Songcraft

We struck a chord then,
she and I;
Her discord and my discord
manipulated into unity
bled into airwaves
bled into eardrums
indiscriminately—

bystanders killed by stray bullets.

We surrendered
a portion of our pain
to one another;
to them all.

Disseminating harmonic disharmony to the masses,

we broke barricades
on scenes too grizzly
to view with impunity.

Our fingers probed the loam—

our songs were gravesites
wherein we entombed the past—

Unknown fingers
harvesting
sown seeds of discontent
flowering from carcasses;

Amassing superficial beauty stemmed from
obscured decomposition.

There were
anthems to agony,
melodies from misery,
lullabies of lies.

Strange how there is succor in collective misery.

Pillowtalk (aka Truth Hurts)

Beloved,

gazing down with
bedroom eyes
your doubt seeps in again--
befuddled by my resolve
to retain my virtue.

I fear it is not my resistance that wounds you;

Perhaps you struggle to recall
when you last felt needed
without towelling off afterwards...

The Thirteenth Step: Chapter 1

To the casual observer, Jann might as well have been a re-animated corpse acting on muscle memory for all the coordination he exhibited upon trying to discreetly enter the edifice at 1138 West Warm Springs Road at the early hour of 1:37 A.M. Upon missing the lock three times with carefully scrutinized stabs he accidentally dropped his key-ring to the ground and slammed the door rather violently with his head in an attempt to recover them expeditiously. It seems a 72-hour bout of sleep deprivation imbues one with the grace of a stumbling drunk. As it stands, the front door of the building had been battered to such an extent that the impact of Jann's head-butt (quickly accompanied by his entire body weight as he pitched forward) was sufficient to finally dragoon the wood away from the hinges. Needless to say, Jann would not have been more pronounced upon re-entry had he shot up a signal flare before entering. Oddly enough, though, his passage was unnoticed.


The compound at 1138 West Warm Springs Road in Carver Park, Nevada had once housed the New Castle Assisted Recovery Center prior to the ratification of the 37th Amendment to the U.S Constitution. Following this governmental declaration of legality for many “heretofore illegal substances” (concurrent with U.S. government subsidies on world-wide distribution of said substances) many of these rehabilitation clinics went the way of the dodo. As such, the buildings themselves were frequently demolished in an attempt to salvage property value. However, the New Castle center was purchased and refurbished by a prosperous and ingenious Las Vegas rounder by the name of Chester “Chess” Mulligan, who subsequently (and rather ironically) created a paradisiacal haven for newly liberated drug enthusiasts from the ashes of this monument to prohibition.


Forcing himself up off the door/floor, Jann cradled his head for a moment as he tried to re-orient himself to his surroundings. To his direct left was a rather spacious room bedecked with varied neon lights advertising the locals’ favored brands of spliff— amongst them Spectors, Watsons’ and the infamous White Widow brand. A brilliantly adorned three-foot-tall spun-glass bong stood like a lone reed in the room’s far south corner, adjacent to the scorched remnants of what may have passed as a pool table in a more civilized realm. Several strangely entwined potted plants and a headstone for someone (or something) named Bertha rounded out the current inhabitants of the compound’s “social suite.”


Scanning to his right, Jann saw a jumbled mass of flesh containing numerous limbs undulating rhythmically across the banister and steps of the ascending stairwell. Rather than fully analyze the jumble he groped furiously behind him for his keys. Upon locating them, he scurried past the surging sexual entanglement on the stairs whilst massaging the impact bubble that had begun to rise on his forehead. Trailing along the outlandishly graffitied hallway toward room 7, Jann recoiled violently into the wall screeching wildly as a calico cat with a smoldering tail darted out of the dimly lit corridor ascending from the basement. Heart aflutter, Jann composed himself as best he could. Squinting to try and discern any sign of the feline’s assailant in the gloom, he shakily closed the distance between rooms 4 and 7 in an excruciating three-minute crawl.


The three-story compound consisting of two above-ground floors and one subterranean level was created to comfortably house anywhere from 38 to 45 patients at any interval. Chess re-christened the compound the High Castle Assisted Discovery Center, establishing a business predicated upon another innovative Nevada rental establishment, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. Initially at Chess’ High Castle, societal outcasts could indulge in their socially lambasted activity of choice on an hourly, daily or weekly basis away from the rheumy courtroom eyes of public opinion.


To facilitate the fluidity of the business aspects of the establishment, 12 staff members were housed within the compound itself to enforce what little sense of order one can impose over such erratic activity.


The business thrived for several years, until the bestial conduct of the clientele (and also, in truth, its’ proprietor) coupled with an almost cancerous public acceptance of many designer recreational drugs decimated the once lucrative industry of operating a den for private chemical consumption. Chess then converted the rooms to rent on a semi-permanent basis, and subsequently the building became the living quarters for many of its strongly loyal patrons. It also became low-income housing for individuals willing to sacrifice a measure of creature comfort for frugality’s sake. Enter Jann Whittmeyer.


Upon reaching the door affixed with a neon pink 7 emblazoned in grease paint, Jann again made several fitful attempts at coupling key and lock before finally using both hands to guide the key around the cylinder roulette-wheel fashion until it slid home. The recent burst of adrenaline from the cat frenzy did little to steady his hand. Upon finally finagling the lock into insecurity, Jann violently thrust the door open and burst into his room as though the devil were licking his pant-leg. Upon securing the door behind him, he proceeded to bolt the three redundant locks he had self-installed that aren’t engaged when he is outside it. With the rest of humanity effectively locked into a periphery realm, Jann collapsed onto his bed and drifted quickly into oblivion.


With the gargantuan levels of marijuana being consumed in the house at any given interval, nothing need justify a moment of quietude on any given evening. Stints of silence lasting up to 2 consecutive days can be indicative of a unilateral shift from DMT to grass by the freak faction downstairs. These trends do not last, however. The sound of shattering glass, the metronome for any significant gathering at the High Tower, had been noticeably fevered the past two evenings. With that providing context, one could assume that the madness was merely simmering its way back up to a boil. This was the main motivating factor for Jann vacating the premises and retreating to the few established areas between Carver Park and Las Vegas that were not overrun by addicts or avid experimenters looking to commune with corporate artwork or VdT flash displays.


What was once deemed an uninhabitable desert had been fashioned in the spirit of the vast majority of the great American continent; converted to a sprawling concrete jungle that forcibly prevented societal disconnect as much as it encouraged it. The modernization of miles of open desert had driven many activities once limited to moon-washed dunes and sand-bars into downtown avenues and side-streets. Few areas truly offer solace. Even Jann’s favorite library was relegated to a nearly-full hash bar peppered with sour-smelling, disheveled college students staring blankly at Foucault like a chimp attempting mathematics. Regardless of the lack of sanctuary, when the High Tower is ablaze with the vibrant sparks of true freak-dom it is advisable to be elsewhere.


The basement, which largely consisted of padded cells utilized in suicide watch during the rehab days, had long ago been cordoned off as the drop den. Given that the Tower’s quota of hallucinogenic flights had been reached years ago the night that Chess and his then coital companion Melanie did a tandem leap from a balcony whilst engaged in an ecstasy- induced slide-session, it was decided that the house's occupants would appear to be fizz-gigs to the greater neighborhood alchemists if nude couples continually plunged from the compound’s upper story. Thus, in the old days, all major chemical activity was relegated to the subterranean realms of the compound. Consequently, upstairs cubbies were intended to be utilized for smoking and imbibing substances with relatively mellow highs. While the building had converted, the mentality had not. The stoners stayed in the air, the crack-heads colonized the loam.


This left many of the buildings nouveau occupants, Jann included, as the ersatz cream filling between layers of hallucinating hooligans and Bob Marley enthusiasts. One would be hard-pressed to conjure a greater justification for an overwhelming feeling of unease than residing between an irresistible force and an immovable object. During Jann’s tenure at the High Castle, many an evening’s tranquility had suddenly surrendered to a cacophonous din of dope fiends orgiastically savaging their minds— but after two straight nights of seeking sanity in different surroundings, he was in dire need of a decent night’s sleep. Yet, just moments after surrendering his consciousness to a comfortable contour of his pillow, the suffocating silence of the house peeled back to reveal the frenzied beast it had so easily contained mere moments prior.

"I require more psychedelic mushrooms you corpse-fucking codpieces!"

Leif, the elfin arbiter of the chthonian chemical crew, was screeching with malcontent as he burst from the basement corridor and into the first floor hallway like an infant angrily shedding its' uterine cocoon. The battle cry of a freak-power behemoth banshee-wailing like Morrison's ghost on a quick ascent up a walkway is not something one can easily acclimate to waking up to. Consequently, Jann's semi-conscious full-torso recoil into his headboard was utterly uncoordinated and resulted in his becoming a trembling heap of bedding and trepidation on his floor. Leif's beleaguered bellowing faded like a siren ebbing into the distance as he had presumably moved from the hallway to the cafeteria in pursuit of his stash of psychotropic fungi that were languishing under an undisclosed sink.


There was a brief period of silence, and then a violent impact tremor shook the door to Jann’s abode with considerable force. Shocked, Jann struggled to remove himself from the bed-sheet tangle while his door endured another heavy impact, followed quickly by another with slightly less force. Then silence resumed it’s dominion over the compound. Perplexed, Jann sat for a moment in quiet contemplation of what strange creature had carried out the random onslaught.


After extricating himself from his bed sheet Bastille, Jann stumbled to his door and fumbled with the four bolt combination in the hopes of reassuring himself that the beast that bludgeoned his entryway had indeed vanished. The yawning maw of the basement corridor to his left was bellowing smoke, and several roving vagabonds from Leif's menagerie of miscreants were spewing into the first floor hallway in conjunction with Jann's exit from his sanctum. Any one of these individuals could have hurled themselves into his door, he thought… but upon Jann’s turning to his right to survey the rest of the hallway, a disheveled young woman clumsily adorned in an askew halter-top and whore skirt caked in what appeared to be either mustard or grease paint furiously hurled herself down the hallway, spearing him at the hip and mowing him down like a wrecking ball.


Clawing violently at his hair and neck with a wolverine’s intensity, the skank cyclone wreaked havoc on the sluggish and disoriented Jann who squirmed violently beneath her frenzied form. Jann could see a trail of blood flowing freely down her forehead, along with bits of wood embedded in the flesh of her scalp as well as her right shoulder.

“I know what you are!!!!” she wailed, “Come out of there!!! You can’t hide!!! Come out!!!!”

The two were an entangled mass of flailing limbs that was not altogether alien to the various onlookers in the hall given the mass Jann had previously encountered on the stairwell. Finally, the woman’s fingers found purchase at one point on Jann’s scalp, entangling with the ragged matt of his hair. He bucked violently beneath her, beginning to howl with the effort as she slammed his head repeatedly into the matted hallway carpet. The fluorescence of the hallway lights fluttered in and out of focus in Jann’s perspective as flashes of white pain like bursting fireworks overwhelmed his vision with each blow. With the squeals of the ravening she-beast resounding in his ears, Jann’s head came down with a firm, moist thud in the blood and fiber of the carpeting that finally extinguished the lights entirely.

Paddleball

In a relationship like paddleball,

someone has to be the string.

My sister loved her dad, so it

must have been her.

One day the string broke and we

never went back.

We hid at my grade school

with our jackets turned inside out

so he couldn’t recognize us.

It was dark and we ate shredded mini-wheats

out of a bowl that once contained butter.

It was a Sunday.

I remember because my mom asked me to get our

bowl back the next day at school.

I told her I couldn’t find it, but I never looked.

What was I supposed to tell the playground monitor,

“I need to find my mom’s bowl

that we left here last night when we

were running from my sister’s dad.”

I could have, but I was eight

and I already understood.

Where the Fear Lives

The fear usually resides wherever the pain is:

right underneath the surface out of sight,

but never out of reach.

It lives beyond the dark alleys of your stomach.

Past the place where all the secrets hide.

It lives above your shoulders,

between your eyes; every pore on your body

that creates sweat has fear behind it.

I met him face to face once,

looked into his weeping eyes

to see myself turn inside out

and crumble from the madness.

Wierd Habits

Sitting on the sink in a public bathroom,

I am regretfully aware

that this train of thought is becoming a poem

or whatever it’s called when ideas

run through my head

as I wait to find out who the guy is

that drops all those pebbles

into the bottom of the men’s room urinal.

Death March of the Yellow Butterflies

As we junctioned from the 85 to the I-8

heading west toward Yuma,

we came upon a patch of yellow flowers

floating through the air; as we saw them

flutter past our window in a chaotic tangle

with the current of air, bodies

swept around the side of our car, I couldn’t

help but imagine a Mexican child –

a little girl resting with her desperate family,

resting under the limited shade the desert

provides for the innocent ones like her –

grabbing yellow flowers from a bush

and releasing them into the wind.

When I began to notice my surroundings,

I realized it was far too late to help her,

as dead butterflies lined the highway

for a hundred miles in each direction.

Verdict

This is the second time you’ve asked me to die,

so why are you the one who looks condemned?

The first time it took six or seven years

To wake up in that stale room to an unfamiliar ceiling

and a half smoked Black and Mild, except that I

knew I was dead, or worse yet: had never been.

I had been pushed back into the womb,

back to the time of Adam,

and grown again from the seeds of life.

I am the only person to see man fall a second time

and yet there is no hesitation

in the words that will end my life again.