NOVEL BLESSING

"A Blessing"
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In the beginning
there was only darkness

a pregnant pause
giving slow birth
to bloodlust

movement
dictated by shadows

a sharp intake of breath
the sudden flash
of a hungry blade

and then there was light…


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"Novel"
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This is only
technically
art

Godheads impaled
on sharp words
and sharper imagery

A passion play
with a twist

Folders and folders
of unrealized snuff

All just to get your attention

Nothing original
(No need to be)


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Lomen ~ 07, 09

FORGOTTEN MESSIAH

Stephen Streamers was slated to be our Savior.
But he was stricken with a terrible bout of Irritable Bowel Syndrome on Judgment Day.
Now he’s settled for used car sales.

UNREAL ESTATE

Despite the sunken living room and inground pool, it was the six decapitated bodies hanging in the kitchen that initially attracted the Dellgoods to the semi-attached.

KING OF EGGS

Mister picks me up at the corner asks if I have money. I tell him: yeah, but my wallet is fried pap.

My words are always dissected, clanked, pulled, stretched, and diced.

I open the window, calling names while Mister pushes me through his puckered eye socket. He has lost all ambition and so: I am squeezed, combined, licked, twirled.

We stop to talk to some people. Pick-pockets dissect my kneecap but leave my clock untouched. It strikes noon: Cuckold! Cuckold!

Mister puts me into the backseat and starts the car: driving, driving, driving, and driving. Sunlight through the trees provides seizures. I tremble under a cloud and spit up crusted & painted yoke.

When we reach our destination I put my hand into the front seat and pull the radio apart. I have no purpose but yet: I lick the knobs, I tongue the controls. I am out of control. I get no reception.

Mister pushes me back and straightens his tie. Stop your messing with technology, he says.

A bundle of soiled magazines sits beside me. Flap caps and hairy flare guns splattering fifty-year-old cheeks into cock-eyed oblivion. It’s like a stag party full of ballistic and pock-marked pancakes and flat cod covered in gravy. There’s several puckered and brown sour-eyes getting a stern talking to by several fingers at once.

Mister struggles to keep composure and from across the street comes Mary skipping in a skirt, no shirt, her pimple-covered flap jacks playing gravity’s game and bruising her jaw. A tooth is loosened, rolls toward the sewer and a Chinese cat bats it around.

In a fury Mister leaves the car and punches Mary in the ribcage and calls her a name I don’t want to repeat. I put my feet through the back window.

Like an urgent letter, I send myself through the windshield, past Mister & Mary and into the diner across the street.

I sit at the counter. The waitress is short, plump, shimmering like a star. Her nose resembles a typewriter. It sniffs.

She hands me a menu and I look it over. It’s mostly seafood. Vampire squid and waffles, spider crab and flaxseed, hammerhead shark with a side order of cinnamon toast.

Mister and Mary walk into the diner. Mister tells me to order the eggs. Who am I to argue?

I order the eggs while the two of them pick lice out of each other’s hair. When it comes time to pay, I take my wallet out but then remember that it is fried pap. The waitress says it’s not a problem. She put is on a plate and serves it to a group of truckers who are all wearing shirts that say: Pancakes Are Not an Option.

The three of us leave and get back into the car. Mister starts driving.

Turn on the radio, Mary says.

We can’t, Mister tells her. He looks at me and gives me a nasty look. For a minute I feel bad about destroying the radio. It was a nice radio.

There’s no ending to our story. Not until the three of us are dead. I guess I could make something up, something clever and witty. But I won't.

So we keep driving.

THE RED FENCE

His mother would never leave the house. She said demons were everywhere and he believed her. She said only the color red could keep them safe, keep the demons away, and so every day she sent him to the hardware store to buy two gallons of red paint. Every day, he was forced to paint the fence that went all around their property without a break. Over and over, all day long, he painted. His skin and scalp were blistered by the sun, his lips peeling away from his face, burnt crispy and gray.

She said the demons would come sooner or later. They would take him away from her, eat him up like a little boy steak. But she knew they feared the color red, the redder the better, the fresher the paint, the safer they would be.

She knew when the time was drawing nearer. Insisted that he forget about school, stay home and paint the fence. Two gallons became four and four became six. There was no eating for him, no bathroom breaks, no sleeping. He would paint by the light of the moon. And still she would scream that it was not enough. Never, never enough.

“They’re coming!” she would scream. “Coming for you and coming for me!”

And they did come, looking exactly as she said they would. In smart suits and polished shoes, stepping out of a mini-van and talking about new places.

The boy stood bravely inside his yard, behind his sticky red fence, his brush in his hand, dripping red onto the dead brown grass. He was confident the fence would keep him safe.

But it didn’t. They came over the fence, not afraid at all, and tried to snatch him up. He ran, crying, yelling, but his legs were small and they quickly caught him, carrying him back to their van as he screamed for his mother.

From the window of the van, through his burning tears, he watched her run out to the yard, shrieking his name, her bare feet stepping into the red.

She stopped, looked down and a look a sheer terror came into her eyes. She wailed in agony, falling to the ground, crawling like a crab away from the fence, backing away, away…

As the van began to move, the boy’s tears dried up and a faint smile touched his mouth. The outside of the fence was grimy, flaking and white.

But it’s true. Demons do hate red.