As If From a Distant Star (Collaboration)

Gnawing serenely on the wheel of life
Leaves arching morosely over our exposed heads,
wheezing gently
Navigating carefully on terrain dotted with
bloodied, gaping maws
Threatening to spill the arcane secrets of
untold millennia spent loafing under
screaming skies

Divine procreation, unreadable,
untranslatable, and gasping at
light from the stars

Effulgent wetness creeping up on the copper gates to the arena. The overwhelming stench of evaporated alcohol left abandoned in cups for the miasma to sniff at. Sheer wonder. Child-like amazement.
Emeralds howling with pent-up rage in the rafters,
terror-stricken at the sudden onrush of white on white,
myriad sheets of empty oblivion waging their war
on the churning sleep of rusting spires

Smoke blanketing all transmissions. A few stragglers huddle into each other, hiding their eyes in awe at what they sense will come. Some attempt to communicate their surrender by loudly proclaiming undying loyalty to the unfurled clouds of id. Others wait timidly, bibles in back-pockets
appearing now as so much straw

Revelations begin to rush in from the outside, melting the surface of the playing-field into aquatic blue liquid. Some people start frothing at the mouth, bleeding from ears that no longer hear. Others speak in strange tongues before diving in, never to re-emerge.

A dark grey plucked bones from our madness,
ageing us decades in the process


Perfidious spirits concealed in the distant thunder. Our hallucinations running desolate alleyways with emaciated rodents and optical larvae. The frenzy to learn new dances to win desire again. Commerce and labour croak their mutual forgiveness at each other amidst the looting. Money hides in fear behind black fishnets left to spy alone on wounded flesh wandering between rows of cold machinery. To traverse piles of rotting teeth laying in wait for unwary beasts to pass.

Brief flickerings return once more. Levees bray their gratitude
at every recording surface imaginable

Peace perfumes our sweating, chases the marauding hordes of blue away at last. Flesh re-carved passion on the swollen purple flanks running frozen through the empty aisles of the urine-god then

Just as we all realize there is a stillness in each of us
that is eternal and cannot die

2

I wrote tomorrow suddenly and with a flourish taking my time to pace through the river side swing doors. Cities are pretty by night. All that tomfoolery of lights that shimmer through a gauze of halogen and neon and sodium. The signs bit the cloud impoverished sky slashing into my subconscious.

‘suck the marrow with colorfill’

‘topaz comes in sink top pretties’

Funny how the shit of industry can so easily and readily flood the mind with hot desires. Narcotic infusion swallowed en masse.

Deidre lived in the low-rise on east. Smeared crap on walls of nostalgic graffiti that spoke in burred words of common tongue. Epitaphs and testaments. She lived a shallow sin of a life. Lining up her lovers like white lines on a toilet bowl. Snorting head and BJ mouth all puckered and wet. Galvanised by her hot lusts. A pistol by her thigh. Cold comfort with metallic penetration.

She did it doggie fashion with Sean. He fucked her sore and then took her up the ass. She didn’t mind that. What she didn’t like was that he took her for granted. He didn’t ask. She shot him through the throat and watched in dizzying slo-mo as he fell dead like wet wallpaper collapsing form a dry wall.

The sirens fell like axe marks in the night. Drowning out the traffic with a nebulous sound.

The final frame was filled by a deluge of pigeons that rose like a reverse autumn leaves torrent.

A Pollock stain on the sky.


3

I wrote All My Tomorrows suddenly and with a flourish, taking my time as I waded from my desk through the swing-doors and out into the pale, unconscious sky of Lantern Mini. Editor-birds pecked at the solemn ring of broken prose that still rotated languidly around my head, offering their unwanted crowspeak critique:


"Suck the word-marrow with a surgically-enhanced tube of bone! That verb don't belong there amongst them ilonyms, bub!" they clucked, hautily.

I shrugged. "Silky topaz halterneck pastiche! Come in the sink if you have to, my pretties!"

Funny how some birds can flood yr mind with hot narcotic infusions, eh? A pixellated swarm of frozen mutes swam past. We swallowed en masse.

I headed east, to the deadside of my life. Overhead, smeared venereal graffiti, an epigram of sores. A migraine of mouth-chancres fell past me like early evening snow. She was lining up heads on the toilet bowl when I got there, each mouth puckered like a pistol. It was a hysterectomy! She shot him doggie-fashion and watched as he drowned in slow motion, his candy-striped eyes twisting like drunken barber-poles.

Editor-birds eat roses in an autumnal torrent of verse.

A purple cum-stain on Jackson Pollack. The sky cried.

4

Bleeding from mouths of ruined thunder, we sang The Blue Single Sheet Song in splintered boats of silent running water.

Duodenal pickpockets returned to 1950 in a fleet of hand-stitched leather time-machines. I cried the first time I met my father. Lavender and rust-pocked concrete. A cross of ether.

My pity slowly dissolves to eyes the colour of brown Demerara sugar. Pools of laughter haunt the rooftops where we shyly coupled. An old, yellowing photograph of a donkey. Dead man’s spittle.

I confess her mouth-ulcers were a turn-on. I followed her home from work, but she grew wings of solid light from her shoulder-blades and evaporated like tiny scraps of litter on the dismal wind. Blurred photostats of her eyes kept phoning me some weeks later, laughing, “Let’s hook up for a coffee sometime.”

5

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Angela Troussant.

this is the thing about it .

I really do want to die.
spent every day of my life.
with another man's words.
and I am a woman.


not just any woman.
: perhaps if fortunate
you have seen the type.


She always enters the room with
and older man.
Her coat; some shade of white.
closed. sepal.


;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Glen William Ross


. i am sitting a small round
table

I have a 1/2 beer and a snifter of wine.
but no one is serving me, and everyone
drifts by my taught site.

an old friend of mine just died.

-- a different older friend of mine just told me about it.
-- Neil was like, distance

"Unfortunately as many of you all know. I am learning how to type like an
adult. the reason for this is two fold. First, and foremost, I am terrified
of the fact that when but a child. i saw my friends out in the fresh snow
crying on acid [ but i thought about my dead father, and began to follow
him to the grave ]. ; . by .bitter. choice.
Second, and still of great value, someone who was once barely a friend of
mine ; but important nonetheless_> was <_> gunned <_> down <_>

6

the body lay cod eyed and cold whilst the forensic's fiddled like perverts on heat. a body bag balloned and rustled to contain the meat and bones.


she raked her nails over the swollen flesh of her calf while her foot punished the pedal.

route 5.

freeway.

flee away.


dark night fingered the ominous cloud that furled its ebony flag over the coastline. waves blasted the sand with a galvanised force of surf and old tampax that floated wasted like blind fish. the moon threatened the sky with a clown face.

yellow like teeth.

glaring like malice.


the clowns tongue, pink and moist, slipped warm into her mouth with a taste of peppermint. she sucked upon it and, for a fraction of a second, bit gently onto it. she felt his hand cup her breast.


"ya got them milky faraway eyes," she said, "reminds me of nebraskan skies."


"i stole 'em from an old hobo years ago while he was slepping. he never missed 'em"


"liar!" she screamed.


rain pellted against the windshield. shied away from droplets by huge lumps of water. gross and imperial like mints. large 'n white.

frosty?

hail?

hail hail rock and roll.


she turned the radio on. chuck berry didn't sing back. tammy fucking wynette did.


she longed for mexico. sand and sun. flesh of boys. rigid movements sculptured by heat.


somewhere over there a raven sprung to life.

cawed.

shit upon a tarmac drive and took to flight.


slices of heaven fell in pieces.

7

"My God--I've become entirely subliminal!" she realized suddenly as the bits of shattered glass stroked the hours of her mouth.


.

8

ice cream grove a dripping. down part down. pouring thick and sludge like over the crystal edge upon the plastic tablecloth. dog lips a licking, because dogs can. because dogs can where men wish. only wish

the rain pelted down smoothing away the tarmac's ridicule. tyre tracks marked the place where the chase fell apart and the blue and red lights stop their confused blinking and spinning whilst the sirens scream a yammering with electric acid.

the red eye of a cigarette stole the dark and rid the night, for a blink, of dark.

this blood.

his blood.

a hole in the throat.

deflated life hisses now like a fading picture.

not even the white lines of the freeway can summon up an angel to protect the guilty.

pedal down and floored.