Automatic writing while thinking about a recent hospital stay...
Expedition One: Atrophied
arms behind locked gates. He hates boats, more specifically he hates drowning.
Or the idea of it anyway. “How are you feeling?” I hate ocean voyages. I’ve
done all the research. Your qualifications outclass every other anthropologist
in this choking weed of an institution. The billowy, albino pockets of
throbbing jelly seemed directionless, content to flow and bobble in the calm gangrenous
water. The afterglow morning of Thorazine and Seroquel. Nodding into his
breakfast. “We detected no head or fins or appendages of any note. It was not preposterous
anymore. Then the Captain went blitzkrieg and beat his wife to death. She never
saw it organized or heard the Captain’s gasp. The speakeasies, the Charleston,
Herbert Hoover. Rafts and submarines. They found the Captain scratching at his
face with bloody, studied fingernails while his wife was a crumpled hump in the
clean, unfair corner - sweet and thick with the perfumed invitation of assigned
putrefaction. Amid crackling thunder and screaming seas the First Mate, Luke,
heard a torrent of voices at his lonely door. “I’ve checked and re-checked the
data.” I’d have saved myself a modicum of trouble if only I’d realized that the
shawls were made of flames.
The old man burst into the pub, his haggard face twisted with
truncated dreams like a worm cut in two. His voice had perished, stolen by grim
ordeal. He used dyslexic telepathy to tell the others, “Down was I Porter’s Cove
was me. A box netted I. A wooden box long. Rusted was the lock shut and
barnacles to wood clung the soft waterlogged. Right at it real close looked I
and lettering seen I across the top. It said,
Expedition Two:
One thick black cord stretches from the muscled mouth of a naked woman carrying
the loss of a dual mastectomy and into the charcoal eyesocket of a promiscuous
horticulturist named Helen Epperbaum. The cord is frayed and stings the air
with short sizzling bursts of white gnats erupting from the shadows of an area
like a risk to your own health. A burro a child a burro a child leaps into a
shallow black splash thrumming with gasping electric currents and like eels
squirming on a slow current of razor blades, fluid fills his gasping utterances.
“Here, let me take this out of your mouth.” He tucked his money into his
pocket. “Eskimos are everywhere these days,” Luke tells me. They sit around
worn ghost-laden tables, casting polished whale bones as if they were new
galaxies, boisterously shouting with each arctic sledge that approaches. Jhinook
pounds his mittened fist on the haunted table and scowls with innate and
created heat. A man tells a joke about vaginas made of snow and an icicle
penis. The other men laugh with glaring toothless smiles, rolling their whiskey
eyes, happy here, chewing whale blubber like unruly gum. He sweeps up the ivory
dice again and tosses them with his whole chronic personality on the ledge. The
notched bones say clearly:
Expedition
Three: Television
repairmen with broken legs hobble and crawl for ninety miles on a desolate road
unpaved and void. The drought patiently dries the swamp, brackish waters
steaming into amnesia. Frogs commit quick suicide by flopping in front of the
blurs on the harsh waves of screeches and sunburn. The forest is cluttered with
dead forest. Branches and leaves conflict everywhere; the forest is
cannibalizing itself, spelling out the sad agony of its collapse with dry
hieroglyphics. “He did not turn in his report in a timely manner. He put forth
minimum effort.” Repetitive, bereft of insight. High expectations turned to
seagull specks in a Goethe landfill. The advanced architecture of a palsied
dwarf in a closed bowling alley - the lanes filled with dying buzzards - the
only light bleeds from the pinball machines and the cigarette ends of the
smoking bowling team. “When’re ye gonna git thet ol’ radio workin’?” Parts are
expensive and small and incomprehensible. I can’t fix it. It isn’t safe here. Gray
globules of space matter itch like pink insulation on his sweater neck. It
starts to rain unrefined memories. Memories of
Expedition Four:
She bounced on the bed and I watched her black hair flop and wave with the mute
surprise of gravity. She beckoned me with black gloves, pouched out her eyeballs
with foggy, noncommittal intent. “Y’wanna fuck me, Horse?” she said. There was
no promise in the question. There wasn’t even a question in the question. It was
one big Grade-A ape between us - a gorilla where my libido used to be. A
catatonic come-on. Where her legs united oozed a tumorous wall of cancer-hardened
cervix. Penetration impossible for the moment. But her hands- thin, smooth,
graceful, casting dancing shadows on the ceiling as she bounced. God her hands
were as lovely as a war-torn ballet. Too lovely to look at. Men went mad at the
sight of her nude cuticles. She positioned her hands for maximum effect. She
acted out Custer’s Last Stand with lithe, gliding shadow puppets. The bed
stretched away like an earthquake under a field and she kicked off her wooden shoes
and they landed like an obituary on the bottomless floor. “Hey! Y’wanna horse
me, Fuck?” And then she waggled out her obscene pink tongue; it stretched out
so far I could see the roots. I thought of the panicked spasms of a gasping, land-stranded
fish. That’s what her tongue looked like. She threw back her head in mock
orgasmic revelry. Rain patted the glass with stained fingertips. Let me in.
“Let me out!”
Luke is trapped in a suicide cell with the Captain. They
stand at the mirror, both staring at the other’s unfamiliar reflection. None of
the reflections look like each other - individuality lost in the fractal mix -
they didn’t blink until the Captain opened his mouth and black viscous liquid
oozed from between his swollen lips.
“What the fuck,
mate...”
“Gblo ahead. Shbloot,”
he sputtered through a mouthful of black bile.
Expedition Five:
She says, “I’m sorry I got blood on your new jacket. It’s this damn Stigmata...”
A forgetful hotel clerk once saved my life. The lawn was a dense expanse of
lost laundry and nothing to eat - Every fifteen minutes they take attendance -
whether you’re sleeping or eating or talking or reading or what - every fifteen
minutes. The worried old gods with bleeding ulcers dribble divine tea into the
open mouths of rabidly anxious baboons. Or so they tell me. A bottle of bloated,
sated, ancient mosquitoes sits on a mink shelf; each insect contains volumes of
historical DNA from the rule of Caligula - it’s right next to my bankrupt
ambition and my bleeding caecum into a teacup - the aging prostitute rubs fresh
blackberries against her dry bloodless lips - the illusion of youth, even
children want it. I used to play in a stream of ruby carnivorous sewage dyed
with the red of raging infection - a slug river of noisome pollution. That was
before the dull tools and sharp glass and the constant pillow of pain in my unlikely
head. The revolution will be led by dead plankton. The obese American sits in a
hay-strewn basement that smells of opium smoke and urine, licking dried blood
from a dead cat banquet. It is a low, bell-ringing formaldehyde night and the
only radiance in the cellar comes from a pale luminous worm that sits squirming
and glowing like a sack of expanding wet grain in the cobweb corner. The
American belches and scratches his hairy nodules. A fight breaks out on the
next floor – again – “I did seven years in federal prison! I ain’t afraid of
you!” The monuments in Washington are built on the backs of a thousand sneering
nostrils. The American lifts his gout-inflamed leg and brings it down on a pile
of bones that were never connected to anything. They shatter and clatter on the
lunar surface forever. And Jesus Christ, on deformed loan from a hymen-colliding
Passion Play will fill your Christmas stocking with thorns and nails and blood-soaked
desert sand and Charles Laughton expels nitrous oxide from his groaning fat
man’s colon while a vast choir of microcephalic children sings of -“Roads and
toads, AIDS and tirades, of apes and rapes and lonely seascapes, transfusions,
ablutions, addictions and fictions and roses and Moses and noses, afflictions.
Syphilis,
chrysalis, rotor and you.
Tuberculosis, gnosis and seminal glue.
Microchips,
radar-blips and Art Linkletter too!”
Only two of us applaud.
Black rabies shaped like the alien genitals of all six sexes.
Leave it to the morning group meeting to explore the stifling awkwardness of
Expedition Six: Tell
Tell me
“Tell me
how
“Tell me how to jump daddy!”
“Sit down.”
“But
I wanna...”
“Sit down I said!”
She plopped to
the floor like a lynching victim cut from an angry limb. He crossed the room
and began shaving.
“Daddy’s too busy to play right now.”
She wanted to say
something.
Meanwhile, the
TELL Clown jumped out from the cracks in the floor and grinned at her. Daddy
was oblivious to the Clown’s presence. The clown bobbed its fat head and
gurgled a high motorboat sound, “Brgblrrgblrgglb rehrgdblngbrr...!!!”
She flinched and
gasped. Daddy turned around. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!!!!!”
The TELL Clown
turned and thumbed his big red nose, giving daddy an enthusiastic, caustic
raspberry.
She tried to
scream but her voice was gone, it was blood and gristle swirling down the drain
with daddy’s hair and shaving cream.
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