[Here is most of the first section of the piece I've been working on. It's one long scene so hopefully it's not too OD. Let me know what you think if you get time to read it. I can put up more later if people are interested in reading anymore. I'll have the first 40 pages I have typed up & edited probably by Sunday afternoon if I feel motivated. Let me know what you think. You might recognize some stuff. Once again it's another fiction project where I'm incorporating my poetry. Let me have it, love it or hate it. Lots of love Commune lovelies
-ian]
Desolation & What Zero Found There
Alien Sun / Delirium Sky
Caravans enter this wasteland to perish where voices whisper out of the dust infecting travelers with a vocal cancer that pierces the skin & ransacks the body cage. It's a dying message that stains the skin with uncertainty & too much sunlight.
It is on such a day, in such a place, that finds Patient Zero rambling, through wasteland stumbling as he concerns himself with a piece of the puzzle lodged in his throat as he jigsaw gags on the big picture, Heimlich maneuvering himself if only to cough up some answers. Instead he simply vomits the days events, the whiskey & the wine he drank to settle his overthinking, seeking serenity of self but sinking into further confusion.
On nights like those it was hard to tell if it was Zero himself or some dark passenger in his skull drunk dreaming into a bottle in need of that motion sick & hating ceiling fans for the way they circulated sins. It was not the stench of Zero's sweat that bothered the other bar patrons, Zero filth stuck with days of unwash, wiping his brow of summer saturating. They smelled his crimes against modern man & he reeked of imminent execution so they circled him like vultures awaiting his untimely end.
& he hovered over his drink suffering the haunt of eyes, those other bastards eating each other out, fucking their thought of We, all their voices achatter because there was nothing left to say, only voices of the dead talking over one another. The Emersonville bar was always filled with the laughter of dearly, departed dead-enders feeding dollars to jukeboxes to pause the silence that only served to reverberate the room in echoes of undeath. Call it a coma. Call it a low that never picked itself back up.
But Zero was determined to dream himself away, to save himself from the fate of these night crawlers & small town creeps. He wanted a destiny different from that of his father Roland, to be some working class Jesus. Roland who set his son on his knee with hands of nicked-cut knuckle bends & skin scab-scarring, his sweat like holy water never to be drank from chalices. As a child Zero would study his father's eyes, once howling moons, labor hardening them into silence. The semblance of life. Zero as a boy would accompany his father in meditations of fatigue in front of the television, praying for a future for his father that wouldn't be toothless deranged. Zero swore never to become a man with clogged lungs & a sooted tongue, never a man with a mouth that surrendered & hands that stiffened & closed. Never a man who sits at the bar & lets second-hand smoke penetrate his damaged skin.
But at the bar Zero was older & idle too long. He'd spent too much time sorting through idiot afternoons, wasting away in suburbia with the small town affliction. So, Zero drank away any sobriety, nervous about his drug & alcohol haze clearing like a fucking depression, his ears buzzing with the white noise of gods' wills accumulating.
After last call Zero would walk barefoot through the streets as a means of becoming accustomed to the landscape, as a means of developing calluses to strengthen his step, as dress rehearsal for his getaway. His blood was reptile electric, contagion staining his jeans as he'd scream monologues to passersby later claiming to the police that he wasn't a pervert it was poetry, flicking embers from his cigarette that added more ash to his bare feet. & his poetry has a destination & Zero was a passenger, a rebel-heathen-prince & scumbag-trickster with diamond wings, dreaming devious & waiting to take flight.
The authorities told him he couldn't be screaming obscenities at cars or verbally harassing passersby. He explained he was merely accusing cars of going nowhere while looking for his own way out of a town that had left him dead-end unremembering. They let him off with a warning & they called his mother Isabel to drive him home. He promised her he was done with paving his way in I owe you's, that he was done with coming so close to home only to be blinded by the floodlights.
So, each night in the bar he patient plotted, the town folk whispering as they passed about this boy who seemed incompatible with the universe. Behind his back they would call him mayor of psycho city, telling tales of him like he was some madman flying full-speed, like he was some headcase half-baked.
He would only stare at his drink & say, "Get me out before I expire," until the thought came to him to get on a bus & go. Pack up his things & flee westward & leave Emersonville behind. With bounce in his step & dreams of something great he left his home, hit the highway, grabbing a window seat & watching America roll by. "Should of done this sooner," he'd say, smoking a cigarette at each rest stop, inhaling the landscape.
So, Zero, that midnight gentleman, left New York like some 21st century anthem of another American Dream in progress. The other riders avoided him like leprosy, Zero too unsociable & unclean for modern man, his pupils wide like barrels of guns, a lethal revolver black. Travel long enough & you begin to notice the repetition. Zero learned love American style. Saw all those beautiful yellow arches & sang, "McDonald's get your pussy wet, all those fat slobbering bitches face down in your cunt."
When he mustered up comfort or complete exhaustion he'd put his head against the window, fetal curled in the seat, dreaming of a contagion queen who could give him her virus kisses of perversion. He would call her his Atomic Baby Blue & dreams was where they'd meet, where she'd whisper sweet propaganda like, "Wouldn't it enlighten to partake in a little destroy?" & all the good citizens would tell him that she rotted his mind, maybe made him so skinny with unrest, but he wouldn't care open-arms cradling her disease.
Most of the time though he was kept awake thinking of days before the bruises. Like before Isabel told him to stop sucking thumb so he started clutching cock, looking up classmates skirts for a tensing of knees. Days before Roland put his hands around Zero's neck, Zero strangling his father back to express his feelings on the matter. Before he had to be hospitalized & speak with a doctor explaining to the balding vulture that he wasn't depressed, just unqualified for happiness. He couldn't forge a smile; he couldn't conjure a laugh. But in the shower he'd use his powers of observation to explore every facet of his narcissism, fondling the depths of his self-loath as bridegroom to his self-love.
When Zero got two seats to himself on the bus he'd stretch his legs into the the aisle & eye the scenery during his trans-American sojourn. He'd read a book to stall thoughts of re-memory but be unable not to think himself back to the nervous awkward age of never have I ever seen calluses carved into my hands held high to block out the sun. Zero remembering the age when Gulf War meant war on the golf course, tanks rolling on the green demanding oil, par, or both. Zero born season of spring cesarean circumcised after festering for three trimesters swearing the Hippocratic Oath as he fled the womb soaked in afterbirth screaming, "Don't blame it on the alcohol or the acoustics of the room."
Before the bruises he was flawless ignorance. How he was old enough to undertand. He knew too much & needed to escape. Got as far as Utah. Missed his bus at Green River. Considers it a plot to leave him to die in some nowhere. Said good riddance & spent the last of his money on a cheap bottle of wine & a flask of whiskey.
Opened the bottle & started drinking. Started a walk that staggered & stumbled as he emptied the bottle under the belief that all you have to do is follow your feet to find your way home but found himself lost & studying a sunset. That slithering twilight consuming the sky with a darkness & Zero keeping on, pioneer of a new frontier of plateaus & arid waste of dehydrated landscape.
Patient Zero, the Resident Hero & wandered of alien waste, watched above him as partisan gods clashed over Gaea's new scarf, that appalling dusk of stars a secular heaven promising Zero's quest would be left to rust. It was as he staggered into unknown that Zero begged, "Bring me back to shore, back to rearrived where Adam & Eve left only their entrails, back to the West, back to the end of."
& it was for his desperate prayers that the gods responded to Zero's arms stretched skyward demanding a way out or a mercy killing coup de grace, a slow collapse into final sunset. Zero fell to the dirt, eyes shutting. He opened them once more thinking it was his last glimpse, when he found a door before him that he touched with a weakened reach. Managed to stand, inspecting & taking swigs from the whiskey flask as he examined the miracle door.
Wooden door & silver knob held upright but who knows what & appearing to go nowhere. Only the door, & its keeper knew the time of arrival but they wouldn't let Zero in on the secret, leaving an uncomfortable silence that fell over the arid landscape, the kind of silence that comes when you enter a room where friends have been talking about you, sharing insights into your shortcomings. Just as much as Zero was examining the door, the door examined him too & he could feel the eyes of its keeper taking a special interest in every move that Zero made
& the door had a destination & Zero was destined to be its passenger, the next one to get off & give his regards to eternity. Knowing it was his only option left Zero finished his whiskey & cast it aside, resting his hand on the door knob. He unstuck the door to let himself in, behind the door a darkness that was abyssal black instead of more twilight desert as Zero's common sense would suggest. He stepped inside & his walking gave way to falling. For a time Zero found serenity in that absolute nightfall.
Zero awoke with drunken incoherence, his irises cluttered with excess vision at the mercy of too much sand & sky. He got on his hands & knees gripping handfuls of sand, letting it sift through his fingers as he turned his eyes skyward.
"Senseless," he thought. "It makes no sense. To find a door leading out only to find myself in too similar of a situation. Well, nothing left to do but trudge," & he staggered to his feet doing the dance of desolation, determined to make the most of his suffering, scraping will from the solitude of silence he'd been condemned to, singing dirges for his discontent.
He tried to concentrate on his steps & ignore the voices whispering from mouths of dust sayings, "Caravans enter this wasteland to perish. Careful where you step, wanderer, or you'll join us in our fate of lamenting our mistakes."
"This is madness. I've just completely lost it," he thought but the whispers continued.
"We were a people who built our cities to be burned, to be devoured by the sword. The womb forgets us & the worm feasts on us because of our perverse hearts, our unclean lips & corrupt mouthes. Our eyes were pecked out by ravens & our bones were scattered at the mouth of the grave. We wanted nothing to do with the light & like the eyes of the adulter we waited for dusk. The hope of the godless is fragile but we hid our hopes long ago like a stillborn child in the ground, like something rotten. Now we stack coffins along the border of Paradise for our children to crawl inside like they came from Gaea's thighs. We met our end at the hands of the worshipers of Machina, all in the name of their God Mechanical. They were penance for our sins but they too will meet their end."
"This needs to stop," Zero says looking for an end to the sand & the voices.
"It will all be over soon enough. The storm is coming & the geese are flying to the farthest from. Will the heathens fly south or stay rusting underneath their cities waiting for the wind to pick up? Either way there is no escape. Thunder, rain, the chapel black. They burned our Zion but their city will burn like Babylon."
"I need to get home or I need to wake up. Senseless, this makes no sense."
"You can't go home yet, Zero. You are here to bear witness. Welcome to the end," they said and Zero was left to hear only the sound of his steps, the sand compacting under his step.
So, this brings us to where we first found Zero, jigsaw gagging on the big picture, uncertain of what to do, emptying his twisting stomach into the sand before rambling on, through wasteland stumbling upon...
Twenty-men struggle up-out of the grave where the dead ones' stenches putrify the dunes like whispers of a priest mouthing vespers with Communion wine heavy on his breath, offering up the body of the broken bread of broken Christ, savior bones snapping. It was once again Zero stepping into the wrong scene where the men were dismembering the dead after digging a massive grave. They had cut 'em up to discover it was damned unpleasant, that sleep is doomed to embrace the last act. They drew x's over the eyes of the severed heads but still the horror of their end would haunt the dead behind closed eyes, images of eternity on repeat like photographs glued to the insides of their eyelids.
Zero knew better & just passed them by, lighting a cigarette & exiting stage left.
* * *
