that was into being, of of hinted)
the spent peculiarities
in fearful atmospherics
a rising reign of appellation
the spent peculiarities..
through tears, the headlight-constellations
by what notes
deposit he there vagaries sentience divining splendour
all touch, impression
ghastly perdition
that structure trickled cordiality up. this day on which gloom added distant mourning
hitherto entombed
gleaming dilapidation
lip-sentiments
if bleak destitute me
life-the it, Them especially, rested hand of Saturn
opium after-dreams
nostrils drawing in scarcely shuddered terms
The day I became immortal, the night grabbed the sun by the face and pushed it screaming down beneath the horizon. The day I became immortal -- that's when it all started.
I dropped 40 ft. like an angel from heaven into the concrete wasteland they call a city, landing on my feet in the palm of the rested hand of Saturn. Landing on my feet. My knees buckled and I collapsed like I was falling off the cross and she caught me. I fell into her. My knees buckled. But I landed on my feet. I woke up in a bathtub full of blood wearing a noose that snapped like a necktie.
This is me rolling open my eyes in a bathtub overflowing with watered-down blood. This is me lifting my arm to make sure the razors and the stinging sensation they made under the warm water wasn't all some wonderful dream. This is me picking up the toaster bobbing up and down in my blood.
"N_xt _im_ _ou sh_uld p_u_ _t i_."
I could have sworn I plugged it in. I could have sworn I plugged it in.
It was Mariah. She was playing with a cat and a pillow.
"I w_it_ed f_r y_uLSDK:FJAFK I waited for you."
I waited for you. "I waited for you." She slept on the bathroom floor. She slept there waiting for me to wake up because I told her I would. I told her I was immortal. I told her that my genes are so filled with failure that I can not even manage to kill myself. She slept there like I was a friend or a relative in a hospital.
She pushed the pillow down into the bathtub like she was trying to drown it. My neck hurts. She said, "Ne_t t_me."
She said, "Next time use a pillow." Sh_ s_id.
She said, "Comfort is wasted on the dead."
This is me pulling out the needle. This is me grabbing up at the overcooked and blackened sky; grabbing up at the bubbles of watered-down blood; grabbing up at the memories as they race towards the heavens I fell from; as they race down my arms in purple streams.
You did this to me. You with your briefcase filled with money. You with your car filled with gas and your stomache filled with pork rinds and your cell phone filled with minutes. You with your navy blue blazer and buttoned white collar. You the poorly drawn caricature of corporate America. You the ensanguined gears of the fascist machine. Turning like clockwork. Oiled by the blood of the working class. Riding piggyback on Sisyphus with a whip and a cattleprod. A_d a c_t_lep_od...
This is me pruning the rosebush.
This is me and Mariah losing our virginity, popping his limbs out of joint like cherries and making him a parapalegic with long shiny knives. Making him look as helpless as we felt. Carving out holes in the palms of his severred hands so that he could die for our sins.
01101111 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111010 01100101 01110010 01101111 01110011.
Everything is black and white and we are red. We are the twos trapped inside a world of ones and zeros. We are the singing voices in an emotionless opera of television static and paranoia and bombs and stage talk. Everything is black and white. Everything is binary.
through black-marbled skies of opium after-dreams
the gleaming dilapidation of thin-skinned vagaries
underwater pillows flapping like jellyfish
through the blood in my brain through the blood in the petri dish
zigzags of cold glassy footsteps and heads in hands
nostalgia that nauseous euphemism for the hitherto entombed
twisting and spinning the world into woozy fox-tails
and falling stars and motion blurs
eyes shut tight to block like shampoo
the wounding light of contusion
making a tonight out of nothing
memory is like a skipping record
memory is like a skipping record
memory is a blood-filled catheter
that i craft the disasters after
the thirst for blood, for chaos, whet
and ducking under death's stretched steps
p-p-pointing a finger at you like a jury
p-p-pointing a finger at you like a jury
with a gun for each hand
with a gun for each hand
in circles and vagaries hitherto entombed
twisting motion blurs like fox-tails
that was into being hitherto entombed
zigzags of cold glassy footsteps
zigzags of cold glassy feet prints
pressing like stamps on crunchy tan sand
a sinister softness in the turned haste
a pocket full of knives in a pillow case
phantasmagoric
staircase of Gold terror
to find some from words
Cheap in soul.
history i say i saw in girls' eyes
glassy radio footsteps
line-drawing cynics
making a tonight out of nothing
nostalgia's a nauseous euphemism
for misery resurection
i craft the disasters after
industrial attack utility
rapid on all that oddity
Oooh lapse
the careful the spanning
took you them your flailing arms
this humble violence
ducking under the stretched step of death
with a gun for each hand
all burned to fragments
<font size="2">
<b>The Cross and Pile Experiments</b>
<i>by Michael Justin Hatfield</i>
Like time stains libraries filled with books and stains mouths filled with crooked decaying teeth a deep urine yellow, Dick and Jane have become Richard and Janice.
Everything yellows with age. Everything looks and smells and tastes like piss. Everything's dripping and wet and smeared with puke and blues and pain.
Dick put down his stethoscope and Richard picked up a hammer. Janice pulled up her blouse and pulled down her skirt, turning in her scrubs for a pair of kneepads and a pair of handcuffs, because nursery rhymes of college funds and sky-high limits and followed dreams proved to be nothing more than another piss-soaked stone in the yellow-brick road to attempted suicide and a well-stocked medicine cabinet.
Now every day is color-coded, and every moment's color-coated until the days on your pill box blend together; until the pills in your pill box blend together; until everything technicolor is spiralling down to the sewers with everyone else's broken dreams and mascara tears and abortion clinic homocides.
Freedom is a lonely blistered hard-on, raped with words for political and financial gain, and I'm the whore tied to it with clenched fists, struggling to keep it from going limp while the sheep-pigs float around me in the sewage, clinging to logs of their own feces to avoid drowning in the lies they were left sinking in.
Delusions of grandeur? Schizophrenia, S.A.D., depression, who knows... Everyone has a theory, a diagnosis, some say I'm fine. Everyone's a psychiatrist, everyone's playing doctor with my mind. Dick and Jane, fondling each other in the name of science while I'm left playing hangman with my brain, trying to decipher the psychosis-dripping salad of words it constantly prints out in riddles and foreign tongues, and sometimes I feel like I'm the stick figure standing atop those Donkey Kong ladder rungs of empty letter blanks, wearing the Ian Curtis necktie I was born with around my neck... Sometimes I'm tired of guessing. Sometimes I just wish someone would kick out the fucking chair.
My family heirloom is a pair of bloody Levi's. My family heirloom is a pair of bloody Levi's and everytime I put them on I pray that the trigger of my .38 works like my SNES's reset button.
-------
Mariah Purder; Mariah, who had a way with words; Mariah, who could sell shit to a pitbull with IBS and a dripping ass; Mariah, with that pearly white set of fangs flashed at every, "CHEESE!"
Mariah, Mariah, Mariah, Mariah, Mariah my disease... a doll faced demon that with tits and tail makes grown men burst into flames and young men wet with dreams.
Mariah was a side-project that took over like a virus. Like those short-stories you keep in your closet that you'll never finish. Like those short-stories you cannabalize until they are completely gone and all that's left is a bunch of poetry that you forgot how to read. A bunch of poetry that makes you sick to your stomache when you think how it started and where it ended up going, spiralling out of your pen, spiralling out of control until it felt like demons had taken over and started writing them for you.
This is me reminiscing.
This is me caving in.
This is me transferring the seven digits scribbled on the back of a pack of gas station matches to the number pad of a liquor store payphone. Luckily, I was so nervous that I forgot to feed the machine a quarter, which saved me the trouble of hanging up when she inevitably answered...
This a coin spinning on it's side. Rocking back and forth on the naked floor of a naked big city apartment, on a naked small city street; this is Mariah -- my light-switch lover, dating on and off with the flip of a middle finger, with the tug of a trigger finger. Mariah was the kind of girl that liked to throw things when she got angry.
Mariah could hurl a plate like an Olympic gladiator, and if it were up to her, during these fights I would leap from the ground to catch the plates in my mouth. Mariah wasn't looking for a soulmate, she sought a dachsund, and instead she got a squirrel, a raccoon, a wild animal that could remain domesticated only for so long before instincts kick in and it turns on you. Most of the time we spent together that didn't involve fucking, I could see it in her eyes. She was waiting for it, she expected it, but she loved me even though I was foaming at the mouth. She loved me even though I spoke in braille and smelled like blood. She could see the demons in my brain through the windows of my eyes. And they were looking back at her. Looking in through her windows at her demons. They waved. They talked. They eloped. They fought and had make-up sex and popped each others' pimples and were comfortable taking a shit in the same room.
I asked myself what I would say to this woman. What I could possibly say to her that would make everything okay.
Some say talking to yourself is a sign of genius... but when was the last time you asked the homeless man talking to Jesus all night at the corner of Lincoln and Meeting for help with your algebra homework?
This is me snapping back into reality, snapping back into the present. This is me spinning the quarter that will initiate the beginning of the rest of my life with the fingers of my right hand, trying to work up the courage to push it into the payphone's hungry coinslot to make that all-important phone call to destiny.
In Greece they smeared pitch on one side of a shell and left the other side white. Called it "Ostra Kinda". In England it's "Cross and Pile." I have a problem making decisions so when I can't make heads or tails out of a situation I pop the question on the nearest coin.
This is my face covered in bullets of sweat.
This is me looking over my shoulder half-expecting the car that just drove by to turn around in an alarm clock of blue and red lights.
This is my white-knuckled fist, clenched so tight that I could feel each of the one-hundred and nineteen ridges of the quarter digging into it.
Heads: I make the phone call.
Tails: I take another handful of fentanyl cough drops and forget about her.
The suspense threatened to suck my pants up through my ass hole, and each flip the coin made sounded like an eighteen wheeler passing me in the opposite direction on the autobahn.
"Op_n y___ h__d."
The voice came from my own mouth, but it startled me as if it was coming from behind me.
"Open it."
...so I opened my hand.
------- [ II ]
These are purple streams of blood racing and twisting down my arm like jet trails at a plane show. This is my fist pushing through the driver's side window of a four-door sedan like a sperm pressing through an egg. This is my shaking heart beating like the drums on Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy." This is my brain on drugs.
The window shattered in a glorious orgasm of blood and glass -- it felt like I just bit into a Tootsie Roll pop fresh out of the wrapper, and I wrapped my fingers around it's chewy chocolately insides and pulled the man out of his car, kicking and screaming like an abortion fighting back. Mariah swung her crowbar with a few dull thumps, until the screaming stopped. We kissed, and the blood splatters on our faces looked like stop-motion photographs of Fourth of July explosions.
I don't remember when the killings started. When I try to, everything goes dark and my brain slams against the back wall of my skull, as if it's trying to escape. Sometimes I dream about them when I'm asleep. When I think back it's like skipping stones that never stop, just grazing against the surface of my mind. When enough of these stones get skipping I black out and wake up somewhere else. Mariah's always there. Or she was until recently. She got an apartment. I used to have one of those. I don't remember where it is. She gave me the number... she said, "For when you remember." I haven't yet, but I'm on my way to call her now.
I started these experiments. I'm trying to remember. Sleep deprivation and drugs and pins and needles and anything that blends the dreams with reality. The dreams, the nightmares, the memories, the reality, it's all a slideshow. It's all a slideshow.
This is me in love. This is me and Mariah blowing bubbles through the dripping severred hands of our latest victim. Bubbles of watered-down soapy blood spinning through the air like stars. But the drugs wear off, fading away like everything else. Now the images burn off of the projector screen like a bad memory almost as soon as I take the needle out of my arm. Footsteps pressing like stamps against the crunchy tan sand, stumbling towards mirage after mirage.
-------
Everytime I go to church I imagine that the choir is singing about me. I look around and imagine myself hanging from the crucifix, blood falling from my mouth as I laugh, bouncing like a madman after them until the nails give way and I collapse on the ground. And I am their only friend. I am their freedom. Humanity is a rose bush and I am the pruning sheers. I am the pruning sheers.
This is me following the minister home.
This is me rewarding him for his faith. To good Christians death should be a smile and a "Thank You." Not a screaming mess of pink clouds of flesh and blood freed from their writhing corpses. The twitching orgasms of freedom's blistered cock.
This is me digging the bullets out with a knife.
This is me removing the skull-flap I carved out so that I could hide the .38 I killed him with behind his contorted face. The .38 I made out with on lonely weekends when all the other boys were parking.
No one will look there. "No one will look there," I tell myself.
------- [ III ]
The night I became immortal, the night that grabbed the sun by the face and pushed it screaming down beneath the horizon. The night I became immortal -- that's when it all started.
I dropped 40 ft. like an angel from heaven into the concrete wasteland they call a city, landing on my feet in the palm of the rested hand of Saturn. Landing on my feet. My knees buckled and I collapsed like I was falling off the cross and she caught me. I fell into her. My knees buckled. But I landed on my feet. I woke up in a bathtub full of blood wearing a noose that snapped like a necktie.
This is me rolling open my eyes in a bathtub overflowing with watered-down blood. This is me lifting my arm to make sure the razors and the stinging sensation they made under the warm water wasn't all some wonderful dream. This is me picking up the toaster bobbing up and down in my blood. Death stepped over me like a puddle on a sidewalk.
"N_xt _im_ _ou sh_uld p_u_ _t i_."
I could have sworn I plugged it in. I could have sworn I plugged it in.
It was Mariah. She was playing with a cat and a pillow.
"I w_it_ed f_r y_uLSDK:FJAFK I waited for you."
I waited for you. "I waited for you." She slept on the bathroom floor. She slept there waiting for me to wake up because I told her I would. I told her I was immortal. I told her that my genes are so filled with failure that I can not even manage to kill myself. She slept there like I was a friend or a relative at a hospital. I listened for a heart monitor.
She pushed the pillow down into the bathtub like she was trying to drown it. My neck hurts. She said, "Ne_t t_me."
She said, "Next time use a pillow." Sh_ s_id.
She said, "Comfort is wasted on the dead."
This is me pulling out the needle. This is me grabbing up at the overcooked and blackened sky; grabbing up at the bubbles of watered-down blood; grabbing up at the memories as they race towards the heavens I fell from; as they race down my arms in purple streams.
You did this to me. You with your briefcase filled with money. You with your car filled with gas and your stomache filled with pork rinds and your cell phone filled with minutes. You with your navy blue blazer and buttoned white collar. You the poorly drawn caricature of corporate America. You the ensanguined gears of the fascist machine. Turning like clockwork. Oiled by the blood of the working class. Riding piggyback on Sisyphus with a whip and a cattleprod. A_d a c_t_lep_od...
This is me pruning the rosebush.
This is me and Mariah losing our virginity, popping his limbs out of joint like cherries and making him a parapalegic with long shiny knives. Making him look as helpless as we felt. Carving out holes in the palms of his severred hands so that he could die for our sins.
01101111 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111010 01100101 01110010 01101111 01110011.
Everything is black and white and we are red. _e a_e __d. We are red. We are twos trapped inside a world of ones and zeros. We are the singing voices in an emotionless opera of television static and paranoia and bombs and stage talk. Everything is black and white. Everything is black and white and binary.
This me is being sucked into the syringe and poured out into a petri dish. This is me all burned to fragments. All twisted and scabbed and walking on glass barefoot through a forest of tall concrete buildings that block out the sky and hide the stars. A forest of poorly drawn stick figures lugging around shopping bags and dogs and stick figure babies. A Reichian plague. A forest of bright lights that used to be comforting, a man with a gun that used to be God and a rainbow of blurs that used to be cars.
This is me stumbling through a city of gleaming dilapidation, a sleeping anthill in Saturn's severred hand. This is me stumbling through black-marbled skies of opium after-dreams -- underwater pillows flapping like jellyfish through the blood in my brain; through the blood in the petri dish. Zigzags of cold glassy footsteps.
Zigzags of cold glassy footsteps and heads in hands...
Twisting and spinning the world into woozy foxtails and falling stars and motion blurs. Passing each street lamp with eyes shut tight to block like shampoo the stinging, wounding light of contusion. We made a tonight out of nothing. Making a tonight out of nothing.
Memory is a skipping record.
Memory is a skipping record.
Memory is a blood-filled catheter that I craft the disasters after. Ducking under Death's stretched steps p-p-pointing a finger at you like a jury. P-p-pointing a finger at you like a jury with a gun for each hand. With a gun for each hand.
I'm almost there. This is me grabbing the black neck of the phone like I was taking it with me. Taking it with me back to the clouds. Back to the rooftop of my apartment building. Further back. Back when I met Mariah. "F_r wh_n y_u remember."
Back before the churches and the bubbles and the knives. Back before the bathtubs and bloody pillows and toasters. Back before I was God. Back before it all came pouring out of my mouth like those short-stories you cannabalize until they are completely gone and all that's left is a bunch of poetry that you forgot how to read. A bunch of poetry that makes you sick to your stomache when you think about how it started and where it ended up going, spiralling out of your pen, spiralling out of control until it felt like demons had taken over and started writing them for you. The drugs. The experiments. The dealers reaching out and catching the flipping coins, replacing them with bags of opium cones and bottles of sticky little pills. The coin landed on it's side.
The coin landed on it's side.
Nothing matters anymore. Nothing means anything anymore.
Life is like those short-stories you keep in your closet that you'll never finish.
That you'll never finish.
(c)2006 mjh