I moved in right quick having found a room that day. Small dormered with a story-book green dresser and a single bed smelling of stale cramped life like the inside of a draw. It was my second time living on a top floor if I include my stay with Grandma, the one I fled that very morning after having been up all night, and when I think of how I might explain why I left I can only say this for now, fright.
So one week in and already found work bussing tables at this Italian family style restaurant, it smelled too and how particular, fetid, damp and garlicky. Finally I thought here is my life. Having made the prodigal return from Queens back home or at least one town over, I thought, this is great, everything being the same but now here and now now.
I had plans to eaves-drop on my customers, study the living, mabey for a screen-play I'd tell others to impress knowing then what I've always known, that everything is a reward unto itself or none at all, and to know people, to live among them with the ears, with the heart open would always be enough.
I still dreamt big but it was a lie to impress myself, to subvert my egoistic conditioning, an attempt to live in between plans, and when those lie's wore thin I thought it was beer or pot I lived for and again another cover for living, for with all its meager winnings and great upset, not once has it been uninteresting.
Like this yule visit with crack toking friends at the end of the hall, a Christmas eve to remember, the unatural acrid smell, the way each would pick and scrape at there pipes at bits of foil in preparation for the next hit, immediate to the last, like insects with big blood filled human hearts and eyes which sought to drink the whole world with you in it, there was real love there.
When living the low life we find it trembling and jewel like there in cramped rooms, in the parking lots of seven-eleven, we hear it falling up the stairs with a head wound, or with pupils grown big enough to house the waking dreams of not one but two boxes of somanex, we clean up a months worth of it's piss in milk pint cartons, we talk with its failure it's deep sadness, how it scams the grocery store's for five towns over, we listen when it describe's the work of carting it's body around, of how it clinicaly died once and the nothing it had seen there, we let it sleep on our floor when it's man-friend is raging scared all the while, we talk with it sipping german dessert wines smoking nat shermans, its face large as life the eyes all a twinkle, blink, blink it says, it claims to be your soul-mate, it begs for sexual favor at three in the morning when your just trying to have a drink, there it stands in it's whities stumbling before a 19" color set clutching a half gallon of Georgi having just bleed its heart out for its boy, it's deceased father, it's failed marriage, it smokes something nameless and black while the last light fades behind the tree-line out of doors, there through the quarter windows, and it thinks, are we out of beer?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
I Need Some (Time & Space) From You
He sat balled up by the front door, silk pajama pants clinging to his wet, sweaty thighs. He itched his hands, and let loose a facial twitch now and then, perhaps a chatter of the teeth as he lips attempted to speak, to ask for something, to plead, to reach out and connect. He was mad. He was pretending.
It all began so simply, a chance encounter left them both drunk and smiling, pitching themselves into the dark night with reckless abandon. A drizzle upon their heads, a chill upon their bones, goosebumps riding up their arms peaking just at the shoulders with a tingle of the neckhairs. He recalls looking at her, deeply, richly, but he can't remember what it was he saw. Lightyears of distance from each other, in love from rival dimensions.
The cosmos buckled and swooned simultaneously as they came together. It all mattered as energy collapsed upon itself, exhausted from a pantomime of creation, our naked bodies sprawled across the bed. He held her close, they sighed, and their souls slowly began to drift away from the ultimate union, whirled up within one another's electrons.
He held his hand out to her, sitting at the edge of the bed, head hung low. She looked at him, concern was there, but so was self-pity, self-absorption, self-righteousness. He wanted to stop pretending, to stop holding on to so much, to release the gravitational pull of the debris he carried in his wake. The swirling mass of science fiction novels, pop psychology books, and comics all begin to slip from their orbit.
She came home to the apartment, the door unlocked, the desk upturned, the dresser smashed. Everything of his was tossed on the floor, set on fire, or obliterated completely, strewn across the wood floors. He was heaving, chest turned inwards, as he took in sharp, shallow breaths. His brow furrowed and fell over his eyes, his hair dropping into spikes, nostrils flared and snarling. Arms dragging, blood streaming from his hands.
He did it, he made her leave. He was the reason, he knew it, somehow it must be him. His outburst scared her. His intensity was appropriate for the world he knew he must belong in, a world that existed parallel to hers, one were he was right, where the rules of logic actually existed. Math was form was science was everything. There was a rhyme, there was a reason. To it all.
So above, so below. A sun, so far from our own that it's distance would be a number quite longer than even this sentence, so please forgive me if I leap through the dark matter of the Milky Way, and warp to this star not unlike our own, only perhaps smaller and brighter, as gravity gives into itself, atoms falling like dominoes, a drain circling within itself. Instantaneously everything is inverted, and stretched right out of space. All the energy within this sun as now burrowed itself away from reality as we know it. A black hole is formed and even starlight can not outrun it's gravity well.
A trillion miles away, yet we'll still see the light from that star for years to come, the particles still passing through the deep sea of space, piercing our atmosphere. Then suddenly one day, we'll all wake to find he's not there anymore. Where there was a twinkle, a peg of a constellation perhaps, if one was lucky, and now there is just darkness, a void. How many of us would look up the sky and ever even knew that a star shone there once upon a time?
His mind cracked, a splinter running through the crystalline consciousness he imagined himself within. Curled up fetal, rocking, pretending not to be sane by muttering gibberish, gasps, and twitching all the while. Eyes flicking about, a stroke of the beard absently as he searched for meaning frantically, knowing that everything was about to disappear.
Things went clear first, the color sucked from their bones like marrow. Then it all went soft, gooey, plastic, mush, decomposing into gel. A small egg-like circle around him, all blank and soft, his clothes fell off leaving him as if in the womb once more. Hair follicle by hair follicle fell from his skin, drifting away like snowflakes. The pain and aches faded away quite nicely, as his skeleton system and muscles no longer were a problem.
He could just lay back and enjoy as molecule by molecule fell in upon itself, his mind taking stock of every drop of information contained within every single cell. Before his facial expressions dissolved into the floor, a smile slid like a snake, a ripple through a stream. Eternity lingered beautifully, drifting along with the casual patience of a caretaker. A blink, consciousness plunges deeper, the light no longer able to draw the electrical impules up the neurons and synapses, it last forever and a day, until he opens his eyes one last time.
The door rips from the hinge as it is atomized in a flash, the floor tearing up and curling, everything not nailed down sucked into the nothingness where he once lay. Now a minature black hole, the swirl of the drain whiplashing itself ever wider, engulfing more and more material, matter to be masticated upon. The pages of his books all ripped from their binding, the data from his DVDs seeping off the disc, dissolving all the shattered remnants of who he once was.
His name was Kenneth. Kenny to family, Ken to girlfriends. She just called him K. Or maybe she called him Baby. She loved him once. She still does. He made her run, pushed her away, drove her away, some part of him flexing magnetic wavelengths in order to propel himself higher, to the peak of creation, Nirvana. She was the yin to his yang. Why did she bring out so much of himself? The eruption of their interactions, the crucible of aeons, pure fourth dimensional soup seeped from the space between them. Her name was Mary.
Marilyn. Not Mary-Lynne and certainly not Merilyn, good god no. She was funny and sexy at the same time, she knew how to laugh, enjoyed herself at every turn. She wasn't a bad person, she didn't hate him or try to hurt him. Why would he have said that. Not Mary. She, she made him laugh to himself, a mere breathy grin, perhaps a roll of the eyes, when he mentioned her name. Notoriously defiant, resistant to his charms, lightning in the wind.
The building broke itself down brick by brick, the roof swallowed whole, every apartment from the center outwards, was emptied of its contents, as was the owner and their contents. It all became nothing, just like he now was, one with everything. Bi-polar tornado devouring the block, negating the neighborhood, and eradicating the island of Manhattan. We all instantly hit the event horizon, where things slow down to eternity, and we slumber into forever along with Kenneth and his dreams.
Eventually she turns, and sees him standing in the center, the outline of his image appearing projected from inside. His energy field holds her back from the event horizon. She falls into his arms, safe, for a moment, before the slow crunch of the center of the black hole consumes them til the end of time. He lifts her head up, brushing his hand behind her hair, cradling her neck. Lifts her from melting into the middle of collapsing reality.
She meets his gaze and disapprovingly shakes her head, shoves him away, and they fall backwards, sent soaring into the center til her hands pressed against his chest, penetrate their way through the plasma wall into the dimension beyond.
"I missed you."
It all began so simply, a chance encounter left them both drunk and smiling, pitching themselves into the dark night with reckless abandon. A drizzle upon their heads, a chill upon their bones, goosebumps riding up their arms peaking just at the shoulders with a tingle of the neckhairs. He recalls looking at her, deeply, richly, but he can't remember what it was he saw. Lightyears of distance from each other, in love from rival dimensions.
The cosmos buckled and swooned simultaneously as they came together. It all mattered as energy collapsed upon itself, exhausted from a pantomime of creation, our naked bodies sprawled across the bed. He held her close, they sighed, and their souls slowly began to drift away from the ultimate union, whirled up within one another's electrons.
He held his hand out to her, sitting at the edge of the bed, head hung low. She looked at him, concern was there, but so was self-pity, self-absorption, self-righteousness. He wanted to stop pretending, to stop holding on to so much, to release the gravitational pull of the debris he carried in his wake. The swirling mass of science fiction novels, pop psychology books, and comics all begin to slip from their orbit.
She came home to the apartment, the door unlocked, the desk upturned, the dresser smashed. Everything of his was tossed on the floor, set on fire, or obliterated completely, strewn across the wood floors. He was heaving, chest turned inwards, as he took in sharp, shallow breaths. His brow furrowed and fell over his eyes, his hair dropping into spikes, nostrils flared and snarling. Arms dragging, blood streaming from his hands.
He did it, he made her leave. He was the reason, he knew it, somehow it must be him. His outburst scared her. His intensity was appropriate for the world he knew he must belong in, a world that existed parallel to hers, one were he was right, where the rules of logic actually existed. Math was form was science was everything. There was a rhyme, there was a reason. To it all.
So above, so below. A sun, so far from our own that it's distance would be a number quite longer than even this sentence, so please forgive me if I leap through the dark matter of the Milky Way, and warp to this star not unlike our own, only perhaps smaller and brighter, as gravity gives into itself, atoms falling like dominoes, a drain circling within itself. Instantaneously everything is inverted, and stretched right out of space. All the energy within this sun as now burrowed itself away from reality as we know it. A black hole is formed and even starlight can not outrun it's gravity well.
A trillion miles away, yet we'll still see the light from that star for years to come, the particles still passing through the deep sea of space, piercing our atmosphere. Then suddenly one day, we'll all wake to find he's not there anymore. Where there was a twinkle, a peg of a constellation perhaps, if one was lucky, and now there is just darkness, a void. How many of us would look up the sky and ever even knew that a star shone there once upon a time?
His mind cracked, a splinter running through the crystalline consciousness he imagined himself within. Curled up fetal, rocking, pretending not to be sane by muttering gibberish, gasps, and twitching all the while. Eyes flicking about, a stroke of the beard absently as he searched for meaning frantically, knowing that everything was about to disappear.
Things went clear first, the color sucked from their bones like marrow. Then it all went soft, gooey, plastic, mush, decomposing into gel. A small egg-like circle around him, all blank and soft, his clothes fell off leaving him as if in the womb once more. Hair follicle by hair follicle fell from his skin, drifting away like snowflakes. The pain and aches faded away quite nicely, as his skeleton system and muscles no longer were a problem.
He could just lay back and enjoy as molecule by molecule fell in upon itself, his mind taking stock of every drop of information contained within every single cell. Before his facial expressions dissolved into the floor, a smile slid like a snake, a ripple through a stream. Eternity lingered beautifully, drifting along with the casual patience of a caretaker. A blink, consciousness plunges deeper, the light no longer able to draw the electrical impules up the neurons and synapses, it last forever and a day, until he opens his eyes one last time.
The door rips from the hinge as it is atomized in a flash, the floor tearing up and curling, everything not nailed down sucked into the nothingness where he once lay. Now a minature black hole, the swirl of the drain whiplashing itself ever wider, engulfing more and more material, matter to be masticated upon. The pages of his books all ripped from their binding, the data from his DVDs seeping off the disc, dissolving all the shattered remnants of who he once was.
His name was Kenneth. Kenny to family, Ken to girlfriends. She just called him K. Or maybe she called him Baby. She loved him once. She still does. He made her run, pushed her away, drove her away, some part of him flexing magnetic wavelengths in order to propel himself higher, to the peak of creation, Nirvana. She was the yin to his yang. Why did she bring out so much of himself? The eruption of their interactions, the crucible of aeons, pure fourth dimensional soup seeped from the space between them. Her name was Mary.
Marilyn. Not Mary-Lynne and certainly not Merilyn, good god no. She was funny and sexy at the same time, she knew how to laugh, enjoyed herself at every turn. She wasn't a bad person, she didn't hate him or try to hurt him. Why would he have said that. Not Mary. She, she made him laugh to himself, a mere breathy grin, perhaps a roll of the eyes, when he mentioned her name. Notoriously defiant, resistant to his charms, lightning in the wind.
The building broke itself down brick by brick, the roof swallowed whole, every apartment from the center outwards, was emptied of its contents, as was the owner and their contents. It all became nothing, just like he now was, one with everything. Bi-polar tornado devouring the block, negating the neighborhood, and eradicating the island of Manhattan. We all instantly hit the event horizon, where things slow down to eternity, and we slumber into forever along with Kenneth and his dreams.
Eventually she turns, and sees him standing in the center, the outline of his image appearing projected from inside. His energy field holds her back from the event horizon. She falls into his arms, safe, for a moment, before the slow crunch of the center of the black hole consumes them til the end of time. He lifts her head up, brushing his hand behind her hair, cradling her neck. Lifts her from melting into the middle of collapsing reality.
She meets his gaze and disapprovingly shakes her head, shoves him away, and they fall backwards, sent soaring into the center til her hands pressed against his chest, penetrate their way through the plasma wall into the dimension beyond.
"I missed you."
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Sub*Text
Hello. Welcome to Sub*Text. An experiment in DIY publishing, a way for me to promote myself and others of considerable talent, a literary zine that pushes boundaries. I'm putting this work out there into the world and seeing what it becomes.
Start something. Anything. Whatever you want, however you'd like. Let me know what it is and I'll help you in any way I can. I'm trying to build connections between the solitary artists that I know and hopefully we'll create a new scene.
I've never belonged to anything larger than myself before. No literary journal really clicked with me. There's not one contemporary author that I truly admire. A void exists where I linger, the space I roam between mainstream and alternative. Part beat poet, part science hero.
I've been writing poetry & short stories since junior high, screenplays in college, and comic scripts through my 20's. I have a few shorts published in comic anthologies, a nearly completed fictional autobiography, and a massive graphic novel about to see print in the coming months.
I also co-host a writing/comic book podcast called Write Club. We try to promote the smaller creator, just beginning their ascent, on the verge of making a splash, just needing to find their audience. I would encourage the entire world to create more if I could, for I feel that's the best way to save ourselves.
And Sub*Text is my way of showcasing the work I wrote that helped save me from quite literally going mad. I know I'm not alone in that feeling, that desperate cry for attention while locking yourself in your own mind. And you're not alone either.
There's something going on beneath the surface of mankind, a fire burning, consuming us from within. Let me help spread the flames and we'll all burn together.
3/7/10 5am
L train to Brooklyn
K
Start something. Anything. Whatever you want, however you'd like. Let me know what it is and I'll help you in any way I can. I'm trying to build connections between the solitary artists that I know and hopefully we'll create a new scene.
I've never belonged to anything larger than myself before. No literary journal really clicked with me. There's not one contemporary author that I truly admire. A void exists where I linger, the space I roam between mainstream and alternative. Part beat poet, part science hero.
I've been writing poetry & short stories since junior high, screenplays in college, and comic scripts through my 20's. I have a few shorts published in comic anthologies, a nearly completed fictional autobiography, and a massive graphic novel about to see print in the coming months.
I also co-host a writing/comic book podcast called Write Club. We try to promote the smaller creator, just beginning their ascent, on the verge of making a splash, just needing to find their audience. I would encourage the entire world to create more if I could, for I feel that's the best way to save ourselves.
And Sub*Text is my way of showcasing the work I wrote that helped save me from quite literally going mad. I know I'm not alone in that feeling, that desperate cry for attention while locking yourself in your own mind. And you're not alone either.
There's something going on beneath the surface of mankind, a fire burning, consuming us from within. Let me help spread the flames and we'll all burn together.
3/7/10 5am
L train to Brooklyn
K
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