Here's one of a series of 'first thought best thought' manuscripts that I cranked out in 1985-86, in the white wooden parking lot booth where I worked the late shift. I guess this piece would qualify as a prose poem, but at the time of its writing I wasn't thinking in terms of form, really; I just wanted to get my feelings down on paper somehow. The shift offered long stretches of inactivity when the booth could serve as a writing studio, and it was remote enough from the downtown night life that I could usually smoke pot without fear of discovery. (Read 'untitled, unfinished manuscript excerpt' for a sense of what that parking lot job was like).
During this period, I was also writing a dystopian near-future novel that I seriously doubted was up to snuff; I would avoid dealing with it by typing long-winded letters to friends, and when I ran out of friends to write to, I'd indulge in one of these autobiographical screeds. Despite being in a period of relative stability, with a job, a social life and a compatible lover, these manuscripts were generally over-the-top complaints about the state of the world and my state of mind within it. I was entangled in contradictory lines of inquiry – questions of spirituality, politics, ecology, sex and sexuality, and a growing awareness of feminism, among others. To add to the fun, I was re-reading Naked Lunch at the time, and its influence on my own writing is obvious here.
In another, later manuscript from this above-mentioned series, I wrote:
"Writing a story at this stage of the game is like taking a single rare flower from an entire section of the planet which is teeming with exotic life, coating the bloom with plastic and selling it at a flea market for fifty cents. My mind is a vast oceanic slurry of thoughts waiting for free expression and the pressure to produce is beginning to hack madly at me. I mean I cannot stop writing incredibly long letters to people I can barely think about usually. I have written the equivalent of three hefty books in the last few months, I think. Why waste this energy by putting it into letters? Because I’m going INSANE that’s why. Because I have to write but the swarming snakes of thought in my medusa skull won’t submit to the usual attempts at discipline used in fiction. So I simply sit here at work and get high and free-associate my way into mental exhaustion."
With all the Cure songs on the radio, and news about tragic insanity in the papers, its a wonder a guy can maintain his peace of mind from day to day. In the dark working dark, I wonder how humans become statues. Day by day their bodies turn to stone, their faces slabs, hearts without warmth. Taught to hate their bodies and their lives. Taught to be ignorant. Blinded at birth, souls castrated by want of love, they lurch through life crippled by the scar tissue that surrounds their mind. Wants and urges denied become sore and then fester into obsession for control, for dominance, a hunger for pain, for order, for a destruction of chance, a narrowing of roads, a shuttering of the light, a clearer sentence in the book of rules, a surer method of enforcement, the soul of the machine has entered our minds, the soul of the machine is a malignant cancer, it is a virus that kills our minds and directs our helpless bodies.
Episiotomy, like a biblical name. Better to cut willfully, logically, than to endure the tearing of flesh that Nature demands. Oh mothers how you suffer and suffer for love, how the rewards of motherhood become torture and ignorance and shame in this viral colony of the heart.
Out. Willfully. Deny. Chance. This is the ethic that severs the head and preserves the shell; the virus. A disease that succeeds in the short term to thrive, despite its meaninglessness. “I shall be and I shall use these good cells to be, and I shall be these cells and these cells shall be me, for I will lay my mind over the minds of these cells and tell them what is to be done for me to be. And I shall be and I shall be, and the truth will be in the future for me, and I will be in order to see my purpose in the future, and I will use all my resources to build a future for me to be.” And in the end the future will be, and that future is death. That is the meaning of a viral life, a life that eats itself to live. The logic of junk and a junk society, an addicted society.
I am a junk cell in a junk body, and I am sick and driven. The junk drives me to find more junk, the junk becomes purpose incarnate, purpose without ultimate aim, purpose despite lack of meaning, short-term drive for a death-seeking cell. Suffering! Suffering! Suffering fucking fuck-ridden lies! Suffering cells are a sick sicko joke. Suffering God on a gore-crusted cross, you didn’t die for a sick junkie joke. You didn’t die to suck our minds out, you weren’t around just to take us away. Heaven is heaven but you knew the score. Heaven or hell are a matter of choice, choice is a riddle to junk-ridden cells. I ask the question, “Why did he die? To rise above flesh and dance in the clouds? Was he an angel or was he a man?” Choice is the answer, choice is the truth. Man is an angel in a forbidden crypt. Junk is the walls of this saccharine cell. Just as in objects that focus our love. Junk sucks our love out and drives us like dogs, puppets of lost love that dance in the grave, Christ was cut willfully from the people he loved. Severed head corpse twitches in false viral life, corpse shudders, senseless, information butchered. Disease symptoms in the senseless pus that pours out of unconscious mouths. This body will live despite loss of head, this body will live despite the perversions of truth. (This body has lived and of course now it dies.)
Here in the velvet casket of isolation is where we all are supposed to sit as if dead already. Notice the blindfold and the penis restraints and the chastity belts; cruel iron causes festering flesh, subtler steels now slip in and slay. Bodies will serve the cause of the disease. Bodies will truss and wriggle and crawl, bodies will shrink or bodies will swell. Bodies that bulge and push away touch. Touching yourself, mirror sex love. Mirror bodies thrusting in sweat-stupid search, bodies are chemical dumps, our souls reflect death. Bodies will shudder under control’s sticky fingers, bodies lock onto each other forever. Dry-humping eunuches, shock-treatment orgasm, robbing the eternity of love for a second of respite, fading forgetting of life’s half-lived love. Love cupped in latex, dumped on the floor, scraped off in the morning by idle drone toes. Aching raw flesh of the unholy loves, heat-crusted eyelids and throbbing rectal lesions, dryness of nowhere a dull desert lust, lizards flick dry tongues that lash or caress. Bodies will fit where the virus sees fit, deny the cycles that indicate life, deny the sense of the world that we rape.
Are we really products of this planet Earth? Did the fire that drives the waves of life around this egg bring about the human slime? the slime-mold that thrives in a sea of its shit? Did mother-love ask for a psychotic son? A sex-killer lover of bitches who bleed? A self-hating brooding juvenile scum that kills what he loves because he knows not? A divided mind on the skull of the world? Waves of schizophrenia cripple this mind. Tearing great chunks from the earth as their proof, ideas that slaughter to prove they are true. Ideas denied by the words they must make, ideas that die like the minds that conceive them, ideas shared live longer than men, outlive the sense that first gave them life. One man one junk cell that saw a new way, ten million drone cells blind for this way, ten billion tears cried for the want of a way that left room for love. Ways cut willfully to deny choice and chance. Words can’t corral the sense that we seek. Words that surround us like a flaming moat, words can burn the sense we seek, burn and distort it and we just see smoke.
This is the egg and the cradle and the body and the love. The egg we deny and the cradle we empty, the body we cut and the love we confound. Of course I’m asking questions that I think you know the answers. Are we from the womb of this mother world? Do we deny the body we have? Do we deny the world as it is? What is the thing that drives us to this? I have sat in the center of a giant construction, sat in the center where the stink is less, and slammed hammered bracework and buttress and wall, watched them collapse all over me, I thought the heavy weight of the dying fortress would crush me but I just wanted to know. Funny the boulders of lies were made out of smoke. I call the mind we are given a hoax. I say destroy the lies that you choke. Choke on the lies that you spoke out of smoke. You act as you act despite words of truth, can your mouth speak sense when your body does violence? I don’t say this to set myself up, I dump the poisons like all of us drones, I piss in my nest and I enslave me loves. But I don’t really love this, and I hope it will fail, wither like dead skin and dry up and die, maybe my lifetime or next or next still; the hovering deathrise blossoms so soon, that’s why I’m talking like a jerk on a stand, I jerk on a stand so you can see the rope, rope from the gallows that puppetlike waltz my lifeless toes along scuffed wood-planks do dance. My rope and your rope and his rope the same, knots to untangle before we can drop. Denying deathrise is loser’s game these days when futuredance drones would party till atomize, bring it on bring it on the left-shadowed ecstasy; I harp on heaven that unfolds tonight. Heaven in heads that stare and stare. Eyes on eyes, shoulders, fingers in hair. Me within you within me within you, mandala spiral galaxy atom planet love, star / dust / mote / people floating in pairs, bonded by this wave of life that fires our fuse; you can join in the love talk and forget about the lies, you can be the one here now you can taste the Messiah in your mouth as you speak, you can hope against hope and you can act as you should, and the empty-eyed lies that yammer in your way are the pitiful shadows of what you used to be.
