Acid Fizz 1 (Bethany Victoria Price Remix)

This is just a section of a really thoughtful and cool lineation Bethany did of "Acid Fizz - 1."

It extends another leg and both limbs

rapidly needle us and roll us into the web. 

We can’t move our legs or spine, our whims

are silenced. But no –  how can I be left

on the Earth, trapped?  How can I be

contained in matter when I am less

than ether?  The spider inspects me

and I know it will consume us.  The silk finesse

fills in over our eyes.  Its legs prod us, finally

wrapping us tighter and tighter.  Every

pause between jabs I expect to feel

its mouth on our head, to feel the acids

digesting us in its hideous body. We will be its meal, 

and where will my spirit go?  Deeper, placid

into this world, absorbed in the spider’s gut? 

Back into the darkness as an insect’s ghost?

For the first time I feel what I used to imagine death

would be.  No limbs to move, no eyes to see, just a host 

of sound, which slows then stops as I steady my breath,

and my antennas bind together. 

There’s no evidence there is anything

outside of my thoughts except that

I feel the bug’s brain still turning. I wish I could say something – 

I wish I could tell it that I’m sorry, a place mat

for his anger. It’s trying to breach my thoughts. 

It tugs my mind through its own

and shows me a path to something, to the chord

that released the toxic fog.  I hear a moan,

and it is put in front of me as if waiting for me to pull it, lord

of this machine.

I grasp it and I steam

from our pores and float

through the silk tomb. It seems 

I am a gas expanding into the world, a moat

between the ground and the sky. 

I waft above the cocooned millipede

and am pained to leave it behind. 

I must be acidic because I burn the spider, proceed

through it, as I engulf it.  It’s exoskeleton, a burnt orange rind,

browns and it writhes within me.

           

I expand further, rise above the battle,

then above the desktops.  The world

thins.  The desks, the shelves, the rattled

man at his computer, the walls all whirl,

blur together. 

I lose the Earth.  The darkness I’ve lived

in so long without making it my home

racks back into focus. My mind gives,

Only the radio follows me there, a sound dome,

then it dissolves away too.

What's did, is did.

FM #2, Cherry, Pecan, or Banana Cream?

make me happy and indulge me. listen to this song before the story begins...

$4 in Harv Jensen’s wallet. Enough for pie and gas. He steered around the corner in accordance with the white arrow on the Hannity-Frakes Campus sign. He rotated the radio knob and the stereo cracked awake, projecting green behind the dial and spitting out a halfway-sung-up song. He tuned it to the hit parade, not for himself, but for Benny. On cue, right when he straddled the dial on the right place, a song began.

            Students strolled the sidewalks and smoked and one hopped on a motorcycle and u-turned just in front of Harv. It was death defiant, not in that he should have died, but that he was kicking the idea of caution in the pants. And then Harv recognized the song. It was odd. He’d never heard it before, didn’t listen to the radio. Unless he heard it in Hatty’s or in line at the drug store.

            The chant under the sticky pop song, it tickled under his brain’s skin, it knew some exiled part of him that had starved alone for decades. South Africa. He’d known that song there, a version of it. They’d stolen it and given it the American treatment. In a minute or two, Benny would stride out to the car, books in hand, knapsack over his shoulder, looking just like Harv did two decades ago but in a different costume. Harv had been sweaty, in tattered clothes, a sheathed machete dangling from his belt. He laughed at the idea of Benny outside his dorm, chatting with a tail-tied coed, and a six-gun holstered at his side the way Harv used to wear his. If Benny saw Harv the way he’d been… Harv looked through that image to the bright bare trees before him, the Ford Galaxy coming the other way, the professor lighting a cigarette on his way home.

            He tasted a wine he’d drank on the other side of the world but imagined it flowing from a flask of blood. His arm cutting down a vine, the Tiger Moth’s chipped propellers hacking into their spin.

The rubber of his Buick rolled the asphalt, a student’s inhaled a wheezy laugh, a girl’s ass danced behind her skirt as she walked. He’d almost missed the dorm until he saw the sign, “Warden Hall.” He drove in the break and swung to the curb. Harv hadn’t seen Benny but he was right there next to the car as if he’d popped from a crack in the sidewalk. They did their “hello, good to see you, how’ve you been” thing but Harv’s head hopped from note to note in the song like the bouncing ball in a sing-along.

Benny told him about his classes’ ups and downs because he’d asked him, but he wanted the moment Benny was done to suggest they do something adventurous before they drove home. He wanted something from one of the juvenile delinquent movies he’d never seen. Drop a nickel in a jukebox, sip a soda, wherever that kid on the motorbike was going is where he wanted to go.

The song ended, a car dealership commercial took its place. Benny was on his Prussian history syllabus and Harv jumped in with a factoid from an old book he’d read on the Teutonic Nights. The conversation volleyed back to Benny. Harv fought through the sunshine and the streetlights, back to the jungle, but it wasn’t there, just more sunshine and road behind a windshield. He only had $4 with him anyway, enough for gas, enough for pie. They’d just go home, tell him more about his classes, get the pie, and go home.

... and listen to this one after. hugs and kisses.

Mama Mama

Wake now, rise and take rightful claim to this new and adventurous future. Where laws and standard crumble and our feet are burnt black while we stumble on it’s ashes.

Hells bells and awful tells the wide world of dirt is a-blazin. Heavy Hands on the editing table. Two new films in pre-production, The Wild Introduction book on tape (I know! Who wasnt asking for that?) and a super secret project that’ll rear it’s head a month from now!

Feelin free, feelin free.

Happy Birthday Lil T!

May your days be filled with pets and whisky and many fancy cheeses.

parenthetical

pollock, number 8

you can't know this about joe: he quit. never another smoke, not so long as he lives, not another pack, not a drag. he's done. we can't come out and tell you that about joe, but you would know that if you'd spent time with the guy. go a little deeper into something you really can't know about him: he was a stress smoker. you don't know either of these things, or let's say you do, but not because i just told you. you just knew, but there were all other kinds of things in your mind that clouded those facts (political elections, a ruined pair of pants, an argument over methods of bird-watching, a weak orgasm, guilt) and kept them from the from the front of your mind.

now you know so much that you don't know anything at all. this song plays all around your head. you drift down a deserted city street at night. it's warm, clear sky, no one in sight, you're drifting right down the center lane. drifting, drifting, drifting. it's not a nice neighborhood, but its not run down. a gas station, a concert hall, a women's health clinic, an italian restaurant, all closed but the gas station, nothing over three stories high. people are alive in the city, but they're all just out of sight. a car comes the other way and you whip around to follow it with your eyes as it passes. you're in the car with joe. he stops at a blurry red light. he looks out his window and he lights a cigarette. if i didn't have to tell you about him, it would have been a beautiful moment.

Halloween

It's about confrontation through escape. It's about scaring your mind into another placer. Horror is a very potent form of fantasy. You confront images of life but a masquerade of it. There is an art to the horror movie or the haunted house, to black metal, to Halloween costumes, the jack-o-lantern. It reminds you of the world's borders. The darkness, the impossible does. And then we see the world we live in from a different vantage as if we looked into the black night hard enough and saw that backs of our own heads. We're all frightened, at least most of us are, of death and a lot else. Horror as an art is escapism but it's an escape to our fears, which is very different than other kinds of fantasy.

We're all scared and many of us don't know what we're scared of, the things we can't quite think about, the dreams we can't remember. In the Halloween movie credits, Michael Meyers is referred to as "The Shape." He's as bland a villain as there can be. Pure white mask, no motive, no weakness, no qualities. He just kills. He is an empty shape, a container for our dread. Anxiety, depression, guilt, loneliness, the things that lay in a ragged pile at the dim end of the hallway, are given names and faces in horror. Freddy, Michael Meyers, Dracula, Bob.

I'm tempted to write off Halloween celebrations like trick or treating and getting drunk in skimpy outfits as some kind of perversion of Halloween, but both actually maintain the same idea that I like about Halloween. Going to a bar with zombies and nurses and superheroes names what's unreal in the world. Halloween is the signpost at the border of the Twilight Zone, making realit that much more acute when it's woken up to in the morning.