This is magic realism in a Honda civic and the driver’s eyes are segmented like an insect’s. He quotes pop literature, perceives new colours, chain smokes cigarillos. He cruises rising crenellations of concrete hell, puffs grape smoke through the holes in his cheeks. We forget the goons in the back, ageless deadbeats who pass the test with designer clothes. They’re passing joints, they’re smoking hash, they’re packing the bong, they’re silent like a nuclear bomb. We navigate the voids of unseen avenues, we scoff at the abject and we ponder substance dualism. Someone says Daddy choked me with a skip rope when I was a kid and that’s why I’m lonely, that’s why I’m angry, that’s why I smoke, but nobody hears him. The station changes on its own accord, jumping from static to static, spectres of glitch pop and audio snow. We throw sizzling butts at a sick-faced vampire thumbing for a ride, we shower him in sparks, we laugh, we smoke avarice, we burn endless fuel. We’ve got five years left and ain’t it a shame, five years left and the gauge keeps dipping from “F” to “E.”
Thanks,
Mike Thorn
(Tuesday, May 10th, 2011) ask me questions.
Fuck, I say, fuck, the chainsaw is out of oil and the chain seizes and the saw won’t work without the chain, and the thing, the threat, is on the other side of the room, or maybe outside the house, or maybe closer than I think, hovering over the desk that’s become my bunker and the thing is an archetype, the savagery of collective unconscious, all aberration and bad intent, and the fucking chainsaw is out of oil, and a door opens, or maybe it’s my mind playing tricks on me, maybe, just maybe it’s someone coming to help, or maybe it’s the thing exhaling air that smells like a morgue, dragging impossibly long limbs along the floorboards, scraping fingernails along the door, and I drop the chainsaw because the fucking thing is out of oil and I dash across the room like a squirrel dodging BB shots, because there’s something in the room with me, and I wish I had asked someone to join me, I wish this sabbatical was a populated place, I wish there was somewhere to go, because I can hear it dragging, I can see the shadow, I can hear the breathing, I’ve been here before, I’ve yelled at the screen, I’ve closed the book…
A song reserved for
headache sifting
in thrift store dust.
Political stage dress,
the sneezing smell of
drum machine overdose.
The floundering slurs
of semantic oppression,
a half-priced candidate
splatters the aisle to
leave a lasting mark.
It’s the way he smokes, you know? On these nights, more often than not, we’ll go without speaking. We’ll remember those terrible halls, and we’ll remember superstition and the backsides of mirrors. We’ll look at parking lots cluttered with the dormant body of a population ascending and we’ll wonder just how the fuck it went so far. And he’ll keep chasing the light, a verse in slow burn, and for a moment that bead of ember will just hover in space. And then it’ll drop, flick, spark, and blink out. And sometimes there’ll be a rabbit down there and for a moment, just a moment, I’ll look at it looking at me. And I’ll really see it looking at me, and I’ll wonder what it’s like down there, low on the ground between the boots of corporate dread. And we’ll know that there was a time, or maybe a moment, or maybe an imagined gap, when we could wax poetic while slogging through absent reminders of the written word. And maybe he’ll mention this image he saw in a film once, or an image from a story his father told him, where three guys sat at the back of a room under a neon sign that said “(A)basement Turned Heavenward.” And we’ll laugh because really, when it comes down to it, even the saddest meditations are bullshit. And he’ll take a final drag, always the deepest, and we’ll trap ambition in a dark room with sleeping gas.
Yes, they say,
yes… the world
will end in thirty years.
And so we watch.
We watch
the embryo
raise hell,
an effort
to preserve
computer coolants
and THC.
We watch
the crossfire
of satin and
death wishes,
toy money
and electrodes.
We watch and we
are watched,
losing sight for
the ocular dream.
Unholy tonic stings the throat
He is epistemic sickness
and she is someplace
watching, adrift,
tearful, above.
She is a sad Wednesday antidote
for scars in the water
and he is the persistence
of undercurrent mud.
This word is assault,
malignance,
penetration
There’s a face that moves
in the corner of your room:
shows itself between
midnight and four,
chews holes in its cheeks
and whispers your thoughts.
You blink and you blink
and it chews and it moves.
This phrase is untouchable
and the face is getting closer.
The violence of a hyphen,
the mirror’s dirge,
twisted cipher,
holographic crack.
Vapor haunting
humid coughs
and hash smoke.
Writer’s block,
words displaced
in utterance and script.
The fetal shadow
in purgatorial drift,
a tug at psychotropic cord.
His hand is anti-matter
and this is a silver screen.
A death cry, quieter than creation. A sooty and larynx-scarring sound. Like bad dinner conversation, like an unchecked motor, like wilting revelation. Hell yeah, that’s the sound, N.L. says—or Mark thinks he says—but he can’t be sure because smoke entombs the phrase. And that’s when the story won’t come. When all he wants is the recovery buzz. When the prose is like gum and he’s sick from too much and he’s dragging hope on an afterthought. When his fingers are glued to graphs of the self, rife with homage to the Book of Leviticus. When the cars are wraiths and his eyes have gone milky and the Muse cackles secrets in a closed repair shop. When office windows peer from an unnamed surface, when the Leviathan shows a face of steel. When he opens his mouth in a silent caw and stares dead-eyed into elsewhere while vapour clogs the scene. When he says the word remorse, when he loves books but hates their authors, when he laments the shoal of his latest daydream. When he’s fighting just to get it down, foggy and warm in a room that smells like affliction.
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Marlon Brando at the Congress of Racial Equality Demonstration in Torrance, California, 1963.
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Manhattan | Woody Allen | 1979
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Julien Donkey-Boy | Harmony Korine | 1999
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Spring Breakers | Harmony Korine | 2012
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Adventureland | Greg Mottola | 2009
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Sylvia Plath, 1953
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The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie, 2012)
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“What are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid that somebody’s going to steal our mushrooms in the...”
