volume 7 issue 2
loop - copyright © 1992 eristikös
dick - kurt von behrmann
memento mori - m zajac
#2 - rick tanksley
death in dreams - matt pinkerton
this is why - arezou ghane
how a scorpio does things - nadine kachur
in my mother's madness - jeff falk
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eristikös launched exsanguinate online in April 1996
I am sitting in my room -- a space no bigger than
a thumbnail. I am thinking about you and trying to
understand. I am not very much more.
Sound is rushing from those boxes to my membranes
and straight into my brain. My eyes roll back into my head
feverishly as certain particular melodies drug me into a
stupor. These are among my favorite moments in life,
the moments when I leave my body and explore the
periphery of my mind and soul; my emotions, my madness,
my pain.
I am remembering a sinking feeling I used to get
as a child. It happened quite frequently and always
accompanied the realization that I was a bad child --
that I was in trouble with my mother again. The feeling
would wash over me in heavy waves, starting at the front
of my throat and ending in the pit of my stomach. I
would stand behind the door of my room, waiting, shaking,
my heart pounding with fear, praying that God would
pick me up like a chess piece and place me somewhere
else -- another house, another city, another state, in a
forest, to the beach, underwater dead as I wished to be.
Now I am much older, and yet, the feeling won't go
away. I recreate and perpetuate it because it is dear
and familiar -- like a baby blanket, or an old doll with
a torn dress, three limbs and one eye. That is why I
love you. You give me the sinking feeling. It's funny
how a pattern laid is a pattern repeated.
Compose dialogues
about Cunt
or Pussy
Applause freely flows
Talk about love
for Cock
see silence.
Explore Vagina
Enter hers
and your own
the world is titillated
Enjoy Cock
When you already carry one
Become
a dismissed minority
The woman who loves Cunt
is adored
The man who
adores another cock
Is the lesser man.
Summer's hours have torn the hospice from your eyes
And sterile I walk room to room,
Throwing open curtains to let the light
That tortures off lineaments from your frame;
Now but in shadows we still meet
And in empty sockets I see my fears.
I lay your photographs on the grass at noon
To bleach the colors back to red,
Salmon, pink, muscle, and finally to bone,
The pigments cooked off, flesh tones devoid of blood,
And yet when by me they are seen,
It's like from the album they were never gone.
My sheets have been washed to remove your scent,
(Which was retreating on its own
But not fast enough to let me lie in peace)
And still through the dense fever in my brain
My nose hears a familiar voice:
The music from your hair clings to pillows faint.
You've been gone for two weeks, and yet you survive,
Simulacrums stand at my door;
In July's heat I cannot shake your grip
And mirages once cloaked become all too clear --
On a different bed you now sleep
And those still living haunt those who cannot move.
do you know
what it is to be trapped in here
behind these eyes that see all there is to see
can you feel
the impotent rage that grips and strangles me
I cant do a fucking thing
yet I am forced to see
the injustices you perpetrate
on your fellow man
the pain and death you cause
just because you can
in the name of mighty liberty
you fly your cotton flag
you enlist the feeble masses
to wring your blood soaked rag
none dare call it conspiracy
I fucking can
diaphanous machinations
on the cathode tube
gospel to the sheep
Death in dreams
it seems
finds me more often
than most.
Once I fell
pell-mell
from a chopper over
the Nam.
I felt my arms
harmed,
broken from impact
in dirt.
My corpse lay
staring
with dead eyes at
the jungle.
I fell another time
in crime
during a daylight shootout
and bled
all over the asphalt.
Assault
with a deadly weapon
killed me.
Once as a suicide
I tried
shoveling little white pills
down throat
fast as I could.
Should
have thought it out
some more.
Just as the drugs took,
shook
my body with their
gentle stroke,
I panicked and rose
too slow
and stumbled toward
the phone.
I fell prone,
alone
and thought I'd rest
a bit.
Just then I knew
it true
I'd never get up
again.
Sometimes I hate
Myself.
I have existed
seventeen years
in ignorance.
All my world
reading and
writing; without
Understanding.
Lavishly feeding
deeper into my noxious
and perishing
self assembled earth.
Indulgence,
voracity
to never confess
my own deformity
the ugly
person I have become.
Lost infinitude
consumed by
disturbing masturbations
loving, making
empty love
to and
for people that never exist.
Creating
a concrete realm
of equivocation.
Becoming my own
traitor.
Doing that I hate.
Found myself in
beatnik verses,
because I was
screaming,
ripping at my lung,
to be born
cleaner than I am
and I never
occupied what I said.
Seventeen decades,
seventeen thousand milleniums
depleted, so
that I would sabotage
the Perfection of my birth.
okay, like this is how a scorpio does things. (extreme).
i don't drink for 15 years, but tonight i wanted a beer.
but i don't want to buy a six of something cheap or all of one kind,
so i go to AJ's when it is really so late that i shouldn't even be out. (extreme).
i go passed the produce, to the back, then over to the liquor section.
i see all the nice-looking single-serving beer bottles
and decide on the bohemia which i had been craving for days,
but i also get a pacifica and a pilsner urquell. of course,
i have no food in the house, but i don't buy any, either.
i do pick up a container of clorox because the white pants i am wearing
has small stains that remind me. i also buy another pair of tweezers
because they are gold-plated and match my bathroom.
these are the fourth pair i have purchased in less than a week
as i am making up for the one pair i'd lost last weekend while on vacation.
i get the bottles home and open all three at once. (extreme).
i sit on my sofa, then, bending forward to an extreme curve,
place each one of the bottles on the unswept floor in front of me.
it is the scientist in me; a sad taste test; a phase of the moon.
i conclude, as i would have guessed, the bohemia is by far the best tasting.
it is also the first one i tried; thus, confounding results with "first-sip" bias.
before long, i have finished two of the three,
and now realize that am hungry. very hungry. of course,
i still have no food in the house. but raymond is on tv,
and i don't want to return to the store and miss
an episode i've already seen five times. (extreme extreme).
i decide the best course of action is to drink the third beer,
wash it down with a flat vanilla coke i had sitting open in the freezer for days,
then root for the morning to polish off the night.
My mother's madness was like a dutch door
Always open, always closed,
Nothing came or went through.
And when she was in the throes of...
Hers was a push-me pull-you love;
I need you, I don't need you.
And when the screaming started,
And the neighbors wondered aloud
It was noon at midnight.
And my father was always wrong,
The speed limit signs were a conspiracy,
and she was a back seat driver to her life.
Perhaps it had been her baby brother.
She had peered over the edge of his crib,
But he never spoke and cried even less.
Finally, from within his quiet form
She heard a yell and saw a finger pointed
But his finger having writ moved on... just not far enough.
Why don't you love me? I hate you. Who died and left you boss?
I wish that you were never born!
If you want to run away I'll help you pack!
And she would stay up all night and read mysteries until dawn
But never told me who done it, yet, when the oracle spoke,
In the sacred grove, a sybil between screams,
I would look up into her eyes and see in her
a hesitation and I knew for one brief shining,
That she was in there, somewhere,
That she loved me,
And once upon a time
she had really wanted me.
But then the voices came and took her away
They say insanity ran in her family.
Yes. Right out the front door and into the street.
But she would not leave that place and come back to us
Though we asked so politely and in church on Sundays
She would sing and wear her hat; beseeching the lamb of god
And later on explode after the roast beef.
It was then that Dagwood spoke to me in a dream,
He said Look out kid! Wrap yourself in us!
And although I never heard
Prince Valiant's sword singing, I thought I did and
it kept me safe from her fire.
And with each Christmas came all the pretty, empty, presents,
Summers too with carnivals and daily vacation bible schools
and Halloweens with masks that made perfect sense.
All these things helped me to survive her madness
and her visits to the dark house and her
fade to black.
Her family shook their heads
And said she was always the crazy one
Well...there was Marcene and then Uncle Bryan.
Maybe she wasn't the only one? But it made no difference.
And when the black sedan came to take her away to Wichita
To study Hermann Rorshach's spills
I missed her. I hated her. I loved her.
And hated her again for what I knew was coming for me
someday -- my own ride in the black sedan.
My brother, my father and I all knew she would be back too soon.
So we went fishing and we were happy.
I caught a sunfish, watched it breathing in my small hand, let it go.
The three of us. Just for a little while.
In the golden afternoon by the river,
Oh, for such a little while...
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timestamp November 2020