hand? Erupting in fire? Look at those shapes and how they erupt with the fire that burns within my hand.
Right until the time they strove to have their throats slit, what one would call ‘Professional Hand Tuning.’ Fiddling with the front of those pants, the projects “uncle” began teaching this lesson from the confusion of the Northern Kingdom.
The hemispheres of my mind, . . . memorizing the moment the bullet tore through my blousing, the puff from the down of my coat softly exploding startle great flocks from the auditorium. Unusual turn in intersection syntax, accidental violence the throws of my charming drama.
Those pants frightened the brethern: the breadth of them, the cut to accentuate the relative girth of vertical pulse within the diamond of sinister warmth. Canned heat, heat that kept the campers warm from the threat of censure. Today, I think I’ll temper the moment with malice.
For the fire of the moment pales in comparison with the ice cold calamity of the deals and events leading up to the moment when we met Him in the frozen wastes and nodded our heads in agreement to the deals struck behind which rose the mountains which spewed forth the volcanic wastes of the damned souls that became the cement for the deals penned in blood when we, He and I, shook hands. I felt my blood run chill and knew then that my blood had been sucked from me, the marrow spilt from my bones like sap from a tree.
And so it was that I had consciously, but unwilingly damned all of my progeny from that date. Hans, the late 12th century woodsman who met the black man in the woods and coveted his axe. There was an unfortunate wood chopping competition that took place later that ended with Hans’ skull split by the proverbial widowmaker after he had won the axe and triumphantly marched back into the woods the next day to fell many a tree. He fell and as well so too many more who would unwittingly draw the blackman nearest us like the flower scented petals draw the bee. Mr. Hawthorne next found the coal black man in a woods thicket in that great dark primeval of the New World. The Maypole man from then to now is not a new phenomenon. That eerie grip, of a moment of uncertainty walking in the woods at dusk, is an ancient sensation. The Wildemensch stalks us, asleep or awake.
Flogging the pavement with waterladen boots, he thought of this and then of how to dispel these demons that drove through his brain day and night. By night, even in the alehouse, soaking his head in the small talk of the keep, wringing the sheets the next morning when he awoke, they were dank with sweat. He woke nearly every morn to the smell of rotten egg permeating his nostrils. He looked up to the grandfather clock, still ticking and tocking. It all had to come soon. Could he escape by water? Somehow he knew that if he remained at sea then he would be not only rent from this earth, but rent from this grasp of the Man with no civilised name.
He walked to the docks once very few days to smell the salt that flooded his eyes with tears and to escape the presence at his back. He turned and peered now and then at a crate, behind it where the shadows lie, but the only secrets were of a headless and stinking fish body. Men jostled him, believing that he were drunk and then a call of “fuggin’ God dead black cloth, get out a the way!” They knew that he had been a man of the cloth and so had no respect for he who dwealt among the vast and incomprehensible changing and violent waves of the earth’s seas. He knew that he did not belong here, but now was shunned from the inviolate Earth and this God whom he had once knew by name. But the sea rejected him as well.
Alone now he wonders in the forest, through the valley but not to, no never near the farms. Shunning that world gave him an elation if only for a moment, an afternoon. In the lighter moments He appeared even with an unsuspicious countenance. A smile breaking across his lips his breath drawn in. From a distance one would mistake this for a hesitation. It is in fact the moment before a violent outburst, a laugh. But, in that moment before he stepped out from the forest he was overtaken by an unfathomable eclipse. The Inky Shade was upon him like a five o’ clock shadow. It appeared not like a malicious wraith, but rather like an accident, the spectre that creates a misstep. In this moment his mind wondered to other things. He had forgotten what made him laugh. It was, however, absurd.

What could have been... (10/01/06)

The following is an alternate and expanded upon version of the original 'Loop-d-loop.' I went back to this and added to the original while keeping every single word that had been there. I think that it is more in keeping with the intent of what the Rev. Dale Butterworth and I were aiming at at the time. We had only missed by a few pages and a few more hours. This is dedicated to you, Mr. Butterworth.
Mssr. B.P. Bondurant

Loop-d-loop 2

Loop-d-loop
When it has ended, it has ended. Not unlike a film strip that flips over and over as the projector has shown the very last frame. It ends, but it continues even when nothing is being seen by the naked eye. To liken it to a Luiz Bunuel creation is probably being too generous. Absurd ennui and auspicious dada. Constructive degeneracy and absurdity phantoms conclusions silently . . . asleep?
(Squelch sound . . .) a knob turns and then there is Morse code . . . the knob turns and 410376 checking in and then there is code . . . is that a go? roger on the approach, over . . . this knob turns and then there is silence.
for the knob was well greased by the best intentions of both men. One grew to become a soldier and the other the world turned to a priest. Killer and Lover.
The original intent was never to harm, but rather to inform. But like many other well intentioned projects, this was never well received. The well intentioned tale of the seaman begins on earth. On earth as well as the opening sky, the sea is a mystery to man and his kind. The earth folds under our boots and the sea often seems a shifting and closing dream. The seaman priest and the captain now noticed on deck that the sky over their heads was not closing over them as they slipped past the horizon. Instead the sky seemed to open up over both of their heads and the gracious and engulfing insults came straight away like the buttered cobbles that they threw at the rubbish men on Sundays after church clattered from the rooves. He and his brother were little knackers for the pranks that besot many a child their age, but they carried them too far one day. One day with a swift descent, the implications of their plans fell into quick disarray. When they had made the deal with Nick, it was to further their tomfoolery only. There was nothing truly malicious in it, but instead the deal was twisted. First, the vicars wife became violently ill in the midst of his sermon. Many eyebrows were raised. It was not like her to make consternation while her husband was in the pulpit. The following week, they skipped church for fear that Nick would visit them again. They ambled the back streets near the fish markets at the docks. And then they stopped for then, old Tom, the cat came screeching around the corner with his tail on fire and howling like the wind in March. They knew that Nick was here.
What was happening, but the deal with the devil that was met without the slightest scruples nor supervision of the details involved. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but they knew that they were screwed over, suckered and screwed thricely, punched in the kidneys and then spat upon. It was not part of the deal to feel the pain drill its way from the small of his back through to his feet like an electrical charge, but when the devil drives a deal, he does it without any compunction to do it with fairness nor obligation to his actions.
They ran through the alleys but stopped. He stood before them leaning on a rotting cask. Nick sidled up to them. Do you like this? was his question, this teat from which you now suck. How dost the milk taste upon your tongues? their eyes escaped to black space and the theatre screen inside their collective minds brought them forward. The skies over their heads erupted in the flame of daylight at night. A silver bird the size of no bird ever seen before over the skies of northern Europe was falling as it dropped death and as well, to its own death.
And, back again, over. good niht . . . nigh the total sum of this rest might carry me over, over. An emergency, when I am awake my legs I’ve thrown above the hole miraculously, I can run. A brief light appears there and I feel I can reach it in a sprint. Bounding out now, fleeing from the radio set, into the waiting arms of a well trodden path. I have been here before and latral punching revives the blood flow to my hands. A shot (squelch sound . . .) Alpha four- six- one- seven- nine- zero- there should be rescue vehicles there now (belch noise) come in over the wire at point- eight o. Oh. Oh yeah there has been or was a deal made I think.. . a rain of fire and punch drunk with the mistake, why did I forget the pulse of your viscious mound of venus, your rich folds of flesh in their violent symmetry. Oh guilt, my heads on fire but the rest is going numb. Foul eyes, I can’t see.
My feet are so near hell that they are growing cold. My feet are on a footpath to the nether regions in my cold, cold mind and soul. It is a trip that I never thought that I would make in its entirety. Oh, and look, there is Judas so far away from me, but like the light that reaches from so far away in the coldness of space from distant galaxies nebula and pulsing areas of so much infinite sadness and fear that we as human cannot ever know what lies beyond our brows.
If the circles of hell are concentric, then so too are the descending paths towards the tightening lassoo of the weight on my mind. The deeper I go, the farther from the sphere of knowing what I will think of next lies. Look at that. Was that my hand? Erupting in fire? Look at those shapes and how they erupt with the fire that burns within my hand.
It felt right until the time they strove to have their throats slit, what one would call ‘Professional Hand Tuning.’ Fiddling with the front of those pants, reaching for the cable release, the projects my “uncle” began teaching this lesson from the confusion of the Northern Kingdom, the flames and darkness of the netherregions that I am falling into. Its split, the flesh and the knife parting it, the lessons, the cabling, the knife splitting the world in two . . . like . . .
The hemispheres of my mind, . . . memorizing the moment the bullet tore through my blousing, the puff from the down of my coat softly exploding startle great flocks from the auditorium. Unusual turn in intersection syntax, he thought. There was much accidental violence in the throws of my charming drama. I watched and then followed him through the darkened corridors, almost losing him several times, but catching him and falling upon him. Accidental violence contained within my pants, the patterns holding the checksum of power to stop him in the hallway. His heart stopped in the washroom and never started again.
Those pants frightened the brethern: the breadth of them, the cut to accentuate the relative girth of vertical pulse within the diamond of sinister warmth. Canned heat, heat that kept the campers warm from the threat of censure. Today, I think I’ll temper the moment with malice and an “accidental” fire.
For the fire of the moment pales in comparison with the ice cold calamity of the deals and events leading up to the moment when we, my great, great, great, great grandfather and I met Him in the frozen wastes and nodded our heads in agreement to the deals struck behind which rose the mountains which spewed forth the volcanic wastes of the damned souls that became the cement for the deals penned in blood when we, He and I, shook hands. I felt my blood run chill and knew then that my blood had been sucked from me, the marrow spilt from my bones like sap from a tree. My great, great, great, great grandfather, the seaman priest covered his face and wept openly.
And so it was that I had consciously, but unwilingly damned all of my progeny from that date. Hans, the late 12th century woodsman who met the black man in the woods and coveted his axe. There was an unfortunate wood chopping competition that took place later that ended with Hans’ skull split by the proverbial widowmaker after he had won the axe and triumphantly marched back into the woods the next day to fell many a tree. He fell and as well so too many more who would unwittingly draw the blackman nearest us like the flower scented petals draw the bee. Mr. Hawthorne next found the coal black man in a woods thicket in that great dark primeval of the New World. The Maypole man from then to now is not a new phenomenon. That eerie grip, of a moment of uncertainty walking in the woods at dusk, is an ancient sensation. The Wildemensch stalks us, asleep or awake. And he has taken my great, great, great, great grandfather, the priest to the underworld with him on Earth. The man who once walked among the foul and fair on the ground can no longer step upon it. For then, the man in black would call him on his portion of the deal struck.
Flogging the pavement with waterladen boots, he thought of this and then of how to dispel these demons that drove through his brain day and night. By night, even in the alehouse, soaking his head in the small talk of the keep, wringing the sheets the next morning when he awoke, they were dank with sweat. He woke nearly every morn to the smell of rotten egg permeating his nostrils. He looked up to the grandfather clock, still ticking and tocking. It all had to come soon. Could he escape by water? Somehow he knew that if he remained at sea then he would be not only rent from this earth, but rent from this grasp of the Man with no civilised name.
He walked to the docks once very few days to smell the salt that flooded his eyes with tears and to escape the presence at his back. He turned and peered now and then at a crate, behind it where the shadows lie, but the only secrets were of a headless and stinking fish body. Men jostled him, believing that he were drunk and then a call of “fuggin’ God dead black cloth, get out a the way!” They knew that he had been a man of the cloth and so had no respect for he who dwealt among the vast and incomprehensible changing and violent waves of the earth’s seas. He knew that he did not belong here, but now was shunned from the inviolate Earth and this God whom he had once knew by name. But the sea rejected him as well.
Alone now he wonders in the forest, through the valley but not to, no never near the farms. Shunning that world gave him an elation if only for a moment, an afternoon. In the lighter moments He appeared even with an unsuspicious countenance. A smile breaking across his lips his breath drawn in. From a distance one would mistake this for a hesitation. It is in fact the moment before a violent outburst, a laugh. But, in that moment before he stepped out from the forest he was overtaken by an unfathomable eclipse. The Inky Shade was upon him like a five o’ clock shadow. It appeared not like a malicious wraith, but rather like an accident, the spectre that creates a misstep. In this moment his mind wondered to other things. He laughed and laughed and laughed when old Nick took his hand in His. Old Nick’s mouth parted slowly and He began a low chuckle too and then stopped. But by then, He had forgotten what made him laugh. It was, however, absurd.