Blood Mask: On Room 237 or, Bonny Billy vs. Wendy Carlos

This is our mother-brain: a synth, raga, and a donkey. It shed hair, hard pressed by the question that doppelgangers are hawks carving chairs to disappear. And this beard is how I growl, see nothing but “impossible windows” in the goat-light of a film clip.

*

Here is the hotel where we strip rooms, luggage-stuffed organs, gutted screeches and a wave. This is not a lunar mission. These are not notes about shapeshifting. This is about wolves, eagles, and the subtext of a frozen frame.

*

We are a hedge maze: a duck is Jack, a boy’s sweater, beastman, finality, cacophonic pastness, gold rushes like “all the best people.” I’ve left you a key.

*

Unmask me in blood, mother-brain. Flood the shaft with royalty. Men in robes clink glasses when music blues the light. Unravel. This carpet is a diamond pattern of brothers, a family escaping these “pictures in a book.” All is not yet.

*

Not real. I’ll bring that ball and gown to the hospital as an alternate ending. It’s fit to shine. Show me the prince who looks like a Minotaur for this tale, our lost soundtrack of revelation, is the final interpretation on how to maunder.

*

Keep to a whisper. The dead do not whisper, they sing master

Goblins: an Essay

I am at the house—again—to ignore a bag of bread, shell casings; guests stare, gnaw the perimeter like trees that get tangled in your hair when I bring you cake. You are hungry, tossing potato sacks down stairs. Let us sit at the table and wonder, we can conjure how to stop time. Rum raisin is not my prayer. You would know this if you didn’t fall asleep on street corners or use your belt and stave hunger, stay the father. I once saw my grandfather come out of the mirror. We built molotov cocktails in the bedroom and set priests on fire—the driveway is where goblins burn. Humans burn. Priests burn. We know how young men run through forests and drink milk, become branches or paste for maidens to eat. We hobble around the camper. I’ve brought popcorn and corn cobs for us to suck until we explode in gorilla suits with pink star-trails and organ flare. It’s not enough—melt. It’s not enough—save my mother from eating an apple. I’ve taken showers in green, hid under covers and shoo away teen boys who feign love for girls who take trips in vans to Nilbog. My grandfather is an angel. Goblins don’t exist. Repeat. This is not your kingdom of shadows. This is Provost in hell. We are a modern family: the van, sunlight, clover leaves and pianos lure mouths open—this is about not eating food. And if we speak, we shut our eyes to hear. And if we scream hard enough, our family just might sprout magic windows and stones of love. Press your hand against the stone. Press your hand against my heart of ham. Feel blood run. I’m made of sap, leaking son. 

THINGS: AN ESSAY (via Eyeslit-Crypt)

A new essay(istic) piece influenced by John Carpenter’s THE THING is up at my other home, The Eyeslit-Crypt. Read on, readers: THINGS: AN ESSAY

The Maze

It wasn’t that I was a writer and you a wife or a good place for our son to play. It was none of this. I don’t speak of dark kitchens at night when you are asleep and I am at the edge of the window looking at windows upon windows—how hot night becomes when soaked in drinks from a locked cupboard or freezer. I should have spoken of axes and typewriters. Typing is not just the clack of the keys or the insertion of paper into the machine, it is a ghost of hate that I will turn novel. I will complete this ghost even if it means I should reach a baseball bat or you walking up the stairs backwards, you dragging me to the freezer, but I’ve slashed all engines, dismantled the transmission and stolen the family key. I have the key. Here is where love lives unchangeable in the glow of soft light. It’s 1920 and I’m wearing a tux. You will notice my tux, because there was a photograph taken of so many people and you were not among them. We were not yet married. You have never stood in the kitchen at night or used an ax to chop down a door. There is more light where you are. The chef comes. I am redder after dark. But I’ve learned. I’ve learned how to follow your little steps around corners. You move quicker than the father. It’s my burden to be a father. I will make things right. Fathers make things right. It snowed on my birthday. My fingers can no longer type like the way snow falls on a maze at night. And it is night when we step into the maze. It is all I can do to give you something to remember me by—in the kitchen, the bright kitchen where you eat ice cream and drive trucks into hotel rooms. There is a room in the maze and I have the key. I’ve seen they way the other women smile. I have seen the father of the girls and I have to keep walking this maze so someday you’ll know what it means to be a father. I won’t carry you far. I won’t carry you at all.

THE CABIN OF YOUR LACE SLASHER

We enter the cabin—it’s often a cabin, a house of wood: lights dim, click off. This is how it begins. Girls play guns in the woods, stack stick-piles by the creek and summon fire in Shinto dirt. They stick fingers in the dirt—never like this, not a blood soaked ritual by the grave. It ends up like this. Shane is the first to go: lopped off legs, eyes gouged, hair torn, mouth zeroed. There are no football players in our house on this night of red—not anymore. First names are not written, they are jack ‘o lanterned and lit. Do not use a hacksaw or a meat grinder or an ax. We know this. We know how to throw rocks in empty windows as if hitting a ghost-girl or a rivered spirit will release the darkness of being a teen. Shane is a teen, so is Eva, Linda, John, and Bill—dead, dead, dead. They are not fashion models. This is not Milano. Cut. Arms pile in the fireplace of the cabin: a fisherman’s net, a brick, a saw blade, rope. This drip is the sound of teen snapshots on Tumblr. Leave. Suck drugs from the soaking lungs of bones in the closet. Burn the oven. Torch the cabin. A step does not make a sound. The rocks we throw in the windows of the cabin in the woods, when we hold them in our teen hands, they are soundless oracles. They never make a sound and I would like to think of that ghost-girl in the dark by the window. She is still there and knows this night is a teen slasher, a way to ruin parties: the sex, the drugs, the blood, the dirt. Turn off the lights.