20 December 2012

GHETTO ASS WITCH (FEAT. GVCCI​-​HVCCI) [BLIND BINDINGS REMIX]

GHETTO ASS WITCH (FEAT. GVCCI​-​HVCCI)
[BLIND BINDINGS REMIX]

from GHETTO ASS WITCH - REMIXES VOLUME ONE by RITUALZ



06 October 2012

Rich October Burn


rich October burn,
where the Sun plays
across the face like
a lover's smile
upon parting.
I turn and hold the
door from closing
and kiss her as it's ajar.
I touch her crotch
and she laughs and
leans on the door
harder which closes
yielding to my too
gentle pressure.
door latch,
and down the stairs,
my heart bounces
and out onto the street.

30 September 2012

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19 August 2012

A Day In the Half-life

To the reader: A special agent to a federal bureau, left this file at the apartment of an avid fan, who then submitted it to us, with you in mind.

He was ideology and I was methodology.  
This is hardly a confessional. It is not a rail or rant. Neither William Chadwick nor I are weird beardos hunkered down in the woods. Nor are we gun-toting white power right-wingers. This is to prove how our project failed due to the very elements we were compelled to eradicate; the sedentary incompetence that has infected this country.

I arrived at Logan Airport in Boston late, due to fog, one morning last September. My only luggage was carry-on, a briefcase containing a neutron bomb that would wipe out the Greater Boston Area up to the Raytheon plant in Wilmington. I wasn’t nervous about the time, once I made the drop I had to catch a flight to St Martin by 3:30. At 5:30, in rush hour traffic, atonement would be made.

Chadwick and I went to MIT together & graduated in 1949, both with Master’s degrees in physics. He was the beautiful bastard, and I the awkward Wunderkind. He was the idea man, and I the one who made the ideas real. He got the gorgeous women, and I got their frumpy friends. He was ideology and I was methodology.

We were in school during the war. Chadwick’s father, who was inspirational to us both, sympathized with the Fascists in the face of the Communist agenda in America. The Cold War reinforced this sentiment in our minds; there was none of our hearts involved. It was this patriarch who made me aware that the underclasses must be put down and their proliferation halted.

I took a cab from the airport and had driver, a Caribbean, drop me off at Harrison and Stuart, in the middle of Chinatown, in what’s referred to as the Combat Zone. I wanted to soak up the filth, and clear my mind before the big event. I started walking west, toward the Back Bay, where the drop zone was.

At the New England Medical Center, I passed mothers holding bald children whose pallor was green. I grinned, thinking, “Soon your cancer will be burned out.”

The two of us built bombs in California. We always worked for the government, in some capacity, up until the eighties. Because of cutbacks, I then began to do consultations for nuclear medicine. The crowning moment in my career was a speech delivered to the American Oncological Society.

“Individuals are the rebel cells. Affecting all others. They metastasize against society.” With this future credo already entrenched, business was good through the sixties. As the decade closed, the sympathies toward a Free Burn Society improved. The big guns wavered from outward to in.

From Rutherford’s early experiments to Cockcroft’s and Wilson’s, the mission was clear: to accelerate the human race to a singular and pure destiny. But these men of the highest ideals, only thinking in platitudes amongst the clouds, had no awareness of the glutting masses, which labored, but prevented this flight from even beginning.

Chadwick and I were the medium through which these lofty dreams were to be made real, or at least truly begun.

But indeed, today it had begun.

“Though even as a body fights a foreign infection from without, how does one amass an army to fight against those most lethal to the self, the enemy within, soldiers from the order of their own?

“Nothing is more dangerous or crippling than a revolution from inside the home ranks. But occupation need not be taken battle by battle. But, by the displacement of sheer numbers using up too many resources.

“Case in point, the supposed invasion of barbarian hordes. The Eastern and Northern Europeans tribes’ progress into the Mediterranean region was recorded by those whose land was taken up by the uncivilized brutes. These brutes, however, had no written language to record their own migrations. Thus the record is one-sided.

“They chose to have only an oral history, not for lack of advancement, but for higher ideals. The barbarians chose not to develop a written language, because in their own thinking, that would lead to a sedentary populace, which leads to kings and tyranny.

As we are earthbound by the laws of physics, without
these laws we would have no hope of ever lifting off it.
“They chose personal freedom over civil order, a choice that still divides this world today. And the hardest choice for any man.

“Order cannot be seen as unhealthy or unfree. As we are earthbound by the laws of physics, without these laws we would have no hope of ever lifting off it. As a body becomes more complex, more order must be enforced, or the system comes in conflict, and a fugue ensues resulting in cannibalism of the self.”

I walked swiftly over the Harrison Street Bridge, spanning across the expressway. The wind was cutting. Passing the Boston Herald, I thought of how the paper declined into a mere tabloid, yet tried to maintain its status quo, working-class roots. Its lies were thinner than its third page. The liberalist Globe wasn’t much better.

The area was desolate now. Some rummies collected like trash in the wind. In an alcove, one pushed another while the others yelled. He reeled around, drunken, urinating and stumbling. Barely breaking his fall, he leaned on the trunk of a car, urine still cascading onto the middle of the sidewalk. The scent of his sick, fetid water knifed along with the wind.

I made my way onto Appleton Street, and took a left onto Clarendon, and soon was in the now eclectic South End neighborhood.

Three fourteen year olds offered, mostly jokingly, to sell me heroin and then threatened to “kick the shit out of me.” A bug-eyed woman, face speckled with sores, said she’d “suck me for a rock.” The fact that I, a 73 year-old scientist, could be a part of their universe seemed to their bleary perceptions, perfectly normal.

Two men window shopped, oohing at a feathered dress, and then looked on into a shop that body pierced. They held hands, and as I walked by, one reflexively and openly stroked the other’s buttocks.

Two blocks down Columbus, I hooked a right onto Exeter, for a short walk to the Back Bay. The drop zone, the Prudential Building, had been bobbing and weaving across the rooftops.

18 August 2012

To Be Holding the Eye

To the reader: A federal coroner was in town for the weekend recently. She was caught short with a steep bar tab. The editors were only too happy to help out, and received this manuscript as a token of gratitude.

In terror I... beheld the living machines
of my mates standing before me.
In 1954 there was an atomic test that was part of Castle Project. It was a 13.5 megaton device called Yankee Shot, and was discharged somewhere in the Pacific Proving Ground. That it happened, of course, is of some importance, but for the sake of my story it is but one brief shining silent instant.

I was a Radio Engineer for the Navy. We were to witness the blast topside, standing at attention, with a hand covering our eyes, in some grim salute. At the time of the blast, for a frightful moment I could see not only the bones in my hands, but the network of nerves and blood coursing through it. In terror I dropped it from my face, and beheld the living machines of my mates standing before me.

I was dispatched to one of the decommissioned vessels that had remained afloat, to test the electronic equipment. This test was intended to be done on merely a pass-or-fail basis, the idea was to get in and then get out fast before things got too hot.

My preliminary testing showed that most of the gear's internal resistance had dropped to zero. This, of course, was impossible, but even my meters were cased in lead, so I trusted the reading.

I decided to extend my stay to pursue this theory, as I was bucking for a commission and transfer. In the middle of my testing, I heard a squad hit the deck hard, and quickly descend the stairs.

"Jumpin' Jay-hoo Mister! Ain't your brain getting too hot down here?" It was Commodore Bracken, an egghead, and some MPs.

"Sir, no sir. I was running some tests on the suspected zero internal resistance of the radio equipment, sir."

"Well sir, you can suspect your ass is going to experience some zero internal resistance with my boot if it doesn't get topside stat."

"No, let him speak." The egghead hissed like a goose in his white protective gear. He was the only one of us decked out for the holiday. As Bracken glared at him, the ever helpful MPs roughed me up the steps.

Anyway, after getting out of a failed career in the Navy, I wound up repairing appliances for some slave-driving company in Poughkeepsie. I had some innate knowledge in the field of fixing washing machines, refrigerators, and dishwashers. I'd just look them over, make some polite chit-chat, and be outdoors, fending off the appreciative thanks of bored homemakers.

Some portion of the good sense of duty that I had managed to glean from the Navy kept me pretty square until about the summer of '66.

I was at some place on Lawndale, which was inhabited by the wife of some pawn-broker, by the look of all the gold dripping off her. She answered the door draped the doily from the end-table, and was smoking a 120mm cigarette whose last half was stained red with lipstick.

I was hungry and grumpy in the humid afternoon, with donuts and coffee straining in my abdominal cavity. I was going to play this one.

"Howdy, ma'm."

Disinterest.

"Mighty hot today."

Apathy.

"What's the problem?" Entering the kitchen, I saw it was the fridge and only a fuse at that.

"Fridge." She said, squinting through cobalt eye-shadow. "Want a drink?" She was a bit puckered.

"That would be mighty kind of you." I palmed a 600 amp cartridge in one hand. Pulling out the appliance out a few inches, I popped the dead fuse out, and slipped in the new one. It hummed alive.

"Yay..." she intoned flatly, handing me a Bloody Mary. "My husband...," she said the word with disdain, "...will be very happy. Cheapprick!"

She trotted back to the counter, boozy on high heels, and put her big ass up on top of it. She fished out another cigarette while giving me a kind of "get to work" look.

"Will your husband be home soon to thank me?" My professional pride was hurt. I stood and began unzipping my coveralls, which were older than me, and stank of sewage.

She stuck most of the butt down her throat and sucked hard. The pigments in her heavily painted face irradiated, glowing under the sudden flush of blood in her heat.

"He told me to thank you myself."

15 July 2012

"UFO" Siting at the Closing Ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles



I found some weird thread with a prediction about an alien, or a least a fake alien, invasion during the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, most likely occurring during the 12 August closing ceremony. There was during the closing ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles an elaborately staged "UFO" siting that happened between the extinguishing of the Olympic flame and the reading of a poem attributed to a group named Pindar by the announcer, and the flash appearance of an alien— all before Lionel Richie busts in with All Night Long. Check it out, it's pretty funny. 

[ed. note: The reference by the announcer to the poem has been picked up by conspiracy theorists as a convenient slip. Pindar was a Greek poet (d. 443 BC) who did write victory poems, but Pindar is also the alias of the Marquis de Libeaux, known as Phallus of the Dragon. The Marquis is supposed to be a Reptilian alien leader who fathers royal Aryan bloodlines, like Prince William's. The whole thing is suppose to be rife with Illuminati, NWO, CFR, Bilderburgs and the Merovingian Bloodline complete with MK-Ultra slaves and Princess Di's murder. So it is hard to say if group was referring to our Reptoid masters, or that he was just another know-nothing media chump. Either way it has to be the worst production for TV since 1978's The Star Wars Holiday Special.]

27 June 2012

Slipping...


He stopped because she said it was too hard. Not what he was doing, but what she doing. Climaxing for what the..?, he had lost count at five, and that was during the first two hours of the entire evening. He had yet to, even almost.

“God, just let my head slow down,” she whimpered. She was still quivering and breathing heavy. Her breathing eventually slowed.

Hey, you okay?” he asked concerned but with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” she mumbled something.

“What’d you say?”

She slurred a string of nonsense. “Sharper” What? “… shopping…” Slipping…

“You’re out aren’t you?”

She was.

He giggled, and then realized how inflamed he still was. “Shit.” He hadn’t been laid in over two years, but still managed to give someone the "best sex she’d ever had," and raise it the requested kink factor, which was higher than he'd expected. Not surprised, just not expected.

Maybe in the morning… why should that be any different? This is how it always went. Alone and wide-awake, in a dark, strange place, turgid and purple; physically, mentally and yes, spiritually.

She had bought him a pack of smokes, that’s where they met, they actually met online, but she picked him up at the 7-Eleven. Bought herself and his broke-ass packs of cigarettes. 

She said later she thought she was picking up a high-schooler the way he had acted. He fished out a cigarette, crawled over her, and walked naked through the strange apartment. Her hippie roommate and son were away.

They had been messaging back and forth for only two days. He liked her look; a little vintage, short black hair, red lips. He had heated it up quick, and she told him to call her. 

He did the next day, and got her voicemail. Her pre-recorded message gave her full name. She had a name from a crime noir novel and a gun moll’s tone and accent from the Boston area.

They later messaged quickly again, and it was at a feverish pitch. She said, “I’m getting in the shower and dressing up for you, I’ll call you to come on over.” He had told her that he liked old pin-up type fashions, totally in a straight-guy way, though.

She called back around 10 o’clock, and told him to come over— she was fortuitously a 15 minute bus ride away, at most— and to pick her up a pack of cigarettes. 

He told her he was totally broke, but would get the cash and run for them. She said she would just pick him up at the 7-Eleven.

He got there, and there was this group of four teen-age boys out front to the left of the doors, so he picked the right side, and stationed himself. 

Three young girls, skin still browning in the night of early summer, came out and walked in front of him. He looked them up and down, he rarely did that. 

The gun moll was closer to his age, and a little big, he knew; he was comparing. The teen-age boys tried to whistle, and cat-call at them, but the girls weren’t impressed.

Seconds later he saw her, walking from the left-side of the store, in a tight red dress, fishnets, and some high pumps; like it was totally practiced. “Hello boys,” she said to the teenagers, totally practiced.

“Hey, you look great.” He held the door for her.

“So do you,” she said.

She got Newport’s, of course, and him a pack of his own brand. They got in this crappy Miata, whose top had been left down in the evening's previous shower.

“So, how ya don’?” she asked.

“I can’t keep my hands off you.”

“Aw.” They kissed a good bit. “Wow,” she said. And they drove away.

On the couch, he lit his cigarrette, and got nervous. Then the thought hit hard. The pills. Earlier, at his house he had a big chicken dinner, rare but that’s what he got from the food pantry that week.

During the evening's activities, he had to use the bathroom, and turned on the faucet to silence the immense farting that commenced. They came at a lengthy duration and standing at the basin, with his hand on the faucet, his frazzled eyes were drawn to the pill bottles above the sink.

“Oh, Jesus.” The first one’s contents jumped off the label, like in an 82pt. Boston Herald headline font: Xanax. Ritalin was in the other two, her son’s and hers.

Now, he sat on the couch wondering what to do. He would just smoke his cigarette, of course.

He wasn’t pissed or resentful about not getting satisfied himself, by the sex. She had begged him in all sorts of dirty ways, but he demurred; he was still too shy with her, which was pretty coy because he was a total switch. The night was pretty rough.

He realized he didn't have a "disease of more", as was oft quoted. He had a Disease of Want. 

He had messaged her that he was more interested in watching her react to his touches, watch her rise and fall, and “slip…” He had left that open-ended deliberately, implying slipping into orgasm and sleep. He saw the former more times than were counted, and the latter, as well. Shouldn’t he then, be satisfied as well? Expectations fulfilled?

Rather than cop her drugs, he got up off the couch, and before crawling into bed with her, he did steal one of her cigarettes, totally forgetting about the baby food jar full of marijuana right next to them. He smelled it earlier, he wasn't interested. He could get better, if he wanted. She hadn't smoked.

He put the little dish they used as an ashtray across her big ass; she had never moved from where he had released her. He enjoyed the novelty of the quick-burning menthol, and of hearing someone slumber deeply again. He touched her forehead, still moist and fevered; hooked her hair behind her ear. 

He smiled, self-satisfied, and respectfully picked up the dish before putting the butt out, placed it on the nightstand, hunkered up close and put his arm around a pretty much perfect stranger for the first time in distant memory. And slipped himself…

21 June 2012

Witch House Pussy

On the hottest day of the year, Loo laid in every window of the house looking for a breeze, finding none. Late in the evening she decided the fan, which went in the window the night before, was alright enough to lay in front of.

14 May 2012

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

After finding a copy of the 15th century occult text Malleus Maleficarum in a Berlin bookstore,Danish film director Benjamin Christensen went on to produce the film Häxan during the years of 1919 - 1921 through a Swedish studio. The film ended up being the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever produced due to the length of production and Christensen's meticulous recreations of medieval scenes. The final version was banned in the US and highly censored versions where screened elsewhere, due to themes of torture, nudity and sexual perversion that were considered graphic and taboo at the time.


The film uses still photography of archival prints, animations and horror movie style dramatizations in a documentary study that proposes how superstitions and misinformation of mental illness lead to persecutions and civil unrest such as the Inquisitions and other witch-hunts of the past.


There are five chapters to the film each building the case of how the human need to provide supernatural, or worse superstitious, answers using faulty reasoning when confronted with the uncomprehensible or not understandable leads to paranoia, injustice and an ultimately sick society.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) -- 240p, silent with English subtitles



The above version is best viewed while playing the "ULTIMATE WITCH HOUSE PLAYLIST" created by YouTube user futureextinguisher -- also on tumblr: witchgate




Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) -- Criterion Collection Version
360p version with musical score and original Scandinavian titles -- no English subtitles

04 April 2012

“Victoria how could you?”; Pendleton takes one from the heart

This is a vintage-era postcard gratuitously
placed and has nothing to do with this blog
I am not a real sports fan; totally illiterate. I am not a follower of popular culture; on the street or any size screen I wouldn’t know… what'shername… see, I just don’t know, I can't think of any female celebrity that captures my attention. I’m weird with my crushes, they’re mostly historical. I am lucky if the camera was invented when most of them did their thing, or that some artist was around during the same century to hear a report of their likeness and capture it in some rendering. I once had a picture in my wallet of Emily Dickinson. I showed to my well-read friend. “Aw! She’s homily!” he cried. She was the Belle of Amherst, and I loved her, although I filed the picture away somewhere. I like female scientists, Lady Ada Lovelace, Maria Agnesi, as well as the real crazy artists, like Valentine de Saint-Point, and Suzanne Valadon. It is rare when I feel a fuzzy, pink-cloud admiration about someone currently on the world stage, and shaking it up. Then came Victoria.

I was a bike messenger for years in Boston mostly, but San Francisco too, and a fairly good one. Cycling history is important to me. The bicycle was responsible for a gender, sexual, and racial revolution in America during the last two decades of the 19th century. Fin-de-siècle women were suppose to be sickly, a costly doctor on retainer was the sign of a man’s success. The bicycle got them out of their corsets, hiked up their skirts, got them throwing their legs up and over a saddle, and sweating. It allowed them to move about freely without the aid of men, or a man’s horse, or other beasts of chattel. New York school teachers were not allowed to ride a bicycle; next she’d be showing the pupils her bloomers, and chewing gum, with a horrible bicycle-face. Sounds funny, but allowing a woman to travel, cheaply, under her own power, and have it contribute to her physical fortitude was a pretty powerful thing. Check The Kominas  video Sharia Law in the U.S.A. for a modern parallel.

A young savvy suitor, for a small investment could ensure some privacy while courting, something that was very new and uncustomary. Ma and Pa looked askance at some mustachioed gent coming a'calling, wheeling up to the homestead, with two rides, or a tandem. They were able to travel some distance into nature, and then let it take over. Sounds a little better than a cramped backseat of an auto, but then I’m a too tall, kinky romantic.

Major Taylor c. 1900
As a historical note Marshall Major Taylor was the second black world champion of any sport for two years around the millennial. The Worcester Whirlwindthe Colored Cyclone was the toast and terror of Europe, yet could not ride competitively in his own country. He died penniless in 1932, his fortunes drained by hucksters, and bad investments, selling his auto-biography The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World door-to-door. He was exhumed from his unmarked grave in 1948, and laid to rest by a group of former pro racers, with money donated by Frank W. Schwinn.

I was checking the BBC sports RSS to see if there was any advance track cycling news on the Olympics in London. I only follow two sports, both Olympic, with some interest; women’s speed skating, and women’s track cycling. I figure, why would I want to watch a bunch of dudes in tight clothes chasing a ball like a dog or small child? [Don’t get me started about a sport where the object is to dominate your opponents’ end zone, with repeated penetrations, with ends that are both split and tight.] Anyway, then I came across Victoria. There was some blurb about British track cyclist Victoria Pendleton saying how she wasn’t the manic-depressive psycho everyone thought she was, she was just in the habit of speaking her mind. She’s had an up and down career since two gold medals in Beijing 2008. [Which now makes sense, given how this plays out.]

I watched her world record setting performance in the team sprint with Jess Varnish at the World Track Cup in February before I checked the FHM pictorial. My ears burned at my peers comments to the pictures, how dare they puerilely sully her heroic accomplishments,  her incredible spirit and self-empowerment. While there were some incredibly sexy shots of a beautiful strong woman in various states of nudity on a bike and not, I downloaded the one of her riding on the track, no hands, sitting erect in team colors, holding the Union Jack over her head. She was Britannia in Victory personified. I’ve been getting a little anglophile over the past few years, but I felt a welling up in me like a damn Tory. [editor's note: UK artist and avid cyclist Paul Shipley was very kind to send his version of this amazing moment done in gouache, watercolor, and acrylic. The victory well-preserved, Pendleton's expression is even more fixed with determination. More of his art can be seen and purchased at http://www.veritasart.co.uk/gallery.html]  

I got two cheap picture frames, printed reasonably descent prints and hung them up. Keep in mind that ever since my girl left, I’ve been taping up every punk rock show flyer, every pin-up shot torn from a magazine I can, because it would piss her off. I actually bought picture frames; this was serious. I capped the 8 x 10 BiV with a 5 x 7 of her chilling in a black half-suit, helmet in one hand, still in the saddle and clips of one hot stripped-down ride, leaning against the track’s rail for support. Her long flowing black hair and makeup on the top countered the lower natural girl-jock victory shot.

I like two types of strong women; strong, and women—add a rumor of crazy and I’m a sucker. I said that to a friend, when we had people over, some women asked what Victoria's pictures, among all my bicycle ephemra, were about. He called it “bike porn.” Let me clarify, the whole idea of these shots, and pin-ups in general, is that the women are the subject, not the object. Pornography connotes a kind of ownership, hence its etymology; porne is Greek for harlot or prostitute, and is derived from bought or sold. Clearly, the only one owning it was Victoria.

The UCI Track World Championships in Melbourne were coming up in early April. I couldn’t wait, the field had some lookers, even the US’s Sarah Hammer is impressive, but lacks the union of form andintention. Most women cyclists get a little bottom heavy, which is sort of nice, but up top, they generally get too thin. Track cyclists are stronger then the road or mountain riders; Victoria’s arms made Michelle Obama’s look like chicken-wings, and the curve of her deltoids, linking to her trapezius, and down to the cleft of her lats, not huge, but incredibly curvy-feminine.

I read this essay by a psychologist who said that males couldn’t help but think of sex everytime they looked at women, because every gentle round curve; breasts, shoulders, knees, even the reverse curve of the nape of the neck, were meant to remind him of the butt, since early-on most sex was from behind, and that used to mean the success of the species was assured. Sounds good to me. That’s why most muscle mass women put on doesn’t naturally get the bulk and definition that men's does. Her body was an incredible machine, but not for assuring the species' success, but to sprint, with a sudden huge burst of controlled power, and thus assuring victory. She was perfectly, what is known in the field as a term of art, aero. [Now it’s all making sense. How could I be so stupid?]

Anyway, while I was engaged in this idle infatuation, I had attempted to get a little closer to a few individuals in the network of misfits I had recently been running with and found my domain. Right away, I failed miserably, and worse alienated some great people. There were some affections exchanged, but the average American fourteen year-old has more action than I had during these two weeks. The combination of a lot of things coming to head; professional, family, financial, during a period of gross transition and restructuring, caused me to choke. Out of practice, or better behaved, because in my courier days I would have kissed three girls the same night in the same bar [Come on, don’t mean nothing.], and played hand-on-the-knee with whoever else would let me, total lothario stuff. All to crank the wheel home alone, psyched because I was my own man. The fact that I was indeed alone would set in once I climbed into bed, in my dingy basement apartment. I had been trying to do things differently. Ultimately, the ladies who I had developed amiable feelings towards, were otherwise engaged. This was not an uncommon occurrence, and one that I had had a well-trod path on. Why had I saved that one pair of clean underwear, or the razor that wasn’t too dull, for the occasion? I might as well, and I think I did, get the full-on lothario mode going again; dirty, filthy and disrespecting.

But, walking by Victoria’s framed victory shot, with her iconic look of sureness, confidence, pride in her accomplishment; as an individual, as a woman, as a Member of the Order of the British Empire with her Union Jack, made these day-to-day pressures and misfires melt. There was indeed, always Hope; hopefully the offer wasn't just limited to the British. [Guess it wouldn’t hurt to be Australian either, jerk!]

So, the World Championship arrived and I combed the internet trying to find a source to watch the event. Not on US cable of course, not on my housemate’s forty-six inch HD television that we never watch, but finally I found a vender licensed to stream it live from Melbourne, at 5am, for $9.99 onto my crappy laptop. But while searching, I had been scanning the headlines looking for my Hope, and some expression of confidence, that she was back, and her name was derived from victory after all, and the same name as arguably the most powerful British Queen in history. Could she sweep it, go back to the London Olympics, and grab all three golds? Then I saw it. I didn’t have to read it to know what happened. The headline was Pendleton admits Aussie affair upset team-mates. Maybe the affair the SBS was alluding to was some errant intrigue?, but no it was an affair with a member of the British Cycling coaching staff. An Aussie Sports Scientist? Is there such a thing?, I am an engineer, and that can't even be a real nerd, and a caneater no less. She was acknowledging how the affair began prior to Beijing, was kept secret until after, dude quit the team, went back to Australia, and they’re now engaged. Since the World Championship is in Rooschtupper Central she’s now in his arms, when she should be thinking of being in the drops and clips.

According to the article on sbs.com.au, “She added: ‘A lot of people felt very negatively about it; team-mates that blamed me because Scott [Gardner] wasn't there to help them and felt I was being selfish; members of staff who felt it was unprofessional, even though we never flaunted it...’” And then I thought about her disappointing record since, there were some coups, yes, but somehow there was a fickleness, or doubt, caused… by… love? Then I thought of the most famous FHM cover shot, you can find it online easy, and her perfectly honed body… Freaking Sports Scientist!

"You don't choose the person you fall in love with.” No, you don’t Victoria, sometimes they choose you.

03 April 2012

Poetic Stalkings


By Dick B. Roman
To the reader. We at Panic Down the
Well are happy to have a flagship poetlike Dr. Roman. Only a highly labile mind and libido could adapt poetry in such modern response to what is appropriate in pan-gender interactions.

All must lay prone in the decay of thought,
and the entropy of warm buttocks.
Stepping like a horse
over a three-bar gate,
the disease held deep within,
in check with a latex aura.
Never shedding chitinous armor
no jingling clink about avian ankles,
to reveal a soft ruddy undercore.
Always feeling vile and enveined.
Neither spreading the legs to expose
nor falling within a hidden chamber,
some outer vestibule.
Fearing the neural splatter that would
stain the white bed-sheet of the mind.
World on fire, smoking, sporidial,
seed-sack broken, sown in the wind.
There are few flowers as fair, amongst
Purpled, poisoned ivies



Your locks would level any waters
I would your form to eclipse the sun
through my bedroom window
in your naked gait,
fresh off the savanna.
All birds are startled 'cepting the one
gorged and lazy who wishes
to be devoured by such a
creature that lays lowly
with no baseness
Your perspirate body would
shimmer like cool waters,
like a dozing pond that shivers
in hot breezes.
For a time you are transfixing
as a rosette window of 
stained glass,
a turning wheel of Nature that rolls
over more than my toes,
giving such things as faith
a recourse, causing me for a still time
(while you sit there in study)
to sketch you in words, though
even the air about you is electric and
adamant.
Hammering my head, now a dull chisel,
the only thing I strike are chords of
disdain and remorse
as you raise your apheliotropic flanks
off your seat and bend out on to the street.
You can make on choke on nothing
as I would say, but enterprise as most are
concerned, but these things die as you
shadow the light
through the door
for a second in real time,
but an etenity in
mine.

 

To E.D. [Ernest Dowson, d. 1900; transcribed (and spell-checked) from a cocktail napkin— ed.]

In consumption
Your words are better than tounges
Crosst lips bought at any cost.
May I never see your docks at dusk;
Or you to view Maeve’s eyes at close
As they all are out here at the perimeter.
For your many hands won at Killarney
Are squandered at the price of a few
Scratch tickets, cheap voddy, and imported smokes.
Your mantel is heavy as a lung collapsing in
Jubilee.

 

I have not touched you in months.
Your form pale, taut with blue lines
And rigid-back; ever-spriraling.
Looking over you, into you,
Opaque, not yet creased,
Dry humors sucking stain
From my stylus.
This moment is freeze-frame,
Tableaux. All else is tuned out
But you. Lack of silver and sugar
Mean naught, but to fill you slow
And frantic, each stroke more
Profane than the first look, so wry,
Upon your smooth bareness.
This line the last I have emptied
My cartridge, but still
Turn to another.

Lyrical Snares


by Charlotte Praecox-Regina
to the reader: Dr. Roman was adamant that we include the work of his paramour, Ms. Regina. Though we first harboured doubts, a lively and and rather insinuating conversation with the French chanteuse convinced us of her penetrating literary depth. We are proud to present her here.

I was new born dead
when you found me,
Blue veined alabastered,
Body thin as kindling,
With no Eulogy, you
lay me upon a linen
slab and loved
me like an autopsy.
The moment. swung
like a pendant  'gainst
my still chest.
Your thunderous roar
echoes through my empty cavity.
Your grip fills me
with the heat I lack.
How you laboured,
How you travailed.
With my deaf ears
You need not say thanks.





When I was a little girl
I would whirl like a dervish.
Spin so fast the world would blast off
In electric white
And I would finally be alone and
Subterranean.
I whirled myself warm on cold winter
Mornings at the bus stop with 
Legs too long
And sweater too small.
When my cycle came down like a
Whip at the
Town pool I whirled in my first 
Two-piece.
When my brother and his grubby
Friends would
Hoot like apes in their treefort I would
Make
Them ascend with the blood pulsing,
Ring in my ears until
My mother would punish me for
Lifting my skirt which had flown up
Like a tilt-a-whirl
I’d rather be a spinster.



In which is there more discomfort:
My silence, or your revelous
cacophony;
My quietude remains amidst your
joyous sounds,
Your face twisted in frenetic zeal,
Embracing friends you pretend to
Have missed.
But not the unknown. You are not a
plumber or spelunker. 
You are cattle mooing
And cavorting, far less civilized than
You'd like. I to like to cavort,
But it is on the pallet, in a hay
Stack. On a checkered blanket,
In a grassy grove 
Or a graveyard.
My joy comes from a oneness, not a
multitude.
Not many, nor a mass. Never have
I seen so many bored faces amongst
What you'd call, if you knew the
Word
Euphony. How joy is silent. pulling
The ear of a smiling face whose
Eyes lock mine like a loving raptor. 
It is not the bestial beating of bodies.
but
A reach that touches. A pucker
Received
And eyes that shine like stars in
My silent room.



Sister Autumnal,
You of equal night,
How you blush in the
weary hour of your fading
And lighted touches,
Which push us beneath
Quilted bed clothes
Embroidered with
Maples, oaks and elms.
With lips stained 
by blackberries, and your
Nape smelling of greened
Apples you bring me
Deeper to embrace you in
Your dark slumber.

Well of Grubs— Preface to the first issue of "Panic Down Well"

Beelzebub— from Dictionaire Infernal, Jacques Auguste
Simon Collin de Plancy; 1818

To the reader: This preface to the first issuing of Panic Down the Well was penned by one of our contributing editors, on the night prior to his deportation.

The ground breaks wide and there is a full-fractal fall into a larval cistern. Pupils become constricted shining no light upon the back of a hollow skull. The visage is incandescent in panic sweat. An August desert sun rolls on by in apogee. These chitins are repulsive. Their society is sonic, constant mechanical hysteria, like the groans of metal seething suddenly, atomically. This noise is their pogrom against thought. Eons of evolution are unraveled and the primate is revealed. All gods are destroyed with cries for the tit. Living far beyond the real of time, there is a short, bright tracking beam that is burst asunder— in an instant. It shines across a prehistoric horizon, and is witnessed by a man with a malted brain, who knows he will soon be dead, and the hunt drums pound. All visions fly away in the vapors of breath on an autumn night. Blue smoke curls into a halo, about an eggshell bead, in oily despondency. All things remain foreign, expatriated, and half-caste. Porcelain figurines in the moonshine doing a candle-dance. There is no grandeur in the naked trying to affect a firm grip upon the shuddering shaft of Light. All is lost amongst heady perfumes and fine linens, used only to conceal a deformity in the human condition, an aberration that shackles us each alone, to a great stone jutting out of a wine-dark sea, beneath an azure sky.

The third eye turns hazyy upon construction, yellowed and half-lidded.

20 March 2012

The Drunken Bike

To the Reader: A janitor at
36 Bromfield St. 
found this bit of prose scratched into the wall of a bathroom stall, and felt it would be of some interest. It was apparently signed only by the moniker "52".

The Dawn storms Dusk, too soon,
staining the curtains with the blood
of a New Day.
Never the Earlyborne, I unfold
myself from bed like an old map
with destinations obscured
in the creases.
Sirens, horns, alarms play like
drunken, Arabic fiddles as the
world wakes with a perpetuate
hangover, yelling catcalls
and profanity.
The bare bulb overhead is a full moon
reflection on the North Atlantic
in my coffee cup.
At the basin, dragging the dull edge
of the Republic crosst my chin, my
throat is crimson as the Morn.
I strap the vestment of my vocation
across my back, unstable my
well-oiled pony from the ceiling,
run my hand up a still, slumbering form,
from leg to lumbar (to the coo of a
window ledge bound mourning dove).
Door latch, downstairs, out on the streets
without a key, now in the shambling
euphony of commerce. Dropped off the
curb, slipped into traffic, I call out into the
static, am dispatched, and the profession,
immediately employed with the
invention of the Word, sits lightly
on my shoulders, like a witch's familiar.
Through veins, arteries, corpuscular, like
hemoglobin, I deliver tidings of the number,
the tort, prayers of complaint, the bottom line,
the red tape, beneath a sky as grey as
other launderings strung out to dry.
By noon I am rich as a dog, and
gobbling a chunk of soft cheese,
and a tin of fish, between a loaf of bread,
the sky breaks blue wide, and
my head is peeled like a Sputnik-sized
orange, too easy.
Revitalized, I am pound and crank
within their rage and fume.
Perspirate agony precurses the
the endorphic uprising, red and sonic
pulse in my jaw, ascension in
chrome and glass, redbrick
and puddingstone.
Yet on the granite and asphalt
everything is concrete,
as I whistle to turtledoves,
and whisper "Hey kitty-cat,"
to the clip of heels and
curling red mouths that fold into
the flips of horses' manes,
and are eclipsed
in truck rumblings.
But not to fear little bird, for
stories of cupboards bare
except for jars of sugar and honeypots to be
ladled out with silver spoons,
crookt and scorcht, are rumors that hold no air
under pressure, and I am no more
impressed by their storms that
come and go too soon and too easy.
I have dined on pigeon shit and
broken glass, defied the idiot factor
tenfold; metal yields quickly to my
skinny, sweaty frame, tight as a
long bow, but this city has raptors
that uncover all bones and cache I
stash like the rat I am, and they'd pull
me up to a high roost, save for the fact
that I know all the shortcuts in this place
where there is no such thing as almost,
and asphalt does weird things to the
skin, which it has, and I will bear these
scars as badges of intent and not privilege.
And this is shown by the Sun, who
beats me in her transit, 'cept her
proud flesh is broken all over the
sheet of the Blue Hills, and mine
is merely matted 'gainst black wool,
but no matter, for the race, so sweet,
stains my rusty mouth, so that I
must chase it down curbside and
crotch-level, with an oily moon-cratered
slice and a cheapsuck brew, whose
vessel echoes down the ally in the
empty rattle of Autumn's gusts.
The ember of the snipe I flick
is in tribute to my victor's course.
As I mount, a silent chain speeds
me away from from the words
scratched into fast curing cement:
"Though over-caution is not
a virtue, it is one fool-hardy in
Temperance, with no faith at all
in Luck, that forms and forces all action,
until it cross-threads in follow-through."

25 February 2012

A Zipped–up Grace in Transit

I was on the Orange Line, riding into town from Malden Center, trying to straighten out my thoughts. I had a speaking engagement that I was going to and was trying to turn the meandering, convoluted mess my head was in into some sort of structure to speak, hoping to deliver a message that was coherent, if not extemporaneous.

My afternoon had not gone well. It was the Sunday of the Columbus Day weekend, where, as I had written in a poem years before, there was a "rich October burn: When the sun plays across the face like a lover's smile upon parting." It was that rare last weekend of flush.

Despite such sentiment, I was dealing with a different parting, and focused as such, was overlooking a fortuitous joining. Per usual. I had just shown the apartment I was to take over to a future roommate. I was moving back to it in East Watertown, but my wife was moving out to leave the state.

"So, do you think she's really going to move out?" he asked.

I looked around. Half the apartment was boxed up. The rest was staged for packing. "Looks like it."

He thought the room was small, and I knocked twenty bucks off the rent. He didn't have a job. I was desperate to get out of Malden. No way I could afford the place, even at half the rent. I wanted my books. I wanted my technology stuff, my zines, my comic books. I wanted Missy Loo to sleep on my chest, snoring and purring. Anything to get me out of Malden.

He took the room. I rode the bus back to Harvard Square. I was speaking later that night, just around the corner from the apartment. I had a couple of hours to kill. I was going to hang-out, learn some HTML, write or something. I didn't even have money for one cup of coffee, but was hoping I could jump on someplace's signal. At Harvard I discovered everyone had similar ideas; it was packed, and after my experience at the apartment I felt vulnerable. I went back to Malden.

It took quite awhile to get there, and once in my room, I dropped my bag on the floor with hesitation, latently worried about bed bugs. But relieved that the bug that was my current roommate was gone, I stretched out on the only piece of furniture I could trust, because I had been dutifully spraying the mattress down with 91% alcohol to kill the bugs and eggs, and liberally applying talcum powder to it afterwards— cuts the bastards that survive to ribbons.

I don't know where I drifted to; I didn't doze or really dream. I guess I went back to SF, down in the Christmas Tree Warehouse; laying alone in bed, shivering, drunk, visions of Yankee Pot Roast, and Oven Broiled Chicken, Suckling Pig (with the apple in its mouth) drifting by overhead like in an old Merrie Melodies cartoon. The room came into focus again, I was surprised how much time had past, but it still wasn't enough. I got ready to go back to Watertown.


So, back on the T, rolling out of Wellington Square, I noticed this young woman in a hijab sitting three seats to my right. She had a small leather-bound Koran in here lap that could be zipped shut. But it was open in her lap, and her lips were moving, forming the words, but making no sound. I watched her mouth, curious. She was very attractive, and I had been in a phase of admiring how a well-chosen stylish hijab could frame a lovely, exotic face in a way that the hooded sweatshirts of her New England peers couldn't.

Somewhere around Sully Square, her head raises to look out the window across the car from us, and her lips are still moving. She's praying, I thought, not that unusual as I had been making my petitions on the train lately too, except it was my little "screw you" to everyone else who had their noses in their phones. I had begun to worry if that diminished the intent of my humble requests for an intersession.

But when the Orange Line travels between Sully and Bunker Hill Community College, there is this long stretch where passengers seated as the woman and I were, can see out across East Cambridge and the Boston side of the Charles River. In the evening hours the sun, as it sets, takes up a good portion of this space, and this balmy October evening it was taking a long rest like it was trying to catch its breath. It hung there in some fiery hue between crimson and a harvest orange.

I snuck a quick look at the girl, she was growing on me. She was still praying as the light filled the car. I was shocked to find that a corona the same color as the sun had encircled her face. Little tongues of flame licked about her cheekbones and jawline. It seemed she was transformed into a beautiful saint with all the ecstasy of the longing of Rumi.

Now I am sure there was a practical reason for this "illusion", based on the angles of refraction between the observer, subject, and light-source. I'm sure the glass had something to do with it. I thought about rainbows; sure you needed to be in the right spot, the antisolar point, and the bow appears at an angle of   41° off the line that connects the head of the observer to their head's shadow...and so on. But the reality is that that rainbow that you see, is yours and yours only; it only exists because you are there to observe it. Even the guy standing next to you, he may see a rainbow, but it's not yours. Rainbows only exist if there is an observer, or its surrogate like a camera, to witness them.

And so it was here, I had come a long way already. The Presence of the Mystery. This was affirmed to me by this beautiful woman, who for a few brief moments on a October weekend was in grace— the belief that despite all worldly appearances, the universe makes sense, and reality is on your side. And if reality isn't on your side, you have made this choice. Reality does not choose sides, people do. Get yourself on reality's side, and be in its perfect alignment. I was present to recognize it, to bear witness to it, and to partake in her state of grace. This was evidenced by the fact the kid sitting next to me on my left had gone on the nod, in the middle of a text message.