Tuesday, January 7, 2014

For Diamanda Galas, Albert Ayler, and the war and plague dead of the 20th Century.


Fluttering bird born by dust dawns the streets. A cross throbs in the field; blood from torn throats decorated its wooden limbs. A howl from the delta to the cities built with bones on the Asian steppe. Dance through the plague on broken limbs. Disease has walked around for years killing artists. The man in the soaked suit turning round and round, his metal throat sealed by the river, a river later filled with the weight of so many corpses that many would not even receive names. Burning magazine pages float through the sick ward, they have brought the sweating and sore covered men here for days, the sweat glistens, and the air is poison to all of them. Twilight god came to test his children he made them insane, angry as any animal in the woods but gifted them music and words, every sickness and murder removed from nature by the refinement we deliver it. One day everything will be as it should be said the man before his lungs filled with the abandoned napkins, vomits, jizz, pharmaceuticals, night sweat, urine, and shit of an entire city. Terrors frighten him on every side, and chases at his heels. His strength is hunger-bitten, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. By disease his skin is consumed, the first-born of death consumes his limbs. He is torn from the tent in which he trusted, and is brought to the king of terrors.
The cross lusts for blood. Men in chains working a field as prison bulls with hardons and shotguns linger in saddles.
Crows fat on carrion carried the piano to the pine grove piece by piece. Skins of the artists of the city had travelled by the wind and caught in the branches. The Piano keys worked themselves and the skin shook and trembled in the still grasping wind. How could they build this city on bones and hope for it to stand? His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above.
Old world turned to bales of hair and bone cities by the driven men. Darkness trembles out across the century. The pine trees fill with faces, the makeup peels and wolves grin out. Prison cells where the shit is washed out by hose once a week, over flowing bedpans in the plague hospital.
The medieval cannons tear down the wall of the church. The scattered firing was over and the bayonetting and machine-gunning of the wounded was all that remained. They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east.
She saw her grandmother, her uncle, her daughter, her son all lie down by the side of the road. They never moved again until the gases danced their bloated forms around. She has no offspring or descendant among her people, and no survivor where she used to live. Her feet bled. She left a trail of ruddy footprints into the desert.
Their lungs filled with water as they swam for the allied ships. The ships were perched too far out to sea from the fire and blood drenched city. Little bubbles of blood and shouts burst from the waves. The sailors stared at cards and liquor and pretended to not hear the singing that would draw them to the treacherous shore. Crumbling empire lashing out in a semblance of a dying animal. In his tent dwells that which is none of his;
Brimstone is scattered upon his habitation.

War whoop and field holler. Cross covered in animal water falls over. Only dust moves in these hallways now. A network of hospital beds and prison cots all drenched in sweat and shit, forms too weak to move. Surely such are the dwellings of the ungodly, and such is the place of him who knows not god.

Singing at night, singing in the afternoon. Nocturnes for tear stuttered sleep. Paint covered fingernails and makeup cracking. The cathedral echoes with the vibrato.
Like cockroaches the rain came down. This rain bundled off the coast and made the city filthier with each pass. An epidemic of burning pipes and wards of ruined flesh, the city held tight to its riches. Its children lived for murder and rape and the city hated them. Shoeless artists starved but felt light fill their limbs, limbs drawn to ceilings. His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street.
She was called a witch. The word was written in reeking marker on white boards. She accepts the term. She is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. Her skin turned colors and two new heads popped out of her shoulders. She brought the piano in to perform a ritual, she wanted to pull all the blood out of the air and weave a monument.
The patient lifts himself to shake her hand. The hand wrenches free of the socket.
If a man dies, shall he live again?
The piano breathed as she moved her hand across its teeth. She pulled from the dredges of the century. Generations eaten by wars, Advertising burning the minds of the next generation, the ugly faces of the exterminating angels that crawled through the cracks in time and flung burning airplanes and darts of madness into eyes. Her frame trembled as she tried to draw it all in and perform the ritual.

The gas clung to their clothes for days. A hand could touch the fabric and then rub an eye. That eye would go blind.
He feels only the pain of his own body, and he mourns only for himself.
Factories churning out shells. Handmixed plaster for the limbs.
Truckloads of coffins. Running out of nurses and morphine. Turning bloody bandages to the other side and reapplying to wounds. Doctors numb with cocaine in the burn tent.
Angels leaving long rivers of shit over the fields of men. A cross left to stand despite waves of violence.
Sailing over the plain with celestial arrogance came the vessel, gold angels holding horns decorated its outer architecture and its engines rattled teeth in their sockets. Days of fire had poured from its belly. Children who had eaten dust for months felt their teeth melt in their mouths and their swollen bellies deflate. The pathetic houses on the plain dissipated like chaff. The angel’s expression never changed, their visages lit with bale fire, and the vessel with its agonizing engines appeared again and again, turning the starving valley to an oily smear.
Two mile long tubes crafted from ceramic. The body toxins move down the tubes in frenzied flood. Darkness, laughter and repelling thoughts lift free. Scavengers loose in the blood sewer. The gore tears at the material of their boots, desperate children and adults in no condition to work anywhere else. All who worked here eventually are merged with the blood and followed it out the tubes. Burning filaments crease the firmament turning animals of the tundra to ash. The permafrost melts rotting bones from distant epochs.
Solar anus issuing weather systems of waste. Ecosystems grow in the emissions.
She pulled her fingers back from the cracks in the century. They were coated in mud. The ritual was breaking down.

The plague ship ground to halt between the Ferris wheel and the carousel. Waves of fog covered it. Confused bats poured free and decorated windows for blocks. The men didn’t wash their hands they walk about the cafeteria and throw lunches on the floor. Nervous laughter from the children.
The men left idols made from filth in the image of infants on doorsteps throughout downtown. The idols shat mold that decorated where they were removed from.
Columns of coffins were brought to the town square. Flesh emptied out of them and streaked the square. Skulls were left in the gutters until they got picked up by the truck that erased graffiti.

1 comment:

  1. Please give your contact to diamanda.assist@gmail.com.

    ReplyDelete