Late October, early evening, fourteen years old, 1984, living with my mother and her boyfriend in their small two bedroom apartment in North Phoenix, the clamshell of my turntable gathering dust gave the illusion of something permanent. I had a room of my own! Dust filtered through the slatted windows, settling over everything, no matter how tight I ratcheted the crank — I could tongue the fine grit on my teeth, feel it on my skin, the scent of it embroidered in my sheets, and when I dragged a finger across my album covers, my record collection being the most important thing in the world to me, the thin line of broken dust may as well have been the Red Sea.

memphis crows eat well
relaxing under the black sun
crowning metro
torrented blood in a canyon
of obelisks of shrines of idols of worship
to nothing making the dirt bubble
someday the sun’s going to condense
into six miles and crush
our flesh into equations, who cares

feasting murder
circling another “senseless
tragedy” to feed––they’re all the
same meat anyways
no victim/perpetrator distinction
beaks like flechettes against bone

Sir, I have registered your desperate entreaty for guidance.  A meaningful dialogue between two receptive adults articulates in a myriad of styles.  Sensuality offers a portal to the subtle communication often not available in our daily lives.

Thousands of decades of life, love and experimental understanding have nurtured a powerfully feminine and wisely balanced woman. I offer a manner of engagement reflective of another era indeed; when grace, sensitivity and the healing power of intimacy were the standard.

As discriminating as I hope my clients to be, I take very few appointments after testing our communication skills to assure a mutually enjoyable and enriching encounter. Please offer your inquiries with a respectful metaphysical introduction and allow things to move from there. I present myself with straight-forward integrity and expect the same in return. That being said, I will simply not respond to queries that are blatantly solicitous or unforthcoming.

I’ve been wrong too many times not to talk about it. As we speak, I don’t know how deep I am beneath the house that hosts the family man, the successful writer, someone taking a chance, top of the class. Stylistic master. Working towards his doctorate. The coveted title. As his hero before him. His dad. We can still say that. God, the world that we live in. The waves that we crash through. The way they can split beds.

Derangement of the senses, is our only salvation, the only cure for death. What does it mean to say merely? What does it mean to say merely nihilism, merely solipsism?

What I say instead is precisely. I say whatever is devalued and dismissed out of hand precisely for not participating by the generally established rules of the communal debate there we must find the secret elixir if it should exist at all—among those “dead ends” one might find what is most fiercely viral, what has absolutely no survival value, what begins the terminal countdown to orgasmic self-extinction. …or, better yet, a count upward that must be suspended before it comes to any end.

Chen Zhaozi (1930–2002)

            “My first memory is the army camp at Yan’an,” wrote Chen Zhaozi in his memoir. “That memory determined all the rest.” Chen’s father was a high-ranking officer in the Red Army, and Chen went on the Long March in his mother’s arms. In 1949, the family settled in Beijing. Due to his father’s position, Chen was able to study abroad at Humboldt University in East Berlin. He attended the productions of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and in 1951 began to write his first play, Autumn Harvest, in the style of Brecht’s epic theater.

            Chen returned to Beijing in 1954 and took a position in the Ministry of Culture. He completed Autumn Harvest soon after; it was staged in 1956. The play depicts a 1927 peasant uprising in Hunan and concludes with what Chen called a “dialectical ballet.” Two years later, he completed The Water Seller, an adaptation of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, praised the play and encouraged Chen to try his hand at opera. Working with composer Zhang Ye, Chen wrote The Prairie Fire, which premiered in 1963. Set in the Ming dynasty, the opera concerns a group of farmers and their greedy landlord. Chen designed a grotesque mask for the landlord character, but the actor was unable to sing in it, and the mask had to be replaced with dark make-up.

   Can’t sleep son, been reading and was just thinking that if I could help you take that brilliant mind and reallocate all that gifting away from things of this world and into the deeper context of real spiritual things you have no idea how much you could be set free to live and live others. Anything is life first starts by decided and looking at our mind. Seeing and deciding what we think, then with that as a reference we decide what we will allow in. Today’s world is crushing with media and influence and shallowness in every possible way. There is a real Spirit realm where all things come from and are manifest, deeper knowledge and wisdom, empowering us into a place of reality where we attempt to get to with drugs, superficial beliefs and ideologies, or feelings and experiences that are temporary. For some getting high, some a fast car, some being in moral high ground, some intellectual

   stimulation and superiority… it’s all idolatry. In that sense we seek and search and look. It always come down. The bubble always bursts and we realize it’s a bust. But there is a high that transcends getting high on whatever the short term idolatry (some very short like getting wasted) can ever provide.

BABYHEAD

Those of Jesus Town are curiously out of the world. Of the Rose, reconstituted of HIS superfluity. Some heed their request with exotic fails. Thus far and dross. A Wonder.

Laminar walls squirm filth.

Egg and Sky bled HIS life

The Eremite spins around his anus. The Seeker was his first mark in a millennium, apart from the Regenerates. They were insistent brats. He perforates the skulls of the foremost, tickling for pain. The Decay-Mystic extends the beguiling prostheses and spigots along his visible axis.

The internet is Satan, says a woman on a documentary but a hole in my memory means I forget which film. Maybe it’s the don’t-speak-on-your-mobile-phone-while-driving 1 by Werner Herzog? Maybe it isn’t but I seem to remember this woman says the internet is Satan cos a guy was driving a truck while looking at INSTAGRAM and he crashed into the woman’s daughter. Killed her. A life kaput cos a trucker was amused by his partner’s selfie or whatever. Yeah. The internet is the devil’s playground, I thought at work this week. It’s the beast with a neatly trimmed hipster beard, 2 goat-like horns. Dunno what sparked the feeling but for the next few of my dot-dot-dot sections I’ll try exploring my notion that the world-wide-dreaming, which polluted my brain with pictures I can’t unsee, is the devil’s work.