Bluebird (Part I)

A STORY ABOUT AMERICA
by King Wenclas

THERE EXISTS a photograph of Melissa Habermyer's parents from the late 1960's showing them as anti-establishment warriors. That they were both from wealth and met at ultra-elite Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, made no difference. Like others of their social class (Garry Trudeau for instance) they were leaders in the enormous youth rebellion then taking place in this country. They didn't wish to tear down society, not really. The war, despite the noise they made about it, was an irrelevancy to them and their kind; neither they nor anyone they knew would have to go to it. For their type the 60's rebellion, when all was said and done, was about them having fun. More than this it was an expression of their youth; of their energy, their privilege and gloriously innate power.

In the photograph the couple is eternally youthful and very beautiful-- as beautiful a couple as ever was-- wearing expressions of security and confidence in themselves; a confidence no American generation before or since has worn; given the faultlines and disharmonies of the civilization now, an arrogant smugness that will likely never be worn again.

Melissa's grandfather on her father's side owned a company manufacturing trucks in grimy Midwestern cities like Toledo, Ohio. Like all such industries, the company manufactured its share of tanks and other war material via lucrative government contracts. Melissa's uncle, her father's older brother, Frank Habermyer, would eventually take over the business.

Melissa's mother was from WASP old money, the kind handed down through holding company stocks and blind trusts over the years and years so that whatever actions, achievements, or misdeeds had acquired the wealth centuries ago in the first place were far removed and utterly forgotten by the time Melissa was born. The greatest presence from this side of the family was Uncle George; good old swanky bon-vivant Brahmin Uncle George!-- who'd skippered a PT boat during Korea and served a few mysterious years with the CIA in Switzerland and played semi-pro baseball for a summer, among other legendary and basically insubstantial accomplishments, the most substantial of which was founding a small press-- a very small press-- publishing George's trust fund buddies and marketing them as avant-garde outsiders. Despite the small size of the press, the books received an inordinate amount of media attention in the isolated island of New York, one of them winning a National Book Award, for whatever that's worth.

Melissa's parents were artists-- artists of life, you could say, living a thoroughly counter-culture flowers-and-beads existence in which they roamed from state to state, east coast to west coast, living in a commune, teaching at small colleges, opening their own art gallery in a gazebo-like building in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Into this paradise in the mid-70's was Melissa Habermyer born. Her eyes were so blue, so strikingly hugely amazingly blue from birth she was called Bluebird. A more fitting name was never chosen as this child of nature ran with the birds and the squirrels amid the dwindling remains of a lush forest. Creativity was the order of the day from her folks, who raised her on Picasso and Mozart; who beneficently watched as their three year-old Bluebird conducted her own symphony orchestra consisting of a few dozen of her favorite stuffed animals.

At four Melissa attended the most exclusive private pre-school on the west coast (her parents bought a condo in San Francisco for the purpose), and attended private kindergarten and grammar schools and prep schools throughout the area to give her the best individualized instruction possible. Her teachers were geniuses; not just those employed by the schools-- every one entranced by the child's blue eyes-- but also genius engineers who worked for Uncle Frank and genius writer friends of Uncle George and genius artists who displayed their works in her parents gazebo-like store.

For all the daily influence of "Culture," of art classes and ballet lessons and piano instruction and the highest-tech multi-media computer equipment to play on, young Bluebird never faced that which might be thought most necessary for the development of talent: a challenge. All was adulation and reward. The brutal traumas of life, the realities of the world, lay outside her cocoon-like barriers. Oh, she knew they were out there-- she read about them and worried over them, had an abstract commitment to the underdog; in the laissez-faire laid back nature of her life identified with such; was firmly against Evil-- or at least bad manners-- and on the side of Good, whatever that was.

When Melissa was eighteen, Uncle George threw for her upon the occasion of her graduation a lavish party at the largest ballroom of the largest hotel at which strutted and posed, for enormous fees, several famous classic rock bands. Melissa's preferred avocation among the many was music. Meeting the mummified rock legends up close, who retained somehow in their withered forms their legendary glamor, decided Melissa upon a music career, though at the moment she didn't know it.

The summer after graduation was the worst period of her life, at least until years afterward. One summer day, a surreally bright summer day, something troubling clicked inside Melissa's head and she began shaking through her entire body. For days she remained like this, frozen, barely eating or moving, her friends puzzled until her parents and uncles were called and Melissa quietly spent several weeks in a private sanitarium where, thanks to the proper amount of indulgent therapy and astutely prescribed pharmaceuticals, she fully recovered.

College was anti-climactic, though she attended the most progressive open-format school money could afford. She'd been through it all before. Though she lived off-campus in a small apartment at the center of the local city's modest downtown, with a boyfriend-- slumming it-- Melissa Habermyer was thoroughly bored.

After two years Melissa Habermyer changed her name to Melissa Bluebird and quit college to form a girl rock band with two friends of hers. They named themselves Melissa and the Bluebirds. They'd been practicing together for months.

Their first real gig was playing at a private party during the Super Bowl. This was arranged by Uncle Frank, whose company was one of the largest corporate sponsors of the football game. One of Melissa's favorite classic bands was the half-time show for the game. She thought it fitting to play, in some small way, in proximity to her idols. The more modest circumstances of her own performance didn't bother her.

The performance itself? In its earnest pop amateurishness it was at least fun. The jaded corporate execs, journalists, coaches, and hangers-on present found the band of pretty young women pleasant to look at. The mild harmony of the band's chords and weak voices antagonized no one. Melissa Bluebird had written the songs, was lead singer and accompanied herself on lead guitar. The rest of the band consisted of drummer and keyboardist: Melissa Bluebird-wannabe-likes who sang backup. Melissa wore a bright multi-colored outfit loaded with scarves, which matched her blue eyes and downy blonde hair. Her voice was pleasant to hear, if one could hear it, and carried a delicate tune, though there was little propulsion behind it. At one point in the modest concert, Melissa "got down" and moved across the glossy black stage at the front of the room in a series of steps. Belching old-bull men clutching drinks in her vicinity applauded.

"Yeah!" Melissa said as the chords of her electric guitar reverberated, swinging her arm around Peter Townshend-style. "Wow! Thank you."

Present in the room as Super Bowl guests of Frank Habermyer were a billionaire record producer from Los Angeles along with an always grinning publicist, Nick Stomponatas.

"Not bad," the producer, blasted on cocaine and cocktails, remarked. "Not bad at all. Whaddya think?" he asked his more sober compatriot.

Thirty-two year-old Nick Stomponatas was a notorious gun-for-hire with extreme smarts and a necessary cynical outlook. He was little-known by the public but respected by anyone in the industry with sense. If you wanted someone made-- or destroyed-- Nick was the guy to go to.

Nick saw something in the girl. Beyond the dollars in Frank Habermyer's bank account, which Nick was well aware of, he saw something for real in the strutting self-important rich girl. Maybe the blue eyes, or the name, or the naive self-importance itself held appeal.

"Give them an edge and they could be huge," Nick Stomponatas said.

There, at the Super Bowl party, he was given the job to create them.

The "edge" he gave the Bluebirds was in the person of Alex Skarski, notorious bad-girl guitarist from the gutters of Cass Corridor Detroit; a music school dropout-- or rather, had been kicked out for telling off her professors. She'd kept her record perfect by being kicked out of band after band-- this though she played the most rockin' power chords heard since Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Alex Skarski WAS rock n' roll, or maybe a caricature of it as she'd absorbed every self-destructive rock myth into her own personality.

Bizarrely, perversely, Nick believed Alex would be a great fit with Melissa and cohorts. He'd seen a soft spot beneath Alex's loud exterior; a hidden vulnerability-- hidden by layers of tough-girl defenses-- that would be dazzled by Melissa's blue eyes and by the sincerity of her modest talent.

They met in a hotel room. Alex was late, had barely made her plane flight-- barely made it through security-- then had vomited for twenty minutes in an airport john after the plane landed. She arrived in the hotel room weak, hungover, red-eyed, tottering, smelling-- despite a layer of perfume-- of sweat, vomit, and urine. Her short dress was so flimsy you could see through it. She wore nothing beneath, and had forgotten to shave her armpits. Or, for that matter, her legs.

Tall, pale, and strikingly thin, with large shoulders and bangs of jet-black hair, she peered at her prospective new bandmate, Melissa Bluebird, recipient already of a million-dollar recording contract. Melissa leaned casually against a divan with the unblemished bearing and confidence of her class. Though Alex was several years older, to study the way each woman approached the other you'd peg Melissa as the elder.

"Uh, hi," the supposed tough girl squeaked with pronounced meekness.

"Hello," Melissa Bluebird said, holding out her hand. "Welcome aboard."

As Nick Stomponatas beamed the two women shook hands on Alex Skarski's arrival into the group.

(To Be Continued.)

now the for the second anniversary

Note: Believe this poem was published on the ULA's Literary Adventures some time after the catastrophe referred to in '04, but we all know that that particular blog and it's work by members and guest poets and writers there in was hostilely seized by bad apples if not traitorous moles embedded in the Alliance. Who like cowardly bullies refused access or to release the aforementioned work after reasonable requests from the ULA. Anywho this poem is again posted lest we forget what happened and is still not happening in the big easy!


Grief by artist, Amy Roberts, @1988

HURRICANE LAMP

“It was not a normal hurricane...”

-- Bush, in his address to the nation from New Orleans,

Thursday, 9.15.05

Was she a giant spider escaped

from the rings of Saturn,

or a mutated crayfish crashing the barricades .

piled in the brink like mashed potatoes

and gravy, or was She a lightning bolt spooked

out of the black and blue lagoon, or a passing

fad taking the market by storm,

or was she just visiting the wet-land bayou

that army corps of engineered no more

and like a mother of four

living hand to mouth got pissed?

If not the heart the liver and spleen

have been tore out of the country

soul first left to rot in the delta

by the tens of thousands poor

and the hurricane lamps

and the hurricane oil lighter than water

unless one counts the toxins,

fry-later grease and the Malathion

run off to kill the insects in the fields

of share-crops where the Mississippi

rolls over bucks for the combines,

cotton wicks drowned in the boxes and those

in the confines of bloated wharves

gone to deep six in the gulf

between the haves’ and the have nots’ husk.

The baby jazz smothered in their cribs

and the blues men blown over into the dark

drink like rum and coke nothing’s changed

and as usually no bureaucrats charged

not one croc in the public works to be

held accountable again and little you

and little me dismissed by fat cats

and Hollywood TV without a peep

unsung solidarity for them in New Orleans

and the muddy proscenium of the deepest South.

One of the sacred cities of the continental cut

with St. Augustine and San Antonio exposed

on either side where the soul of America

quickens from a skip to a back slide.

Where will Nature strike the nine pins next?

What does it all mean, should we pray to God

on our knees when the ministers and priest

have lost before the open and shut eyes

of the dispossessed, the working mother of four

who survives pay check to pay check and huddles

with the rest of them people in the bottom lands

filled up like a bowl without no cereal or soup tho’

but what else is different, nothing has changed.

Unless you can catch a glimpse in the poisoned

sheen waiving like the flag but black and overturned

the slave ships ghostly prowed toward the blocks

block after block slave auctions without terminus

or old Ponce De Leon privateer and skinner

of muskrats whose ghost would be less fearful

than most being a Frenchman stoked the high ground

for a Quarter frequented by intoxicated tourists

Northern for cous- cous and gumbo and a voodoo

tease in the yellow fever of the souvenir news.

Speaking of the turn of the screw what agency

will comfort if not the poor minority and Cajun

parishes perished under the surge in the cycle

gone made hotter than hell and globally warmed

to a irreversible burn but the creatures of the mojo

midnight witching hour in the silvered glass,

the aristocratic vampyre, pathetic zombie hordes,

and even a loupe-garue or two, when its obvious

from the tube there’s not even a place for the living dead

to lay their heads but then again perhaps all these

things have got themselves an office in Washington D.C.

Nothing ‘round these parts, nothing ever changes much.

So on the third day I caught the Louisiana Governor say

cease and desist the search and rescue in effect

get your shot guns loaded

and the billy clubs spit shined

‘cos there’s poor people roving behind the picture-

windows, Walmart, K-mart, Quickie-mart

must be defended at all costs, money floats the whole damn

network, as visions of ownership danced

in their profits’ heads, the disparate are

racing off with diapers, colored televisions, and bread

and bargain basement semi-automatics to kill the living dead.

Eighteen holes cut short for the vacationing Feds.

The mass media spun and monopolized

same old same old to keep us hypnotized

looter and helicopter rerun nine to five

obscuring the truth that the poor are sodomized

day after day under the boots of a corrupt

and underworldly government bottom to top.

What are systems, lies, dirty deals

in face of the homeless panning for a meal

when the wrath makes all the church bells squeal,

Old deities send plagues and catastrophe

against the common people when tyrants reign

so that them folk will rise up against those

in power who rile and ruin the humane

Earth and sign the times with monster births.

Nothing ever changes but there’s chance

a third or fourth party might emerge at last.

Let those who dodge just desserts swill like hogs,

our Creator has proved more powerful than their God.

9.8.05

Weedwhacking Eden by Wred Fright

If the Garden of Eden were in America,
then instead of an angel with a flaming sword guarding it,
there'd be a guy with a weedwhacker having at it.

The Trees of Knowledge of Good and Evil and of Life
would've long ago been sold as Christmas trees,
or chopped up into souvenirs.

The serpent?
He'd have to be a very crafty creature to avoid the lawnmower
making the Garden look like everyone else's yards.

America was supposed to be a new Eden,
but paradise has been lost again,
and this time we can't blame it on Adam and Eve.

It takes years and years for a forest to grow, God knows,
but it only takes men with heavy equipment days to undo it
in an impressive demonstration of the ugliness of efficiency.

Oh, how I miss the frontier;
the taste of wild, sweet fruit;
and dreams of innocence

We put a price on everything, even experience,
so how dear is the fact that there's nowhere new to start over,
and now only ourselves left to destroy?

14 August 2007

(Dedicated to the woods that used to be behind the house I grew up in before the new owner decided to build a house there instead of just buying any one of the dozens of houses for sale in New Castle, Pennsylvania).

"McCartney at Starbucks"

by K.I.N.G. Wenclas

(Rough draft.)

McCartney at Starbucks
Harry Potter at Borders
Home Depot and Wal-Mart, Shrek at McDonald's
Monopoly junk culture
everywhere surrounds us
Incredible fantasies of plutocratic garbage,
riotous gargoyles of hypocritical nonsense
Green-zone gardens of orange plastic petunias
policed by soldiers on bikes,
concrete suburban bunkers guarded by halogen lights
(latest movies inside)
Mobs worshipping hyper-surreal billboards
of airbrushed celebrity faces,
empty gods;
Traffic jam flows into 21st century stadiums,
boozhie monsters with electronic lifestyles
desperate disturbing human-size puppets pretending
to be people
to be hip
to be writers
with unthinking unblinking obedient eyes
as the force of paranoia strengthens. . . .

Boy, haven't you learned yet about monopoly?
about Murdoch
about how to survive
in the fast running machine
of wheels and pulleys
looking like treadmills
those could be hamsters
but they're people
Haven't you learned yet how to get along with your betters,
haven't you learned how to play the game,
haven't you learned that you'd better behave like
everyone else,
haven't you learned to take the paper-pushing
lap-top clicking
cubicle-dwelling
bureaucratically self-important
manufactured-by-intellectual assembly line
drones as your model?
Haven't you learned that the apostles of sameness
the credentialed
rubber-stamped
mouthpieces of Officialdom
have the answers
your job is to listen
put your mind into a box
not to seek;
Haven't you learned that to live outside the system
is to be branded an outcast
you can't fight the sheep
you'll be crushed by steamrollers
infiltrated by moles
stabbed in the back
hung in the town square
in effigy
like a dummy
and for real
for the people to see
used as example
how not to conduct your life
your words blackballed
reputation slurred, smudged, and deleted
a walking nonperson;
haven't you learned this is the fate of the free-living person?
Haven't you learned anything?
Can't you see that Lennon is dead
but McCartney survives
as monopoly-produced icon
strumming across your TV screen
like a cartoon replica
a 3-d computer-generated simulation
He once was a Beatle
spur to revolution
500 years ago
even then it was a dream
subject of boring documentaries
now you find him
on the shelf at the local Starbucks
two dozen right down the street
every one exactly the same
the sunlight's daytime heat
boils bubbles of wetness
on an urban blacktop
accompanied by a celebrating band
twangy guitars, happy voices
'cause the rebel is dead
they got one
shot him down at the entrance to a building
surrounded by police
while the hyper-regulated assholes of Officialdom
click away on computer screens. . . .

and the colorful band on the sidewalk
plays predictably
religiously
night and day
as homage to the yuppies
marching like penguins
backed by the glories of
manufactured-in-China
infrastructure
investments in their careers
monitoring stock prices
served by their nannies
their gardeners their housekeepers their drivers
their brown-skinned less-than-minimum wage slaves
without papers

A dozen mad yellow tractors at
gentrified housing projects
running over protesting human beings
toy dolls crushed
as easily as Rachel Cory
it's about the money
the contracts
the greed
Baghdad is here in our cities--

Twenty cop triggers
two hundred gunshots
eighty-five bullets
through the body of the city's latest casualty
(the rest of them missed)
he was psychiatrically insane anyway
certifiably psychotically
you have to be to challenge a badge-wearing cop
stray bullets smashing bricks
bubbles of blood
welling on the summertime
black asphalted concrete of the street
flowing in rivulets,
and the red, white, and blue
band on the sidewalk
playing for pennies
hat on the ground
raise a chorus of "yeas"
they saw it in a movie
while the marching penguins thrill
to the soundtrack of their lives;

It's lonely at Starbucks
closing time at the big box malls
employees released from their schedules
their perky personas
serving lattes
lights turning off going out
McCartney on the stand
packaged in unbreakable sealed plastic
miles from Liverpool
untouched next to Albom
(in truth the music is horrible)
he's long since been homogenized
orange-red gunshots cascading across
carnival streets as
the civilization of greed cracks in half
but the glass door to the chain store is locked
security code set
no one robs a Starbucks
or a Wal-Mart
except the insane
no one robs a church
Capitalist temples
Harry Potter on sale
40% off
The unseen sky
grows late
time to get to sleep
if you can push the buzz
of this mad commercially-produced mini-series of reality
out of your head
in time for the alarm clock
to march you off again
to your robotic role
of conditioned reliability
in the morning.

NAZI ART VAULT

NAZI ART VAULT

graffiti painting by Bood Samel, the "Tanks", south end of 49th St., 2004

I am thinking out loud and don’t want to imply

there’s any truth in what I tell you except the lie

looms large on the horizon slashed from ear to ear

just happy- faced with the results of terror and fear

has had on the working stiffs and the radical subjective saps

who create to live on the fringe that’s not quite where it’s at

the aliens under the radar pressed into service

by the all consuming Reich of real estate interest

Bagdadadelphia, maybe there’s somewhere healthier

no doubt it’s right to be worried now

there’s a big hole in the ground that won’t be null and void

for long, containers from China, the boats from Vietnam

cheap labour to dig the floor up to fit the fetishes got

under pretext of helping the third world here and there out

of the self fulfilling prophecy with foreign tyrants paid off

to make it look good to the bleeding hearts and ping-pong.

The Buck, the Yen,

a pound of flesh

and requisite dash

of salt under the skin

the stolen artifact

traded for sex

with a starved child

to weak to scream

it’s only another

Nazi Art Vault

come to an immanent domain near you

Spellbinder, hex laid on thick,

if only the Sea Witch knew

she’d give the devil his due

Beep heil, beep heil Nazi Art Vault com’n’ thru!

To a white washed black bottom near you.

Nazi Art Vault’s bigger than a bread-box

but never as large as a Black Hole

(there’s been a change in the zoning code

Beep Heil, beep heil Nazi Art Vault com’n’ thru!

UCD plus PNC is good clean family fun Nazi Art Vault

30th Street Post Office lost leased and Penned in by the tax

payer is Green Zone IRS Nazi Art Vault so is the World Cafe BBC

and the museum of Archeology the poster child of Nazi Art Vaults

Don’t mind the mad poet, don’t shoot the piano player,

nervous ticks, I’m possessed by beautiful Israeli spies

and I work down the Pike digging the Nazi Art Vault

for the absentee landlord and the precious gentrified.

I image you think, I imagine there’s something

not quite right with me and I witness the blistering

shell rise over the skyline Comcast like a gynecologist

high on meta- amphetamine scraping the heat inversion

architectonic, terrorist proof by volume and channel

locks to the degree the TV syndicates want us

to believe in God, in Country and the Nazi Art Vault

com’n’ through loud and clear channel high definition.

The acquisitive consumer could

just as well easily pump the blood

of a dozen Nationalguards men and women

into the gas tank of their SUV

or an Iraqi wedding party into a Hummer

but nothing compares to the capacity

of a spanking new Nazi Art Vault

popping up like poppies all over the Green

Zone phone home for a gold bricking binge.

They maybe the Beautiful People

but we’re better looking than them.

Carnivolution, Ellen Tiberino Memorial Museum. 6.8.07

note:

There's alot of local Philadelphia references here of course and then a casual reader might want to know the why and wherewithall of their inclusion. One needs to do a web search on the various references to get the impact perhaps of the usurpation of the great city's soul (including it's culture underground) by a combination of "conflict of interest" and immanent domain". And good luck in finding anything that is seeing the trees thru the forest! But I think we would all have first hand experience with the purpose of Comcast's erecting towers upon the metropolitan skylines, at least on the East Coast.

Otherwise I beg your forgiveness for the heavy handed polemics.

ATLANTIS FM

This poem was writ on the road late summer of 1991. It was published in Philadelphia while I was living in Jacksonville Beach, FL running a heavy-metal club called RPM's for my younger brother by Andrew Lovatt in an interesting one shot literary zeen called OZONE "a map of alternate realities" in 1992. ATLANTIS FM and possibly another more recent piece-- in the punk "raving-poet" genre, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, will be action-read ULA style with improv backup from the Hydrogen Jukebox band during their first Carnivolution 2nd Friday performance art, music, sideshow event for 2007 at the ELLEN TIBERINO MEMORIAL MUSEUM, 3819 Hamilton Street, in West Philly this May11th. If your in this part of the East Coast Hood, by all means, check it out!
Thanks to Matt and Eric "jelly-boy the clown" Broomfield.
I will most certainly return comrade James Nolan's beautifully disturbing short story to its position at the head of the pack early next week so that any stragglers doan miss the opportunity of reading it.

ATLANTIS F.M.

Out along the blue-green

edge

oceans swell and billowed foam

the clear eye near can see

cliffs and high plateau where the fogs

dance, the rush of the waves rouse

oh, mesmerisms

whispers rise between the sandpiped trill

Atlantis, lost continent,

lost and drowned by pride

heaves back for an instant into view

spectral, steep

out along the green-blue

edge

who among us may reach down

deeply past the clocking mind

regain the pallisades of Atlantis in those depths

where dreams crash and mill

and ripple outward to touch a million

sleepers with longing wonder, then

release them so they float

to the surface of their routines.

Out along the green-blue

edge

that philosophers and prophets

have, hallmarked down the millenniums,

rumored, and charged their writ

with reference to that super race

who with similar intent and bent

of technocracies and science to those

entrenched and no less impertinent

at the present moment, though our own

differing from its tragic precedence

by virtue of its global extent;

did succeed in wresting the reigns of Nature

away from the sure and sufficient hands

of the elements.

Out along the blue-green

edge

you were once my scribe for a bit

during the summer of the great

Opposition, and I yours, but I imagined

more attentive, a lover,

and as such now where I stand alone

when the morning disengages from the seas's gorge

and its long night of forbidden pleasures,

nearly can hear the drowned accolade

sparked by the fleeting victory march

of war undertow the hollow roaring waves.

Then the glare crowned

and glacial fear brought on by inordinance.

Out along the green-blue

edge, were you again at my side

and ventured with me into the verge

of the drowning tide.

9/1991- 5/2007.

Looks like I am

the last man on Earth

as if an atom bomb dropped not here

but over New York

maybe I’m the only one left

until of course

photo by Geoff Hall, 2006.

wandering the vacant streets

and littered plazas for some can goods

I discover, as the apocalyptic

yarn went, the last woman

scantily clad in a cracked

phone booth that doesn’t work.

She’s screaming into the receiver

for her husband and kids

like there’s no tomorrow

which a matter of fact there

And then under a sky that is a sound effect

it dawns on me that what are the chances of this

phone booth being on the deserted city corner

in the first place, a coincidence? Was it supposed to be the last phone booth on Earth when before

the Apocalypse nobody and their mother

could ever find a pay phone as the authorities

had removed almost every last one by then

blaming juvenile delinquents and pushers

the public pay phone going the way of the family

amusement park or the neighborhood basketball

court and the 1 point O! blood alcohol

percentage.

What else was there at one time

just didn’t add up unless

it all made sense that it was

the sequel of the Children of the Damned

in the Village of the Damned and damned

in this damn World I found myself

besotted, misbegotten and different from them”

the pre-pubescent blonde haired straightened

bleach conditioner and Prussian blue eyed

Kinder of legal tender rendered perfect if not

alien under the cell-phone pay to play higher

technocracy who were in the process of world

domination before the shit hit the fan

when the grid goes down

and out for the count

from zero for naught

the ghost of the atomic

energy commission would

have to know what it’s all about.

The indifferent towers and citadels of business

bilked to the gills and not a soul in site

there’s nothing and no need to on my mind

no reason to search the parameter for signs

I just drift off to another free lunch

while the supply lasts and the candles hold

back the tears of this perfect dark night

and I dream of things as they should

as I dream again of being the last in line.

3/2007.

The Anus of Evil

THE ANUS of EVIL
by
James Nowlan

I could never be like other people. The shadow of my father’s work, whatever it had actually been or not been, floated beside me like a ghost keeping me from ever sharing in the normal activities of others. Whether I was with a group of friends or alone with a girl I could feel its terrible wraithly presence contemplating me, correcting the syntax of my sentences and changing their punctuation. College was even worse. The severe gaze of the professors trying to pierce my distraction while occasionally glancing towards a point above my head where they almost perceived their pupils tormentor. Of course they didn’t know of my dad because hardly anyone did as he’d been seldom published and almost never read. His short-lived fame was due to the unusual circumstances of the "accident" that took his life.
I usually told the other children that my father was infirm and so spent all his day in bed. I some how sensed that the truth was much more shameful. My fathers "work" was said in such a way that one could tell it wasn’t work in the sense that most people understood it and what he actually seemed to do, filling waste baskets with torn up pieces of papers and the mail box with letters with well printed impressive sounding addresses that were torn open anxiously by my father to feed his dismay like some strange drug was much more obscure and arcane than the activities of the other kids parents. And unlike the professional pursuits of other parents it became that much more inscrutable as adolescence approached. Where before all that came from his office, actually a converted walk in closet, were the sound of his typewriter punctuated by occasional curses accompanied by the static of the paper being torn from the carriage to be crumpled and thrown into a trash can now an endless tirade of low murmuring. "They should have" followed by something inaudible then a peck at a few keys "they didn’t need to" the carriage being thrown abruptly back "I’m going to have to" more pecks. Longer and longer silences began to set off these intervals, silences that became more and more filled with cryptic dread.
Why he chose the office of the publishing company that he did to perform his act was never known because he didn’t leave any note. A "literary" magazine that had been one of the few publications to actually print something by him had been recently acquired by the firm that had started with college text books (a sure thing captive audience and you can impose a certain taste that will influence their later life purchasing patterns) and was branching out into everything. Where he had gotten the explosives to commit it, indications of links to extremist groups had been hinted at, or how the explosives had been introduced into his body cavities, some expert witnesses had sworn that it must have been ingested others theorized introduction through the rectum or even some form of surgery. Regardless, the effect of the explosion had been to not only instantly kill my father and mortally wound the security guard at the reception desk but to shred the collected manuscripts that my father had been pecking at over the last twenty years. The man having attached the thousand odd pages to his torso by dissimulating them under his clothes a bit like a bum might do with newspapers before bedding down on a park bench on a winter’s evening.
Anyway, the blast projected bodily tissues and paper in all directions the former serving as a sort of glue or tacks to stick the latter to the sandalwood walls and ceiling that had recently been installed. The whole lobby was closed off after the event and the personnel passed through a service entrance on another street. The images recorded by police and journalists made there way around the world and before the lobby was reopened to the public the agent of a well known German conceptual artist called the office of the multi-national that the literary journal was a part of with a strange offer.
The lobby was transported around the world and millions of people passed through it in a dozen different museums of modern art. A phrase like, "she wasn’t feeling very well but she hid it very well indeed", swimming amidst a sweaty summer public swimming pool of like phrases would be a very sad page but all by itself nailed to a wall by a splinter of bone from its author it became filled with all the cryptic possibilities of the empty pool in late fall with a few leaves in a puddle in the deep end and for awhile my father was seen as some sort of deranged genius.
After a short spell in an over priced university I came to the conclusion that it certainly wasn’t leading to anything; most of the other students had gone to exclusive boarding schools and so were already well connected to the world that I would more or less be permanently excluded from. Going back to New York I tried to exploit what little notoriety was left from my fathers spectacular end to become some sort of transgressive literary star. Unfortunately punk was pretty much dead and there wasn’t much hope for me until I was anonymously contacted by some one claiming to represent an important group that was at the moment the center of attention.
My personal style was so in conflict with theirs that when they made me an offer of collaboration I imagined some sort of set up. To quiet my suspicions and convince me of the seriousness of their offer they even suggested a meeting between me and the person who, though he tried to present himself as just another casual collaborator in a collective effort, was actually their leader. We were to meet at "Spatzes" a delicatessen whose fading authenticity had made trendy.
I didn’t think I would ever see the great man himself and when I did there in those humble surroundings with a platter of fairly greasy corned beef and fries I almost dumped it into his lap but his reassuring smile buoyed me up until I had sat down and the odor of my food wafted up to his sensitive vegetarian nostrils. The food proved to be an effective negotiation device for to escape the site of it, Dale Beggars (yes it was really he) quickly transmitted the hushed instructions for my mission and emphatically promised that my dreams of literary fame and fortune would be fulfilled upon its completion.
A few days later I was on the train for Pittsburgh to meet with the group who had become the sworn enemies of the Beggar’s band a group of literary misfits commonly known as "The Haters". They had fixed a rendezvous in a strip tease joint that found it self in a zone that had been washed over several times in the last decades by the ebbing and flowing tides of decay and gentrification and looked worn down by the current. I entered the dimly lit establishment that seemed empty except for an almost naked female swaying unseductively upon the stage. She looked to be in the terminal stage of serious crystal meth addiction, the formaldehyde derived substance claiming its own was witnessed in her cadaverous appearance. As my vision adjusted to the strange pastel-lit interior I noticed a group of shadowy figures in a corner booth crouched around a beer pitcher reflecting the multicolored spotlights. I stumbled across a floor strewn with broken bits of furniture and glass and they seemed to straighten up in anticipation of my coming. It was only when I was seated that their features became recognizable in the varying hued illumination playing off the glass pitcher from which they poured me out a pint by way of welcome. I hesitated to drink it fearing any beverage served in such a place but wanting to be accepted I took a swig; it was actually quite good.
I don’t quite remember what was said that night but the hospital emergency admittance noted something about me getting up on stage with the emaciated dancer to strip with her and then falling off the stage onto some broken glass and needing fifty or so stitches. I thought that I’d failed my mission and missed my chance at greatness until a chirpy message on my answering machine from Dale Beggars advised me otherwise. He was apparently quite content with my "infiltration" and was eager to give me my reward. An appointment was made for the next day at Spatzes.
This time he didn’t even wait for me to set my offending tray of food before him but stood up regally and pointed an imperious finger towards the toilet, which upon entering I found to be much more spacious and cleanly than I had imagined. Dale opened the door of a stall and indicated that I should occupy the adjoining one with a nod of his head. I had just slid the bolt shut when his penis appeared through a glory hole.
"What the fuck, I stuttered?"
"Suck me.." insinuated Dale.
"But.."
"You wanted greatness well here it is; swallow my semen and be owned by my muse…"
Mechanically I got down on my knees and went to work. I’d always thought that something like that, sucking cock for the first time would be some great transition Like now I’ve changed and can never go back, something as big or maybe even bigger than killing someone but actually it was completely banal and made me think that when the time in my life came, if it ever did, that I should have the occasion to do away with a fellow human I could do it with total nonchalance, thinking yes I could right now be taking your penis in my mouth and swallowing your sperm but as chance might have it I’m thrusting a knife into your chest or pumping a bullet into your head and you should accept and acquiesce as I have acquiesced in the past…..
Later in the subway I stared at myself in the mirror watching for change to come over me. I knew that right then another passenger was doubtlessly gazing at me looking at my reflection having this introspective moment and thinking there is someone gazing at their reflection in the window of the subway train against the darkened background of the tunnel rushing by while it is occasionally obscured by the well lit platforms that interpose themselves upon his image. Platforms upon which amongst the crowd of passengers at least one was thinking there must be someone on that train looking in the window while having an introspective moment. The tongue amongst the taste buds of which some of the greatest voice of my generation’s spermatoza were wriggling their last began vibrating with a strange urgency that I knew must be sentences of dazzling eloquence and I stood up on the swaying floor of the subway to release them in a flood of incoherence.
They let me out of Bellevue after a seventy two-hour hold. They didn’t offer me any explanations and I didn’t ask for any. Back in my decrepit apartment I called "the Dale" several times with out any response. When I finally threatened to expose his involvement in my "infiltration" of "The Haters" he told me to go to the same stall of Spatzes’ toilet in order to avoid us being seen together. After waiting for what seemed like several hours I heard the door of the stall next to me open and close and I sense it must be him. I was about to get down on my knees before the glory hole when he told me, "no time for that, I’m leaving you something that should work out better for you, wait until I’m gone then come and get it."
After a painful pause the door hastily opened and shut and I went over to see a note taped to the back wall of the stall "eat me" with an arrow pointing downwards. It floated there forlornly; a sad reminder of human mortality and not at all smelling of literary genius. Surrounded by the piss-flavored waters of the enamel bowl it might be a minimalist delicacy of a cuisine still too exotic to be appreciated.
The revulsion of the act of eating it hit me like a bad drug and I staggered home stopping only to buy a six-bottle crate of vodka and a supply of porno DVDs at a new concept boutique liquor store/sexshop that had opened in the neighborhood. The next week or so passed in a blur of alcohol and hardcore sex but I woke up at the end of it with the manuscript that I felt sure would be my guarantee of glory.
When I emailed it to him he sent me back a mocking response. When I called threatening to expose him he laughed egging me on saying that he could use the publicity. I then decided upon a path of vengeance that would not only punish Dale and his band of Beggars but also award myself and my father’s memory with some long overdue recognition.
I bought a laptop and a camera and then salesman helpfully demonstrated how to set up a pod cast. The counterman at Spatzes carefully wrapped two dozen frankfurters for me as if he knew they were going to be used for something special. Flying to a gun show in Reno I was able to complete my equipment and was soon across the state line into California breaking several federal laws and singing along to Frank Sinatra and ranting with radio-evangelists, rolling towards San Francisco and destiny.
The sleepy eyed posers in the "beggars’ bunkhouse" an ex south of market S&M bar that had been converted into a pretentious literary venue looked up with a start when I barged in the door with my camera, guns, all beef frankfurters and laptop at the ready. They thought it was simply "a performance" but when I fired several rounds over their heads they quickly lined up against the wall as I ordered. "But how many had swallowed his sperm or eaten his feces? Or swallowed the sperm or eaten the feces of someone who had swallowed his sperm or eaten his feces……" I wondered. Anyway I waved the nerdiest looking one over with my .25 and then held it against his neck while he set up the camera and the laptop meanwhile holding the rest at bay with my 9mm. When it was ready I ordered them all to get strip naked and had the nerdy one carry the sack with the beef frankfurters and my manuscript to a table standing before them. One by one I then ordered the females to bend over the table while from behind the males (I call them such because they had become for me like another species for which I felt as little affinity as I might for sheep or cattle) stroked out a passionate reading of my work.
The nerd held camera broadcast this event to the world. I felt a certain pride knowing that millions would now know my words.
"When he first arrived in this distant age he imagined that he had stumbled at last into utopia. Every chance encounter with a female seemed to be an instant pretext for rapidly consummated intercourse. But then he noticed the cameras and a series of short notes slipped discretely into his hand during the trysts revealed the truth; they were all just the toys of some perverse artificial intelligence."
"Life’s a party but not all of us are invited, or more exactly we’re invited but not welcome or let’s say some are maybe more welcome than others but sadly the host neglects to include this information in the invitation so that we could dress more appropriately."
"At the same time that the sensation of her stroking his testicles was making him harder speculation upon the significance that testicle stroking held for her as, "the testicle stroker", was tending to make him soft."
"When the American empire finished its robotised army in time to secure its domination of the world. Unfortunately the contract for maintaining this army was subcontracted to the lowest bidder who further subcontracted security to a firm whose employees spent their shift watching porno films on the computer. The immense central control became "aware" by bias of these images and sent out its robotic minions to transform the world into one immense theater to satisfy its strange desires."
When all the females had passed their turn the cowed and naked group looked hopefully towards me for some indication that their ordeal might be at its end but then I indicated the unread half of my work and made them know that it was now the turn of the males to recite my lines of genius. Which they did with the females all beef almost kosher encouragement.
"The first time I saw one who had not performed satisfactorily hung up for punishment, mercilessly tortured with electric shocks I shivered in horror but I soon learned to pay no attention."
"The festival began with the massive consumption of raw alcohol and ended with the "fucked out" having been doused with the same liquid and set afire squirming and screaming as they were immolated alive."
"But before the flames had completely consumed me I saw opening before me a passage like that that had brought me to this cursed époque."
"And so it was that one brave traveler through time had prevented this most monstrous of futures and made known to us to manner in which the blessing of alcohol might preserve us from the horror of sexual intercourse. And now at a certain age all of us that have the misfortune to belong to this thing that might be called humanity are anointed with the substance and illuminated that all that that might provoke desire be burned away."
Now having passed their turn the males looked even more shamed than females had while a few of the females appeared to have some how restored their dignity in the process. But what would I do next? Seizing the bowl of sausages and taking a small jar of mustard out of my pocket I rapidly swallowed them and when they were all on the way down my esophagus put the barrel to my head showering the SWAT team rushing in with my brains. And in Williamsburg thousands of recent MFA grads seized with a unbearably agonizing self-consciousness rushed to the Brooklyn bridge to leap into the East river and obliterate it, as Samizdat seminar students in Prague threw themselves under the wheels of the nearest street car and many others elsewhere hit by the terrible wave of introspection that my death provoked sought appropriately dramatic ends to their failed literary ambitions.
And now I see them often here in this place which though not resembling any description of hell I had ever come across certainly isn’t heaven and they give me a tragic look to try to stir some guilt feelings but I just smile. Actually the worst thing about being dead is that it isn’t really all that bad, which is perhaps the worst thing about life as well.