BOTTOM LEVEL

 

1. momanddad tell measachild to avoid ingestion of lead paint chips

which have been clinically proven to contain arsenic slash cyanide slash

strychnine slash lsd slash cocaine slash heroin slash smog slash and slash

or less than the daily maximum allowance of riboflavin

too late the heroes for i'd already done my share of munching and so

was rendered fuckupforlife

later on in the screaming, skinned knee schoolkid days other children

ran from me because i glowed in the dark like an aurora monster model

icing vegetation within a thirty foot radius o lookathim lookathim in my

superman suit but what was happening wasn't my incredible powers it

was gang abuse, was alien virus haunting, unshakeable

now older on my stage refusing to act my age this is me let it be

BRAIN IN A CAGE and proud red sign flickers for your loud, hoary

approval and i open my cranium spurting

jizz

blood

tears

braincake

to show you.

--APPLAUSE--

2. meanwhile, in comfy suburbianestledinnowhere, leaveittobeaverbradybunch

   man finds himself irritated by BORED meeting, comes home to ralph the

   cocker spaniel and the kids who are playing with their beav and wally dolls

   while watching the cabbage patch kids on tv. Wife has a rolling pin and is

using it to beat the dust out of the cat, three weeks dusty but at a later time

determined to be three weeks dead

“hi, honey, got my wall street journal and my beer in the fridge,” he smiles,

slipping the youngest son into the sock drawer,

“oh, i'm fine,” wife trills, windexing the toaster

with a wistful, faraway glance she dreams picturesque reveries of burying a

meat cleaver in his forehead and WOULDN'T IT BE NICE sing the beach boys

on environmentally-controlled radio

3. “hi,” i say to her sad eyes as godzilla dismounts from his holy ass

4 x 4 and caves my face in for talking to his girl

i bite him in his flabby alcoholic tit and run for pride, vaunted, exalted PRIDE

is a negligible frill in the face of self preservation

tearful in my fool beer it always ends this way

nursing my bruises i plot to neuter the evil bastard and his porcine slut

while they sleep

this last, i think, will be paramount, satisfying cruelty

getting them right where it hurts most---in the raison d'etre

proud o scarred saint i become of these wounds for they name me martyr,

carrier of a little-recognized state of mind

and when they fade i am full of chagrin

4. The convenience store spiel

   it's 7-11 and he wears a harley vest

   he leers and gags and spits and is boisterous and loud and

   unruly with his beer buddies and he talks about “lynyrd skynyrd”

   and “kickin' some faggot's ass” i try not to let him see me

   eyeing the comic books

   why?

   He's on his own mission

   he has own own fucking trajectory and it has nothing to do

   with that worm in the corner

   the blasphemy in his mind

   the flotsam barely thought or whispered

   the cardinal sin, fool, you bite back on every day

   in every aspect of this aberration you call a life:

   I AM.

5. It was a dream i had once

   it was a sunny, clear day and i was waist deep in a pool it was

   my duty on that day to keep an eye on the baby ducks

   inordinantly large body count that day bouyant they would

   be but every now and then one would forget how to swim and

   so then drown

   PAINFULLY

   duty then under circumstances saw me having to dredge

   up the bodies that had floated to the bottom of the pool and

   in the distortions of the dream the bodies had shriveled to the

   size of breakfast cereal marshmallows

   at the same time the abstract effect remained terrible and

   disturbed me profoundly because they retained the

   shape and color of ducklings

   about then i would hear the spectral burble of childhood

   enemies preparing to pelt me with rocks

   i would hear bomber squadrons droning in

   can you relate?

   Dream as recorded has no beginning and no formal ending

   it's just there, crucified in the time and the place of things

   suspended and that is all

6. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

   Playing with the ants.

   WHY?

   Don't look at me that way.

   WHY ARE YOU PLAYING WITH THE ANTS?

   Because they're more fun than people and they cause me no pain

   go away you suck you see the world through a rose colored

   vantagepoint of what OUGHT to be linear limited in scope

   deluded slash oppressive slash happy slash like all the others

   but is it real i think not people like you make me long to be

   attached to a respirator (as in DEAD)

   this is fun

   it's theraputic for me and

   who are you to play judge and jury because i choose to

   play with the ants please go away

7. i was sitting in a small, family type eatery sipping

   on a cup of bad coffee gazing out the window i saw a

   murder being committed in the distance

   a man in a tank top chased a refined looking girl out

   of a beauty salon he was screaming at her smashing her

   delicate frame against a chain link fence she objected

   and struggled, her face beat red she tried to escape but

   couldn't i felt very frightened for her

   my bovine waitress poured me more bad coffee

   stared and smiled at the carnage “my husband did that

   to me last week,” she said warmly

   “why?” i asked

   “it was valentine's day, he wanted to give me a romantic

   evening”

   “i'm afraid,” i told her, “i think we should get help, i think

   he's really going to hurt her”

   the waitress eyed me like i was a blasphemer

   “why?” she asked, “it's so obvious how in LOVE they are

   and who are you to come between two LOVERS? You

   make me sick, mister, enjoy your coffee!”

   she left me there to watch

   i became very upset and before anyone came

   to help the girl, the man killed her

8. the cowboy movie spiel

   i'm the bad guy

   yeah i'm the bad guy

   i dwell alone in the corridors of stone

   and i lurk in the shadows while you live a lie

   i'm the bad guy

   i reached behind the mirror

   and fell inside a thousand hells

   but they're inside you as well

   and i want you to see them all

   so i'm the bad guy

   crowds cheer and canonize you

   when you seize the holy grail

   and i die puking from your bullet

   laughing at a private joke because

   THEY call you humane

   sunny face you head off with your lady

   while i weasel away tail between legs

   plotting your demise while she gnaws

   on your gristle

   there goes the bad guy

   you win congressional medals and

   kiss babies for those photo ops

   but only i see the shit piled up inside you

   i'm the bad guy

   quick

   lock your doors

   get the guns out of the closet

   it's the bad guy

   here comes the bad guy

9. there is a lot of life in this city

   and much death as well

   and joy

   and sorrow

   love, we ought to go find it all, you and i

   take my hand...

   no, but no,

   but no

   we don't want to suffer the consequences of

   my having your hand, do we, now?

   i may be tempted to place it in my lap

   and so something revolting!

   --APPLAUSE--

10. ??!!SHROUD?!!!!!

    pariah shrill on the thundering hilltop

    pariah tirade and scream to the stormcloud

    overwhelmed, overtaxed by the juggernaut of circumstance

    falling, imploding, live cliffsummit in a futile, fetal sprawl

    murmuring strange litanies to the roaring, ravenous brine

    i i can't no i hurt i spike the sky the sky the ocean i oh no

    blooming i no i bug crush bug crush big looming i

    you caterwaul for order, definition

    you subdivide and subjugate

    and pariah rattling i splutter and inarticulate

    how do you define the scream of the nucleus in the

    soul's midnight?

    How can i explain OH GOD the snapcrackle of my

    circuitry?

    How do i verbalize and inventory you this?

    i i i cliff crash wave foam rage shake i no swallow no

    consume no cry run hurt night i shrink

    on a cliff too high under a sky too wide

    over a sea deep and impossible

    i've become a paralyzed golem hexed by my vision

    this is not your priority list!

    This is not your subdivision sorter!

    This is not your regimented file cabinet!

    The water is war its tendrils clash in elemental incest

    beneath that,

    calm,

    a big, new sky,

    another world

    fishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfish

11. life slows and stagnates congested

    red and yellow lights glare

    where are these modern gods, these heroes of the night?

    They lurk behind the churches and temples, torturing the

    meek and laughing

    i shall be hero-atheist, he who is unbelieving in the hero,

    the good man, the man of action

    for he is a lie and i am a witness

    i caught him urinating on me while i slept in the street

    he laughed and stood revealed

    the white knight's tinpot armor is soiled

    with the blood of thousands and your

    petty hopes and expectations are for nought

12. Hell street gasps, grabs

    suck

    poisonous

    vapors

    we children strove in the gas and machinery

13. i woke to the sounds of footsteps on my roof

    (and the prancing and pawing of each little hoof)

    closed my eyes and prayed for the sun

    'cause a horrible monster who walks like a MAN

and speaks like a CHILD

saunters through the rows of ranch houses and split

levels

whose inhabitants dream away in false security

to those in troubled slumber there are lights

in the stinking, charred tunnels and the only way out

might fail

but look to the end

look to the end

14. Suburban leaveittobeaver man's eyes redden

    as he scans the shopping list:

2 dozen eggs slash waffles slash 1 gallon of milk

slash bread slash cheese slash 2 cartons of cigarettes slash

2 sides of beef slash 1 tube of toothpaste slash vegetable oil

slash 1 hammer slash 1 ball of cotton slash 4 ingrids slash

4 deuces slash 5 aces slash 6 bottles of tylenol

and realizes he forgot to go shopping

he pulls up in his driveway beside the ambulance

two white-coated simians emerge from the two-car

garage carrying a stretcher sheet covering a

tiny, humanish shape

he wipes the sweat off his brow and asks tearful wife

who is waxing the cocker spaniel,

“what's for dinner, honey?”

--APPLAUSE--

Shockbox Press Chapbook #3 copyright 1991 C. F. Roberts/ Shockbox Press. 

rev. 11/20 Molotov Editions

APOCALYPSE NOTES: GOING BIG

As I wrote previously, I didn't know what Mike was going to be bringing to the table with “Black”---I was actually not even sure we'd be recording a new version, as I hadn't received a new recording through Dropbox.

With “Black”, we'd recorded two separate and distinct versions---one 4-Track cut in the late '80s and later on 8-Track in the early '90s....both had a more or less similar lyric but they were very different from one another as far as arrangement and structure went....the first was a gloomy, ominous doom rocker that's probably unlistenable considering the technology we were working with at the time...I can tell you there was a pretty good guitar solo and that shortly after the recording Mike had no idea what he'd done to get the bizarro sound he got, but it was pretty one-of-a-kind.

My template for the song as far as what I wanted to get out of it was actually the Swans' “Blind Love” from the CHILDREN OF GOD album....that's not to say that's what it wound up sounding like but think epic and unnerving----at least as epic and unnerving two guys with a 4-Track recorder and a windup toy of a drum machine were going to get....the song came to a literally-apocalyptic end with crashing chords, thundering windup toy rhythms and me on top of all the din, bellowing, “BLAAAAACK!!!! BLAAAAACK!!!!!! BLAAAAAAAACK!!!!!!” Over and over....it was tracks like this I played at Heather early on in our courtship that prompted her to crack, “aawwww----did somebody need a hug?”

And actually, yeah---I could have used a hug back at that time.

“Black II” had the added bonus of four extra tracks and it was a helluva lot better, production-wise...we were more on top of our game by then. Structurally it was probably more of what they called a “power ballad”----I loathe that term and, generally speaking, I don't have much use for the form. It starts off very quiet, with me whispering, muttering and crooning....I even do backup vocals that aren't particularly good, but they're drenched in reverb so, y'know....the desired effect. “Black II” is probably the best of our old demos and I was of the opinion that, if we wanted to cut corners we could actually stick that on the CD and no harm would be done.

As it turned out, there WAS a new cut of “Black”.

PLEASE GRANT ME THE SERENITY: RECORDING “BLACK”

“There's no sign of the morning coming; You've been left on your own”

----Ronnie James Dio

Giving the track a listen, I discovered that it essentially followed the structure of “Black II”, and that was a plus...it was a nice, Godzillian jam and Mike had totally brought the Rocket Sauce. One thing I was very taken aback by was that the original track had a fairly standard bassline....on the new version, Mike had really jazzed it up! And I mean “Jazz”, literally! Very tasty jazz-bass stylings that were almost a direct contradiction underpinning the big, moody grog-metal.

This was gonna be fun.

It was another game of “finding the arrangement”.....the structure was very similar to the old “Black II” but I was going to have to go through it a few times to learn how my ballpark rewrite was going to fit.

Much like the old recording it starts off slow, quiet and eerie and what I was singing was more or less spoken.

“ Every day the struggle to get out of bed and walk out that door is a more and more insurmountable task

I don't belong here and I never did.

I can no longer stand seeing things and people I can't deal with

I'm through---finished----through.”

Then the main riff---clean tone----kicks in.

“Lying in a pit of garbage and lies

It's a world that's run by politicians and whores

Color it all black, now, 'cause it's more than I can stand

I don't want to see it anymore”

Lyrically you could probably draw a parallel to “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones, although that song is about a guy who's mourning a dead lover and he can't get a grip on life anymore. With “Black” there's no tangible catalyst for the speaker's misery; he just can't get a grip on life, period.

I am the other planet man

I don't know what I'm doing here

I don't know what I'm here for

let me out”

And this is where the song just blows open and starts raging.

“Color my world, my world black

Decided I wanna be blind forever

Deliver me from this world of lies

I just wanna shut it out altogether

CHORUS:

COLOR MY WORLD, MY WORLD BLACK (x4)

Let it all stop, let it end now

I can't take it, I don't know how

Need someone to shut off my mind

I'd be happier if I were struck blind

Holy Pilgrim, I went hunting

I came back with a fistful of nothing

Living on this planet though I'm not of this earth

I take a look around

and see that it ain't worth shit”

Melodramatic, or WHAT? There was a whole litany in early versions of the song where the speaker lists off a laundry list of everything that's pushed him to the brink, and it goes something to the effect of “a man in a caddilac/ dead babies on my TV/ a government that doesn't care/ millions of people happier than me/EVERYTHING/YOU!!!!!”

That's right----he's blaming YOU. PERSONALLY. YOU!

Yeah----YOU, Bucko!!!!!

We had this drummer at the time---he wasn't with us all that long but he was our longest-running bandmate and we hung onto him for dear life because he had a basement we could practice in. I remember during practice one night he picked the lyric apart and goofed on it----”okay---so this guy walks down the street and he sees all this stuff going on that he doesn't like....so what does he do?! He freaks out and he yells and then he goes back home??? I don't know where that's goin'----sixties are over, man....”

Not real sure what my autistic angst had to do with the sixties.....still and all, he took me down a peg or three or five and I rode home all butt hurt over it. Mike tried to play it down a sensible middle---we needed the guy, at least at that point...he'd had experience playing out in bands, he knew music theory, and, shit, maybe we could learn from the guy.

I was very tunnelvisioned by my own ego, though, which might go as far as to say I needed a pin stuck in it. You only need to take one or two steps outside your situation to see the humor in it.

Following the template of “Black II”, though, I eschewed the laundry list in favor of ominously intoning, twice, as the song drew to a close, a line from the AA “Serenity” prayer:

“Please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

 

This last bit is crucial----the reason it's important to the song (and to the Apocalypse Krew in general) is that it's a direct contradiction of the band's entire existence. We are classically the LEAST serene entity alive. There's not an iota of serenity in the song, or in the character's head.

With this line of the poem the Drunk (hypothetical or universal) is asking God (however you want to define “God”) to help him/her cut his/her losses and move on, and how to have the wisdom to know how to pick their battles.

The entire ethos of the Apocalypse Krew is based around an inability to accept the things you can't change...the Dreg has no idea how to pick his battles. He's hellbent on running directly into a wall.

Not the smartest way to go through life, but who hasn't gone through that at one time or another? Who hasn't failed to see a way out?

THE NEW STUFF, PART TWO:“FEAR AND HATE”

 

“The idea had been growing in my mind for some time----true force. All the King's Men cannot put it together again.”

----Travis Bickle, TAXI DRIVER

By the time I actually sat down to WRITE “Fear and Hate”, I'd realized I really painted myself into a corner with “Rise”----It was a busy lyric that followed a busy rhythm and sought to cover damn near every note of that rhythm. I wasn't going to make that same mistake with “Fear”---as frantic a number as it was I knew I was going to need to put every ounce of gusto I had into it and it would be a good idea, given the confines I was in, to let the song “breathe” a little more. And let myself breathe a little more.

I wanted to do “Fear and Hate” from the moment Mike brought it to the table....it clocks in at just over two minutes and it's both furious and abrupt. Hammering, thrashing riffs, very fast and dense, with this layered, atonal, descending chord structure on the chorus that defied anything I think I'd ever heard in straightforward rock music at that time.

Mike gave me the music template back in the '90s...the chorus was, “You gave me the look of fear and hate”. The lyric I wound up writing was couched in the paranoia and isolation I had that last year in Nashua, the year I was living alone in that slum on Pine Street. To my recollection it was another one of those crazy, busy lyrics and would be like algebra to try and tackle.

The way I finally structured “Fear and Hate” was that each individual line would take up two bars...the line itself was essentially over by the end of the first bar, but it would trail over the second, allowing more room for the vocal to breathe and for the riffs to get some naked space.

I decided it would be an anti-bullying song. Bullying has been a big issue for me and mine for years----most incidents of school or workplace violence are the result of one or another form of bullying, and such incidents are bound to continue as long as we, as a collective mass continue to turn a blind eye to the pecking order. I've done my dead best to talk distraught kids out of pulling a Columbine---but I understand the rage that motivates them.

So this was going to go out to everyone who got beaten up, threatened, raped, had their shit stolen or who was otherwise put in a corner...it was also a shot across the bough to anyone who was in the upper strata of whatever food chain----hey, buddy---you know when you do that shit? Here's how that person feels about you. Does that make you nervous? GOOD----keep feeling nervous.

It didn't rhyme. It wasn't stylish. It wasn't witty or hip. It wasn't cute, clever, politically correct or kind.

The whole thing was designed as a scream of impotent rage. One of my favorite old jokes was, Q. How did Helen Keller break her fingers? A. Screaming for help when she fell down a well.

So my aim with this lyric is it was Helen Keller breaking her fingers screaming for help.

For the first time anywhere, “Fear and Hate”.

“Why did you back me into a wall?

I was just minding my own business

back a coward into a wall

you never know what he'll do to get out

I'm afraid to wake up anymore

it's your world, I'm forced to live in it

CHORUS:

YOU GAVE ME THE LOOK OF FEAR AND HATE

This is your world, this is your toilet

I have to live with your gun in my mouth

I can't take it one more minute

you've been on top too fuckin' long

people like you should be raped by livestock

people like you should be shot in the face

CHORUS X2

I can't make it out of your cesspool

so I'm calling in the airstrike

shit can't continue as it is

people like you need your dicks cut off

now's the time for fucking justice

hurt me, motherfucker, I'll make you pay

CHORUS x 5”

Strong statement, I'll admit----not exactly coherent, either....but what right do you have to ask coherence out of someone who's trapped in a well? Or someone who's trying to tell you that your house is burning down around you?

It's the most direct line to the sense of violation that goes on in the brain of a bullying victim all the time. And I'm sure there are all those handwringing PC-types who are frightened by this level of expression, saying it encourages violence. I'd tell them that zeitgeist prevails with or without the song, so rather than look for a scapegoat, why not address the real problem? And I'm certain a few of them might say the real problem is too big. Well, maybe you're too small. Or are you PART of the problem? See, that's half the problem—--those who in some way, shape or form, benefit from the existence of a pecking order can't imagine life without it.

Well then, don't come cryin' to me....

“Fear and Hate” was going to be a rip-roaring screamer. I was prepared to put more into this than any other song we'd done so far. This was not going to sound “cool”----it wasn't going to sound “rock star” in any way, shape or form. My best reference for what I was going for is, if you listen to some really stellar hardcore, like, say, “Pride”, by Husker Du, off their great album, ZEN ARCADE, there's nothing about Bob Mould's delivery that sounds “cool”...he sounds like he's having a goddamned conniption, and I have to listen to that every fucking time---there's something so liberating about hearing this guy---and you're not listening to a “singer”, per se---just this regular guy that could be you or me, losing his shit.

There's little to no acceleration in this song---there's a drum cue and then you're in it. DEEP in it. Guitar, drums, bass, vocal, the whole blood vessel-busting enchilada, and before you've acclimated yourself to it it's rolled right over you and left you for roadkill.

I basically screamed the whole thing, spastic voice cracks and all, like a distraught stockbroker getting ready to jump off a building on Black Friday 1927. I wanted to sound like a man whose world was ending. At one point in the third verse we had to stop and do it over because, headset and all, I couldn't get my cue....I couldn't hear the music over my own screaming.

There was a bridge section where, if I'd had more time to mess with it, might have used some vocals---realistically, throughout the recording sessions there were moments where I went sparse where under more ideal circumstances I wouldn't have. But I figured giving Mike more blank canvas to have fun with wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Mike perused the result on the timeline and assessed it as “definitely the most ferocious song in our repertoire...”

MONEY!!!!

 

THE BOUNCY ONE: “OUTSIDER”

 

“There's a man outside....he wants to come in.”

----Henry Rollins

“Outsider” was the next logical one to tackle....we were in the home stretch at this point.

If “Fear and Hate” is our most ferocious song then “Outsider” is one of our catchiest. Tement he riff is instantly memorable---it would be cool to hear a swing band play this. Mike and I have joked around a long time about doing a big band arrangement for it.

Rhythmically it bounces along in a manner similar to Cheap Trick's “Southern Girls”, with this huge, heavy boogie riff topping everything off. In approach it would be similar to “Black” or maybe “Time Bomb”----more a matter of showing off the song rather than letting loose.

There was an extraneous riff dropped from the old demo, but other than that the song hadn't changed much and it would probably fit the lyrics I had cobbled together without much of a problem.

I tried to approach the vocal with a degree of ease; when we talk about ease, it's not to be said there isn't work put into it---rather it's to say the listener shouldn't hear much labor. Much in the vein of Bukowski----the reader shouldn't have his or her attention drawn to the nuts and bolts of the effort...it should just come off as a smooth, organic whole.

“Residing in your cozy little house

unsuspecting, happy as a church mouse

I'm looking in on your measly little life

I wanna intrude on your measly little life”

The whole genesis of “Outsider” to me....did you ever see “Fatal Attraction”? Remember the scene where Glenn Close is spying on Michael Douglas and his family through their picture window, and she's so disgusted and envious of what they have that she literally vomits? That's the kind of spirit I'm going for.

It's classic American Have-Not-ism.

“Standing in the shadows and I'm looking in

standing in the shadows and I'm looking in

lurking in the peripheries and I want in

I am the Outsider

I am the Outsider

and I want in....I want in...I want in...

Laugh and yawn and take it all for granted

don't appreciate the silver spoon you were handed

you should be destroyed, you should be replaced

standing on your lawn and I'm looking at your window

I don't like what I see, I see a room full of people

happy, happy, happy

a room full of people all happy except me”

Here's the self-contradictory nature of the politically correct---x number of people are going to knee-jerk at our songs and argue that we're insensitive, or they're going to take everything out of context and say we're sexist, racist, advocate violence and so on and so forth....chances are no one's going to tell us we're anti-homeowner, though. Guess they'll conveniently miss the memo on that one.

That happens with extreme idealogues, though----with an old episode of “The Abbey of the Lemur” one of my castmates was wearing a very funny tee shirt that had a fake Coca Cola logo, except it read, “things go better with Satan”. And the local right wing bullet head who was very locked into literalistic thinking was alarmed by this. And our performer was up there cracking jokes about sacrificing children and I put a lower third up in front of her identifying her as a “local cult leader”----and this guy's complaint against us took that and ran wild with it....”this person----this cult leader....” meanwhile, in the same show we had a lower third graphic that identified me as a “local chimney sweep”. He never took me to task for that. Did he believe I was a chimney sweep? Did he just not care? I guess chimney sweeps didn't jibe with his agenda, or his sense of moral outrage. If it were me watching at home, I would've been enthralled---I would have been waiting to see if this guy would start dancing around on rooftops singing “Chim-chimeny-chim-chimeny chim-chim-cheree”....but no. Selective reasoning. Or non reasoning. But I digress. Back to the song.

“I'm knocking on your door

you don't know what's in store

it's the end of your rainbow when your wife starts screaming

you don't know what to do

and I'm staring in your window

I want in!

I want in!

I want in!

I want in!

I want you---and everything you own

You people shut me out and made my life miserable

Flaunt your happiness like a diamond ring”

A little note, here, on the humorous irrationality of the S.E. Apocalypse Krew....nobody actively shut this guy out of ANYTHING. His quarries----the homeowner and his family----probably have no idea who this nut staring in their window is. This shambling pile of crazy takes other peoples' happiness as a personal affront.

“I want to eliminate you

I want to exterminate you

I want to decimate you

I want to eradicate you

I want to reduce you

I want to subtract you from the equation

I want to erase you

I want to erase you

I want to erase you

I want to replace you”

Back in the day Mike and I thought that if we ever did the whole MTV/music video-thing “Outsider” was our first candidate as far as a video we'd like to do, and we figured it could even be done cheaply. The affluent family sit at their dining table and engage in niceties while I, as the crazy, stand at their window in a blizzard, ranting and raving....the band are behind me, all bundled up by a trashcan fire, attempting to play their instruments in the driving snow (obviously fake confetti snow). Eventually as the song hits its peak I crash in through the window, jump up on the dining room table and begin threatening the family, specifically the patriarch, whose position I'm envious of. At one point between lines I lean down, pick up a turkey leg and start noshing on it.

The last image in the video would be a family photo---the patriarch disappears and I fade in in his place. As though I'm a member of the family, replacing him as Dad/Husband/etc. Kinda similar, maybe, to Jack Nicholson appearing in an old-timey photo in the Overlook, I appear in some Olan Mills monstrosity as if I had been the patriarch of this family the entire time. The original family man is lost to the ages.

We banged “Outsider” off without a lot of excessive effort. I felt like I did alright. We were on the home stretch, now...eventually, we would leave North Main Music and hit Mike's home studio to knock out our last number, “The Candidate's a Religious Man”.....but there was one more song we had to tackle beforehand.

NEXT: EXPLODING

APOCALYPSE NOTES: HARDBALLIN'

So I was up, wide-eyed and bushytailed for day two of our recording session.....my brother had gotten back to the motel room very late and I was reluctant to wake him up with so little sleep but I was up and around and he got up and around...taxi driver body clock, I guess.

We piled out of the motel and I probably owe him a lifetime of fruitbaskets for actually carting me around Nashua for the purpose of the Apocalypse Krew. He needed some sleep.

We puttered around South Nashua for a while and at this juncture I have to go off on a tangient regarding the ubiquity of chains.

At this point (as previously stated) it had been ten years since I'd been in that part of the country...and my last trip to New England had largely seen me hanging around in Mass. My brother and I were both hankering for Breakfast....back in the day I would have probably opted for something greasy at Bickford's. Now, there IS actually still a Bickford's in (I think) Acton, MA, but the two stores in Nashua had shuffled off this mortal coil a long time ago. The South End Bickford's had been replaced, unceremoniously, by Walgreen's, which I believe, though I could be wrong, had a CVS across the street from it. (Seems to be the case in many locations---I imagine Pharmacy Gangbangers engaged in drive-by shootings, but that's just my funny way of seeing things)

Shit, man....you could get me going off in a hundred different ways about the closing of the map---I look around Nashua and then I look around Fayetteville-----what used to be Lechmere is now Target and I'm like, yeah----we've got one of those, too. Bickford's is now Walgreen's, and of course, you can't get away from those. Panera? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got one of those, too.

At least there's still a goddamned Barnes and Noble. It's nice to know folks in either town are still reading....don't even get me started on the incremental death of record and video stores unless you want an all-day screaming tirade.

We initially opted for IHOP and discovered in fairly short order that they weren't even open. Chris disclosed to me that they might not be open some days because they were having a hard time “hiring cooks”.

Oh. Wow.

Maybe time to start treating your workers better, IHOP?

In the end we opted for drive through action. Hey----I got a large coffee...I was good to go.

The slow, creeping erasure of localism is always a bone of contention with me...Mike and I would later have a conversation regarding this----he espoused the notion that we might all see accents going bye-bye in the next decade or so.

He might be on to something. When Heather and I first got engaged she and my brother wound up on the phone together---he asked her if she'd been born in California.

Now, Heather was actually born and bred in Arkansas. You'd never know it talking to her...if you talk to her Mom, she's about as Southern as anyone you've ever heard....but you'd never guess it talking to my wife.

So...food for thought....fuel for nightmares. Do with it what you will.

By the time we showed up at North Main Music Mike was already there and we were ready to continue.

“PIG”: THE HATE AND THE HILARITY

We opted to start with “Pig” on day two....it would require a lot of screaming and yelling, so there was no getting one's feet wet---I was jumping right in.

As stated in a previous installment, if I wanted to give anyone a quick, hard, uncomplicated dose of what the S.E. Apocalypse Krew were about it would be three songs: “Threats and Warnings”, “Kid Eternity” and “Pig”.

“Pig” was unquestionably the most brutal of the triumvurate----a fast, deliberately obnoxious blast of pure, non-diluted hostility for hostility's own sake.

I think I'd written the lyric (or a rough approximation of it) in the mid-80s...pre-Apocalypse Krew, around the time I'd gotten into hardcore punk---it was a great vehicle for a lot of my frustration, issues with authority and what have you. By the time Mike and I had formed the band it became a natural keeper....we had a lot of rage to get out of our systems.

“I don't like you, I don't like you

You talk too much, you stab my back

Ask too many questions I don't wanna answer

Your values suck, you'd better change your act

I hate your guts, I hate your guts

You badmouth everybody, I hope you die

CHORUS:

YOU'RE A PIG (x4)”

What no one—especially in this politically dainty day and age----will ever under understand is how much fun we had with this song, or how uproariously funny we always found it.

There was never any finesse to this...we didn't revisit it with an iota of new maturity----pure fury, rage and stupidity and precious little else. I screamed the damned thing like a wounded warthog and the Krew rampaged along as per usual----short, fast and blunt.

“Fry your ass, fry your ass

You make me puke, you make me ill

I'd rather die than talk to you

Go back to your hole, die in the grass

I hope you scream forever in hell”

JESUS CHRIST!!!! How much do you have to dislike someone in order to want them to “scream forever in hell”?! Again, no one will probably ever understand how much we bust up over this ridiculous song.

BUT THERE'S MORE!!!!! I initially considered this particular take of “Pig” much longer than the original demos (and it may still be) and so I actually took it upon myself to write additional verses for the new cut. In the end I thought it was all too much and decided to let the song “breathe”---maybe give Mike more room for some guitar fireworks----and just go with the original words.

But in case you were wondering, there are other lyrics, now, for “Pig”, which were not recorded. So here, on my stoopid blog, for the first (and probably LAST) time ever, here are the newish and unrecorded additional lyrics for “Pig”. Enjoy.

“I want you dead, you fucking prick

I promise it's not me, it's you

I can't live another minute with you on this planet.

Motherfucker, you make me spew

Hate's a many splendored thing

I'm sorry for this little tiff

The world's too small for you and me

I wanna push you off a cliff

Suck my dick, suck my dick

I'm sure you'll let me know who's boss

You make me puke, you make me sick

I wanna nail you to a cross”

Fun, or what? No?

How much must you dislike someone to want to nail them to a cross?!!!

Mike had added a new treat to the end of “Pig”---as the song screeches to an abrupt halt a little loop of silly, sampled ragtime music plays the track out. Impeccable? Nay, PERFECT, sez I!!!! I loved it! It was the icing on the volatile cake, the Porky Pig stuttering “that's all, folks!” On top of our mini-symphony of primal scream nuttiness.

And so day two was officially underway.

THE NEW STUFF, PART ONE: “RISE”

“Rise” was “newer” than some of the other tracks we were recording....which is to say its genesis might have been early-to-mid-90s.

One or two instrumental demos may have floated around at one point or another but I never added a vocal to it----Mike was getting busy with Tristan Park and a lot of my attention at the time was going into writing and/or zining. The Apocalypse Krew was more or less over at that point, though there were still these loose ends...I think there may have been an initial lyric for it, but it was another “lost” lyric like “Fear and Hate”----I was going to need to rewrite it.

Fortunately, unlike “Fear and Hate”, I'd actually gotten a recording of “Rise” to work from, so I'd actually managed, with some difficulty, to crank out a lyric.

This was a fucking HARD one and I'd labored over it off and on for months. What I wanted to do, in a lot of respects, was write an S.E. Apocalypse Krew song that would ride along with the old stuff but in a lot of ways be more representative of “now”, mid-2010s. If I had an audience listening to old songs of ours like “Pig”, “Threats and Warnings”, “23” et. al., what would I want to tell them now that I thought was important?

We took the title, “Rise”, from a legend scrawled in blood at the LaBianca murder site by the Manson family---we had thought of making it our first album title and it fit in very well with songs like “Threats and Warnings”. Musically, the song was an aggressive piece of work that was like falling down a flight of stairs with no end in sight---glorious main riff and then a rough-ass chorus that was like a car crash----there was this weird mid-section that almost went into what felt like waltz-time before ripping back into the main section. I love this fucking tune.

In some ways, “Rise” wasn't going to be that demanding a track on my voice because I was almost going to speak-sing a lot of it. The chorus would require some leather-lunged yelling, but other than that---not much wear-and-tear.

In other respects it dawned on me, very late, that this was going to be very difficult. The lyrical structure of “Rise” was DENSE. Rhythmically, it was similar to Black Flag's “In my Head”(albeit a lot meaner)---a busy song with a busy, bunched-up lyric that went along with it and precious little room to breathe.

It was going to be very difficult to get this thing out of my mouth onto a recording....it was going to be very difficult to jump from one line to another---let alone from one verse to the next.

This is me at age 54, with no practice and no practice space, having not really sung in any capacity in about 20-plus years. If the circumstances were different it might have been another story, but the blessing of this whole digital recording thing they do now is we could tackle the song line by line...

The choruses were easy in that it was just me screaming “IIIII WIIIIILL RIIIIIIIIIIIIISE!!!!!!” over and over. The rest wasn't too demanding on my larynx but they were a tongue twister and I would have to hit one line at a time.

“This is your window so listen up now

I ain't got the time to be misunderstood

I've got no compunctions 'bout hammering down

Don't tell me you wouldn't if you knew you could

You can't get no traction and so little action

with the victim mentality holding you down”

This borders on a direct contradiction of stuff I wrote in the '80s like “Kid Eternity” where people were telling me “life is what you make it” and I felt like some kind of a victim---and yeah, phrases like that still feel like a dismissive tactic to me, but if old geezer me was to tell anyone listening to our music right now anything it would be don't play victim, don't act like a victim and don't trust those who do---be a goddamn warrior!!!!! Don't knuckle under to anyone and don't let 'em play you for a chump.

“Losers and squids blow away like debris

Nothing can stop my apocalypse now

Everyone's doggin' it, teeming around

leading to nowhere and no one knows when

What would they do if it all came down now?

We're bringing it down so it's a blessed event”

Here I'm copping some rhetoric from my public access show, “The Abbey of the Lemur”, more or less verbatim. Our original “schtick” on the show was that we were a loveable death cult and the audience could come along and laugh along with our quest for world domination and generalized subversion.

“swim with the tide and you just might survive”

A tip of the hat to New Age author Shakti Gawain, here. Which would probably horrify her.

“You can cover your ass or be crushed by the wave

A nation of numbskulls can't hold us back”

And a tip of the hat to Public Enemy.

“If you've got a problem get out of the way

“Dregs of the world your wakeup call's here

If they side-eye you tell them you're no one they know”

We had this surly saying in the Apocalypse Krew anytime anyone looked at us askance or with any kind of curiosity----”no one you know....no one you like....no one cute....” defiance and resentment.

“If they give you an attitude death from above

You give them fair warning saying look out below

You can't run the ratrace when the rats always win

Now is the time to let it explode”

And of course, “Explode” is a BIG Apocalypse Krew self-reference. Yeah, we're cheeky.....we're witty....

Two down, several others to go.....

3 DAYS/3 WALKS PART THREE: THE EASTER EGG HUNT 1991

My head goes dervish derby and the music takes me to a sad, mourning, world-anchored bittersweet look back in sadness euphoria...in these throes of wounded despair I wish to tear my flesh off, break the indifferent membrane of this dirty, unjust coil, to go where it doesn't matter, won't matter, ever.....

In dreamland I see it again, head on, dead on, the image, blood creating a new and growing and altogether damp and sticky world on earthly, mundane floral pattern velvet and I am a sprawled mannequin, naked, pale, in a frozen, silent, muted scream---statue of drained human ash remnant, leftover, trash----my wrists hold the one semblance of a lifething as they sore and ooze and bubble---the twin, ragged, furious maws grieve aloud---bashed, mangled life ebbs away from them, still wet and blackcrimson and raging as they seem, the clutch of life would still appear to be upon them----

-----Music is playing closing out the slothful ignorant parchment world and my dark is a crazyquilt of mauled emotion; I'm huddled, manfetus, on this carpet and I'm rocking like precision machinery and somewhere in the haunted back, the pain attic, I know I'm crying---I can't stop---retreating into my nucleus, loser again—failure again—the worst man again—booby prizer tot of the Easter Egg Hunt again and I cannot change it, cannot steer it in my direction it won't end---

---I unkrinkle my body and try to heave it into a semi-upright position---I open my eyes and stare---the first time with open eyes in a sea or so; it takes nothing to focus as if I've been accustomed to the dark---I stare at the corner of my room---the space of white (now gray) wall between my closet and my bureaub and it's there, confronting me, glaring back eyeless shapeless but it's intent on me....

The black thing. I can't make it out—an object, a blotch, there sitting, facing me---what is it? Black----so deeply black it eclipses everything, like a cavity in the world that threatens to swallow everything, everyone----

Facing me---

No---

The black thing sits, stationary, immobile, looking at me----a penetrator, a cancer that poked, violating, thunder, raping this world and it is intent on me, this abomination......I can't look anymore.....

I fold up, enclose, and shut my eyes, wrap my arms around my head and pray for the black thing to leave me. The music merrygorounds again and again---I need it now to blot out the beckoning, the whisper of the black thing. Sick. I throw up on the floor. I keep my eyes shut and I try in my mind to crumble into coal, to unwant, to invincibility so that the black thing will leave me alone----

At an ageless time I awaken. The stench of my vomit is incredible and my displaced head feels like a racetrack-----the black thing is gone, it has vacated the corner. That's an empty worldsmile---I know with my deep downest that it will return come nightfall to torment me----

***********

Running, now, downtown in the cold and the laugh of the springsummer electric Coke commercial dirt---people laughing and squinting phase in and out of my tear bleared vision---nine beers plus what the hell ever and I can't walk a straight line, I can't stop, the Janeharrow is whittling at my insides---I can't go home; I have to escape the night sit solitude in my fetal crawl and the gloom and the close and the silent threat and stare and point of the black thing, the new intruder in my house.....

Outside is a teetering carnival full of jeering clowns---Emmett Kelly in shadow and cigar and shitstain and laughing, ballyhooing fat ladies, circus renegades with pissed-on flower sundresses all bleached and worn---pukes and pugs congeal and clot on corners, playing King of the Mountain for bleachy-headed, gum-snapping ragamuffin dumpster porn angels; yowling, smearingunshaven,, toothless phantoms rove by like obstacles on a hellish, nocturnal sideways funhouse distortion mirror drivers' course----they haunt me and chastise me and in the blunt of my blur and my desperation I throttle among them away as they come too close----

---the sidewalk, pissing and shitting, discarded journal rags blow by me and it's all a sewer, a sewer carnival and every fifth girl I bump into is a Janething, a giggling, mocking counterfeit Jane, a worm in the mold and disease of the rubble of that harsh dynasty---the haves, the have-nots, the you-can't-haves, the golden chalice in chains, the shut-in angels, away, Tantalus, the little Janes, the inescapable crush of sorrow, of madness, of hell, of hurt, and it won't stop, it won't stop----

Cal Kelly the remnant crashes, flaming to earth all ashen and ruined, uuuuuuuhhhhh, I cry aloud, uuuuuuuuhhhhh, no more, no more, oh, God please no more and I die and my stomach twists and needles up as I fall, teeth clamping down---I cry, I taste blood, I smash my chin on the cement...all around me the gleeing, sneering, roving outdoor den of shambling garbage people point and laugh at this new spectacle---wiping my chin I turn on them. “You don't know,” I roar and my voice is fragmented, teetering out of an even tone, a bellowing, cracked trumpet, “none of you, not one of you fucks know, goddammit, Confucius say no problem, but there is a big problem, a big problem, and it's right here!” I stumble to my feet and I mime throwing rocks at them, all the plaster-faced, sniggering multitudes. “I look around at all of you and there's nothing, just nothing!” I shrug my shoulders cartoonish and bigfoot, and then I start screaming again. “For the five fuckingb card games you win some sad son loses every godforsaken day of his life, damn you all, and this, and THIS sorry opus is the bare-assed crux of it all----who did you forget? No, don't tell me....ask yourself! What about the forgotten ones?!” Dull faces stare back----this is the downtown zoo and more and more I realize I am the panda bear. “She forgot me,” I cry, hands extended, “I am forgotten.”

They are frozen, uncomprehending----I give up. Zero. Gone. I turn and shun their dumb scrape of skeetch this, chillun and I look at the stairs, the classical, elegant rough bludgeoned railed cement tower thing, the walkway I cut my burning, babbling, grieving head on---the stoop is scopeful, architectural refinement and it leads into the church. I stumble up those stairs and halfway to the summit I crash splintering to my wobbly knees scuff scrape and bleed cold scorches like ropeskip asphalt mishap child-manhood---I crawl to the entrance and I'm muttering every spare despair desperate litany left at my disposal....the church's dim innards loom, the towering stained glass robular Sunday School legend hero designs and a hunched, shawled womanthing putters around inside, painstakingly setting ablaze a network of candles, all solemnly peeping hotlight in a tangled assortment of twisting candelabrum; each candle, each atom of twilight fire represents a Saint, from booming Saints like Anthony and Joseph and John and Jude (of that Novena fame) and Christopher and Patrick and Valentine all in their congregation with obscure Saints----the Saint of mottled flesh, the patron Saint of the nearsighted, the Patron Saint of Zydeco music, the Patron Saint of nose hairs, all in a holy jumble and I'm peaking, summitting and I'm creeping for the Jesusholy refuge sanctuary cavern and now the Priest, Father Ironclad, Padre McVictory, arrives in his robes of glory and rebukes me.

“Sorry, buddy,” he rasps, “we're closed an' we don't take vagrants.”

“I'm lost,” I squall. “I'm God's Children!”

“Want a medal?” The Priest snarls. He slams the Cathedral doors in my face and I hear the lock click into mechanical intercourse with itself---the Heavenly Host booms in boundless celebration and I watch the iron entryway solidify, become inaccessible, before my eyes....... 

 

Copyright 1991 C.F. Roberts/2015 Molotov Editions

I went about this kinda in reverse, or roundways, mostly because it's my fuckin' blog, and I can if I want. HELLO, UGLY was actually the first Walk, and I wanted to craft a kind of Dark Night of the Soul where you're literally with this kid every step of the way as his already-precariously-balanced cheese is sliding off his cracker.

The Walk in THE EASTER EGG HUNT is a nervous breakdown on paper....to me all of these bust down into a sequence kind of like the Stations of the Cross----that, of course, is my lapsed Catholicism at work.....and the Catholicism in THE EASTER EGG HUNT is pretty overt. Some of that is, yeah----obviously a Kerouac ripoff-----but you can take the boy out of the church-----can you ever really take the church out of the boy? Well, maybe, if you have a good scalpel.....I don't know if I was following a conscious motif at that point with the Walks, but it was definitely there......

When I wrote “The Walk” in '93 or '94 I knew exactly what I was doing and it was kind of a “Meta” piece where I was going through my usual messed up pathology and at this point I could break down the nuts and bolts of my pathology and tell you exactly what the ingredients were.

I wrote several Walks throughout the '90s somewhat similar to the ones I've posted in this little run. Another story I wrote around that time, “Shark's Fin Slices”(title taken from a line in The Birthday Party's “Six-Inch Gold Blade”) was very similar in tone and theme to “The Walk”----in fact, the line in “The Walk”, Not a bloody lot in the whole sad world, you saviors you liberators you hawkish mawkish regulators can preserve me from THE WALK---also appeared in “Shark's Fin Slices”, which probably tells you I have some trouble telling the two stories apart, but they share lots of similarities.

Another big early Walk was in a short story called “The Night is for Lovers” (The granddaddy of all my Guy Who Can't Get Laid stories), which was actually based around this semi-spoken word piece I did with the S.E. Apocalypse Krew. As a spoken word piece it was my knee-jerk reaction to codependency and dysfunction. The story, which was from 1990 or so, concerned a socially awkward office drone who gets passed up for a promotion in favor of a more extroverted, charismatic co-worker. To belabor the point, the latter also nabs the protagonist's longtime office crush. The character goes off on his own brief Dark Night of the Soul, which culminates in him watching some random couple engaging in a stupid, codependent squabble. He concludes, “I'll never be a part of any bullshit like that,” and he goes off, ominously enough, “into darkness”, and that's the end of the story----the note probably suggesting he might go postal or become a serial killer or something to that effect----in reality, using today's Johnny-on-the-Trend vernacular, he probably goes on to become an MRA, or a MGTOW, or a TFLer, or some other such asshole like that. In short, he's a lonely asshole who's very hung up on being a lonely asshole. And he will probably die a lonely asshole.

I released “The Night is for Lovers” as a longish chapbook on Shockbox Press. As far as short stories go it was kinda lengthy and way above the word count of what most publications were accepting for short stories. And again, it was my press----I was gonna do whatever the fuck I wanted. That was the inaugural year for Shockbox Press---I released THE MASSACRE ANNEX and BOTTOM LEVEL the same year, both of which got a better reception than TNIFL. Oh, well.

If I were to write another Walk in the future my goal would probably be to construct it very tightly around a Stations of the Cross motif and I'd probably model the various segments around the individual stations. I've got no immediate plans to do that, but it's a neat literary trope that might bear repeating in some form or fashion if the right piece of writing calls for it.

3 DAYS/3 WALKS PART ONE: THE WALK (1994)

In the early 90s I wrote eighty billion Guy-Who-Can't-Get-Laid stories. I wasn't getting laid at the time----go figure. Most of them were angsty, melodramatic tone poems of sorts. “The Walk” was probably my favorite of the bunch. It ran in FAIRY TALES FROM THE URBAN HOLOCAUST, my tandem chap with Alfred Vitale, and was published under his aegis, Yorkville Press. I think I also did a spoken version of it on this audio collaboration with Kevin Hibshman (FEARLESS/DISTURBING DREAMS AND DRIED BLOOD) and don't ask me why the hell I did that....it really didn't work in the format (at least I don't think it did). So, here it is, published around '94, I think....

THE WALK

Raging stuck tunnel lust lost confusion fused.....poor little smashed mirror....

My conclusion is ever alienation from rigged games. Your sensibilities pre-programmed, you kicked back with a preconceived agenda. What it did. You watched that movie....

….you bought that movie...

….Falling....

….Sinking....

….sucked under third time manic wall of no-hope....

I can't get away from it, it's everywhere. Even most of you who piss and moan to your Morrissey CDs about present tense inconvenience, about your temporary states, are nothing----you're softcore. You've got nothing at all on me.

Give it a body, give it a face, give it a mouth, a maw that rips and rends.

It's like they took the sonofabitch out its hole, made it a saint in spite of itself, crucified it, nailing it to the four corners of my head and so we sit as it yowls and threatens and shreds, so we sit, eyeball to eyeball, tooth to tooth, spittle to flying spittle. It's all I see, it's my whole universe.

And still you persist in going along, bobbing your fool head to that inevitable well-worn tune and you ask, “why? Why abandonment? Why sullen?”

Because chicanery, motherfucker! Because snake oil, because keeping up with the Joneses! Because follow the leader and other marching hymns!

Not a bloody lot in the whole sad world, you saviors you liberators you hawkish mawkish regulators can preserve me from THE WALK.

I'm talking about a self-incarnating road of trials a cancer of a thousand faces leering a ravishing body sprawling I'm talking I'm talking----

#################

It's the science of condemnation, of Entropy.

She said that everyone suffers at the hand of the heart; said that hearts crush hearts, that's the way of the world. Meanwhile she gets something to tide her over, even if said train's careening down the pike without the benefit of brakes. I wish I were a magician who was capable of alleviating blindness...people tie themselves to destruction, unveering and when salvation of any sort slaps them they are too locked into doom to notice. I wish I could shake every person on this planet and scream at them. Their complacency and bovine acceptance of all the slaughter will be the death of me----if it is, I hope to take a few of them with me......

I will kick, fight and scream all the way down......

People search for religions and philosophies to help them accept the horrors and the pain that befall them and others. They dehumanize in the grip of rationale and come to terms with barbarism. Evil and suffering are shrugged off as things that must happen---people need these psychic buffers to throw blinders on them so that they can swallow the randomness of cruelty.......

################

Fragile: Do Not Break.

I know you your face occupies an endless motif perpetuates homespun futility I know you yeah I know you taxidermy in time and space impaled on exhibition superficial details shift mutate fundamental horror goes uncanged you're a rerun the toe stubbed over and over and I should know better and like the windup soldier marching headfirst steadfast into a wall again and again mistakes echo in a loop that never stops....hey you! Were you conscious of station the last couple times out? Can you be different this time?

Can I?

###################

We are all of us

(the bus overturned)

all of us (kids running around in the road)

treading (in the freeway)

(screaming, bleeding)

We are all of us treading

(motorists hitting the gas, scoring those crucial points)

a line

between

(several hedonistic types ram the bus itself thus totaling their own vehicles and in some breakneck thrill cases dying themselves)

grace

(but hell it was kicks)

and

(the kids still scrambling, crying for their mothers)

vulgarity

(TV News confirms 12 killed 10 injured)

####################

It plays in my head again and again, being in their shitpile, crawling their gauntlet, They kicked and beat me 'til I screamed, I bled, I shit, I cried....after a while it was a fight uphillnjust to breathe without the lung suction ripping my chest in half---I couldn't talk straight and the lot of them, those handsome, beaming heroes stood over me digging swinging heels and dicks in my ribs, my back, my groin, my face, laughing, “howzat?” They were laughing, “howzat?”

In my facebashed word impediment I slurred, shitting, bleeding, “because you say so,” and brushed upward with my ragged right arm. It was my plan to impale the asshole's balls on my fist but I was all adrenalin no punch and they stepped on my hand, it felt like they had smashed it to a million pieces, it splayed out and quit on me. They laughed.......

####################

RUMINATIONS ON THE WALK:

Protagonist in his confusion always encounters the grotesques. They are everywhere, everyone,----sometimes they are man, sometimes they are machine, probably a combination of both. They can't be real but there is little illusion that they are.

As streets seem to stand on end the grotesques filter into consciousness---they interact and react. They involve themselves in sundry activities out in the margins of perception—the murky ones in the shadows and in the backs of buildings and in the woods out by the railroad tracks engage in actions sexual, violent or both. They fuck like war machines, not like humans. They leer at the protagonist, shout linguistic parodies of human hostility. Sometimes their shadows are enough to provoke a phyical detour..........

###################

Pug, true to his nature, chases parked cars, flattens his face, doesn't learn. The hard line of banality taints Pug's disdain for the impurity of cynicism. Pug in his tenacity devolves into a self-abusive windup toy.

###################

ONE MORE STAB OF ENTROPY: You called the girl. You always call the girl. She's in her ever-mobile-stage. Unlike you, she has somewhere to go. She just left, out the door, down the street. You quote Flipper lyrics to her roommate and hang up.

It's the next two or three turns you fear the most.

Civic Destruction is underway your tax dollars at work and all the exits on the highway are closed.....

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----the machinery so systematic in its programmed disdain whirred and clanked going through its sinister, rote motions, hacking, gutting, subdividing---splattered remnants of FISH took on a new, whittled feature for distribution as product and for miles about that formidable rust apocalypse the dampened skies became unbearably rank......................

dogging the holocaust that rings in my head---all I can think of is the shit I went through to get where I got and I got shit anyway....the thousands of fucking miles I crawled on my belly all for a taste of elevation and all I tasted was asphalt and the dust and the shit encrusted in the asphalt.....I screech at the top of my burnt, sorry sentiment and in my mind's eye they are all destroyed---glass flies and maims as windows smash, limbs are torn off and heads are removed in a wind...I could do it all, mauled in my insides all for a little taste...................

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Frankie was huddled under a table in a dark, quiet corner of the big house sucking on a bottle of Mad Dog while the party went on full swing. Frankie had heard that Kelly and Sid were supposed to show up and the thought scared him. Word was Sid was real possessive and controlling and everyone knew how he, Frankie, felt about Kelly....Frankie took another swig.

Sound of the door opening and in lurched Sid, half-in-the-bag by the looks, yanking Kelly along by the wrist while she argued.

“Sid,” she objected, “you're hurting me!”

“Shut up, cunt,” said Sid.

They landed on the floor. Frankie took another belt of wine.

Sid, like an evil, ape-brow reflection, drank from a bottle of tequila. He looked at Kelly as though he had won her at an auction. He started roughly kneading her breasts.

“Oww! Sid...!”

“Shut up!” He went at her for a little while and she began to moan.

“Oh! Ah, Sid, you're my man...uh...you understand me...you're such a good conversationalist.....you're my BEST FRIEND...”

“Shut your mouth, bitch! I'm God! Don't you ever mouth off to me and don't you EVER look at another man, get it? You know your place.....”

Dutifully, Kelly unzipped Sid's fly and took his horsedick out. Frankie felt useless looking at the size of the thing---it was uncircumcized and looked like a greasy little elephant's trunk.

Somehow Kelly managed to get her mouth around the thing. She sucked and horked on it for awhile, working it furiously. Sid payed her some mind at first, whispering soft threats and abuse to her but eventually he seemed to get bored and his eyes wandered. He saw Frankie huddled in the corner, staring, and eyed him disapprovingly. “Fuck's your problem?”

Frankie remained silent and Sid laid his head back. Kelly kept sucking, even after it flagged and went limp. She kept going, though, her head bobbing up and down like precision machinery, working the flaccid thing like she'd ceased to be human. Frankie had to look away. Forever seemed to go by. He got up and he stole out, thinking about that day they'd had dinner together, how she'd told him all about her family, her desire to be a teacher someday, they'd talked about a million things. The mechanical slurping sounds were still going on behind him........

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You toil away at the nightly ring toss. The girl blows by and ignores you. You recall how she never failed at one time to stop by and grab a talk and a laugh with you...that was a long time ago. Hell, she saw you. She didn't want to see you, she didn't want you to see her............

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In each scenario one will happen upon an edifice of some religious significance. It always seems to turn up on The Walk. It just does. It might be a church---it might be a candy store or a burger joint. It's still a church of some sort, even if you wouldn't initially think so. Last refuge repays pilgrim (weary from trials) with scorn. Sanctuary in its myriad incarnations devolves into twisted punchline. Poor schmuck steps furtive, beaten across sidewalk,. Icon looms like proverbial carrot on a stick. Pilgrim wavers. Door slams.

“Welcome to Epiphanyland, place your order. Today's Special, Savation, has been depleted due to popular demand. In its place we have erected the Entropyburger, a hot new item you'll be seeing a lot more of................”

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that time it was over, i was through and i'd had it i was freaking out i was all over the house screaming i was cutting myself I couldn't take it too much too many times i couldn't take it anymore i went into the bathroom and attacked myself i beat the mirror into a thousand pieces with my fist i vanquished the cursed face no one would ever love it hurt like hell i laughed i cried i screamed some more i retched i heaved i laughed i cried i pooooooorrrrrrr liddle shatterrrred miiiirrrrror

slogged to the urbane cathedral fell to the stone doorstep cut my head open on pretty stained glass watched the blood run down my eyes as the parishioners sang their warm hymns of joy and togetherness and the door slammed shut and the pastor assured them that they had truly succeeded in purging the demons, the perverts, the subversives, the savages....and a great, triumphant noise went up...they sang halleluja forever and ever world without end praise the lord amen and i lay outside and bled....................................

…..............ah, jesus.....................

…....................ah, jesus......................

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Stationary in hallowed alcoves eyeless saints scream frozen screams. Their gaping eyeholes gush plasma; they inhale humanity and spew out pinfeathers.

Brian Shane once told me, “yes, God is a Wolf!”

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I used to think Dark Night of the Soul was an occasional process which ran the gamut of trial-revelation-change for better or worse. I was wrong. It just goes on it never stops it never ends it goes on and on and there is never any point or lesson to be learned it is an existing condition this is not an illusion this is not a temporary state this is happening this is here this is going on RIGHT THIS MINUTE.......................................................

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The screams are incredible.

The job done, Frankie puts down the big file and stares into the dresser mirror at his handiwork. He knows it might be some time before he can talk again. It doesn't matter, he supposes, as words are an inherently useless thing. He looks at the table, the shavings, the blood, the stained file, then again he looks at the mirror. His face grimy with tears, sweat, bloody and dirt he parts his ravaged mouth (with considerable difficulty) into a smile. He has filed all his teeth down to needle-like points.

Satisfied, he gets up and walks out the door, a new man ready to exist in a new world.

 

Copyright 1994 Yorkville Press, 2015 Molotov Editions