The Devil and John Berryman Took a Walk Together
Well, at long last I've decided to shutter my little corner of the blogosphere.
Nothin dramatic about it, it's just that place exerts a tidal pull on my brain that I find distracting to the work I'm doing now.
Many thanks to everyone who's made this blog such a cool project for me for the last year, including robert-nyc, garrison, alex, Saä Viccenzo, t.pkendall, dave, nikolas, porcelain skull, postbreakitup, scott h. and mr. cooper.
See y'all around around Dennis' place and your own nooks in the interwebs.
xo,
Mark (teenagekicks)
P.S.: One last fiction fragment, this one about icy-cold, refreshing drinking water:
EXCERPT
Water, let’s have water all around...
Drink the water to the quote unquote last dregs, I said, and laughed, because water doesn’t have last dregs, then stopped because of course water has last dregs…
The table groaned, brushed steel warping, walnut splintering…
You can’t see the dregs but they’re present, we think we’re drinking pure water but we’re drinking a noxious paste, an admixture of dregs, and I hurled the pitcher of water at the window, I cursed the Sunnis and Shi’as and Kurds for forcing me to this point, where I would see water for what it was, nothing but dregs, we go our whole lives living and thriving on water, we elevate water as a pure substance when it isn’t pure at all, it’s a putrid substance, a weeping bile, all water is corrupted by the grave and spiced with human remains…
One day the Sunnis and Shi’as and Kurds open our eyes to this fact with their silence, by the intensity of their uncompromising and conspiratorial silence they force the scales from our eyes, scales that we’ve come to love and cherish with our hearts without ever once taking notice of them with our minds, these scales fall away and we discover we’ve only ever been drinking tomb-water, that the bottled water and the tap water, the water imported from Zurich or Barbados or pumped from the well in the countryside, even the water we kneel to cup from the mountain stream, is juice perking up from mass graves, sweat dripping from the vaulted crossbeams of mausoleums, water is nothing but liquid waste, ice solid waste, and every sip chokes us like mummy wheat, it's a fact that if we had any sense of propriety we’d dust our jam jars with lye before drinking from them, these potters fields, these pit latrines fit only for the disposal of bodies, one pit latrine for heads and hands, another for trunks…
If we had any sense at all we’d sew our lips up with fishing line and knock away the IVs, tear away the straps and restraints that anchor us to our beds and rip out the IVs, damaging our veins if necessary, doing the quote unquote necessary work to our veins so that they’re no longer of any use to the doctors and nurses, every vein destroyed for these quote unquote medical professionals, we must destroy the last usable vein so it’s no longer possible to pump us full of cremains, and if they try to run a line up our nose we’ll sew up our noses, too, sew everything up and cauterize the holes, the nose holes and the mouth holes, and at last we’ll crawl out into the desert, at last we’ll find our desert homes, and all the self-loathing we felt in Pittsburg, to say nothing of Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Toronto, will vanish…
We read about water that is mountain pure, that bubbles up through artesian springs, but it is only ever bubbling up through boneyards and leaking down gigantic heaps of cadavers….
In the boneyards the coffins are stacked five or six deep, grave-tenders have no shame, they sell a plot to one person and when that one is in the ground they yank the stone and sell the plot again, often they don’t even yank the stone they simply etch over the old name with the next one and the one after that until it’s been obliterated by the succession of names and they’re forced to replace the stone, they often go through many stones in this fashion, my point being that the water is bubbling up through at least twenty or thirty bodies per plot, plots which are by no means generously space but crammed in together in such a way that you vomit to think about it, but twenty or thirty bodies per plot is a lowball figure, as a general rule these plots deeper and denser, often there are hundreds or even thousands of bodies jammed and stuffed and jellied into a single plot which is so small it should be called a semi-plot, and up out of these semi-plot affairs with their thousands and tens of thousands of bodies the water comes bubbling, and as for quote unquote mountain purity such mountain purity is the purity of a mountain of maggots and guts…
p.p.s.: Don't forget to buy the new Hold Steady album -- as it happens, I'm one of the little faces on the cover, my proudest life achievement yet. (Upper right hand quadrant, the guy w/a sort of blank expression and asymetrical haircut.)
Nothin dramatic about it, it's just that place exerts a tidal pull on my brain that I find distracting to the work I'm doing now.
Many thanks to everyone who's made this blog such a cool project for me for the last year, including robert-nyc, garrison, alex, Saä Viccenzo, t.pkendall, dave, nikolas, porcelain skull, postbreakitup, scott h. and mr. cooper.
See y'all around around Dennis' place and your own nooks in the interwebs.
xo,
Mark (teenagekicks)
P.S.: One last fiction fragment, this one about icy-cold, refreshing drinking water:
EXCERPT
Water, let’s have water all around...
Drink the water to the quote unquote last dregs, I said, and laughed, because water doesn’t have last dregs, then stopped because of course water has last dregs…
The table groaned, brushed steel warping, walnut splintering…
You can’t see the dregs but they’re present, we think we’re drinking pure water but we’re drinking a noxious paste, an admixture of dregs, and I hurled the pitcher of water at the window, I cursed the Sunnis and Shi’as and Kurds for forcing me to this point, where I would see water for what it was, nothing but dregs, we go our whole lives living and thriving on water, we elevate water as a pure substance when it isn’t pure at all, it’s a putrid substance, a weeping bile, all water is corrupted by the grave and spiced with human remains…
One day the Sunnis and Shi’as and Kurds open our eyes to this fact with their silence, by the intensity of their uncompromising and conspiratorial silence they force the scales from our eyes, scales that we’ve come to love and cherish with our hearts without ever once taking notice of them with our minds, these scales fall away and we discover we’ve only ever been drinking tomb-water, that the bottled water and the tap water, the water imported from Zurich or Barbados or pumped from the well in the countryside, even the water we kneel to cup from the mountain stream, is juice perking up from mass graves, sweat dripping from the vaulted crossbeams of mausoleums, water is nothing but liquid waste, ice solid waste, and every sip chokes us like mummy wheat, it's a fact that if we had any sense of propriety we’d dust our jam jars with lye before drinking from them, these potters fields, these pit latrines fit only for the disposal of bodies, one pit latrine for heads and hands, another for trunks…
If we had any sense at all we’d sew our lips up with fishing line and knock away the IVs, tear away the straps and restraints that anchor us to our beds and rip out the IVs, damaging our veins if necessary, doing the quote unquote necessary work to our veins so that they’re no longer of any use to the doctors and nurses, every vein destroyed for these quote unquote medical professionals, we must destroy the last usable vein so it’s no longer possible to pump us full of cremains, and if they try to run a line up our nose we’ll sew up our noses, too, sew everything up and cauterize the holes, the nose holes and the mouth holes, and at last we’ll crawl out into the desert, at last we’ll find our desert homes, and all the self-loathing we felt in Pittsburg, to say nothing of Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Toronto, will vanish…
We read about water that is mountain pure, that bubbles up through artesian springs, but it is only ever bubbling up through boneyards and leaking down gigantic heaps of cadavers….
In the boneyards the coffins are stacked five or six deep, grave-tenders have no shame, they sell a plot to one person and when that one is in the ground they yank the stone and sell the plot again, often they don’t even yank the stone they simply etch over the old name with the next one and the one after that until it’s been obliterated by the succession of names and they’re forced to replace the stone, they often go through many stones in this fashion, my point being that the water is bubbling up through at least twenty or thirty bodies per plot, plots which are by no means generously space but crammed in together in such a way that you vomit to think about it, but twenty or thirty bodies per plot is a lowball figure, as a general rule these plots deeper and denser, often there are hundreds or even thousands of bodies jammed and stuffed and jellied into a single plot which is so small it should be called a semi-plot, and up out of these semi-plot affairs with their thousands and tens of thousands of bodies the water comes bubbling, and as for quote unquote mountain purity such mountain purity is the purity of a mountain of maggots and guts…
p.p.s.: Don't forget to buy the new Hold Steady album -- as it happens, I'm one of the little faces on the cover, my proudest life achievement yet. (Upper right hand quadrant, the guy w/a sort of blank expression and asymetrical haircut.)
posted by teenagekicks at 1:19 PM
3 comments
