For a copy of my book, inquire by email

• [email protected]

The Raven And The All-Knowing Dirt

I walk up the stairs and I mend the locks and I collect the mail and I take stock of what was stolen and I bare witness to the horrible atrocities and I listen to the far-off sounds and vibrations of lullabies soothing us all into catatonia. I scrimmage and spar with delicate idols and I cower in front of reflective surfaces, the dark wood creaks beneath my step. The lamp with the old shade and new dust turns on as I summon my spiritual advisor with the bright tolling of two brass adornments. Magenta strings shoot out of the moldy drywall. Threadbare and watersoaked. I feel a thick shadow fall over the length of my body and the temperature of the room adjusts to the dark presence.Azure heavens, gently blotted out by puffy clouds. A woman is stuck on the train tracks without the strength herself to escape. A democratic vote was held: should she be helped out, should she live and should each of us be spared the sight of extraordinary violence? Voter turnout was pitiful. The clouds were puffy. Children walk around the platform in dire need of cosmetic surgery — bone lengthening and hair plugs, irreversible tinkerings and creation. The Platonic ideal yanked from out of the firmament, tied down and stuck on to our most contemptible and ugliest children. The woman pleaded and pleaded, she was spilling tears. She looked at me and I told her I could do only what my catatonia permitted. She asked me what my catatonia permitted and I told her it could permit nothing. Another man, cloaked in marvelously spun wool and hatted with bowler, kneeled down at the edge of platform and asked the woman: quelle est la source des larmes? The children, their bones ought to lengthen. Their cheeks ought to be siphoned of every bit of fat. Sell the fat to the restaurants. The ones with fish bones in their spittle. Warm bodies hide among the deep herbage and chilled frissons are coaxed out of our flesh...The thick shadow falling over the length of my body, those puffy clouds blotting out the azure heavens: my advisor. We converse casually for a brief spell before my sudden brooding quiets the scarcely lighted room. I point my words inward and level on my advisor the fears of a sordid skeptic, the bleak dreams of a disgraced believer. My spiritual advisor sits in my body and listens to these words I point inward, words with sentiment that I've attached so much urgency to.I've been having visions. I've been suffering visions. I'm sitting under a white light at the end of a long table. Opposite me is the all-knowing dirt. A pile with shades of umber, rotted leather, and despoiled flotsam, bits and pieces of earthen detritus, morsels of cower. And I am the raven. And I'm all alone. The room is suffused with dread, with a stubborn coating of finality. Urinating multitudes assault the sense, the smell of a thousand sows. Nothing blooms. Nothing remains idle. Everything in the room contracts and sinks deeper into itself, more so than what growth will ever recover from. Including I. The raven. And I'm all alone. It's always the same: I begin with perfectly clear sight. My cognitive faculties are fresh, my skin reacts to the air and my pupils dilate quickly. But the presence of the dirt begins to mar my vision, slow my thinking. I see the room as if through a murky droplet and the crystal form of something ekes into my seeing. Pollution can root, grow bark too — forests of the urinating multitudes. In a moment I'm only able to see blackness. The puffy clouds blot out the light and I can almost make out a mist of an even darker something...My functions of voice are waned until I'm nothing more than a pitcher of still water. My wings are clipped and I am transformed: the wafer is flesh. The dirt doesn't grow or spread but the depth of its history is felt more viscerally, and the reception of this antiquity infects the broad side of whatever humans are made of. The dirt doesn't exist in this room, opposite me; the dirt is the venue for all of this to happen. The dirt is the track that history glides on, the fixed rails that drive the unseizable force. And the wide plains of life can be miraculously thinned out, miraculously thinned out. Janus is lifted up on the cross, nails are driven through palm, and blood that gives life is siphoned. Cease do the cycles of the moon. Ebb only do the tides. And the blackness turns to a blacker nothing before I am no longer the raven and am no longer opposite the all-knowing dirt at the table underneath the white light.I look my advisor in the face for the first time since I summoned him. He blinks. He blinks with eyes that want to help but his twitching hands betray his better impulses. Stranger does he appear than usual. Cheeks coated in verdigris, his mouth not usually where it is, no blood where it ought to be. Now that I think back to his entrance, it was quite a stiff occasion. Limbs moved by a plasma. Soot in the bearings. Rust. Rust; I smell gun-cleaning oil.Thank you, he draws out with a slimy tongue, for sharing that with me. But it's imperative that you be honest, imperative that you share with me all your raw data. This vision of yours, it's — disquieting. See my eyes: I want to help. But without your raw data I cannot do anything. I cannot otherwise guide you towards the light or the marble staircase or even the walls cut from maple and oak. But there is a way: You must implant a device into your brainstem. Student doctors, experimental anesthesia, it's all quite new. The device — and here my advisor mumbles some words resembling 'Caina Needle' — can collect and compile every bit of raw data you contain. I must then plug myself into this device in order to synthesize the bits and pieces into words of actionable advice. Into a real prescription. It's more erotic than you'd imagine, if that interests you; I'm certainly interested, and my member aches to influence.Here, my advisor adjusts himself in his seat. Pulmonary function expands, blood reaches to the farthest extremities. His smell grows, erects like a stubborn brawn shrouded in aspic. He continues.This implant allows for a predictive algorithm that would be able to map out what the rest of your life will look and feel like. The whole thing! You won't have to worry about anything anymore. You'll be in my fatherly care and I'll smoothly guide you towards that light and those walls cut from maple and oak. This is precisely what the mystics had in mind when they imagined an existence without suffering. Imagine it, smell it: rich fields of velvet, gales of gold! A contentedness congruent with long and peaceful living. In fact, what I can conjure for you will transcend even the most enlightened existence of those pitiful mystics. Those dusty old bastards tolerated the existence of suffering, thought that awareness could lead to acceptance and that that! would dull the teeth of suffering. But the algorithm doesn't ask you to tolerate suffering, — it completely snuffs it out. You don't have to tolerate anything! As your spiritual advisor, I implore you to get the implant. We must become one, the seer and the knower. The swapping of fluids, the embracing of navels, it's quite intimate. Only then could I provide you the appropriate words of advice, only then could I truly take you by your thick and fleshy reins and steer you towards the alleyways and gulches of your transcended existence! Here, slake your thirst with this.My advisor hands me a flask of wine in an execution of some rehearsed movement. The red nectar massages my throat and sits fatly in my bowels. He hands me a business card. Turn it around, he mutters. I read it aloud.

Nexus-driven alignment methodology, continuously redefined best-practice enablement, dynamic interoperability, nursing nascent workflow architectures, curdling rectal mucus, proactively incubated sustainable innovation vectors, corporeal reproduction fluids, full-spectrum agility, candied placenta syrup, end-to-end corporate continuum.

My eyes well up as I finish reading. Light seen through the murky droplet, a thousand sows. His cold hand presses on my knee and I meet the gaze of my spiritual advisor. He opens his mouth.The woman on the tracks who had struggled to escape ended up making it far. Her splatter did. And we all rejoiced, for her spread was glorious.

Cause of Rock

Ungan once asked a monk: “Where have you been?”
The monk answered: “We have been talking together on the rock.”
The master asked: “Did the rock nod, or not?”
The monk did not reply, whereupon the master remarked: “The rock has been nodding even before you began to talk.”Dialogue based on an incident involving a Buddhist thinker called Dosho (died 434).

I

“Vaguely punch in a direction and wire down eyes to feet, grow towards it, you’ll always become- but make no effort towards direction. Grow like a tree. Floor fauna scratch but strafing failure should shape you famously. Don’t make an effort towards direction, effort effortlessly.”

The apple was down to its core and I made to toss it out of my driver side window, leaning towards the right to give my throwing arm some room to extend and letting go of the browning core at the apex of my extension. The spent fruit arced beautifully, but it had seemed to hit a child hitchhiker that I had not noticed per my split attention between the voice the apple and the road — the margins of which I disregarded. Even from the driver side mirror I could make out that the apple core had struck the child’s head. His hands were bent acutely, grasping the impact point just above his forehead and writhing his body to the rhythm of affliction. I brought the car to a swift halt, the apples flew off the passenger seat and I flinched at the thought of their bruising. Omen.I got out of my car about 100 yards past the boy who was still applying pressure to his head. The closer I came to him the more distressed he appeared. I didn’t know if his condition had plateaued after the initial impact and it merely only appeared worse as I came closer, or if he was truly suffering more. And if the latter was true, was his condition responding to my proximity? This possibility did not stop me from approaching the boy, who was now laid out on the shoulder with the stillness of a dead oak. His blood puddle laid still as him, the deep grooves of the asphalt catching the flow and pooling the plasma to a standstill. He was face down so I was unable to see his last expression, the one I could tell his mama about as she rocked forwards and back on her Louisiana porch.

No one was around at the time so I didn’t feel too bad. I ran back towards my car and towards the passenger side door. I opened the glove compartment and rummaged through all the gauze and bandages until I found my camera. I ran back towards the dead child and advanced the film. The sun was bare and the soul sky stark, so I set the exposure to one one thousandth of a second and shot him with a smile. The rest of the drive East went smoothly and I almost completely forgot about the child hitchhiker as the man with the brass voice soothed me with instructions.

“You have to be receptive to bold words… You have to be receptive to bold words… You have to be receptive to bold words.”“Follow the lead of the person you never turned out to be, be a third thing. Synthesize cordial previous happenings with uncertain future occurrings and be a third thing. Paralysis in our thoughts gives the key to the bold.”

As I rolled into Pershing County my driver side window finally unstuck itself but not before the backseat was coated in cooled sand. Castles slowly began to form and horses passed away from arrays of sky arrows — I always wondered why mothers batter their children. I parked and walked into the courthouse with only one courtroom. I entered and saw Jade stood at the counsel table, he was wearing a silver metal helmet with a gilded cross design on the face. I sat down precisely at the moment gavel struck wood and the judge’s voice boomed words of consequence. Jade was sentenced to a bludgeoning on the spot right above the forehead and the judge asked the jury if anyone would like to commit the bludgeoning, no one raised their hands. The judge huffed and turned his gaze on me, Jade took off his helmet.

II

Three months after the trial Jade’s wife finally moved out of their apartment, the one above mine. Katie was her name and she took the death of her husband awfully hard, harder than I thought his death warranted. A bludgeoning right above the forehead is relatively humane compared to one of the alternatives: treadmill room, inflation, heretic fork. I remember hearing Katie’s violent throes of sorrow through every inch of floorboard and every drop of ceiling plaster. The satisfaction I had cultivated from bringing down the Judge’s bludgeon rock down onto Jade's forehead (right above) began to wane as the excessive noise from above had merely been replaced by a worse, more piercing one. Though for those three months I was quite lucky that she had not known it was me who had carried out her husband’s execution, she told me she had missed the trial by an hour, at the end of which, in that very courtroom, the execution was executed and I was 58 minutes gone.If she had known it was me who carried the blood dried rock then I’m sure I would not be able to write these words now, on account of the degloving of my face on account of the trauma fueled rage she would have been thrown into on account of my honest and noble civic duty. And I was sure it would’ve been a facial degloving, the most optimal killing method that accounted for both hate and cruelty, the two forces that would chiefly motivate her revenge. Fortunately, while she lived above me, she remained ignorant and my facial tissue remained attached to muscle, and in a turn of fate only predicted by the sheer unexpected nature of that family, her son ceased to scream right after the death of his father. This was a welcome change and I attributed it to him growing up from having to fill the void of Man of The House. It wasn’t until the day after Katie had moved that I realized why her son had finally shut up.The landlord had come to perform a routine inspection after the exit, in order to gauge the appropriation of security deposit used for potential repairs. In the master bedroom, in the room above mine, the landlord found a deceased James Waldon in the closet. The child was cradled in dead flowers and appeared partially preserved as decomposition hadn’t yet turned him unrecognizable. Most exemplary of the apparent preservation was the still intact instrument of the boy’s cause of death, a small but significant rock lodged in the spot just above the forehead. The landlord notified the police while I was at work and a womanhunt for Katie ensued, the local news even interviewed me for their seven o’clock spot. I was obviously a very intriguing variable in all of this, being the oblivious downstairs neighbor underneath all that horror without a grain of suspect. So intriguing that some particularly thorough journalist had seen my interview and dug deeper, making the connection between her husband and my status as his executioner, which is, of course, public record. This sensational detail in an otherwise captivating story only added fuel to the flames, the story getting picked up by the national news.

MATERNAL FILICIDE ONLY INCHES ABOVE FATHER’S EXECUTIONER

It was clear the authorities, and now the public, had accepted that it was Katie who had killed James, his condition being labeled as death by blunt force trauma. The motive was a large fill-in-the-blank that everyone took much pleasure in filling out, answers ranging from crazy lady rampage to occult minglings of a damned soul. Not that anybody thought the motive was seriously important — everyone knows why mothers batter their children. All things considered, I was glad the heat was off me, according to everyone I was just the blameless neighbor who had performed his honest and noble civic duty by smashing a man’s guilty skull wide open. The whole ordeal turned me into a local celebrity of sorts. I couldn’t venture two avenues before some kid with a cape and a shirt with the dead kid James depicted on it handed me a small rock and asked me to bring it down on his head.I was growing anxious at the thought of Katie's revenge, she surely would have seen the news of my crumbling Jade’s skull, and if she leveled at me even a fraction of the rage I knew she was capable of, her proximity alone might be enough to kill me. I had seen it with her son. At night I slept with a hunting knife duct taped to my right hand with the serrated edge pointed up. I laid down white canvas sheet on the floor around my bed so as to catch and absorb any blood that Katie should spill from her stomach, falling to sleep with the eager of a Christmas Eve child.During this time I often had dreams of my reunion with Katie. Each one was the same and involved me lying on a surgeon’s table as Katie meticulously opened up a large hole in my stomach with her long fingernails. She would make no effort to stop the drool at her lips from falling into my open cavity and used her brown spit to lubricate the opening of the many cuts and tears. When she was done she would always thrust her head inside of me as I lay paralyzed and wide awake, unable to wriggle or scream. And when my stomach fully engorged her head, she would screech with the same violence as with her son, only this time without the restraint of a mother with breathing progeny. The screeches would leave from my mouth as her hands blindly found my lips and stretched them open to coax the noises from out of my throat. If there were any intelligible words beneath the screams it would always be the same: “I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY.”About a week later I woke up in the night and found Katie standing over my low bed. I could move, it was not a dream. She wasn’t at the foot of the bed as I had expected, but immediately at my side, hair dangling scowl and all. In her hand she held the picture of the dead child hitchhiker, the one I took on that day and had framed on my desk.She contorted the muscles in her face in such a way as to ask me, “Why?”
“… I thought it was an apple.”I motioned to stab her groin when I realized she’d taken my knife, my hand smelled of gasoline. I rolled off the side of my bed and picked up one of the small rocks the caped boys had given me only a day earlier. I launched the rock and a moment later Katie was dead atop her mountain.

“We climb mountains at the pace of our able. Slow down if you’re tired and speed up as you can. The top is not the end, the top is not the end.”

III

With my facial tissue still attached I could breathe easy. According to the news Katie was still on the lam, there was constant speculation as to her whereabouts howabouts and whyabouts. Her face was nearly burnt into my TV alongside the words “The one he needed the most.” More disgruntling considering I already had to see her grey face wrapped up in my white sheets on a daily basis. I needed a change, maybe a reversion.I had driven back to Pershing County to the courthouse there with only one courtroom, this time in such a rush I had to forgo my green apples — no time to chill them: no firmness granted. The blood puddle where the dead kid James fell remained crimson and still. Had I really thrown a rock out the window? Perhaps James wanted to die and landed himself in the exact spot he would fall, and willed the rock from my hands as he always planned.Behind the courthouse, in the parking lot, was a blue dumpster. Inside the blue dumpster was Jade’s corpse, not even fractionally as preserved as the dead kid James’s was. His trial was in April and it was now the middle of July, and in the year 2007, the heat was extravagant. His corpse had been baking in that oven-dumpster for a little over three months. To get him out from there I had to use a shovel to scoop the melted body into a trash bag. No small feat. I’m guessing no one had opened that lid since he was tossed in there because the smell could not have ran any faster up my nose so far up I thought it was molding more folds into my brain.After I was done scooping the melted meat I double bagged and then triple bagged and then quadruple bagged his body, which at that point was more liquid than solid. I put him in my trunk and went to throw the shovel into the dumpster when I saw one of his melted eyeballs still at the bottom. If the smell wasn’t so bad I would’ve contemplated the effort it would have taken to scoop up the eyeball and put it in the trash bag, but I couldn’t even manage to manage so I left what resembled a discarded child’s scoop of ice cream in the dumpster and laughed at the thought of what his roleplaying buddies would do without their brave knight. Neighing beasts scream and birds take flight at the canyoned echo. I listened to the brass voiced instructions on my drive back with all four windows rolled down (for the smell), the hot sand resumed its steady stream and horses made sounds of mortal distress.

“Great minds snuff out self-doubt in extraordinary feats of ego. What it takes will seem counterintuitive, what it takes will seem counter to everything.”“Let go of everything.”

Jade and Katie were together again but their reunion seemed stilted, neither party really putting in the effort to acknowledge one another — they weren’t efforting effortlessly. I guessed this was because their son was not yet with them, acting as glue for the couple, though in their living life he seemed to work more as a solvent. Maybe just seeming ideal is enough for them. I could still hear Katie berating Jade, this time for being a melted fat ass in a trash bag. All that was left to do was to retrieve James’s corpse and the family would be whole again.I unraveled Katie from her sheeted tomb and stripped her naked, replacing my clothes with hers. I put on some red lipstick I found in her pants and fingered the waxy pigment to apply as blush. I walked into the office of the chief medical examiner in the Bayview near Pier 96, head held high and with an air of resentment, a smug portrait of indifference I knew too well. I asked the receptionist if the chief was in and she said yes ma’am and went to fetch him, I adjusted the toilet paper in my bra.When stuffing your bra with toilet paper to imitate cleavage, it’s important, although seemingly counterintuitive, to maintain a consistency in size between both breasts — even when it’s completely natural for one breast to be slightly larger or smaller than the other. But for the purposes of retrieving a dead child whom you may have accidentally killed by dressing up as their mother, it’s important to avoid suspicion and thus present consistently sized breasts.The chief approached the reception and I told him my name was Katie Waldon and I was there to pick up my dead son. He then informed me that I was currently wanted by the police because of suspicious circumstances surrounding James’s death, and I then informed him that I would give him a blowjob for his discretion, his eyes widened and the rest of him tightened. I walked out of the examiner’s office with a duffel bag stuffed with dead kid and wiped the lipstick from my face. Katie’s underwear was very comfortable.The Waldons were now all together again. I fitted Katie’s clothes back onto her, a task easier than anticipated as my wearing her clothes had stretched them out just enough to accommodate her increasingly bloated corpse. I gathered the boy and the melted fat ass and put all of them into my bedroom closet. I took the tape of instructions out of my tape player and put in a tape I kept of the yelling slamming and banging I would record from when they all still had hot blood pumping through their bodies. I put the tape player in the closet alongside Jade in the trash bags (4x wrapped), James in a dirty manger, and Katie in my white, blood soaked canvas sheet. When the closet door was shut and the tape player was turned up all the way it seemed exactly as it was before, before Jade was sentenced to a bludgeoning, before James got a rock stuck just above his forehead, and before an imitation of that same rock was launched into Katie’s head in the same spot as the son she always hated.

“When trunks leave their roots and fall towards dirt, make sure to place yourself in the path of the falling wood. Take the first step into your creation and be proactive in death. Through not around.”

IV

I was staying in a small rural village in South West France. It was nearby an old granite mill and tucked away in a large valley that had laid still ever since the revolution. I was staying at the home of an art gallery owner, François, a short, limped man with gout and poor eyesight. His gallery was attached to his home, a small space just big enough for a family reunion. I had previously contacted François through an online discussion forum for curators of small scale tableaus. I thought that the scene in my closet, the trash bag manger and sheet, alongside the sounds of domestic disfunction, was worthy of a solo exhibition. The idea came to me one day after I went into my closet to flip the cassette and saw the Waldon’s as clear as I’d ever seen them, there seemed to me an overwhelming congruence between them and death. After sending a photograph of the Waldons to François he sent me an invitation to display them in his gallery at the end of the year.By December of 2007 the corpses of son and mother were very different from their infancy in death during the summer months. Katie’s flesh had completely decomposed leaving just her skeleton, and although Katie and I had made our own attempts of preservation, James was also just bones (a child skeleton is an excellent reminder to not traverse desert sands within apple core (or small rock) throwing distance). Only Jade resembled his form from the previous months, actually solidifying slightly after his removal from the death heat of the dumpster, still contained by the trash bags. During their respective decomposition processes, I was photographing the scene in my closet on a weekly basis, creating a record for posterity that would supplement the tableau while in the gallery.It was the day of the inauguration and there were twenty guests set to attend my exhibition. François’s friend from Toulouse, Jean-Pierre, was visiting during the days I was set to exhibit. I was told Jean-Pierre had recently left his wife and kids and ten thousand chickens to move closer to his friend and drink more. Among Jean-Pierre and attendees like the village’s assistant mayor, it was stressed that this was an especially important event for the gallery. François was eager to impress. He had set up large speakers with subwoofers to make the sounds of domestic violence more guttural and true to life, and I appreciated the virility with which he attached himself to the project.He was an older man who had spent his life traveling through Africa collecting art. All throughout his house he had displayed beautiful bronze sculptures from an artist he met in the Congo. François had told me the story of how he purchased the art. How the artist had never before sold a single sculpture and had accepted the first price François gave when he offered to buy his entire collection. He told me the price he gave to the artist was, “stupid,” something he found very amusing. Just being near him you could feel his heart beat wane and even see everything underneath all the armor he thought he could buy. I thought back to my tape of instructions.

“We wear masks with markings that easily identify the face beneath the metal. Hide by showing your true self.”

I went for a walk alone in the nearby forest to prepare for my opening remarks. You could still smell gunpowder in the air and had to be careful not to trip over the dead little German boys that still littered the ground. My speech before the exhibition was going to include vivid descriptions of the Waldons as they lived, to establish my emotional culpability as their distinguished director. I had thought of a funny joke to open with: “Everyone will forget who they were but remember exactly how they died.”I was feeling confident about my words and descended through the cypress trees that obscured the village. On my way towards the gallery a priest in front of the catholic church called out to me and, with a smile, asked what an American was doing all the way out here. I told him I was hosting an exhibition at François’s gallery. He said that was wonderful and inquired about the art.“It’s a tableau of my upstairs neighbors, they’re all dead. I must’ve killed them all.” I was shy when I talked about my art, being creative was so new to me.His smile did not waiver. “Well, did they deserve to die?” he asked. I thought about it for a second, I had not considered it before. “It was not my intention to throw rocks at their heads… and I efforted effortlessly. I guess whether or not they deserved to die was up to them.”He was beaming at me. “That’s absolutely wonderful, my son.” With the priest’s blessing I made my way to the gallery.The small room I was showing in was completely filled with the oldest residents of the village as the sounds of rage and regret poured out of the speakers. The Waldon’s were in the center of the room, arranged just the way they were in my closet at home. Photographs of their decompositional journey were displayed on the perimeter walls in chronological order, beginning with a picture of them as they lived, and ending with a picture in my closet of two piles of bones and a nondescript trash bag. François looked very proud at the turnout and was whispering in the ears of each guest as he smiled wide, throwing occasional glances at me as he did so. One older woman, the village’s assistant mayor, was frozen in contemplation as she stared at the scene. I asked her what she had thought. She said it was promising but showed signs of immaturity.“It does not challenge the viewer, nor does it elevate the discourse. It’s a tableau for the masses, and that, my dear, is simply unforgivable.” I frowned and stayed silent as I tried to see into what she was seeing. Noticing the effect her words had on me she continued. “But as you said, this is your first attempt at tableau, perhaps you should sell it to François. He would give you a price more fair than most.”I thanked her for her honesty and approached the old man, Jean-Pierre, who flanked the Waldon’s as he squinted in serious observation. I asked him what he thought about my work.“They remind me of when I was a boy dining underneath my grandmother’s willow tree, and the floggings me and my brother received when we stayed up much too late.” In the corner of my eye I saw François glaring at his friend, and noticing, Jean-Pierre continued, “…yet the composition is, for lack of a better word, laughable — each element scattered about like forgotten trinkets in an attic.” The old man leaned closer to me and met my eyes from over his glasses, he smelled of scotch. “François told me that he would offer five thousand.”I furrowed my brows and said nothing, I went to get more wine. François came up to me as I drank and asked me why I looked so down. I told him what was said about my art, and expressed disappointment in myself, citing the responsibility I had to the Waldons.He put his hand on my shoulder. “Oh, it’s not so bad, I’ve seen much worse.” I smiled a bit and I finished my wine. François continued. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy the tableau from you. They can stay here with me and I’ll take good care of them. How about five thousand?”I considered his offer, I considered what the priest had said about them deserving death and I considered what I had deserved in all of this.

“It’s much like riding an Ox in search of the Ox.”

I kindly told him that I would be taking the Waldons back home with me, that if others couldn’t appreciate them then I ought to return them to my closet where they would always be appreciated. François turned very serious and looked back at the tableau, his fists were clenched. I left for the train early in the morning, sleeping in the gallery while I dreamt of a vast desert with dunes of bloodied rocks obscuring a way out, the night as forgiving as it was forgetful.

V

The train to Paris was full and I was one of last ones to board. I was sitting in the isle seat as the train passed by large fields of sunflowers and maize. I sat in self pity and twirled my thumbs, were my compositional skills really that bad? Should I have let the sloppy Jade matter spill out from the trash bags instead of keeping him plastically obfuscated? I wanted to study the pictures again so I took them out to see where I had gone so wrong. As I pondered the piles of young and grown bones and bagged melted flesh, the man next to me asked me what I was looking at and I told him everything. He was shocked that François only offered me five thousand, telling me that the Waldon’s were surely worth at least millions. He especially commended the composition and the use of space as a metaphor for a neglected childhood. Exactly! Even he could see the family’s anguish through their bones. A woman from across the isle became interested in our conversation and wanted to see the pictures as well. She gasped as I turned the paper towards her, mouth hanging open as she grabbed it from my hands for a closer look. She asked me if this was work of mine, I told her it was, she looked at the last picture.“He hides himself in the trash bags because he’s too ashamed to face his family.”Pretty soon a small crowd was gathered around my seat looking at the photographs. Everyone was amazed by the tableau and sympathetic to my journey. I was grateful that they appreciated the Waldon’s as much as I did, and I grew skeptical of the people at the art gallery, how could they feel so different from the people around me now? I thought back to the story François told me about the artist he met in the Congo, and how he offered a pathetic price for the artist’s life’s work. He hid behind his mask but the metaled markings told you everything about him.Everyone around me on that train said the same thing to me, that I should publish my photographs and introduce the world to the Waldons. They didn’t care if I said I was shy, or that I was worried what people would think about my artistic ability, they insisted that what I had was good and that I was a good person.When I got back home I took their advice and published the pictures as a chronological collection of a once-lived family. Long and wide success was overnight. Large publications contacted me the day after and my answering machine was full of people asking me to send them bones of child. Days later the photos were on the cover of The New Yorker and I was being flown out to a gallery in the West Village for a large exhibition. As soon as I stepped off the plane I was treated as a celebrity, grown men handing me rocks and asking me to throw them at the heads of their wives and children — real swords and fake armor.The gallery was much larger than François’s and there was much more room to arrange the Waldons. I used this as an opportunity to explore different family dynamics within the space. In the end, I decided to place mother and son together to isolate them from their deliquescent patriarch. I set the speakers up on the side of Katie and James and left Jade’s corner silent, removing him from the conflict just as he himself would by way of watching videos of medieval role-play in his office. I even had the very rock used to execute Jade shipped to the gallery and placed on the floor beside him; the judge from his case was fond of my work and happy to accommodate. I placed the James bone pile in the same duffle bag I stuffed his flesh into at the medical examiner’s office and I laid out my bloody brown sheet beneath Katie.The scene was set and people poured into the room. Many of the patrons had visceral reactions to the scene and the floor was wet with tears. Others had to excuse themselves to call their loved ones outside, shouting into their phones: “WE NEED TO STOP TRYING SO HARD!" I signed many foreheads with marker, drawing a circle in the exact spot I would launch a rock and signing my initials below. Towards the end of the exhibition the mayor stopped by, bringing with him lots of cameras. I shook his big hand and we had a photo-op with the tableau. I could hear Katie screaming at Jade from across the room to please try and not look so ugly for the picture. Little whimpers from the duffel bag were quietly audible for most of the night and I would have to occasionally kick it to shut him up. By the end of the show I had an offer of six million dollars for the entire tableau.The next day I flew back to San Francisco and, with some of the money I had made, decided to buy the unit above mine. I left the apartment completely empty except for two large speakers, both playing on repeat the digitized tapes of domestic disfunction. I was home again.

“Rotted foundation will support a home up until the exact moment it all falls apart, but what isn’t actionable now is shallow conjecture.”

In the paper I read that people all over the world were throwing rocks at their friends and family’s heads, and that the seemingly violent act allowed people to put their love on display in a manner wholly new and unstigmatized. Blood pools piled still and dumpsters were always full, everyone lifted their masks and no one could see anyone anymore, making everything clear once again. When I was done reading the paper I went into my fridge and took out a cold, firm apple, listening to brass words ring.

“Vaguely punch in a direction and wire down eyes to feet, grow towards it, you’ll always become- but make no effort towards direction. Grow like a tree. Floor fauna scratch but strafing failure should shape you famously. Don’t make an effort towards direction, effort effortlessly.”

All that will reach out towards us is comprising of the mind. All that will come from us is comprising of the mind. Our mind will animate all of our suffering and domination, two poles opposite each other comprising the same sink hole swallowing all that is seen heard felt tasted smelled and thought of. Thoughts that scar flesh and make remembered its influence on the vessels that can observe its thinking. What we bring to what we see becomes half of what there is, and thus how we see what we see becomes the salient mechanism for transforming how it all makes us feel.

I

Don’t be shy or timid as you grab a wonder fistful of Earth below. Breathe from your feet and watch yourself from them, get a good lookin’ for your time and know that they’re doing the same. Afterwards, ditch heartedly conceptions of both dirt and feet- take a load off you damn soap eater.Cracks and dust as the evidence markers for my existence. A something to be ruined and changed and cracked, and a something to be still and taking up space and dust accumulating. Thankfully the bar for existing is low, a death potential stamped on my forehead by an eternal unmoving customs officer- his layers of dust obfuscate his own forehead stamp. Maybe his authority has granted him idleness, maybe there’s no other way for him, in that case there’s something to be ruined and changed and cracked.The window whistled, the bridge whistled, and the boats whistled. Travelers in public are stabbed with knives, and only sometimes do they die right there. A smiling detective leaned and a man hugged the floor still. Laughter and sand followed after, the ocean whistled too.The air of bundled grace galore spackled interest crusted over, heaving its great grumble out across the worlds. Hiding out in Vanuatu, away far from peering menace long-arms. If I shave absolutely or otherwise obliterate the follicle, what will the long-arms grab a hold of? Forgot to shave my lashes, pulled by my eyes I couldn’t even see the perps. Drunkards sloppy and without insurance, horrific she-burns on her face and everything. “I didn’t do it!” I winked to the wolf behind the bench. “That crib will kill that baby soon, space to role over suffocation subdued.” Matilda’s all gown and she blew my brain up with her head damnit. Shirley Temple mopped up my spilled cerebral muck damnit.When bitching is no-bitching, there is real bitching. Mug of some hot Oolong as my spoils. When pity isn’t hot and in a mug, try not to accumulate it. You have to disguise your disposition with your face, not that there’s a seamless translation, it’s usually very seamfull- but an extenuating eye or two will look you up and down and invent your life all over. Internalize your sick and let wait for others to breathe life into your sorrow, hopefully Oolong follows.Damn Ho! If only my birth was delayed, so I coulda swam a little bit longer before I had to die. Best thing to do now is squander it completely.

II

Leaves slick with rain,
Trees stripped of bark,
Dogs barked with glee,
Grass dulled of blades.
Mountains full of liquor,
Glasses full of empty.
Warm stomachs sit on their ass,
Empty mountains boom and rain falls.
It all mixes together like everything else does.Double problem, hidden animals, window worth its weight.
Botched digit scream, honey hugging its walls.
White and green and ginger too.
Naked woman pictured, Albert Tootie Heath.
Written on the wall near where the branches grow inside,
A tiger with a knack for rule following will make sure you mean well enough.
99 year old hit the floor the way he was always going to: hard.Copulated bold blooded the fur hide of an inspecting officer, and through their clothes the minerals of spilling stains gushed gold. The new appearance donned them a name of embarrassing fortune, coating them as absolutely as the gold they gushed. Drowned in metallic reputation, they could finally move between people with heightened ease in dances of pointed influence not to be undistinguished from manipulation. With followers many winged under, it becomes clear who is illuminated from stark reflection and who absorbs all, dark against the platform of worldly dedication. Foot over head, body over body, higher placed illuminators can relay greater goods to the dark undertow sweeping beneath the platforms. Had the inspecting officer worn thicker threads, and had the gold stayed ungushed, then the pointed dances would not have caused any degree of influence, changing absolutely nothing.I’m seeing a lot of blind people lately. No one person, no one person. Admire the still and dead, corpse effigy doesn’t have the blood to move around and ruin the memories of a perfect person. A learned creature cannot be learning still, trade in your books for a raffle ticket. Water and food gambled sometimes yields more nourishment.In the most revered pools, toiling towards monument, drowning in sorrowed seams. Arrested on the sands of Normandy for being a woman, sentenced to death in the states guilty of doin’ it all wrong, fuck. Pitched a tent for 60,000 a semester, got murdered for roasting some marshmallows. Academic administration straining their jaws from swallowing up all that surplus value. Requested backup for the Hondo on 7th and Market, stock buybacks for the dead and senile. Leaded pipes race the muck beneath our feet and gilded mirrors turn us good. If you don’t have to ask about the rules they’re not meant for you.Submitting to pity wills,Gauging success intuitively.Submerging experience in bore,Boring through it all.Grabbing something in the nothing,Resonating quakes to bone,Forgetting about now to drill down.Stabbing past armor, blood as ink.Impressing organic systems semi- permanently,Entrapping a local predator publicly.Felled esteem soils beneath our star.
Sureness spurs, sporadically settled
organic materials embark warmly.
It never took knowing to change,
only bold convincing, pieces part
together advantageously when its
opposite is ignored.
Maybe acknowledged and maybe registered,
maybe a care isn’t had and maybe one isn’t needed.
Twisted my knee on a branch,
my defense: never seen one before.

III

Find a perfect balance by doing everything all at the same time. Never find yourself lacking in worldly lust, pull on the choke collar around your neck until you see color. Drink on the job and at lunch pray thoroughly in all directions, mail a hefty money order to your life coach. Save time by putting a book underneath your pillow before you sleep and read the police blotter as you drive fast, “Man not constantly doing something is violently murdered.” Catch a red eye to the Baltics and get a new nose, opt in for in the inflight veneers, they’ll shave your teeth before takeoff. Take lots of fiber supplements and join a polygamy cult in Utah, service your wives at the same time they’re servicing you, do the crossword in-between orgasms. Tremble and twitch with anticipation, for stillness gives to contentment, and contentment gives to FEAR. And when it’s all over and you finally die (not enough fiber) you’ll have to keep it up twofold in the underworld- at least your skeleton will still be smiling wide (someone
forgot to take out your veneers).I wanna be like the buddha bird. Falling rising altogether changing course rippling outward on the bankside of the lake always. An arc flung across the sky, aired pulse blinks spry. Not a lot needs to fit inside, only one thing. Gather in the trees and fade away when you have to, always.Shedding my gravity, loose chunks of me flying towards the moon. They found all my pieces and put me back together, signed me up for the draft afterwards, send me back to the moon.Sniffing fentanyl at the Areopagus, throwing stones at the poor. Undoing vital screws and shovin’ corks down too tight to drink. Administering CPR inadequately, laughing at the down dude whose agonal breathes tickle me, maybe even record it for my friends and family. Award a no nothin’ with it all, paint him nice and ugly and get everyone all hot. Ain’t no discourse round here that can set fire enough to illuminate all the freaks in the dark, better off fabricating everything and leaning hard into abjection, won’t be me suffering!A workman never blames his tools. Though liable to be blamed would be the fingers that grip the tools, and maybe the hands that hold the fingers. The scheming muscles behind the movement is also suspect, and should be reprimanded appropriately. The mind told the muscles how and when to contract and relax, in the steps and manner necessary to work the tools, though I can’t seem to find the mind anywhere. The nerves running down my neck are complicit enough in my incompetency to warrant the grabbing and ripping of them up and out from my body, assuming still that I cannot find the mind anywhere, and I’m sure that I cannot.Can’t help but grow tall, towards fine nourishment unshaded  by higher palm leaves. Stretching room for swaying, swaying room for creaking, creaking room for breaking. Try and try again, amongst the floor fauna scratching at our birthed bark. Until time again when the swaying does not give to breaking, and our leaves stay unshaded all the way to our star.Financially sponsoring rebel militias in Ethiopia for the coffee.Dropping an aid package of matcha on a Sunni child.Burning history books in Armenia and running away when the fighting gets sloppy.Making everywhere better off, considering starting a permaculture commune in the country.

IV

Breathing in sickness, expelling all that is good. Spill until the rotten ratio no longer can sustain going on. Feel burning where feeling isn’t. Chew an almond and drink bagged tea. Die with gusto and leave the casket open wide, arrange for a priest who was excommunicated for virulent heresy and make it a cash bar.Child scribes with minds too weak to try, a wooden spoon should set them straight enough. Micro particles of old insulation for breakfast with sides of polyfluoroalkyl, washed down with anti-freeze sourced from the back alley of a middle school. Dig the cardboard VHS sleeve painted with vintage porn right next to it. This is all to say that kids these days are made of iron and it might be easier to let the rust accumulate before attempting any sort of restoration- at least for the kids who got good grades. Throw the dummies into a pit of hot tar and throw bricks at any fleshy bulbs peaking out from its bubbling gurgle.Let’s debate and sit on pillows and get all comfortable. Wash our hands and clean them of dust, dirt, grease and any other such particles that aren’t perfectly in line with the itinerary that some stupid monk stapled to the back of my hand. Never get dirty and chase only what’s warm. Mother’s milk isn’t liquor and liquor aint good. Let’s exchange ideas that someone smarter ejaculated into heavy books, maybe multiple volumes and maybe ideas that were never that smart anyhow. Stop your drilling and hammering and building! I’m trying to hear that dead guy disguise his adolescent sexual trauma in prose! Let him speak and write about everything in sweeping declarations that would turn a sinner’s cheeks whore red. Well maybe he’ll leave out one glaring piece of the whole that shatters the grand narrative, though that glaring piece (women) is probably inconsequential in the scenes these ideas are meant to swim around (discourse, dialectic, rhetoric circles and such and such). In the end, you should feel guilty regardless, you weren’t born with the hand stamp, and if you were, that stupid fucking monk stapled that damned itinerary over it.An assumption that you should have an assumption, ruining the whole thing before it even started, but blame away. Putting stake in form, not a form that anyone told you to stake in- but betting against everything from your boat made from straw while in the rough waters of a disappearing ocean on a dark dead night. An expectation that you should have an expectation, ruining the whole thing before it even started, but blame away. Putting stake in authority and esteem, not an authority or esteem that anyone told you to stake in, but betting against everything from your lone rock in the lost part of a forgotten desert at a time that will never happen. Authority and esteem and the forms that spring forth from them are not the only way to interact with the world, and that how you see everything before the thinking happens will be all that you need. Nothing needed to happen the way it did, so find some solid ground to stand on and bend your knees generously.Metal repositories worn from often abuse.Soaking mouthpieces slip from mouths that pucker too tightly.Steam cooks tediously, except when burning tight child-skin.

V

Passed gripes chimney my oracles afoot. Missed tethers tally the talkin’ bird. GUAP, HAWK. Staple feather to leather and let God fly high. Mass attacks, vile violent topple tipping tropics, awakening as experience golds our walls. Ladders latter to shoots don’t climb no walls, they’re damn faker than a smile go lucky prancin’ dancer. In most affairs, practice mostly fair. Keep a balance between your land legs and don’t fall in between all the spaces that reach the bottom. Dingy and dark don’t do you good, you need a spotlight! Get this star a magnum and an audience to see the head go inside out. Menus of maps to mooching oars to make ways for canoes. Money as mallet: reprimand never felt so good! Make symphonies of all the rags stuffing all the spaces that reach the bottom, dirty ol’ nasty rags that’d be moppin’ oil till the oil aint slick.Why let walk what cannot be lost? A fish swims faster when landed and even faster when dead (ideal creatures have ideal qualities and nothin is ideal about living but nothin is anything anyways). You can be better than the mirror but not the same- usually worse. We’re poised to live again if we do not look’n- all destruction is self when we’re all the same. Porous barriers requires us to make squeeze of our limbs and ribs- the ones that distinguish us from everything. The eyes in my stomach don’t see and it’s for the better, chewed food don’t look good as can be- not unlike the dead ideal bein animated just cause it’s gotta be.Everything moves fro and through when you’re not layin eyes on them, and everything stalls flat and grey when the looking happens. So if you’re wantin to go or stop time, depending on your waning or swelling degree of apathy, just direct your lookin towards or away from the objects of your influence. As with mostly, exceptions are the lay of the land, look inwards and feel your silhouetted body cavity against the all it blows thru- and growth will happen regardless of the flat and grey and stalling nature that seeing and knowing grants. You won’t grow in the mirror and marginal progress will let your eyes down again and again, once again stalling and greying and cementing and altogether letting you AND everyone else down until the greys spring from your head and you can take a picture every second and watch the cement weather the skin of a once and long converted spry seed into a seriously rooted oak. And if nothing of anything is good enuf, separate the knowing from the seeing, and know absolutely nothing of what you can see and compartmentalize. Sever this connection until you wake up one day good as dead, and until you die just as good as life. Then growth will be just a forlorn nostalgia that will mean as much as regret or anticipation.Octane marked exception fuel, flag flames char at the damned edges, glint heap hop there goes most the fiber. Migraines muck up up pup, marked for the time being scared to look up the flight, scared to look up the flight. Few would fly if it weren’t for wings.Master works told to be fired, soppin’ wet gross slate gonna grow sum mold if stored without mindfulness to be, anything else, appreciated for its growth potential. Don’t ill advise the specific faculties to undertake grand processes, sound dry peace with grit, faster it takes to die.Morph into that! Take that! Thrust back! You missed it! Roll in the mud and pick up everything that sticks, love your global conglomerate. You missed it! Grab it stick it down grab it it’s fucking yours! Make it adhere! That will stick to you long enough to get it!Space broadened, all it bode was bitchin’. Accounts account actually, across and around anonymity analogue as always, altogether agreeing aggressively around all actual actualities accumulating across all amenables. All it took was askin’ nice!Everyone’s toes grip onto the same tight rope taut tween what we can’t see in all directions. There’s little slack and no room to waiver, we all go only forward. We’re spread out a good amount, not all confined to the same place, in more ways than one. The exact, pre-intellectual moment we forever (ideally) reside in is shared and passed around like the wine at dinner, when the wind is running and the craving blows us all up the same peak. Never as a favor, never a reciprocal expectation (ideally). We all climb, we all sink, we all are the absolute worst, and it all has to happen to get to where it’s always been headed. No one feels the chill from outside the blanket of suchness, and the song and dance of its warmth keeps us good. Nothing is outside of us, not even our sun rising above the forever horizon, not the violence between all the people we’ll never meet, and especially not all the good or worthwhile that you’ll never be able to brag about. Bob up and down and let yourself be bobbed up and then down.Go the way the mushrooms painted. Can’t get lost when organic screeches pierce the forest ground. Call out to falling woods and hear them out before the moss absorbs seamlessly the sounds necessary to ward off prey. Wherever your foot falls is past, look up without looking up.

VI

Heavy and formidable, substanced to the core and advertised as such. Tight pathways whisper a way through and the through way is full of others. The whole is made from the bare and empty because the empty and bare moves and changes quick enough to make a solid. Hair on your arms will raise and that’s the only signs of life, when the hug from all around squeezes you tightly and ignores how you prepared. To prepare is to spit in the face of how you’re going to turn out. Unless that’s how it always needed to happen, in that case do as you please without regard for much of anything. No-regarding is real regarding.Forgotten happenings forging fearful feats. Don’t touch the dogs old or yung, a preliminary parting devoid of recognition: bastard handlers! One time I forgot that the way bends to our thoughtful will and it all fell apart, in ways that prohibited restoration. I also forgot that any degree of falling apart and restoration also bends to our will allowing imperfection to reign in the face of non-action, unlocking all that’s good for everyone. I murdered the referee and the audience cheered for reason, the audience paved all the ways to be new and gold. The speed of the Lord’s forgiveness is irrelevant if you’re a woman.Spinning fixtures entangle with the cribbed children of all the pubs and daycares, providing milk water to each cooing creature.Finding holes to fall down into. Digging holes to fall down into. Paying others to locate holes for me to fall down into. Complaining about spending all my money to those fucking hole seekers.Alone, with the feeling of presence, proximity wise or temporally I don’t know yet. Overwhelming. Wind Coos. At the center of all the feeling we create as people are my eyes. It’s us, increasingly and infinitesimally small, that holds the bulk of all feeling amongst everything that there is. High plateau, brown grass, and our last monolith. Seeded above the clouds at a spot no one’s yet been to, the last one to be. We are the being that looks at itself, we are the small and the big, the being split into two and right back into one at the same time. Our creation creates the consequence of seeing, it’s both a crutch and a blessing, then it turns into nothing at the very same time. Nothing is such as it is before we can throw our thinkin’ at it!

VII

Cosplaying as increasingly signaled strategies and there’s not even mud over my eyes. Gotten green, heed headed high outwardly, caustic action melts my reputation, not even mud over my eyes. Gotten ahead with murder, remembered more than what happened, materials lay unrusted and work best for plans non-contingent. Great greed outpacing gone stubborn inquiries, lay mud over their eyes. Too happy to stop, stopping happily after the happened is not mere abstraction but is actually leaving red marks on my face. There’s nothing to hear if I can’t even listen for the wind. So called lesser thans will eat at the dead and their flourishes go unpublished and unread, at least by those deemed to matter by those deemed to matter, while also having the predilection of advantage taking that is of course, of course congruent with their other comings and goings and doings because it’s all the same thing dressed up in such convincingly varying ways that we actually get hurt by it- and if it can hurt then it’s sure real. Cold water carves shapes into the land, sheep breath before they die, food eaten is converted into energy. Im only too happy to go the way back if it means I’m going at all. Molten core at your feet shouldn’t be enough to make you jump, suffocate before you swim. Swimming is to suffocate. Moving arms and legs in some sorts of unison is the same as not have enough air in the way of your open throat for you to continue breathing. Both action actionleslly- look at the moon not the finger! But I can understand your apathy about the where of the looking if you can’t even make it to the moon, can’t even pocket sum loose dust falling on a bare rock and bring it back to our rock and blow it in the eyes of another. Gifts! Wrapped and given! Look at yourself as if in dream, What would the coldest part of our mind think about us? Doesn’t it have the key? Trusting to let yourself decide how you feel, it’s not the one driving that needs addressing. So we get insurance before we realize that going is stopping and stopping is going. Dressing it up because you’re scared is only kind to your eyes, you’re not your eyes.

VIII

Crass methods blow the wild wind Eastward and gets the attention of the particularly wet clergyman to do the job god wouldn’t even touch. Go old, go new, go ring that rung wrought and rot weary woes Westward. All mechanics are bastards and all art gallery owners are racist as all hell, aw hell. All pedophiles are hungry and all banquets have buffets. Who’s this all for? Four feet scurry hurry on the roof, a student of calligraphy and honey butter bread. We started a family out here, ducks sheep and a sixty three year old son who rolls up weed residue into balls and smokes them in his short pipe. We all share the same values and hear the same calls, there’s a ringing out there and the fire is loud. Felled wood sounds like flocks of birds running in mortal scare. Three drunken men turn up and purchase ecstasy, we speak in French, none of us speaks French. Meditate in every second of every of everyday, don’t slip up, it’s not something we fall in and out of. And If I can’t do it now why would I be able to do anything tomorrow? There are no distinctions in any action and we’re constantly falling from our forever peak. Slipping is faster than falling and what hurts more lasts longer, don’t shorten life, bandaids catch blood so we don’t have to. Go blindly into the night and dawn will find you well and alive. And when the well runs dry we mix no-name 96 proof no-do-goodery with the juice leftover. Need to wake up from my sleep so I can finally rest, takin everything I can, takin it all- tryin not to hold, at least not too tight. PAH. But don’t cut yourself up about it, tis hard to hone in on what you don’t have, expectations wise. Be like the tea labeled naught, lack of knowledge gives ways to happiness. Comparison is the thief of joy, and expectations and reality will always compare, expectation is the thief of joy! Go blindly up the mountain and the peak will find you well and alive. Nettle nicked me nicely, nettle the missing piece tween now and the end. Wouldn’t be the same without the climb, climb couldn’t happen without the top, top would be impossible without the start. To start creates an end, nettle nicked me nicely, nettle the missing piece tween now and the end. Satori at Café de la Paix with some old old dawgs, they’ve long known, smelled out the route as yung pups. Wine delivered in a box and wet rocks stacked. Dirty clothes and ants dead at the threshold. If everything works out perfectly then trust is the most important thing. Never mind that and do the washing up, use your mind to do everything even if that means running the tap dry before the bud rot kills your dreams for a roof that’ll hold water. It’s always the many that’ll do it and the few that’ll die doing it. Impermanence is our only king! Squander nothing and fall into squalor, It’s all in the eyes you see. The old man silhouette that stays at the top of every mountain tells me to stack the wood better, I throw him some tobacco leaves still wet and he’s blinded by the melting likeness that realization can grant. Old tools soaked rightly in alcohol can pop easily the one wheel on the lone burrow, and the noise might scare our last pet that we share, somewhere between feral and ours, never further from forever the meatier. At least until all the buttons fall off, the whites burn red, the wine goes, the fire spittles, the bubbles cease to spawn, the moon smoothes over, the pristine rusts, and the whole way becomes outside of us. Only then.

My Blood-Milk

Coagulated blood-milk teased out from each and all of my neck pores. All
slipping down my front and back, its warmth apparent. Thinned pieces of
chunk loosely hold onto the sides of bigger chunks, preceded by liquid chunk-
residue. The residue will fall faster and slightly more pointedly than the lumpy
plasma, creating perfect paths for the chunks to fall faster. The bloody
campaign down my torso wrings me like a bird’s neck. A pool will form in my
umbilicus, a milky puddle of warm blood overflowing out of the shallow flesh
pit above my loins and below my chest. No lifeguard will be on duty at my
blood pool, and no kids will be running amok too close to the edge near
slipping into my depths. The beautiful black blood makes me resemble an
obsidian arrowhead, impregnated by a crimson seed just barely visible. Low
and slow, its pronunciation limps. A whisper cuts louder than a scream and
everyone screams when they see me like this. They will scream even louder if
the blood-milk concoction spurts near or on them, maybe on their cheek or
maybe near their eye. In the likely case a loose droplet should find itself flung
into another’s eye, I should be kind enough to remind them to blink the blood
away. Simply blink several times and any blood fallen on one’s eye will be
swept away by the natural functions of a blinking eye. This warm advice would
have to be received with the assumption that even more warm blood might find
its way on or near themselves as I come close enough to relay my message. I
would shout, but the added strain of the exertion will most likely push out more
of the blood-milk from my neck pores. This would certainly spill more blood
than usual (already a lot) on any person within blood-spurting-on distance,
which in this case averages around twenty-four inches out at a twenty-five-
degree downward angle. Bad news for anyone shorter than me, as well as those
at my height, and also those taller than me too. I do not think that the beautiful
obsidian black blood color would suit other people, especially if they did not
wish to be covered in the coagulated blood soup splattering all from my neck
pores. Pores continuously stocked by my fat jugular veins. Blood en route to
my brain is forced to take a brief detour from feeding my head to spilling out
my neck. A big head fed will appropriate enough blood to itself so as to create a
perpetual rush of traffic up the body, a big head fed also knows that traffic
spills out into the side streets. The biggest head that’s the most fed will realize
that weak points like neck pores are the most vulnerable exit ramps of the
perpetually rushing blood highway. SO it’s only logical and reasonable and
making sense that the blood in my feet will eventually spurt out one or near
you, including potentially landing on an eyeball

Small glass jars should be perfectly fit to store the excess blood spilling from
my neck. The small glass jars should be cleaned and gleamed in order to most
effectively display the milk once coursing through my body. Ideally, there
would be little doubt as to the contents of the small glass jars as word spreads
of the man who jars his blood of spurting excess. But if social awareness and
visual queues fail, one would need only to slightly slosh around the liquid to
gauge its viscosity. Jam would be too lumpy, and syrup too morose. The slight
slosher would be quick to determine that the unlabeled jar is filled almost to the
brim with black obsidian (impregnated by a crimson seed barely visible) milk-
blood. The source of this thick brew would be unknown to anyone handling the
small glass jars unless the jars emanated a warmth denoting a recency of filling.
Depending on the degree of this warmth, I might still be spilling some of this
milk-blood from my neck and down my torso. If this were the case then I could
simply hold up a small glass jar to my neck and let it be filled by nothing but
gravity and the natural rushing force of my body’s blood highway. This would
cut down on the labor costs of having to mop up the coagulated blood
concoction from the floor or from an unblinking eye. And until that eye blinks
the blood away, I’m just taking back my life force for the use of displaying my
gold in small glass jars. These jars would eventually find themselves on and
flying off of the shelves of department stores. Now cold (the recency of filling
would have since faded), my jars would be displayed next to Kate Spade,
Ralph Lauren, Kenneth Cole, and maybe even Dior and Cartier. The blood jars
would make great additions side by side the reversing buckles of black/brown
leather belts, faux diamond earrings forged by virtuosic twelve-year-olds, and
cashmere sweaters colored the same shade of piteous white as the puss at my
wounds. Pah. Store goers would need to exercise extreme caution when
handling my jars near these designer goods, it would be a tragic shame if the lid
became loose from the jar and had the contents became tainted by Chanel
perfumes or by stale department store air. Jars would cost $49.99 and only be
accessible at the brick-and-mortar stores, as online stores lack the tangibility
and dignity my jarred life force requires. Of course, this would have to happen
after all the blood stops spurting from each and all of my neck pores (except for
the first couple of jars that I filled using only gravity and the rushing force of
my blood highway). Before then I need to wait until either my neck pores
regain their strength and resolve, or until my brain becomes so starved of that
warm, thick milk-blood that I lose consciousness and hit the floor falling.

Patrons of my $49.99 ichor have full autonomy to use and abuse the jar and the
contents within to the fullest extent of their desire. Once re-cleaned and re-
gleamed (lest you desire to ingest my blood), the jar could make a satisfying
repository for various herbs and spices of your choice. Though no one is
spending their hard-earned shekels on just glass. The real prize is the liquid
plasma soup within, and the design is a journey of self-discovery one must
blaze when deciding what to do with the soup. You can drink it down all the
way, carefully swallowing the clumps so they don’t get trapped in your throat
or molars. You could slip some blood into the toilet bowl of your friend, after
they excrete but before they flush. This would create the illusion of bloody
stool that your friend would interpret as some stomach sickness, slipping them
into a death spiral of dissonance and delusion. My blood would probably make
an excellent base for a tomato sauce, paired with fusilli and an aged
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. Cook it low and slow to make sure the good stuff
doesn’t burn off, money wasted is my life force squandered. You could throw
my blood on a Rothko or a Klimt to raise awareness for climate change or to
protest massive wealth accumulation. This would be precious advertising for
me and my jars, my trademark coagulation would assuredly be recognized by
the masses. They’d see the videos of the protest and exclaim, “Those black
obsidian blood trails perfectly complement Orange and Yellow! There’s only
one man alive today whose bloody clumps can capture the consummated
experience between subject and observer!” Maybe the parties in charge of these
paintings would let the blood stay, only adding more value to the already
infamous works. If we’re the same blood type, I see no reason you couldn’t
inject the blood into your veins, increasing your red blood cell count and
allowing more oxygen to flow to your muscles. Become the blood jar
Ubermensch! But you don’t even need to use my blood at all, its potential to be
displayed on a shelf or a coffee table is very fertile. It’s certainly a conversion
starter, “Is that the blood-milk of the man whose each and every pore on his
neck spurted out black obsidian (impregnated by a crimson seed barely visible)
blood about twenty-four inches out at a twenty-five-degree downward angle?”
“Well, I didn’t pay $49.99 for nothing!” It also displays excellent business
acumen and significant artistic taste, think of all the dinner parties you could
throw with blood jar centerpieces sparking interesting discussion. And
depending on the recency of filling, they could be interactive pieces for all to
enjoy and bask in its fading warmth. Class now has a price! Once you purchase
a jar or two, you’ll instantly become part of an exclusive community. You can
align yourself with like-hearted jarheads (is that already a thing?), forming a
forever bond; blood is thicker than water after all. Perhaps a popular activity
within the community will be to come together with the jars and stack them
head high, or to take group selfies with everyone holding their jars with a
smile. The possibilities are limitless.

I inevitably stand to make quite a profit from the selling of my alluring root
water. My jump in status would be discombobulating, my journey becoming
etched into the forever consciousness just overnight. The grand ship of my
success would certainly attract opportunistic barnacles suckling at the neck
pores of fortune. The first step would be to secure a personal attorney. Can’t
you see these are tumultuous times? Decoys will begin showing up shelf-side
along with the originals. A true pity, the blood would most probably not be
authentically sourced, farmed from second and third-rate cattle on some distant
and dirty farm. My blood jars came from a spontaneous solution to an even
more dire problem, not milked out of me by persuasion, but spurted out of me
by God (who, like the moon to tide, willed the forces of my blood highway
forth). My lawyer at once would begin to go after the makers of these insulting
dupes, preserving the value of the one and only milk-blood jar. Once I know
my image is well cared for, I begin using the money from all that surplus value
I’m creating. I would find the best back-alley surgeons for purposes of skirting
modern medical “ethics.” Their specialty would have to be in experimental
vein and artery enlargement, to rip and stretch the walls of my blood highway
to make more room for blood to flow through. These procedures would have to
come before what would be my second, and more important surgery: heart
expansion. This expansion would enable my new heart to pump more blood for
my now more wanting veins and arteries. My new heart, at its base, would be a
healthy horse heart. Because my body would reject the foreign organ, it would
have to be combined with my heart and a pig’s heart, a big fat pig. Then, my fat
new horse-pig heart could pump more blood than ever into my thick veins, at a
faster rate than before. My virility would be felt by those even just near me,
and the appearance of the man with ropes for veins would confirm my
presence. But before this can happen I would need to shrink the gap between
the amount of blood currently in me, and the actual amount my body would be
able to hold. If the answer isn’t already obvious, I would simply inject a jar or
three of my own blood, wouldn’t be too hard to find a vein anyhow. The third
and final procedure would be the most scientifically dubious one yet. It would
involve creating a relationship between certain ingestible hormones and the
size of the pores on my neck. Allowing me to influence the gaping of my neck
pores at will. With large, open pores I could then more easily coax and tease
the blood from my vessels to shoot outward and everywhere. The various
procedures will have changed the color of my previously black obsidian
(crimson seed barely visible) blood into a fully black brew because of the
complete damnation of a biological, organic being. This is a price I am willing
and fully capable of paying, after all, it will only lead to new jars of mik-blood
for immediate and vast distribution. I am investing in myself, for myself. At the
swallowing of a small white pill, I will be able to violently and with much
volume shoot out and spread my lumpy milk everywhere and anytime, not just
at the will and when of God. I look forward to becoming a machine of blood
spilling perfection, an experiment of true sublimity and grandeur, fulfilling the
human desire for ideal form. All it takes is one purchase of $49.99 today.

A Guide To Live

CHAPTER 1

Thread by thread I'm torn apart, unwound by my own being beneath my donned flesh, though it's on my flesh donned that the bastard effects of my sickness are visible and even telling. It informs you that I am somewhere halfway into the ground, in a spot vague enough in depth that you cannot tell whether or not I am sinking or gently rising, but either way subdued.For only now, I have left vice alone and remain so. It's said that it is giving up everything for one thing- or the other way around. When your everything lacks Fear and Control, the scope of your autonomy becomes shriveled and pruned, setting you on one unfortunate path. To get off that path early, we’re told to steep our life in commitment to look the best we can for the one entity with the most power and (supposedly) the least capacity for Judgment. That entity made us from pieces he's created of, but emphasize or suppress certain qualities that we ALL contain, and you'll find yourself eternally damned and remembered for your heresy- it will be carved into a stone that lasts forever and wears erosion favorably. At least according to those that claim to be the messenger to us from this infinitely powerful entity. Let's hope they are good actors and aren't deliberately using their position to manipulate, misinform, and Control. Even if they aren't using their position to lie and cheat, let's hope that their trying best is good enough. It’s a large responsibility after all, relaying the dogma from an unknowable entity to us: Animals at the will of our most base instincts. Let those instincts guide your success. Success in power, in killing, in ripping flesh and chewing the blood dirtied sustenance the weak have just laying around. That's the kind of shit God is fluent in- pubescent bone cancer, scorched corpses, concentration camps, and good ol’ bloody death and injustice. These and all the other horrible acts we're all (supposedly) culpable for have damned us to a life of knee prayin', shawl wearin', and Fear havin’.Flex your wish muscle and arch your dream bone all over! Green your stay and build your case- it won't matter now but it might hold up later, when everyone is a little more spent and care is harder to come by. Judges and Beasts will hide behind oak bondage and employ others to do the terrible acts they promise. Without us to Control, they wouldn't be. There is an existential necessity for our (supposed) criminality. There is no Justice when there is no Crime. Don't hold out for a balance and keep your fingers uncrossed- tilt your head down.Though sometimes they make no effort to enumerate the provisions of bad or savory and leave it up to the hearts of chance, and it beats grey and ugly. It’s a deliberate attempt to usurp the will and prod the cattle. They are traps designed perfectly for our paws- don't scurry, it just makes their job easier and their dispositions sourer. Let's carve our rules and codes into the sand and turn on the fan, don't misremember! It'll cost you your everything and doom you to beyond what you have. Thank You! We should pray our thanks to the architects of our living, for they have created new depths for us to inevitably sink to. Why stop at zero? Tighten the slack and redo the clasps, when we sink lower than nothing we transfer our bodies to those with the most- at least now we’re close enough to get a good
look, maybe be inspired to change our damned ways.I've known creeps to soar and bastards to climb, grit to smooth through too- don't fall in between the cracks. Know when to scream and how to lie, and don't forget your Big Gun to give out Justice when you're scared or maybe just curious to see how they fall down. (Sometimes they're already lying ("You don't wanna do this!") down so they can't fall). It's better to be scared than dead, always remind yourself of this and let it influence you more each time. Let the legacy of impersonal Violence scar the tissue of your wilting flesh, and if you can manage, create platforms to catch the falling flakes of skin. Forge a record of what erodes, make remembered what you could have been.So when it all has to end, what does it matter that which has stake. A grasp tight around your dignity goes flaccid once you're in the ground, underneath an epitaph that most probably reads: Wasn't Scared Enough. Legacy is fruitless- when you're unable to hold it firm: choke it. Exploit and Expropriate. Speak words to it and find them comforting during your brief run of Fear around your years few. Let other people regret making you scared, better them slaughtered than you. Damn the dead to Hell to let those still living know that you’re the most scared and it’s your biggest advantage. All that trembling and shaking and nervous twitching will keep your muscles stimulated, leaving you primed and ready to take out that staring panhandler.Pissing kerosene on the homeless and fumbling for my matches. And if they wake up dry and stiff, they'll end up in a duffel bag outside a music festival. Their limbs cut and arranged to accommodate their stored condition- heavy and gone to go. Binary fate, we live or die, everything between these conclusions is a temporal oversight. We do the pissing or we get pissed on. In fringe cases we end up at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, swallowing lead born from jihadism and marital bliss. Look around and see all of this, but try and keep yourself from freaking out: tie yourself to a pole and let honey cake you good as it goes. Forget escape and hear for the ants trailing together. Tremble not with malice, accept that they got to eat and you’re doused in kerosene. Remember that you can't barter with Hymenoptera, and even if you could, you wouldn't have enough to offer. The sun will bake you just as fast as the critters mistake your skin for sugar. Come to play come to die, die high and cry me oh my.Porcelain plates crash downward and Future Buddhas go through car windows giving us the tools to sustain our addictions- ammonia and burnt plastic habits. Death as our penultimate virtue, living regardless and maybe even in spite as our last resort. Sell a baby on 24th and Mission, I'll throw in some rock. Toss that vaccine and fetch those magnets! Grab a scalpel and leave your caution at the door, in fact, ditch it altogether. Don’t feed the Death Machine, which is really just Life. I’ve seen it before… The bicycle with a child’s seat fastened to its frame is the salient manifestation of the Death Machine. Surrounded by nothing but hard, a child’s head will make contact with asphalt below or the metal hulls fro, to produce the product of Death for the one who didn’t even know Life. It wasn’t their decision- they’ve been on this path forever and it ends with blunt force trauma to a head that could have worn one thousand helmets regardless, that’s just the path’s end. It doesn’t care.Tend not to operate within the limits of collective, established guilt, it might just be easier to fill air with metal. You don’t need to tackle ideas when you can just shoot your way through debate. Logical fallacy? Spill their blood. Straw man? Clean them of their teeth. Claims? Evidence? Let spill black from their liver. There’s no end until they can’t speak anymore. Only then the winner isn’t some vague abstraction, but an obvious standout amongst the corpses at their feet. Smart is alive is a killer.

I’m under the impression
that the salt of my existence
bears prickling sanctions
for the grizzlies amongst
my sated faculties.

My old professor got the wheels of his Porsche stuck between the north and south tracks of the California Bart locomotive. The tracks carried the trains simultaneously to and through Professor Speight’s Porsche while he sat in the driver’s seat, killing him. The question of any intention on his part is technically unquelled- though the News reported it as an accident. I wonder how he got himself in that position. Goes to show what metal and wheels will do to subdue people on their path’s end. A more likely variation is, of course, the world famous Car. We all get to swim in a hellbroth of terrifying speed and impersonal carnage, it’s our greatest privilege. “Cars give us freedom!” Of course they do! We shit & sleep whiles away from where we piss & do everything else. What better way to bridge the widening gap than to do it quickly. We need Cars so Gun violence isn’t the primary cause of death for children, it’s imperative to beat out the Gun lobby! We ran the numbers and it’s easier to Run these little shits over than it is to shoot them all dead. Woe is the pedestrian ha ha ha. And if you want, you can shoot Cars from out of the sky and on to unsuspecting (probably criminal) children. Just make sure that the Car explodes on impact so as to stuff shrapnel deep in every sinus and socket of every bastard that sort of resembles who we Hate or just whoever happens to be looking at the falling Car at the time.

Bounce and bob on the wonder belt
charged with carrying us to (1) Jail and (2) Death.
When things buckle and you’ve already signed up
for more than you’re worth your weight in
misery: trottle uncarefully to a verdict
arbitrarily sought and steam off
in a block of grey alloy.

CHAPTER 2

Tilt your head back up and see that it's been far too long to be had talkin' shop so you gotta get up and leave. Row down your road and sleep at the intersections. Fall into a long blink, watch something else for a change, believe something else for a change. Keep moving when prompted- move on through the mud you down dooly.You ignore the fog and come closer, you don't see that what you can't see can only sneak up on you. You’ll pucker your Coober Pedy when you turn the corner and see a mirror exactly your height and width, it won’t yell at you but you’ll hear it loud and clear. It will try to sell you the idea of Natural Virtues, inherent traits that we’re all born with. No loose associations here, only all-encompassing, fundamental shit. I hope you got your wallet on you, because you’re going to want to give it all you got. With these notions bought and sold, you’ll see the world as a flat line, where we’re all born at the limits of our purpose. No rising above or changing the path, which is really just a placemat to sit still on until a Car lands on your fickle baby skull. It’ll be easier to hate our neighbors, spout shouts about Heretics! Creating clubs will be sweet, denying entrance and hospitality will feel good. Our animal, primitive and true brains can’t properly function in a society that’s created so much depth, so many rules. We’re thinking too hard! Hate can be squeezed, ringed out and sifted in order to get to the pure juices of Fear. Drink up and up and up, let it dribble down your chin and stain your clothes. Now we can tell you apart from those who play content when they really should be dry heaving from the smell of putrid horror constantly raining down on us ever since Eve was a gluttonous Bitch. And sometimes these Natural Virtues manifest in obvious physical dissimilarity, Aristotle said women had fewer teeth than men.

AN INSPIRING STORY

Alan wanted to find out the truth. He was extremely curious and very handsy. This got him into trouble a lot at school, his handsyness did. His hands were ten inches across and his fingers were as long as his sad little face and about as wide as his prick. Those horrible hands and fingers would constantly find themselves down a shirt or up a nose, but never to the amusement of his classmates. He was classically creepy regardless of the hands, though they definitely compounded his despairing freakness; he looked undeserving of compassion. Alan was constantly reprimanded for his mischief at school and made to be an outcast amongst his normal-hand-sized peers.In one especially troubling fit of involuntary isolation, Alan picked up a book. “Aristotle said women had fewer teeth than men.” This tickled the curious bone in his skeleton, vibrating it to a frequency felt by all perverts in a thirty mile radius. The first thing he did was stick his fat long fingers in his mouth and count his teeth. This proved difficult, initially. Soon enough he scribbled down ‘thirty two’ on a piece of paper and made for the nearest woman he could sniff out. She was walking back from a laundromat in broad daylight, her hands bound by the strain of her laundry bag. Alan wasn’t wearing any socks or shoes, and his toenails were the color of tobacco-stained drywall. His hoodie fell off over his head as he bobbed up and down during his desperate dash towards Suzy, the girl walking back from the laundromat in broad daylight, her hands bound by the strain of her laundry bag. Alan, from behind, wrapped his huge hands around Suzy’s face, inserting his hot dog fingers into her unwanting mouth and poking her eyes on the way. Her muffled scream roared inside of him. He only counted about two teeth before Suzy managed to spray mace behind her, landing on and around his face, eyes, and nose.It turns out Suzy knew Alan to frequent the area, his presence had become synonymous with danger and disgust and he demanded caution. At first it was difficult for him to yank his fingers from her hole, her fully extended jaw could barely house his chair-leg fingers. But when he could finally manage, Suzy took off running, the grime of his fingers and the air of mace still on her tongue. Ever since, she lived in Fear. Fear of Alan, Fear of big hands, Fear of long fingers, and Fear of every little thing that could ever enter her mouth. This ensured that Suzy would live a long, cautious life. Alan gave her the gift of Fear, which let her live forever. As for himself, he attempted and survived multiple suicides. His fingers were either too big to pull a trigger, too undexterous to tie a noose, or too cumbersome to wield a knife (also the ceramic bathtub felt too cold for his grey flesh). It seemed impossible to kill himself- so he lost his Fear. Without the knock of Death chucking at him at all times, he got cocky enough to live. And at the precipice of his arrogance, his path’s end came. Alan’s official cause of Death was cerebral hypoxia (big ass fingers hogged all his brain blood)- but really he died from a lack of Fear brought on by his will to live, despite the conclusions of his Natural Virtues.

CONTINUED

Instead of laying a looking eye on the end of your life, try and see everything that you could have achieved. Lean in to regret and anguish as motivating factors- they won’t budge or waiver. They’ll prop you upright and make you seethe with action. You’ll lock your eyes on what isn’t, and you’ll try and find a way to it. It might seem illogical (have faith) or discouraging (be better), but it will keep you focused on the doing, even if the doing wrong. It’s either that or scooping out your eyes, but why waste a good spoon. Ditch your shoes and fasten some spikes to the bottom of your feet. DIG IN. Many will try and pull you out, they’ll try to persuade you to buy their ideas and join their religion. Their signs are bright and their words are promising- crap in shiny out. They might tout words of self-fulfillment and inner-peace, impossible claims to be unlistened and reported. Find your nearest Fear stained soldier and spread the news, organize and collude. Inner-peace and self-satisfaction are qualifications to be applied retroactively, while you lie in your death crib surrounded by no one (friends are enemies). You can look back on your life, or just the very fact that you’re able to look back at all, as a testament to your success. But only at the end are you able to succeed (ENDS ALWAYS JUSTIFY THE MEANS). Take your winning ticket to the shifty concierge behind the large oak desk. You won’t win big, someone in front of you already did, but at least you had a chance at retribution. Everyone loves an underdog, so stay underneath your potential and remain rooted for. It will feel good and that’s good enough.

A BRIEF MESSAGE

TRADE SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. CATERWAUL ABOUT YOUR JORUMS
OF SUFFER. FEED YOUR SEED TO THE DIRT. FALL UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF
ARBITRARY DAMNATION. WE LOOK DOWN AS IF WE’RE NOT WILLING TO
SEE OURSELVES. RESOLVE CURDLES UNDER A BLESSING OF PAIN AND
RETCH. THE OLD MAN SAYS MAGIC IS TECHNOLOGY. SLAUGHTER
THE FOND. THERE’S A SHOOTER AT THE SCHOOL AND IT’S THE
SUBSTITUTE. DITCH THE SLATE. CAULK VISCOSITY CLOT BOILS UNDER
MY NAILS AND FACE. BURNING LOVE HATES TO BE USEFUL. CHUCK YOUR
DISCERNMENT ASUNDER. COLLECT THE PARTS AND BUILD YOUR
HARROW FOR THE USER. SIT. SIT. SIT. TAKE OFF THAT HELMET AND
SCRAPE THE MEAT OFF THAT FACE. EAT A GRILLE. CARELESSNESS OF
THE GODS IN THE FACE OF HUMAN ANGUISH. PRUNE THE FOLDS AND
CULL THE HOARDS. BORE INTO ME. EXTRACT WHAT IS
INSTRUMENTAL TO MY FAILURE. REPRODUCE AND MASS
PRODUCE. INSERT IT ALL WILDLY. MAKE DOGS OUT OF YOUR VOLITION.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK BARK
BARK. BARK BARK BARK. BARK
BARK BARK. BARK BARK BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK
BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK BARK BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK.
BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK. BARK

CHAPTER 3

Keep what you can Control within arms reach, dry your hands of grease and sludge. Consolidate your privileges into one basket and show it to everyone. You have lots and they need to see. Inspire the lackadaisical with your prowess- set them straight. There’s no state to rely on or community to appeal, you have to be completely self-reliant on your own faculties. Home school your children, keep your milk unpasteurized. Don’t “pay” your “taxes” to an administration that uses that money to “pave” roads and open “libraries.” Roads are only good for going where they want you to go, and libraries only carry books they want you to read. DON’T READ ANYTHING WITH A SPINE. All the good shit is in the loosely brought together stack of paper. Each letter cutout from a magazine. In the meantime, you should only worship what comes from inside you, that’s the only dogma you can trust- that’s real Control. As soon as you desire to learn or expand, you’re already vulnerable to the influence of others. You’ll become an amalgamation of all the bastards who aren’t you.The different methods of Control vary by difficulty. As previously mentioned, you could scoop out your eyes [total Control over what you can see, best results]. Left eye out first because it just makes sense. Not for the faint hearted. Don’t accidentally slip on a wet slimy worm nerve and kill yourself before you can bask in the unControlling. Another method for garnering independence is to buy a large Truck. A big ass huge large Truck. It puts you above all the shit eaters in their cardboard boxes and tents- just run those hippies down. Feelings wise, bones crush just as good as metal. As with staining your clothes with the pure pulp of Fear, owning a Dodge 95,000 or a Ram 2.5 million will signal to others that the cold fire of Terror crackles deep in your heart, searing the valves arteries nodes veins fibers and ventricles to a blackened crisp smelling of patchouli, tonsil stones, and blood soiled shit from a GI bleed. These people are your family, you can listen to them because they are you. Shower in the incestuous bond of your recognition.Ideally, you’re driving around in your lifted Truck, drunk with power (and liquor), and unseatbelted to the full extent of your freedom. Both your eyes are scooped gone and your empty sockets are wet with bliss. If you’ve learned anything so far, you’re driving not on paved road, but on any other surface that your tires can grip, be it a hospital or a mosque. Stomp the accelerator, squeeze your God trigger, and forget about the worst.Arrest warrants for the wives of the Baptist pastor, documents scribbled in the silver blood of children. Spiritual warfare, militant clergy members outfitted with experimental weapons of mass efficiency (goal is Death). A mortal tithe to be paid out in guilty flesh, we’re all born with a bank. GIVE. Used car dealer with the passionate authority to exhort the mislead to find themselves in him. Nimble phroggers planning Hell surgery, missed the pregnant rape by the skin of her teeth. PICK UP THE PHONE. God called on you to Love killing. Claim a nation for Him, fill out the necessary paperwork and file it with the necessary branch. Ignore the oversight committees and never heed to arbitrary systems of accountability. Go to war with the other winners, funnel strength into more strength, iron sharpens iron (you’re half way into the ground: if you aren’t rising, you’re sinking). Aspire to ancient written word, text as moral Law. Of course recent developments won’t fit into the perfect picture made from the perfect materials of times ago crafted from the perfect model of a perfect time. Cram the square into the circle- just make it work regardless of material stipulation, you’ll be forgiven later.There’s no such thing as greed, you have what you have and you’ll have what you’ll have because of the plan laid out before you, before you. Don’t feel bad or guilty, it’s okay to tower above those whose plans were worse than yours. Maybe they were born out of wedlock, or maybe their ancestors did one bad thing one time. Your success means that you’ve always been perfect.The urge to quell what is out of order beyond you is inevitable, a subtle drift towards total consolidation. In these cases be like Alan- grow your hands big through strain and focus. Use your large, grasping hands to bring Control to those objects people and events outside your normal purview. Extend over lines and borders and previous agreements. Let your oppression known and have it be the foundation for the colonies of your necessary influence. Want more hair on your head? Rip it from weak scalps. Want more orange garments? Rob a Tibetan monk at Gunpoint- if they’re on the right path they won’t even care. Want more love? Coerce it from an emotionally vulnerable Human and toss them aside when you’re sick of it. Was it really love you needed? Wrong question, you looked inward, a mistake.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

The noble truth of Contentment
The noble truth of the origin of Contentment
[Excessive desires of
Safety, Assurance,
Calmness]
The noble truth of the extinction of Contentment
[Achieving Fear]
The noble truth of the path leading to the extinction of Contentment.
[Noble eightfold path, the Right Way]
Little understanding
Only some thought
Discouraging speech
Violent action
Isolated livelihood
Half effort
No mindfulness
Narrow concentration

CHAPTER FOUR

To say that profit motive is King
is to forget about Hate.
Not to say there’s no money in the usurping of will and the prodding of cattle,
that’s where most of the money is.
But to qualify our institutions on the basis of financial exploitation alone
misses out on so much Hate for others on the basis
of circumstance.

You need to Hate. Take your aim, squint your bad eye, and squeeze don't pull. The trigger meets its destiny and people fall down. Hate is the path of least resistance. It guides you to stay in your most animal form. Be like a Hecuba Lion and take your revenge out on everyone who aided in your tragedy. Maul Revenge. Bite to kill and prototype your destiny on all of your victims. Really no one's a victim (Death is impersonal, Life is impersonal), but the systems of rules and Laws and morals demand a delineation between victim & perpetrator, just so we all feel better about ourselves. No animals allowed inside a courthouse and any lawyer representing a Lion will not be taken seriously (and mauled by the Hecuba Lion for wanting to take the plea deal (he was a public defender.)). The Law doesn't see us for who we truly are, so we have to operate outside the Law, and if that so happens to be against the Law, then they make a message out of us. A loud, high- pitched message that only tortures us Animals, leaving the socially constructed Humans unscathed and confused as to our twitches of pain and yelps of agony. No news media will feature us and any mention will only slander us. We need grassroots campaigns and militant manipulation to push back against the system of arbitrarily constructed morals in order to etch out our birth right on the face of our collective existence. Poison the blade and infect it outright- etch the dastard mark deep in that flesh and rip it through all resistance and hesitation. A mark of this significance, no matter its size, will never waiver to influence neighboring plots of flesh- always ripe with potential. You got to make people Hate before they can fully feel Fear.When Hate and Fear elicit a response of resistance, of revolution, then you have no choice but to respond with Violence. Annihilation unto total surrender. It was a good working strategy when we had that whole Indian problem in North and Central America. And they resisted more than most. An arrowhead is a pitiful match to lead, and an even worse one to measles/typhoid/smallpox/malaria and cholera. We couldn’t have done it without the Hate. It would’ve made looking into their eyes painful, instead of fulfilling. We would have seen ourselves in their pupils- sparking flames of introspection. Those arsonist bastards. Our disposition transcended written Law, it empowered the divine settlers closing in on Indian country. Took it on themselves- blood cooked initiative dirty with red willow particles. Hate gave us the land and it's going to allow us to keep it- let our guard down and contentment might sneak up on us. Our land once bloody and wild is now fraught with comfort and homogenous rule. It might smooth us over, we’ll lose our grit and become liable to being replaced. The nature of genocide (Life) is cyclical and soon it’ll be our turn to face existential threat.True or not, it’s a good message to rile up some Controlling, Fearful, and Hateful, soldiers. Skip boot camp and send them off to the front lines. Their rations are Walmart gift cards and kisses from Momma. Give them their first big Gun and tell them stories about how they’re on their way out of this country. It will all make sense when they score their first kill and they realize the impersonal ease in which they can exercise their autonomy. It really is as easy as just listening. Our ideal soldier brings to war nothing but Fear Control and Hate- they are a direct extension of authority, one of Alan’s enormous fingers. Three times a day we’ll feed them a healthy portion of propaganda just in case the Death they witness cracks at their resolve. This cracking is irrational, it’s a mistake caked into our evolution. We treat it with pictures and headlines of the enemy in prosperity. You’ll have to personally proliferate messages of finite influence, that if we’re not at the helm then we’re becoming something different. Different is what kills us. The standard for living should be set by those with the lowest tolerance to anything outside their standard of comfortability. They’ll be our new God. We won’t need to justify anything, just point to them and say “This is what makes them comfortable.” These are their Natural Virtues, these are our Natural Virtues.Bombs will take out convenience stores, projectiles will tear up homes, and brain matter will stuck itself in the long hair of women and hippies. Lifted trucks will be fitted with treads to roll smooth over nurses and firefighters, and roads won’t lead anywhere anymore. Good and bad will be obvious- the clothes you wear and the books you read will tell us how to kill you (presence of any book is enough to elicit an investigation; a motive to learn is punishable by Death). Our campaigns are natural reactions to a slow Violence mounting its undeserved authority over our infinitely bulkier claim to living in superiority over others. This is our path’s end.

Wipe The Dust From The Mirror

My dining room table was the perfect length for the boy’s body. There were about four inches between each end of him and the edge of the table, had the boy been taller I would have had to sever his feet from his legs before prepping him. This would have created a tedious scenario, one where different sections of his body would begin to decompose at different intervals, hastening my delicate work to a standard undeserving of both of us. Thankfully I could begin with the boy fully intact against the white tablecloth I had taken from the restaurant. I had to keep both windows open as the smell was overwhelming, even with candles and incense burning all around us. The scent of sândalo, rhubarb, and lemon merged with the air of exposed dermis and eccrine glands, the thick fog of gaseous expulsion and leaky bile. At first, I was wearing a full-faced mask to filter the air, but seeing the boy fully exposed to me on that table compelled me to take the mask off, I felt I needed to be fully present with him. The reciprocity between us also commanded I be fully naked, our flesh blending together and uniting, his stealing the warmth of mine while I basked in his cool leather.If someone were to open my front door at that moment and enter my apartment they wouldn’t see a violent play of mortal expropriation, not at all, they would see two equals in a gracious exchange of mind and body. Each of us had so much to offer the other, for me it was enlightenment, both in my worldly craft and in my spiritual existence. I had long since rejected religion, and although I wasn’t going to change in that respect, the boy seemed to offer me something not of this world. As for him, I could offer honor, dignity and life. Without living agency, his body had no yung, no use. Preparing a new type of cuisine from him would give the patrons of his substance satisfaction, carnal fulfillment, once again giving life to the boy- restoring his yung. In this way he would live forever in the body and mind of the one who chewed swallowed and digested completely the parts of his body, the sum of which the dish consisted of. These gifts made us accountable to each other, further binding us. For me, I had to honor his legacy by realizing my potential, and for him, he had to resist sorrow and dejection from infecting the taste of his flesh- the chief tendril of his use- a feat I felt was made easier by my compassion and discerning legerity.The red light from above the dining room table gave the boy’s meat an exemplary quality of display, I could have invited my neighbors in and had them bear witness to such a state of poise. Maybe they would have all laid their hands on his supple skin, animating him with their warmth and having him dance for us on the table beneath the light. But his warmth was my warmth and you don’t show people the uncarved block from which you sculpt. By his sides I laid out my scalpel, forceps, and scissors, for opening up the stomach and intestines. Next to those I had carefully arranged my larger knives and sat my cleaver adjacent, all recently sharpened on a brand new whetstone. Ridding the body of hair was the first step and had to be undertaken with extreme caution and deliberacy in order to keep his silken flesh flush and unbattered. Afterwards, I ran my hands across his shaven body and imagined warm butter caking him absolutely, and how it would look and smell searing each piece in oil. I slowly severed fingers from palms, toes from soles, removing the bones in all of them with a vague idea of later stuffing them with garlic. The arms and legs were next and gave to the sharp edge of the cleaver excitedly, begging to reveal its alluring cross-section to me, to let me in on some corruptible secret.Cleaned of his limbs and left with only stumps, you’d think his image was tarnished and made to look like a bastard version of some creator’s ancient design, but I assure you this was not the case. It had felt like he was waiting for this, that all his living life was a state of drudging purgatory and it was only after his death that he would truly be born. I was knocking down the hurdles for him in his race to perfection, and the more I had done to him the more beautiful he became, like an addict kicking their habit or a churchman clutching his crucifix. At length, I debated keeping the boy’s genitals for myself, as some token of remembrance. I had this debate all the while holding his genitals in my hand, guarding them from perverted exploitation like a parent would a child, feeling that only I could take after such a task. I decided against it and thought it best if I instead focused my culinary efforts to the restaurant. I removed the organs from his torso and kept them in an icebox for some later occasion, perhaps some tripe or offal dish would be added to the menu. In the end all that was left to remove were the eyes, nose, lips, tongue, and ears, removing the boy’s brain as my final act of resurrection. There was no dispute as to what I would do with his head, I had planned on burying it in the park across the street from the restaurant, for it to remain near the sight of where the rest of him was to be cooked and prepared with extenuating sincerity.There was one specific person in mind for the consumption of the dish- of the boy: the owner of the restaurant of which I was employed. The executive chef was soon to retire and had nominated me for his replacement. The owner wanted me to make him a dish to prove my culinary prowess, to prove to him that the restaurant would be in good hands, though the executive chef had told me it was just a formality. Regardless of the certainty of ascension I was guaranteed, I wanted to create something truly transcendental, to prove to them that I was capable of rising above the water at our necks. That is why I regarded the boy with such attention, care and respect, for he was my path to realization, he was helping me wipe the dust from the mirror and reflected in it my undefiled self-nature.Before I left for the restaurant I neatly arranged the boy’s pieces into a cooler and wrapped his head in cloth, putting everything in the trunk of my car. I arrived during lunch hour when the other chefs were eating in an adjacent building as they took their leave from the day’s preparations. That was the only way I could go unnoticed while I stored the boy’s meat in the freezer. That was my usual routine when I brought in off-menu ingredients, and that day was certainly no exception. I had known that other chefs were jealous and skeptical of my recent promotion and would try to find any reason to ruin me, and what better impetus to my destruction than the discovery of a young mutilated boy in a cooler I could not pass as someone else’s. I knew they wouldn’t be able to see the same beauty I saw in the boy, regardless of his worldly condition- and that made me feel sorry for them. How trivial their ethics were in the face of the ultimate reality.As I was bringing the cooler to the entrance behind the restaurant, I saw one of the cooks smoking a cigarette on the stoop leading up to the door. He had a vexed expression as I passed him, though he didn’t utter any words of shock or otherwise voice grunts of disgust. It wasn’t until I sat the cooler down at my feet and put the key into the door that I noticed the top of the box was slightly ajar, probably from the various bumps and turns on the road, but definitely revealing a single loose eyeball still attached to a severed optic nerve. The boy’s apparent will to see the world around him even after his physical death confounded me. It was through my care that I was guiding him gracefully along to the next stage of his life and I was committed to being all that he needed, he didn’t need to see to realize that. My eyes glided upwards and met with the young cook, the ash on his cigarette accumulated but did not fall. I used my boot to press the top of the cooler back into place while holding eye contact. “You never saw a pig’s eye before?” I silvered cooly, the ash on his cigarette fell to the floor and I turned the key into the kitchen.Everything had to go perfectly, which was more complicated considering I hadn’t previously cooked with human ingredients. My culinary pilgrimage towards self-realization began when I was just a cook. I was in charge of entrees and there was a particularly large volume of Soupe à l'oignon being ordered one evening, something about a spot in the newspaper. I was garnishing with fresh tarragon and couldn’t help but notice the textural similarities between the particularly slimmer bits of leaves and the fine legs of a spider. I would often stare into the pot of beef stock and twirl the tarragon in my fingers, near spilling drool from my lips into the brewing soup as steam coated my face. Eventually, I brought a paring knife down into the wine cellar and looked up into the corners trying to spot a spider in its web. I would reach out and grab the spider, squeezing its body until it would struggle no more, severing each of its legs while in the dank fog of the dark cellar. I returned to my station and began garnishing the soups with the spider legs on top of the tarragon, finally seeing into the purpose of my tenure as a cook. There seemed to me a beauty and poise in the marrying of typical ingredients and the ones less conventional or altogether disregarded. Distinction would melt away and approach closer to ideal forms increasingly obfuscated by concepts like acceptable or taboo. I remember the executive chef pulling me aside after dinner that evening. He wanted to inform me that several guests had an exceptional dining experience and especially commended the onion soup for its bold flavors and attractive display, it seemed the path I was blazing was a righteous one.Due to my repeated honors, I was quickly promoted to sous chef. I was becoming more daring and felt increasingly pulled towards this new way of seeing the world. Only about a week after my promotion, while on my way to the restaurant, I spotted a dead snake curled up in a roadside ditch. Its head had appeared to been crushed underneath a great weight which assured me that no organs would have ruptured in the bulk of its body, making it an ideal source of unsoiled meat. I typically found snake to be somewhere in-between chicken and fish in taste and texture, of course after it’s been chopped gutted skinned and cooked in oil. Because I was already en route to the restaurant and unprepared to cook the snake, I had to slice the dead reptile into cylindrical pieces while in my car before I could go inside. Our most popular dish was the Coq au vin and I had a feeling that the snake would pair well with some of the Burgundies we had just received for cooking. I had an idea to first cook the snake and then tuck pieces of it inside the whole bird, to maintain the dish’s typical display while still implementing the wild animal. I put a lid over the large pot with the snake bits inside so no other chef could watch them stir in the oil, I would notice the others were attentive to even my finer flourishes so I had to be careful. The severed head of the snake was still in my coat pocket and at one point fell out onto the floor as I was bent over. I quickly fetched the detached end of the scaled beast, sure someone had noticed. When I stood upright, the chef beside me looked furious, he turned his gaze to the large pot with the lid on it. Extending his hand towards the lid he licked his lips like the snake he would surely find but was impatiently called on by one of the waiters, imploring him with urgency to help convince an especially dull guest that the Confit de canard did not in fact contain the hard beak of a duck. When he returned there was nothing but mushrooms and bacon stirring in the pot. That evening I again received praise from our executive chef, this time from guests commenting that the Coq au vin was impossibly savory and that the chicken was apparently so maturely braised that it was surely handled by none other than our chef executif. That night I buried the snake’s severed head in the park across the street and drank wine over its solemn grave.I was becoming more settled in my spiritual journey and praise from authority only assured me more that I was closer than ever. Everything around me seemed to affirm the fruits of my efforts, I could do no wrong and that meant I was all right. When I heard about the promotion I knew that cellar spiders and ditch snakes, stray cats and fat raccoons would no longer suffice for a truly noble creation. But I now had the ideal canvas, the boy was perfect. I was to cook the dish alone in the kitchen after dinner when we had closed to the public. The only other people in the restaurant at that time were the owner and the executive chef whom I was replacing. This granted me complete privacy as I moved pieces of the boy to and fro, leaving me blissfully unworried of jealous colleagues.I began by cutting the meat of his thighs into cubes, seasoning with salt and pepper and coating the chunks in flour before setting them aside. I stuffed his fingers with minced garlic and threw them into the cast iron with bacon fat, removing them when they became crisp. While the bacon fat remained I added in the cubed thighs until caramelized, setting them aside with the garlic fingers. Next, I sautéed onions and carrots until soft and fragrant. I would have preferred the dish to consist only of the boy and his meat, but certain flavors I deemed necessary to highlight his substance and to present it in the best context possible. I returned the fingers and thighs to the pan and added red wine, scraping the bottom to release the fond from its bondage, simmering everything as it reduced. In a separate pan, I sautéed mushrooms and added in the lips, nose and ears. Before the mushrooms browned I squeezed both of the eyes over the pan, releasing the vitreous fluids over the rest of the ingredients. All the while the boy’s tongue was simmering in a pot alongside bay leaves and peppercorns. Once the tongue was cooked thoroughly, I carefully removed the outer membrane and shredded the meat overtop the simmering thighs.The boy was nearly fully born, he resembled the perfect image I had of him since he first laid out in front of me. I had held up my end of our bargain, I had given him yung, for his use was transcendental passage for me. It was then necessary for him to uphold his end of the bargain, to let his trust in me spread throughout his flesh and meat, to assure that they did not denigrate his taste and embarrass me in front of the chef and proprietor. That would have caused me an immense shame, surely not to be surmounted. Anything shy of a cleaned plate would have meant that I failed, myself and the boy alike. A denial of his would be a denial of mine, for distinction between us was quickly fading as the flames beneath the metal seared the meat and boiled the water. Our paths had not only intersected but became one and the same, at the end of which was praise gayly sung from the trumpets of angels and the mouths of my patrons. At last, I deep-fried the boy’s genitals in duck fat and brushed them with lemon juice. I laid the fried testicles atop the rest of the dish and garnished everything with fresh parsley and truffle salt. He was done.

The presentation of the boy was truly sublime, and I was sure that both the chef and proprietor would bask in his beauty as assuredly as I. With the dish plated and in hand, I pushed through the kitchen doors, both men eagerly turning their heads toward me as I set forth, their wine and patience quickly waning. I was becoming increasingly apprehensive as I approached, I thought that they might not appreciate the boy as I knew I could, but I had come too far and still thought there a serious chance for my salvation. When I was only a few strides away from the table the young cook from before, the one on the stoop smoking a cigarette, entered through the front door alongside an official and a policeman. The official seemed to be an inspecting officer of some sort, and in fact, I had seen him at the restaurant before during a routine inspection. Close behind stood the stout policeman, baton gripped in his red-knuckled hand. Both men watched as the young cook pointed directly at me mouthing words of naive accusation. I continued and set the dish down in front of the proprietor who was still looking over at the trio that had just entered seemingly at random. At that point, the proprietor stood up and approached the source of commotion while the executive chef remained seated and stared at the plate with horror on his face. I had not previously let the pair of men know what I was to cook for them, but perhaps the sight of a charred nose or fried testicles deeply disturbed the chef, who now looked as though he’d fallen quickly ill. I looked back towards the front door and saw that the proprietor was now also watching me in horror, having apparently been convinced by the young cook and whatever he had to say about me and my conduct on that stoop behind the kitchen. Everyone in the dining room was peering at me with a stir of terror, disgust, and unfavor. Clearly, no one was going to appreciate the boy, not only as I could, but to any degree. We were both being wholly rejected, but in that moment I felt most sorry for the boy. How could no one else see his beauty? Especially in his current state of perfection? I had thought so surely that the two men feasting on him would lead me to realization. That the forks scraping against their plates would submerge me in bliss. My competence as a chef, assured to me by these two figures of esteem and authority, surely should have given me enough confidence to find my way. But as the chef pushed his chair away from the table and the policeman shoved past the official, I felt lost, never further from my salvation. So I did what no one else wanted to do. I grabbed two fistfuls of the boy and ate them whole, barely chewing but defiantly tasting. Each bite more delicious than the last, each piece just as perfect as the rest. As his chewed substance slowly crawled down my throat I realized that I was never meant to use him as some means to an end, he was neither the canvas nor the uncarved block. I had come to love the boy profoundly, and probably had come to know him better than anyone else could have as he lived. I washed the boy down with some wine as the policeman hesitated to come any closer at the sight of my rabid ingestion, I must’ve resembled the very animals I would sneak into the food, but I didn’t care. As I chewed and swallowed the final piece of the boy I closed my eyes and approached the source of a murmur that had for long alluded me. I no longer split my awareness and instead focused solely on the low hum that grumbled ceaselessly. The acid in my stomach digested the boy completely and without opening my eyes I could see clearly, there was no dust to wipe from the mirror.

A Brief Collection of Poems

Text