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.....
###################
----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...................
###################
###################
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........
#################
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............
#################
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................”
#################
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......................
#################
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!”
#################
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.......................................................
#################
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
