Walla Walla Sequences – Greg Bem Zombie For Natasha When I stare in and I don't know what is. When I don't know what is but I stare anyway. And I type. And I regress. And I type. And I fire. I am fire and the flame coat melts skin. The flame melts the corners and the circles of shadow. Shadow made by a long burnt out flame. I stare at her image in my mind and see nothing but frames. Frames rotted by ash, the great suffocation! The great mire we find slugging through: like bullets (in molasses, in the thick of mud of dirt of water) as they launch to be failure, to fail and to be caught. What does it take to flick the match and how long must one hold it? I imagine the sizzle of the blood, which is too wet to burn. I imagine the evaporation of blood into steam, the misty gas death of blood. Liquid converted into that which seeks to be free! Try to keep up. Try to be in the firmest moment. The clearest now. The shuffle of paper. Kindling. Your cultural kindling makes you most combustible. There are constables who have had purer looks than you. I await messages in dreams: talk is cheap so we chant against one another. We don the hoods of the blackest smothering. We are the mouthing chaos fanned out like flame in the wind. We let the burnt collapse the structures so many rely upon. When we are done, we find more to do and do it orange. What we deserve when we deserve it is the undoing. Scorched earth covered in books' worth of charred birds. Scorch birds sing no song when blackened in the ash of feather. Gone to the song and gone to the blessed space to sing. Left is the pit reeking of decay and absence: filled with death. Where do the people who created this gouge go to? Slouching where does the scrivener sulk off to? Buried Nuns [Named After the Fact] Notes 1. Rust barons. Rusted barons. What are the rust barons? Versus batons. What defines a baton. Versus a rod. Or at least a bayou. Could work depending on the room. Or the story told. Or the buzz held. To have as much. To get bored. 2. Lesser really. It is more because you fill less with the meaning of your latest self, your fullest self, which is always composed of the idea and its idea of itself. Our consciousness. Claustration of the Road For Natasha In my dream we are flight down road and across plains and deserts we spread wings, open eyes, shutter thin layers of skin: open, click, closed. We are doom eminent and pearl-colored satin. We are pearls of creature. Devouring and transpicuous. It is risk: we eat and we explode like vomit. I am imagining bodies flying down road and I am imagining the dead who came before us rotting. There might be ants. They could be dead too. What phantasm of fantastic reality. What wondrous mayhem we have to look forward to, and then back from, and so on, we make it, we move it, we become attuned to it. You've become attuned perhaps, or perhaps I am mistaken, taken aback by the mystery in your eyes, in your ruby colored gemstones, made of soft tissue, taking in world, warding. Wobble of the vibrato of the roadside shedding rust flake as we careen across archway of stone and, once arrested by the mountain's firm hum, we fall into spiral of unconscious, masked pendant of time ticking and peaking. The air is flavored in the glory of dust. I want to sleep. I want to gasp for air and pass out, fade away, pass on, too tired to be afraid. Pre Sequences 1 Broke her back slamming her into the face of the clock. Serpentine rhythm matching serpentine symbols along the Western edge of the city. A blistered sun sets while overhead automotive gas clogs and moans. River above. Corpse of the self is sitting amidst the pallid twist and spin. Charcoal horizon, smudged smog or depression enhancing contrast. This is the river of ashes. This is the minute hand scratching the skin off the back near the spine in a single, furrowed divot. This is the liquid sky flooded with pollutants. I am maniacal in my shirt of sun and blood borne illness. I strip my gaze to pick the skin from under my ears, smearing it between my fingers, the nails chewed and piling up, long ago discarded from my body, spent time collecting on the carpet of the car. Pre Sequences 2 The pills came today and they were modest. Plastic opaque, a cylinder is as good as the skull that holds it in its laughter. There are pauses. There are trees dotting the lawns of people who have secured their rite to voyage. A voyage in a stagnant bog. A journey through cascading light: this is the space of the noise of the city, as it cackles and crowns. We sit upon the throne of greed and its moldy layers obscure the image of the carcasses. Someone laid to rest, to die. There is the pause and peering into lightly textured mirrors. It is black, this gaze. We are mute, ghastly. The color of ghosts going outside to fight: the blend, it is bounty. It is the music of strung organs puckered into systems. I can feel each one when clutched in the psychosis of the basement pit. Your rouge eyes lunged and ripped open the vacation of madness sitting in the breath of the stars. Pre Sequences 3 No blame but in the inching deprivation of sensation. No cause for concern. A tinted window. A dent in the fender. The exhaust lounges beneath the body. Rust and the weeping trickle of salt. We have corrosion. We have deference. There are people who have decloaked and monitor from the gutter of suburban monotony. How long will I let the boiling water sit before I take the action further with my hands, that same action I once mouthed in silence to you, made aware to, and then refused to commit. In my disappointment, as vague yet certain it is, there is a shroud of knowledge that will keep the trees looking limp and the claws of my fingers cold, but energized. Potion of amber hue: the soothsayers have blotched skin, their liver disease extending across their skin as the symbols of mathematics force the water to spill over the edge of a cast iron pot. Pre Sequences 4 The machines smile back when they are devouring. Clamp and crunch: exception to rules keep us awake beyond our comfort. And yet we know the simulation well. We know what we say we understand. Crows fly fattened by our dried bread. The compost bulges with a composition of menace, mucus, and malevolence. Slices of rotten meat. Noodles hanging in an agony of sour and spite. Beyond there is a house and in that house: distance, separation, and a dull screen hovering through a veil of dust. It is turned on. The glow is mesmerizing, but there is no one to see its transmission. The final display of electric current was for one purpose only: abandonment. And with it the archive of our existence began its decay. For what is nihilism if not for a total lack of audience to your most immortal performance? Pre Sequences 5 In my own rendition of Bleak House, your avatar is the house, and you are inviting inside narrator upon narrator. Future narration is diet: to consume is to prevent story. To exhume from life, to remove from possibility. To obliterate the potential spawn of ideas. Uproot the narrative. Gut the plot. The words softly spoken arise through a bleak humor. From the tips and corners and ridges of the lips, blossoming flowers of agony are what we know through mistake, mournful memory, forever the childish misguidance. I hold the simulation of the anti-home in my hands like one holds an artichoke: the delicacy is quaint but antiquated. So subtle yet dominant and tangible. There is discomfort in this sensory foray. When skin mixes to skin and all that looms is the immense sequence of bell pulls: chance of the weak, destiny of torture. Where the required cord is metallic and barbed to draw blood, and the walls of brick surrounding and muffling emulate their grinning creators. The instrumentation releases, and vibrations are sent. Doom call. Flooded chant of aurally recognized. Our ears are commanding in their resilience. This is harrowing. Orange broom of fatalism: scruff on floor keeping us haunted, mortified, dulled through exhaustion of labor and each acidic task. Pre Sequences 6 But our eyes ache as well as our mind shifting before those who remained. Stayed to be present before the flames. Earning their keep. Giving penitence. What do we know of being humble? How do we learn to become figures within the robe of night? Beyond the mountains there is the wash of heat and great stillness is kept moving through the wind, shuffled and repeated. Dealt with by the hands of our most uproarious figures. A tar of blood slowly sucks its way across the bottom of the mouth, the mixture composed, conformed, motioned. I love the peaks in their majesty. Dragons of bone and scale. Flames flickering through rock and channel. The age of cloud is long past: we now face the ache of visibility. It is too much to know, and yet we find our stupor with every addicted, enslaved approach. Pre Sequences 7 Known not before the fallen. Known not before the unrest. The unusual and the oaths that were made shrugged off like the towel before the bath. Bath of ungodly heat: so hot it brings its skin to a pop, to its closure. There is no boiling process just as there is no longer any skin. We are laughing skeletons living amongst the remains of the humans, amongst the people captured in image, video, movement. We say things like “Murder” and ask questions like “Before the gong do you still watch?” But there is no one. No listener but in ourselves. Our true microphone in harmony with our shoulders, where they attach to the areas of the back and neck we constantly forget. Dirt on the floor and in the cupboards. Above the refrigerator. Melted plastics burning on the side of the road: I remember the smell of burnt palms and coconut husks slowly wisping into the yellowed evening. There is always more poverty inside you waiting to burst. To explode as trash does when placed within the ugly white plastic of our people. The societal shift. The mood swings. Ripping up the most purposed vegetation and throwing it upon the pyre. We are ready to sacrifice. We are ready to implode. Bring forth the writers so they may document, and allow for the most advanced, uncontrollable forms of augmentation.