"Insomniac In Exile"

"Insomniac In Exile"
by Ash Lomen


I dream sometimes of strangers, strangers cuddled around the French streets of my boyhood, oak-ancient streets haunted by the promise of vivisection and the whispers of hermetic ghosts discarding their wooden shells of old Victorians. Circus equipment is set about haphazardly.

I always meet a girl in the dream. Always an amalgam to fit my shortcomings. A reader, an intellectual, far beyond my equal… but she still looks like that girl in high school whose tan legs I would commit to memory before excusing myself to spill sperm in the communal urinal, imaging she instead was my receptacle. Today, she is wearing candyglass spectacles and her hair is dyed a whore’s yellow. As always, I am shy; she approaches me and breaches our common interests.

I feel love.

Not the kind of love that makes you want have children or become a better man… but the kind of love that makes you want to stick your dick in a blender, cuddle up and have pillow talk with your own regurgitated earwax and brain shrapnel. The girl and I walk off amid the throngs of people until the sidewalk is eventually swallowed by the horizon. We never fuck, we never even kiss.

I wake up in cold sweat and and search for a warm beer under my bed. I catch my breath, crunch the can after downing it in a few quick gulps, and I try to fall back asleep.

I never can.


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"Traced In Red, On Wet Sand"

"Traced In Red, On Wet Sand"
by Ash Lomen
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“Life is black Comedy. Slapstick and vulgarity. Unworthy of the name.”

~ J.R. Hayes





Ask anyone who has ever lived. Life is long.

Too damn long.

Still the bedlam that dripped like hot wax through Los Angeles and down the California Coastline… deaths to rival Jerusalem… rapes to rival Nanking…

And Jim Pulver knew he had to be a part of it...

Wartime Warsaw had nothing on Long Beach by the time he reached it, bloodred sand, waves of mutilation, tortured wildlife, nancy boys hiding behind poorly erected stucco barricades, discarded infants, beach bums disemboweling each other with splinters of surfboards to pounding Christian rock, the smell of cheap weed and cheaper pussy, genocide, mass graves, mass orgies, rampant disease, celebrity families forced to fuck at gunpoint for the entertainment of starving militias, target practice with the handicapped, meaningless pentagrams scribbled in the sand, earthquakes, rum and coke and battery acid and the screams of virgins all mixed in with the roar of the great old ocean…

And then the party was over.

(Jim takes out his digital camera and goes to work.)

Just another day at the beach.

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