Unearthed

He looks harrowed, checks his watch, and turns the
television to a channel displaying the time. His movements are clumsy
and urgent. He is thin but not from any effort, but from malnutrition
and long hours sweating in nightclubs. His look that unadorned
meticulously casual hip that sends judgment back to all but those
similarly pared to style. Rifling through a garbage bag he removes a
disk and puts it into the player.

Our screen fills with his screen. For a moment, we see only static and
horizontal distortions, the sky and branches, a building, cars
passing, all chaotically unframed and thrown around, then breathing
comes over the speakers, the sounds of frustration, grappling,
struggle as the jumble settles; the video is grainy, the color
oversaturated and anachronistic. The vehicles, the buildings on the
screen are similar, but all out of place, out of time. The film is from
eastern Europe, a city of utilitarian curves and older, more western
looking structures, public buildings and bridges in the Haussman
style. The inelegant camera work calms to focus on a girl walking.
The names of streets and signs are spiked with dashes and accents, a
mixture of I's and Y's. The camera follows as she walks into a tunnel
and the screen goes dark. We can clearly hear two pairs of steps,
unmatched but in pace together. The rapport of her heals are less
subtle than the camera-person's; she is walking with greater urgency.
The end of the passage appears as a set of stairs that the camera does
not follow, but falls a few feet short of, and instead it points
upwards. She hesitates, turns, and says, Mit akkar? Hagyon békét!

She doesn't climb any further. The camera zooms and focuses on her
back. Her dress is made of an uncomfortable and very bright synthetic blue.
Her breathing is compact and her tension is clear.
Her legs and ass come into central view and fix on the screen; her skirt
so short that if she ascends any more it will be hard for her to
prevent an illicit view without some complex and awkward sideways
climbing. Instead, she raises her skirt with a resolved quickness and then
leaves it up. Her panties are yellow with a reddish flower print. They
are scant enough that they do not cover her flanks, and a dark
cellulite rumple, a kind of phantom reflection of her asshole... She hooks her
fingers through the fabric at her hips. She slides the garment down to
her ankles and bends to the camera. She brings her hands up the length
of her legs and the back of her thighs, she holds her ass apart, and
arches to show her vagina.

Ez amit akkar?

The camera doesn't answer, nor blinks. She fingers herself slightly,
touches her breasts, but still the camera remains an unwavering,
unblinking, ceaselessly surveying eye. She drops the fabric and turns
and looks angry.

Ha csak meg kérné, meg fújnám, meg basznám. De ellenörizet es most
már félek. Nem kap semit. Söt, menyen a francba!

She stomps up the remaining stairs and the camera hurries to follow
her across a square. She waits near a bus shelter until she recognizes
the driver of an approaching Opel. The camera again scrambles as the
camera-person retreats. Paving stones, branches, the stairs again,
then darkness.

A jarring edit to men kissing under a street lamp. One man undoes the
top button of the other man's stiff denim trousers with difficulty. It
takes time and force to undo it, and it gives the camera a moment to
draw in to the eventual pop of the button, through the tricky hole.
The video reverses, cues to that moment again, and replays, and
replays, and replays. Pop, pop, pop.

The environs change again, the outside world has shifted to something
recognizably American. A girl in a red t-shirt and no bottom unties a
ribbon and lets her hair fall nearly to her waist. She is at home
idling behind a house on a suburban lawn somewhere, at that hour of
light that makes the camera unfailing with her simple beauty. The girl
walks, talks, waters. She mentions her undergrad plans, a professor,
an annoying administrator. A long silence as she brutalizes a rogue
encroachment of crabgrass with a spade. When she rises she looks at
the camera and must recognize the desire of the operator, she smiles
and runs her hand over her chest and down, and without
a beat, several of her soil covered fingers disappear, and she says she
is so dirty.

A long cut of a beautiful native in a snow-field.
Indescribable light.

Now it is as if the camera hides under something, on a table in a
crowded café. A voice complains of the smell emanating from a
bathroom. A man and a girl drift into view and a door opens revealing
a long mirror, a sink and a toilet. The couple signal to someone out
of frame, the man looks furtively over his shoulder. Another man
appears and grabs the girl by the hand and then the other man. The
three all squeeze into the tiny room, and the door shuts quickly, but
with some effort as the trio struggle to clear their limbs, and to
seal themselves inside.

Another break and a raddled and sour queen makes watch over a young
dancer in a halter as she dances with a very young African boy on a
hazy street of walk-ups. She shows him her breasts with a flash and he
smiles wild uncontrolled gums, his eyes glazed. His body is lean,
sinuous, and a near opposite the queen and his colorless, overfed,
squashy contours. He massages his cock through spotted lamé. A
thin visible snake encased in a sweltering metal pantsuit has a
partner streak, a soak of semen. The music is not typical dance music,
it bares and changes signatures, is atonal and aggressively modern,
but then settles into a predictable disco throb as the African grinds,
as she winds in the foreground, and the transvestite in a cower
mournfully runs his index finger and thumb along his shaft.

The phone rings. The video pauses, two white bars appear in the corner
of the screen, his screen and our screen, and the young man sighs.
He has to put his pants back on. His cock bounds filled with blood. He
reaches the phone and says a short and pitched hello.

Mom. Yeah… I got in just a little while ago and… What? No, I don't
know if I will stay.

Her picture is on the wall next to the phone, when she was young. She
is felinity, coquettish, looking mid-century.

I might stay with Andrea instead. I haven't seen her in a long time.

She is everything that she was in her Tiffany and Chanel, accurately
and specifically dressed to impress boys with her breeding and charm,
the picture taken at Fordham, even though she went to Barnard.

Mom, don't say that. Don't already! That's the other reason why I
don't know if I'll stay. I've known Andrea such a long time and… Well,
she doesn't say things like that about you! God, how can you say
things like that! Who believes that anymore! I think I'll go, but I'll
meet you at lunch tomorrow. No, no, I didn't bring my camera, no.
You'll have to bring yours… At the diner on 52nd? Ok, ok. I'll call if it changes…
I'm going to go now.

He re-starts the film and brings it forward to an explicit montage.
The camera focuses on a cock, so we are sure the camera-person is a
camera-man. A girl with a short tangle of curls bobs her head on the
cock, slicking the veins and hair, her glistening glissando elicits
ahs and profanity. The camera registers the voice of another man coming
from behind it, demanding attention, and the camera moves and sets on a
bureau, pointed to a divan. The girl positions like a tripod, on a
knee and on her head. A young man, not so different from our young man
is behind her, but it is uncertain, because another taller and sturdier
man, is behind him. The three fuck in tender unison.

Our young man spumes a froth on a very expensive looking couch while
looking from his vantage into the living room and to the picture above
the television. He closes his eyes.

His face registers inarticulately a certain unction he feels so integrally,
as to believe it is his alone, as though nobody had felt his mixture of pleasure and sadness,
for ruined, lost images. It is hard to believe in sole belief, in a belief free of
other possible representations different from one's own, to have belief in unrepeatable belief.
Unique belief, impossible to stage or to re-enact, a belief that is
purely interior, would be directed at a grave disadvantage to the real.

FERAL DEBRIS

The Wound (A Fragmentary Return)

1.

I was born in Times Square. I was born under the NASDAQ sign on 43rd Street and Broadway, a little south of where she worked as a night cleaner at the Toy'R'Us, on the next block. The stocks were down, so the red of the ticker bathed her as she shat me.

2.

A man shouts ⎯ Not for a dollar or a dime! My head caroms off the sidewalk. I cry. Burning, charcoal, roasting animal, train musk, garbage, personal fumes ⎯
The light swirl, the light swirl, the light swirl, the light swirl.
Now there is sunset, and the eyes of thousands, someone carries me, sirens, traffic.
Pink blinking NEW YORK POLICE DEPT

3.

Now I am waiting for a call at a payphone at the corner where I was born. The man next to me is wearing a jacket that cannot be comfortable in this heat. He is obnoxious to the person listening on the receiver,

⎯ Tell Subotnik to suck my dick, he says, clutching himself.

999

People sat there on a Saturday. Something was terribly wrong. What was it? They're all dead, they're all dead. My friend Phil, he took LSD with Humphrey Osmond. We're sitting in the sun and moon window. Laughter is the best medicine. I've got Allstate bills, Mastercard, stacks of books stamped SOCIAL WORK, or with DO NOT REMOVE bands. My tires need more air. Corruption is a quality of time. I'm poor and sober. Can you believe it? I need a new turban. Yellow. Cake. Maximum. Permanence, becoming matter, that is all that is left. The homeland, it has no purpose. How to say good riddance to the cosmopolitan plague: Cities are the virus.

"She says that she thinks that I am controlling her mind."

Contain

Unexpressed, ur-repressed. Better or worse than is a comedy. Do you know? Cabala plumbers. Add that, and that. My tab runs out. Dine less on hearts, get finicky, ripen, delay, atone, master, narrow. We're going off the medication at the same time. My molars feel like there are rats inside of them, INSIDE OF THEM.

I want to be a tv funnyman, a commonplace, a pillbox. I wanna be hungry, or something, I want to pioneer a new unexpressionism, starting now. I believe art is in crushing defeat, in feeling crushing defeat. I'm biting myself in here, and my skin is coming off.

No More Slush

3 (3)

He moved as though sped up in a silent movie, jittery, then when he came to the cornerstone of the old hotel, he closed his coat to the wind and cold, and rubbed his hands, and looked over his shoulder suspiciously. His eyes were sunken-in and black in circles. He wore a dusty bowler hat, covering long greasy hair. He walked with a cane and a definite limp. He reached the edge of the city, an embankment overlooking the river where once a tunnel had linked the city with the mainland, now the built up parts of overpasses and bridges had given way to a broken promenade, at the end of a bleak and unremitting street in the middle of the grid. Do not judge me for pissing in the pedestrian walkways! Try to do it. I know it hurts to swallow, but you have to or you will not get better. Hiccup some blood and cereal. There was only water now, there wasn't water before, the water rose, no matter the rosewater thrown at it in the mosques, or churches, the swoon of vestals and prayers aimed at the wrath of God did not deter the deeds of men. The sun, one day in the past, lit the world, defining all contrast. The differentiations of a golden sun on an ice world, made it seem so bright that solid things, that solid things melting, melted. Ice cubed.

Miscount (Mouse in my Wall)

MISCOUNT

Psychic Vampire

παρα

His allure I could not escape as I felt myself drawn down the cobbled slope. In the dark his outline was that of a massive man at full health, strong and handsome, wearing an overcoat. His hair was short, his eyes were irradiant blue. I could not help my gaze from meeting his and I immediately sensed that I recognized him from some place before. This recognition buried in my memory, was out of step with the present, and the disorientation led me to keep my eyes in his direction for a moment too long. It felt like I was staring. He put his hand in the air and waved to me. His hand was impossible at its height, and I approached to see if he was really as tall as he appeared from a distance, somehow expecting the rules of perspective to operate in reverse, making him smaller as I neared. The likeliness of my recognition increased without becoming more specific, and when I got within ten feet my wariness doubled, my heart began to beat faster. I could smell the strong scent of his cologne. It smelled first of some flower, followed by a hospital smell, and a hint of library, dirt. I faced him at arms reach, and then I noticed the paleness of his skin. The luminescence that made him appear on the dark street, the whiteness of his face at a distance, had seemed natural, but closer up he was so colorless that he would have seemed ill if not for the confidence of his expression, the steadiness of his eyes. My sense of recognition vanished as the geometry of mouth and chin was unknown, his biometrics shifting to an impossibility: This was not a man that I had met, but a man impossible to meet, a singular man, a man with a face unlike any other. A face I knew as being familiar only for its impossible unfamiliarity. Though I did not know it, he was the darkness we cannot see in light. The Other is either the preternatural wave, or the phantom particle.

He met me spreading his coat open, bringing me in. I felt small and warm. When he released me, I felt cold, and my fingers would not work. When I am nervous I play with my fingers, and I could not bring my hands to move, to begin speaking. I needed to speak with my hands, and I felt that I was speechless. I tried to place his physiognomy into some bracket that I could understand, as he walked around me, observing me, as I stood frozen still, and unable to move. I felt his hold. Or maybe the hold was my own. A suggestion of a hold, left in me, making my system close down, a collapse under which I was pinned and could not move, under rubble that squeezed the air out of my lungs. I could not speak and could hardly breath. I felt frozen but also felt a hot stream down my neck, even on the insides, a warm stream, pouring up and out of my body, and I felt an increasingly hot feeling on my skin as I could feel less of my outside. The world around us had fallen into a vague periphery of solid objects. My senses turned inward, my body draining, the drain, him. I could not feel him sucking. I felt nothing, and then I felt a horrible feeling like my guts were pulling out from my insides, I felt like I needed to shit and piss and come, and I felt the nausea I felt when I broke my arm, when I was young. Then I felt like I was coming and I was coming. I could feel my come blasting out of me. I lost consciousness, or it was as if my consciousness flicked into a new register, something unknown to me but also forgotten, the present became a half-remembered place, and it felt like the future would remain so, empty of newness, always corroded by past, false recognition.

The world felt re-thought, re-cognitive, processed, transfused, infused. I felt crazy, angry, and then deeply sad, then he kissed me, and he gave me my new name, Tom.

It was later on a bench in the park. We still had not spoken. There had been a great deal of turmoil. The driver noticed the blood as he tossed me into the back seat. He shot him in the throat with a small revolver, he took the wheel, and we abandoned the car and took a path to a terrace. We noticed a woman walking a dog on the path above, and he hid us behind a tree and drew a dagger out of his boot. The blade did not glint in the light; made from a material easier to sculpt than steel, it curved to an impossible degree, and as I stared at it, I thought I could see it bend back to make a circle, then extend. Suddenly it snapped out like a whip, and covered a hundred feet, decapitating the woman and the dog in one swoop. The woman was a geyser, she walked and the dog walked for a few more steps before falling. I looked back to his weapon, and it was the revolver. I looked at his face unsteadily, I felt like I was going to cry, and then I looked back to his hand. It held a knife. He told me to sit and he sat next to me, and he told me in a low and quiet voice that I should think of him as my doctor, and I as his patient. He could tell what I needed and he said he could see it in me, this thing that needed to be empty. Perhaps he meant my heart? I remembered being alive, the pain and guilt of it, and it was then that I was a vampire when I felt the first wave of knowing it would be better this way. In silence, for what felt like quite a while, I contemplated what he told me, and what had happened, what I had become, and the time passing felt much longer than it was.

We walked back down Broadway. He insisted that we needed to walk because that way we would elicit the least attention. I looked at my hand and my skin remained darker than his skin. I couldn't see my blood vessels anymore. He told me that I still had some of my own blood in me, because he never drank his victims empty until he had to. The last blood tasted the most bitter and dead blood made him nauseous, he said. He said the marrow tasted good, but was a delicacy. He said I would come to know if his tastes were real, or merely qualms and aversions. This was his first instruction, and I realized that he was my father and teacher, a lawgiver, my progenitor. We took long silences in walking past windows of luxury. He avoided Times Square for the light that he said would draw us out, and took us to the strange close-together corridors around the Empire State Building. He shared a theory that the building was a conduit to a realm above our heads, and that it brought down evil from the sky. I thought he was crazy. He had been re-born before there were buildings of this type, super-tall buildings made of metal. He talked of conductors and of energy, and spoke of currents of blood, and currents of voltage, current time, currency, and the meaning of money, and the passing of time. Circulations, the circulatory systems, networks, all had implications, he told me that as I got older I would understand, but I doubted very much that I ever would understand his gush of ideas. As he spoke, the voice became only a voice. I could no longer keep up, and instead of paraphrasing his comments, processing, I listened without hearing, trying to place the place of his tenor, and I could not, as it changed registers, catapulted ethnic codes. He could have been from anywhere. I noticed that when we walked his motions corresponded to mine without me needing to indicate much. He was a good walking companion, pacing himself very considerately, while never laying off the pace that I understood to be essential. I noticed him noticing things that I never would have, anonymous places, things, repetitions so much part of the redundant design of the city, windows, doors, trace lattices of incomprehensible graffiti, and yet his motions of notice, looks, seemed to hold some profound knowledge, distinction, a taste rooted in a layered feeling for the city, recognitions tied to what must have been experiences, everywhere re-cognizance of things present, or perhaps remembrances of things now long removed, rebuilt, replaced.

He stopped me by telling me to stop listening to him, then he bit me, he said like a rattlesnake this time, and I felt the traditional fangs. He took a little more of my blood, then he mixed it in himself, and shot it back in to me, he said a symbiote could be a flask. I was a flask. He rejuvenated off me, took a hit, ceased his mourning, that is, he got high off of me, and I didn't mind him using me this way, but he said as he did it that I was a flask, so I'd soon be empty, and this had to be the last time. He put some of the blood back, to save, because my blood was now his. I had been bestowed a gift, he told me.

A guard behind a window noticed us as we were in the courtyard of a building, once the global headquarters of a bank, but now only a husk watched by the lone sentry. He aimed the revolver at the length of his outstretched arm, standing sideways, and seemed to send a kiss, accelerating the bullet, blasting through the viscous membrane of the guard's eye, and out of his brain. The shell reversed the same way in went through, but turned into a cudgel on the way out of the man's face, leaving nothing but a hole. It then shattered, turning into a fine glass, chewing up the ejected flesh and blood in the air. The sudden gore horrified me, the vessels breathing air, communicating an emptying of the pump, made a sputtering hiss. He made a comment about the blood of the worker, and used the word defrayed, which I did not know. He stared at my incomprehension. I was a student when I was alive, mostly ignorant. As our blood started to mix, I could feel a mingling, as we were shedding our incommensurability, our independent discursivity, he would later claim. I could feel him at this moment, how he could flash inside of my thoughts. I was never able to will myself into his thoughts. Even now, as it is much later, and I am writing this, it is as though I am speaking the voice of my master, that he speaks to me, or that I am receiving him. In this way, I am always his subject, even though I cannot say that I would want it differently. He has been gone for a long time, and I have been myself, without him, I suppose. What I am describing is the start of a very short love affair that in actuality lasted an eternity, in which I can only resort to remembrance, and have no memory, since I have been dead for ages. We were together only briefly, but the afterimage, the presence of his presence, is still there, or it is as though his voice is another voice inside of me. So then as now, words can appear, bits of knowledge, as I absorb them, or as I receive them via some secret network. For instance, just now, when I wrote secret network, the voice was there, appearing as much as sounding, saying to the receiver in me, set to an inner frequency:

circulation.

Whole sentences would come to me shortly after our break, then days, and weeks, of the voice. It would answer questions, sometimes run like a tape, filled with vampirisms, vampabilities. I understood that this voice was his, but was also a vital education… Or I should be more careful, since there was nothing vital about it on its own, as it was an education on being undead that entered into the fluid of my body, fluid that I ached to exchange, or renew, night after night. And I could feel it too, change, if I learned something that it had not gathered, it changed in a way that it gained something that would transmit to the next recipient of doomed wisdom. What can I say? It was in the blood. It is very hard to communicate… He is still alive, and though he is nowhere near me, I can feel him, and I can sense his sensing me recall and write these things. I can sense him learning, his reading, not with the vivid detail of actuality, but as a resource:

involuntary memory.

His recollections were much more precise than mine, due to his rehearsals of knowledge, specific to his old age, and the access he had to languages, and developments of thoughts over the long passage of his afterlife. Even now, I cite without example, feeling the transmittal, acting out the roles of biographer and autobiographer. To complicate matters, his children, not to mention the few that I have spawned, share and contribute to the same underground I draw on. It is not in the fluid, but in the ache. I have often wondered if this highly attuned system was not a result of his predispositions. He was the original, the father of fathers. The memory does not go farther back than his memory, and he became what he became because of no reason I could ever confirm. Perhaps the milk of his mother poisoned him; or a strix raped her; perhaps he was a suicide. The children that I have made have all been female, although once I brought them down, fathered them, they ceased to be female. I can sense them. I can sense my brothers. The collectivity senses.

To protect me from the sun and my new nature he locked me in a white painted box outside a Dutch-style building, a gold plate on the door, read: SOLVENT, Psychological Consulting, M. Blod, PsyD. He explained that the white paint would reflect the heat of the sun. I asked why I couldn't stay inside, and he explained that during the morning, the part of the building where he worked would be in shade, and that if I were present when he was working with patients, I would be overcome with hunger, become mad, and I would have to be killed. He said that only after I fed would I be able to stay indoors, he told me that it would be painful in the box, but it was the only place for me, and that I should focus on the enclosure, and not the breathlessness inside of me. He slammed the box shut and all the light disappeared, and as the sunlight broke down the street and onto the box, even though the white metallic paint reflected most of it, I could still feel the light, but under my skin, and it felt like sunburn. I felt myself lose consciousness but I didn't sleep. I became the last beam of sun.

When he let me out, he took a syringe and shot me up with the blood of a woman who lived on a quiet street of foreclosed homes on Staten Island. He drew the sample from a bank that he accessed for a clinical study that he was developing on light transmitters, depression, and blood. I don't remember much of what happened next. Later, I am inside with him in the minimal confines of his home and office, we are watching a television that he has revealed behind a sliding panel of white tiles. We watch a news story. She had been taken from her apartment in the night, a trail of blood leading all the way back to the ferry. He says the next time I will be in control, and I will remember more, until one day I will control feeding the way he does. He hands me a large sum of money and tells me it is from bank accounts, that I should remember to steal from the dead, until I decide that I want to do something else, if I ever decide to. He tells me that he will help me with whatever I need, and that I now have a weekly appointment to meet him on Friday nights, at midnight. He says the best way to commit suicide is to stay awake in the light, or to walk into a fire. I'll have three day until I have to feed again by absolute necessity. He gives me keys to an apartment in Harlem, a bank account number, and a small, ineffective seeming knife, made of the same material I had seen him wield.

I am on the street outside, alone. I look in both directions and decide to walk, my hands jammed in pockets. It is cold and I buy a scarf. Nobody looks at me and to my surprise, I show up in a mirror when I go to look at myself. My face is full of color. I remember in our last moments together he was normal looking too, his pallor replaced. I understand at this moment what blood will buy for me. I still don't understand why I deserve it, or what he saw in me, or I do, in the sense that he knew I would continue replacing the stream, I would make more of us, propagator vampire, I. Somehow, outside his network of knowledge, I was sensed, sentenced, to undie. He left for Europe, years later. I stopped going to see him after the second week.

I resented the presence that I understood would always be there, along with me, in this amorphous sensorium. What to call it?

kaleidoscope.

It is a sanquivorous aporia, so to speak.

Hear I am, years later, later, the joke is. I have a little practice of my own, writing anonymously, an Internet persona, I edit and offer services to clients that come to my lair. Now and then they will go missing, and yes, sometimes I will bid them that they join us forever, although it is rarely a choice of mine, the system decides it, fate, or call it what you will. I am amoral about the process, I have come to accept it just like him, and like him, I want to know how old and interconnected this family line can become. I should decry the years of murder. The anemia of the past, my killing, our death, I can't mourn, as much as anyone today can; as much as anyone. The word for it is compel, the feeling, not some moral choice, but the absence of moral choice in a social order that demands motion instead of the freedom of stillness, it requires progress, and it will not let anything die.

There is a young girl that I know, the daughter of a man who delivers an envelope to me of readings that he wants me to read and mark. The man is the husband of a famous anthropologist who wrote a theory on the parasitic as a theme in human societies. I believe he is an accountant. The girl aspires to be an opera singer. I think I am writing this as much to the family, by way of explaining what it is I am about to do to their daughter, so they can understand as well. I am reluctant to turn anyone so young, but the compulsion for me is too strong to resist. She's turned out lovely, and is wise beyond her years. At nineteen, I do not believe she is too young, I am sure she will survive the process. I will have to gauge just how much to draw, since she is the slightest victim I have ever taken. My hope is that she will continue to sing, despite how she will never mature into the voice that she would have wanted. No, I will doom her singing, with her doomed maturation. I am a master now, like my master, and she may become one too, because of an inner voice that will be so strong. I wonder if her children, the children that she will make like me, I wonder if they will hear the voice that I hear, but in song? Again, not so simply, not hear, but I think they will sense whatever it is with a new musicality, a music of dissolution, ruin, panic, regret. Her children will feel this sorrow, like the voice that hadn't reached its womanly character, that could never become. The metonymy couldn't be clearer.

I'll spend my exile in Greece, after I am done what I do not want to do. I want to learn the language, and I have all the time in the world. Maybe I'll return to the city where I was re-born after a decade. At that time, I'll buy accreditations, open a new office, have my own patients. I'll design a chamber where they will come to unleash their secrets. Unlike my master, I'll specialize on feminine psychology, of course. I don't think I will go the route of a minimal stage for intervention, but I will fill the space with totems from Christian blood cults. I will have them interact with my assistants, and I will have dozens of screens and cameras set up to surveil their responses to my voice, spoken into speakers, creating surround-sound. The office will be a circle, the patient in the center, surrounded with figures of a bleeding Christ. I'll take Catholic patients only. Do you think I am the finger that pierced your Christ? Your menses? Yes, I'll tell you, and say to you that the circumambient outside, free of your blood, that you bathe in, is where you are falling, into a space of blackness, a rupture from the rapturous hysteria of a world of holiness, without the holy. Coming to a therapeutic hospice, I will relieve you of your blood. One in a hundred I will transform, they will seek peace with me, and I will sink my teeth in.

Image: Lin Swimmer


Today marks the 666th post of Chicken in the Field. Chicken in the Field is dead.

DV DIE

Protection from Witches

L'enfer

"I could hardly see any more in the dark. I guessed at, rather than saw, myself in the mirror. I had a realizing sense of my weakness and captivity. I held my hands out toward the window, my outstretched fingers making them look like something torn. I lifted my face up to the sky. I sank back and leaned on the bed, a huge object with a vague human shape, like a corpse. God, I was lost! I prayed to Him to have pity on me. I thought that I was wise and content with my lot. I had said to myself that I was free from the instinct of theft. Alas, alas, it was not true, since I longed to take everything that was not mine." from Henri Barbusse, "Hell"

L'Assommoir

Lamplight glimmorous
paving stones,
the spirits headily mixed.

Woodish
trash and tawny,
dark, old bar,
new signs,
and new waitresses.

Where all the men went
at some time or another
heading netherwards
drink and gaze.

In their seats,
bending their arms back,
each one was the other's
best friend.

Cars, trucks, bikes, buses, pedestrians,
all passed the big glass windows on the lower floor,
and on the upper level their was a row of bar stools that looked
the way down to where the hill angled up to another avenue.

This is where they bludgeoned, stunned, and rendered themselves senseless,
day after day burning off
into the woozy nightglow.

Faust