BANALITY, or: Abandoned by Angels

I lay my head down
in the boneyard of relatives
to feed Aunt Bea’s chickens.
Over in the corner
in the shade of Grandpa’s old pear tree
my mother lays among buzzing yellow jackets
feasting upon apples scattered in decay.

Momma pushes away all of her children,
those of us still alive;
screams for us to grow up;
demands we stop listening to the news;
shouts we better hunt us up
some animals for breakfast.

Desperately she lifts tattered, dirty burlap,
shoves small bones ragged with chunks of meat
into her vagina as she mourns and grieves
the deaths of three babies
from dirty, unwashed hands.

I glance up and see Aunt Bea peeking down
thru broken shutter slats guarding old attic windows.
She won’t come down;
expects us to visit her instead.
We do not dare, of course.

Aunt Bea is hungry beyond pain,
yet she avoids the bone yard where
her sister screeches
in the shade of serpent grief.

She pushes notes at us
from under her door,
notes so raw her letters leave us
wet with terror.

Aunt Bea’s eye sees me as it always does,
quivers with relief as it watches my head twitch.
Her one enormous eye, wild, heavy, swivels “Yes!”
I stand up headless and walk away
as chickens cluck and peck at my face.

My old twin head Wilson, severed across the throat,
rolls in staggered jerks beneath
swarming hens, roosters, and slaps of Momma’s shoe.
I’d once saved Wilson’s life from drowning.
My twin washed up on Absinthe Beach north of Yurka
five years after vanishing off Nikumaroro.

I return to the shed to cook down
p-ephedrine with hydroiodic acid,
red phosphorous, iodine, and lye.
Daddy slouches naked in the shadows
among broken antique furniture once
slathered in now faded yellow, green,
red, purple Dutch Boy lead paint.

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Coffee at the Bus Stop

Zoroaster or Zarathustra above the two fish-human hybrid gods called Dagon (or Dagan).

Zoroaster (Zarathustra) above the two fish-human hybrid gods called Dagon (Dagan).

Nommo the Fish God from the Sirius Solar System; sacred to the Dogon tribe of the Hothburi Mountains of Mali's Sahara Desert, near the Ancient city of Timbuktu.

Nommo the Fish God from the Sirius Solar System; sacred to the Dogon tribe of the Hothburi Mountains of Mali’s Sahara Desert, near the Ancient city of Timbuktu.

I love making coffee in the morning. Every morning. Every morning right here in Seattle! Oh, the gradual, sloppy slide of my naked skin over the edge of my bed after I axe my alarm, the
whump ass
WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!
whump ass
pillow thumper dumper alarm
hearing folks sometimes think is a goddamn bomb.

Indeed! See, once a cloisterchuck of well-dressed, hotel staff came to make my bed after I left for breakfast with one of the humans I was mating with at the time. Oh, my, they saw this womp ass pillow whumper tucked under the pillow, saw the long electrical cord snaking out and down out of sight into an odd-shaped alarm clock. And don’t bombs having timing devices? And don’t terrorists like to attack hotels and swimming pools and tombstones and shit? They were so perturbed I thought the local police was going to cart my sweet ol’ scary alien monster ass away into a classified, black site laboratory so they could shackle me upside down and probe me with aromatherapy candles and colonoscopy scopes and whatnot. Or to the local human jail out behind the courthouse for hapless thugs and foolish, drug-addled tourists and hungover drunks with their britches all a slippy-slippity-twisty down around their ankles and hung up in yanked-up socks and shit. Took a deep breath, I did, took seven deep breaths in all. Explained the situation without rippling my man skin with ripples of sweat. The police rolled their eyes, looked studly for a bit, then turned and walked away. A bomb! Bombs, indeed! Well, Jeeezus Buddhie Socrateezie!

Yeah, pillow thumper alarm clock. My clock as a small, thick, flying saucer-shaped vibrator I slide inside my pillowcase. It bangs my brains awake. See, I’m beautifully deaf in both ears. I can’t hear, see. I can’t hear very well, not at all, so therefore I feel. Feel into the world. Feel into it all. Oh, yeah, where’s my Adderall? Where did I put my pill bottle? Oh, goodness, this crazy feeling! So much to know! So much to feel with this amazing body I wear! Just didn’t know I could do it, feeling these feelings, feeling this way and feeling that way, feeling at the unexpected moment I watched someone die. A human stranger jerked off this planet by The Powers That Do before she could even finish her coffee. She died horribly, too. Died right in front of me. Died drinking coffee. Or while I was drinking coffee. Bus stop coffee. It’s all a haze of red and brown mist now. As she passed on into the Afterlife, well, in the horrific screeching krunch of gravitational krush, I could feel it…I felt her life wrenched loose from her dying flesh. Scary at first. Almost…intoxicating. As intoxicating as the smell of fresh roasted coffee in the morning as I prepare the drink of Gods.

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All the Darkness in Space

Dedication

To all those dreamers who dare to write science fiction, fantasy, and horror and thumb their noses at the arty-farty literati. We can all have fun being serious.

All the Darkness in Space:

A Novella

1

Flames burned purple at the dawn of death. The skies droned with the color of moron flesh. Silent explosions flared upon the distant horizon beyond the lake. Gesele stood among the pines along the shore watching the dawn mists rise and float above still waters. She squatted, enjoyed the crunch of pine needles and pebbles under foot, ran her hand through the water feeling the almost creamy smoothness of calm water then jerked it away. The lake was ice cold. She watched droplets of water drip from her fingers. The skies grew lighter and lighter with a video dullness. A breeze began to stir through the trees and rippled the waters. Grey boulders jutted out of the metallic pond. A sun bleached log lay across the sand, its top half still in the water. Stark, skeletal branches cut through shadows of the dawn. The sun rose churning fire.

A whirlwind of sunlight crashed through the conifers, drove out all shadow and seared the forest floor. Gesele backed away, shielding her eyes with her hands, stumbling, tripping, falling down. She cursed the sun, her breasts heaving beneath her tight suit of flexible, breathable armor. The breeze whipped into a wind and gusted across the now choppy lake. The early morning fog blew alive and writhed with energy. The sun sucked mist into its maw. Straw-like reeds bent across the water toward the rising heat. It was her first morning in what used to be the old American state of Maine. Despite the terror of war she loved the Maine outdoors. Gesele relished the early-morning knife whip of sun-warmed wind.

Fighter planes pulsed overhead, screaming silently into the radio static. Gesele cussed again and ran deep into the woods, pushing through pines and firs to hide among giant red spruce. The earth was so soft yet cobbled with rock. More explosions. The sky flared with radiation. Gesele wiped sweat from her brow and stood there, ribs swelling and falling with each breath, her taut muscles flexing, curled fingers flicked open sharp as talons.

Goddammit where the Hell is Korbin?

She reached up behind her left ear and pushed. A microbutton, resting just under the skin, indented and clicked. She grumbled at the obsolescence of her augmentation for the newer ones didn’t need tiny buttons. All you need to do with the new ones was think the command. Her neurocomputer implant flashed behind her eyes as she mainlined into enhanced reality.

Gesele scanned the forests. Every object shimmered with auras of electromagnetic radiation yet registered with amplified digital clarity. She focused her electronically amped vision and expanded her own aura. Pseudo-psychic sparks erupted as tongues of bioplasmic energy rubbered out through the woods, searching. More planes zoomed across the face of the rising sun, blasting the rebel forces dug into the mountainside.

ZEEEMmnn . . . a sensation of iced razorblades slit her consciousness. She cried out, surprised by the intensity. There. A kaleidoscope of glitter pinwheeled her into a vortex, and she went with it. As the wind coursed over the lake she flowed through the morning quicksilver and then she was there. Gesele reached up behind her ear and dropped out into the real world.

Ahh, the real world, she thought as she took off her cap and ran a hand through black, spiky locks. One had to be careful not to wander too long among the planes of enhanced reality. It was the outer space of the mind fused with electronic synth tissue. It was nowhere yet everywhere far beyond the borders of the ancient Internet and things virtual. There were people who never came back, leaving their bodies catatonic while they wandered lost in an illusion. But the illusion could be so sensuous, the sheer erotic power of it, the showering sparks, the multilayered colors of a billion auras, the wild, still unexplained mystery of computer-enhanced extrasensory perception.

There were even some, it was whispered, who deliberately sought to lose themselves. Many among the super wealthy had the resources to keep their bodies plugged in and fed, some longer than others. Some claimed the world of illusion was just as real, if not more so, than the mundane. It was beyond dreams and out of the mind. They were out there searching for the perfect astral orgasm, the melding with nirvana, to electronically escape from the mundane world into the seduction of the unknown. Cyberghosts, they called themselves, and in some weird way their sacred scripture were yellowed paper copies of Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” Most failed to break out, many went insane, but a fabled few never returned. Where they went no one knows.

Ahh, it was so beautiful here amid the pine and maple trees clustered around old ice age boulders and primeval lakes of cold, cold water. Combat ships howled across pale blue skies and worn-down mountains as a cool morning breeze caressed her unwashed face. She could settle down and live here…almost…maybe…just maybe…

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Blood is Messy

Some kids dress up as superheroes and monsters from Outer Space. I dreamed of being a serial killer. And as Richmond sat surrounded by Civil War battlefields, there were many grownups that dressed up in butternut and gray to play war among trashy shopping malls and picnic tables. Ever notice they’d rather shoulder rifle-muskets and fire cannons than play at being saw-wielding surgeons surrounded by piles of amputated mannequin limbs?

Me? Well, I was different. I am a serial killer. But, I ask, who killed and maimed more people? Soldiers, of course. I was far more selective. Yes, indeed, I am a serial killer. Yea, I imagined I lived in a comic book and was born for death.

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Willy Ain’t Got No Brains

Lookit that damn fool Willy standin’ there under the giant ass end of General Robert E. Lee’s monstrous horse waving the axed-off head of a rooster up in the air for all the world to see. Scaring all of Richmond, Virginia down into the James River and out to sea. Folks driving down Monument Avenue jump up outa their seats, point like little kids, and almost wreck their cars going the wrong way down North Allen. By the time they popped outa their trance they laid on the horn and shout everything but hymns. Willy didn’t care one wit. He’d already seen the beginning of civilization and the end of the world. And so he scattered droplets of blood everywhere while dancing 65-70 some feet below the end of a bronze horse.

Red against the pale granite of the monument base was a large, square cloth. It was half as big as a picnic table and more crimson than a pool of fresh slaughterhouse blood in sunlight. Rocks held down the corners and the sides, rough chunks of granite and quartz dug out of red Virginia clay. Crushed slices of silvery-glass mica and yellow fool’s gold lay scattered across the square of the cloth. In the center, bound up in orange red twine, was a headless rooster with his chest cut open. Off to the side was a fifth of whiskey. Good whiskey, too. Not great liquor, but souvenir spirits. A black and tan bottle of 1964 George Dickle Tennessee Whisky strapped with a worn leather choker. With a file-sharpened felling axe layin’ right up next to it. There was, however, not a candle in sight.

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Lipwood and the End of America

imagesdrone_1_thumbUnknown Free Clip Art

A Next Generation Drone Just For You & Yours

Once upon a time not all that long ago somewhere over there in the Land of Barely There and Right Here Now, a group of men and women from across different religions and races gathered together in the city. They were fed up. They were fed up with frakkin’ ass local politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers hobfoggin’ all together to hire those guys from Way Over There to come way over here to install those robotic spy cameras all over town.

So these men and women from a number of ethnic groups and of varying religious convictions took up arms, as was their right, and blew the FRAK out of all those damn traffic surveillance cameras in Lipwood, George, the once-new state named after the first American president’s first name. Yes, George was a composite of counties that once bordered two states. Could be what used to be the Washington – Idaho border. With a corner of Oregon? Or Colorado-Nebraska with a corner of Kansas? I suppose it doesn’t matter because the once-famous State of George doesn’t exist anymore. In the beginning, however, their clamors for secession were so loud and cantankerous the rest of the states hollered, “Truck ’em away, goddammit! To Hell with ‘em then!”

Oh, it was a wild, righteous joy to pump slugs from a shotgun into those damn spy cameras. Never mind one or two shooters themselves had a couple of tiny little surveillance devices discreetly tucked away on their persons to record such destructive indignation. In the shouts of revolt all justifications arose and no one would remember the lessons of violence throughout time. Something just had to be done…NOW! People were beyond feeling FED up! Aye, We the People felt frakkin’ FED up with the flipass FEDS!!!

Oh, it felt good. Real good. They weren’t terrorists. Who the hell were they terrorizing? Even the cops felt waves of relief. Yes, these good men and women considered themselves patriots and reclaimed their privacy from corporate-dominated government gone amok with schemes to get rich by privatizing domestic spying. F*ck*rs.

Yes, these rowdy citizens considered it their solemn duty to get out yonder and blow shit up. Especially when they found out their own shit was looking back spying on them. So out came bags of nitrogen fertilizer and cans of diesel fuel, yeah man. Freedom loving democratic socialist vanguard redneck libertarian green goo anarchists coffee tea whiskey mixing neo-communist muhfukkahs LOVE to … blow shit up.

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When Machines marry Humans for Love

If some folks can’t handle the vast variety of marriages expressed around the world, wait till humans start marrying sentient machines.

(Saturday 12 May 2012 via Twitter to Facebook)

—-
Response to Facebook Friend Liz T.: Liz, I’m honored. My comments were inspired by a convergence of 4 thoughts: Romney’s recent address at Liberty University where he collapsed his opinion & wants with a definition of marriage, and I sought to respond by not being one of many autokneejerk reactions, and of studies of marriages taking many forms including but not limited to polyandry, polygamy, polyamory, group marriage, open marriage, gay marriage, intersexed, etc., without extolling nor condemning any one choice. Ethics, not morals.

(13 May at 8:46am via mobile to Facebook)
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Yellow jacket punches thru a spider web as a humming bird dips into petite, purple flowers. Green stalks quiver above the grass as I brush my teeth this side of windows.

(Mother’s Day Sunday Morning 13 May)
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Sol slips behind the Olympics across the Salish. Sometimes those mountains rise above the water. Tonight they cut open the sky as it bleeds down into the sea.

(Monday night 14 May just after sunset.)
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Once upon a time a long, long time ago in some faraway place much like home, an epidemic of broken hearts raged thru a land afflicted with romance and delusion. The realm’s healers were quite perplexed to discover a broken heart does not bleed but turns to stone. And when they chipped away and cracked these broken hearts open out spilled the most sparkling diamonds. From every one.

(Tuesday 15 May 2012)
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Overcome with emotion, the first healer scooped up handfuls of diamonds from the cavity of a broken heart turned to stone, the one he cracked open eight minutes ago, to discern any clues to the current epidemic. For a moment, for one, infinite moment they sparkled with the Eye of God. Blinded into madness by such health, he danced with the Joy of Oneness as he knew nothing else no longer mattered.

Jealous and dismayed, his associate broke open another broken heart turned to stone, snatched up 6 diamonds only to feel them dissolve into liquid and penetrate his skin. His glee turned to surprise then fear then horror.

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Six Words Make A Story Short

Here Are Six Very Short Stories:

It’s all true, and a lie.

Got fat. Lost weight. Drank beer.

Climbed mountain, lost pants, took nap.

Clouds ripple in moonlight. She screams.

“Hey, you! What time will it…?”

Pink escalators spun candy to heaven.

 

More Tall Tales for Tight Whales

Corpses wash up in surf. Crabs!

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