we made love beneath the tarantula

Mexican Spring





early mornings give birth to mystery cloaked in red heat. the shadows are cool until the hot bricks of sunlight burn them black. I know nothing of Spain or its colonial bitch, Mexico. I have visited her plains and deserts and jungles before, but in the way that the lipless have sung hymns. now is the dynasty of my imagination, thine is the kingdom with hollow walls. Suzanne was naked again in the bright pink morning, and the luxury of her nudity was enriched by a fine American cigarette. She stared transfixed at Martin as he adjusted the belt on his pants. Outside a spanish guitar started then stopped as if silenced by the thorns that grew on the windowpane. Her violet eyes, very much like a feline's, poised triumphant beneath their brow. Martin stared at his toenails which had grown long and had cut Suzanne as they tangled together the previous night. That was one against him. Her hands were very still and the ash from the cigarette tumbled down like an ill-starred jet to rest among the snowy tops of her naked breasts. "Your hair is very red, you know." He said to her, his first words in a matter of hours. Everything seemed to be of a fiery hue, and he believed this to be a sign of the devil. "That may be because I'm Irish." her voice was hoarse from all the yelling and she took another drag from the dying cigarette. "Your pussy is bald, though." He fastened the buttons of his shirt. "You don't like a clean pussy, baby?" Suzanne stuffed the burning head of the cigarette into the headboard of the bed, suffocating it. Martin straightened up and looked at her, "I like me a natural woman." He moved to sit down on the bed but she made some feminine sound like the unfathomable snarl of a lady lioness. He swung left and rested against the white plaster wall. "If I stopped shaving and let it grow out, would you stay with me then?" She walked on all fours - paws heavy with fire - stirring the sheets up into a primeval nest. Martin shrugged his shoulders guiltily, "Naw... I'd probably get tired of picking pubes out of my teeth." But there was something in his mind, a vision, that suggested a streak of crimson running up from between her legs like a river of lava from a belching volcano. Like a crack in the dawn dripping down over the heavens and into his mouth. Suzanne was laughing and her laugh came in waves of electricity. The waves piled up on the floor and filled the whole room until Martin was trapped in his own narrow space against the wall. "Even with the window open this room smells like sex." Neither knew which of them had spoken, as if the room itself had uttered some truth, and they both breathed deeply the perfume of sweat. "Where is our miracle in the moonlight?" Martin asked her, "Where did last night disappear?" Suzanne clawed at her pillow and sulked.

She slid into a jaguar print dress that bulged around the rounder parts of her figure. Her stomach was a valley surrounded by lush and healthy mountainsides. Martin straightened his tie and then lit her cigarette. Suzanne put on dark sunglasses and pushed her hair back with a black band. She hung her purse across her arm and stood waiting by the doorway. "Breakfast?" Martin said. "Buy me a drink." was her reply. They had slept very little the previous evening and their movements were slow and purposeful. Martin felt the strings of tension pulling in his neck as the electric light inside his head flickered, about to give out. The couple stumbled down the narrow wooden staircase, and shambled through the low mexican halls that were made from planks of pine and had been dressed with gaudy religious figurines. Martin nodded to the old keeper of their intimate sanctum. They crossed the dirt street that had been baked and cooled and baked again. It took them all of sixty seconds to make the crossing and to get inside the small air-conditioned cantina, and it took all of sixty seconds for the blade of the sun to open their pours and let the sweat drip. Sitting down at a table Martin whispered something in Suzanne's ear. Suzanne's eyes percolated behind her sunglasses but the bags beneath her eyes weighed the whole expression down. He ordered a coffee and beer, she ordered whiskey sour and said "you want to do THAT with me and you're having those to drink? If you have onions with your breakfast your mouth will taste like compost."
"So I'll brush my teeth again."
"Once wont do it."
"So I'll brush them twice."
"And mouth wash?"
"And mouth wash."

Suzanne purred and ran her paw over his. She tried a smile at him but a fugitive beam of burning light broke in through the window shade and speared her eyeball turning her smile into a twisted grimace. Martin caught the tail end of the look and sat back glumly wondering what he had done to inflate her jaded turpitude. Their drinks came and their drinks went and the food arrived and they ate quickly and in silence. Another round of drinks and Martin finally opened his eyes and pressed them close against Suzanne's. In that purple afterlife he found a birthmark on the left thigh of the mother marry. He saw the carnal results of god coupled with himself in the form of castrated angels. There were giants bearing medals of honor from some war that was happening across a body of water that had no name. They wore their badges in eternal sleep as their countrymen buried them beneath mountains of flesh and foreign spices. Martin wondered what other beautiful women he could be found here with and how many of them would also be witches, sorceresses, benders of men's will and sanity. He wondered if all beauty corrupts or if it merely played suzerain to madness.
"your nipples," he began, "are the colour of wet lips. They clash horribly with your skin which is a brutal haunting white that reminds me of Russian battlefields. Your legs swim like ancient rivers and when they climb up your dress I wonder where on earth they meet your middle, I get lost in wonder, I slip into hypnotic trances, I become invisible. And where do your breasts begin from where your arms pour out of your blouse? I have seen you whole and I have seen you in pieces and bit by bit as you expose your flesh to me or when you systematically hide it again, yet I know nothing. Nothing but the red of your hair that smells like rain water and burns me when I touch it." Martin withdrew his wallet and laid several pesos on the green-painted table. Suzanne withdrew her sunglasses as if they had been a smoke screen and a sound screen all at once. As if she had suddenly realized that Martin had been speaking to her and that she might give him some attention. She cupped her ankle and looked up at him,
"It still hurts me, where your toenail cut." was all she said.


That was one against him. They rushed upwards into their chapel of wet lust, past saint joseph and his pearly gates, through gilded halls of botched crucifixions, into a room that still smelled of seraphim and heat. A spanish guitar began outside, the notes fell in through the window all covered in nicks and scratches, they had braved the thorns. Martin grew naked, his skin moist as a forest canopy after a thunder storm. All the demons revealed and the devil left a sign on the door. Suzanne was a changeling, she slipped right out of her jaguar fur and became a rose petal floating through infinite space. Those violet eyes hunted ardent jungles and dug up shallow graves. Nothing was scared but the sacred themselves and bounties reaped and clouds parted to ninety degrees. They set upon each other and devoured their ancient coats of skin and grew strong with blood on their lips. A million fingers touching, caressing, a hundred hungry mouths breathing secrets into new and smokey flesh. Cresses were made and filled and tailored to fit perfectly around the shoulders and in the crotch. Parts were loosened, others tightened, scorpions slept beneath the floorboards. A photograph captures slivers of time in its glossy finish. Time is impermanent, like honesty and love. The moment dies, the pictures age and tear and so the people in them. One day humans will make something infallible and when they do they will vanish. So says the deep throb at the bottom of the ocean and the well of light that bubbles somewhere in the universe. These mexican hills carry no sound, but the coyote barks and can be heard for miles. This is the inconsistency of a land that harbors nothing but dust and a sad wintering for living things that are coming to their end. Seasons too will disappear.

A Spy In the House of Love

I know everything,
everything you do
everywhere you go
everyone you know




and its with spanish subtitles!

a side of beef

For your Francis Bacon: 

This is my soul

The blue specter of not death
Un-death and never waning
Always dying, never dead
The dust within this tunic breathes
A gust of plagues fans the fire of -

There is no flame, no spark
No glowing coals
Only smoke,
and the lack of oxygen

The nine winds of freedom blow
But these curtains of -
These shoulders of -
The gore bodies and rotted strings
of -
The wings of shock and meaty pride
Are heavy

This man is bones and dust
When will he depart?


S. Sparling

the fashionable dead

"we are a dying breed."

"Yes, and thank god."

now the clincher of this mind game, of this superfluous chatter, is the eye of the son. He is a giver and a taker, a child, and a fucker, and a lover among men and women alike. He is a beautiful freak with long legs and greasy hair and a shit little mustache that has no soul. He is a man, for sure, he is a feminine man. He is a man that girls, girls who look like little boys, like to go to bed with. And the rest of us try to forget about him. The rest of us with our muscular arch and our bare naked perception of how the raw dogs of lust are suppost to be rutting in the street. Like dogs, first of all, and not like delicate flowers. Certainly not cocaine dusted - this isn't the 70s. We are not players of mirth or dulcet sin. In this time we are all a pale reflection of the life that reverberated through the bare knuckle walls of our parent's bodies. When we forget the son we forget ourselves, which are equally as damaged.

"are we safe in here?"

"no, I doubt it."

Then let us make waves. Because the deep sea will never forget your face. The deep eternal blue. It will eat you up and leave you slumbering beneath the folds of fat and fidgeting follicles of demented organ. You will be coated in mucus and slowly your exterior features will be washed away leaving a very soft, very smooth, bag of skin and bones. Deep digital blue. It never forgets your face. Traces of your dna will be found a thousand years in the future, a million years, decades of secrets that anyone could scavenge if they only held the interest. Luckily you are a puzzle piece that is meaningless without the whole. Luckily you are unimportant to mostly everyone. Unluckily your life does not revolve around those people, it revolves around those who care about you, for better or worse, for evil or mercy. 

the son holds no light and sheds no power. he is a figment of all our imaginations put to rest. he is recirculated hot garbage, a recycled martyr, a veritable forget-me-not of kind and culture. his coat is wove of many years of interest, his armour is gold and he sleeps on a bed of roses (like the sunset a bed of roses). he is love but it is the love of empires rusting at the bottom of the ocean, it is the love of decay. It is not the love of animals (the only sacred love) it is not the love in the temple of eden. That particular kind of love only lurks behind closed doors and in the corner of the eye. It is strictly on the peripherals and it is rarely mentioned much. Hardly discussed (even as I write these words I am not discussing but merely bringing it to some sort of attention). It is a love that is not thought nor committed to speach, but it is acted on. It is action. It is pure and it is simple and it is clear. Like britta water, or something similar. Whatever we drink these days that is not natural but clean. Clean, whatever that means. Whatever it means, its taking over. Symptoms of a dialogue, I ramble, you read, you get bored, you put down the book, you come back and maybe turn the page without finishing the last paragraph. I do it all the time, I forgive you.

"there is nothing lost between us."

"just the days that kept us alive."

those days are golden books in a memoir of hope. I hope indeed to read them some day, and when I read them I hope that I look up and scan the horizon and hear a gull cry and see the tide slip and feel that even in this day and age I can relate to it. That there is still a little bit of something left. I don't see it now, but I sometimes feel it when I stop thinking in the middle of the night about the oppressive hole in the sky, and begin to merely glide on greased heels and embrace the street. have you ever felt that all the science fiction stories that you read are starting to quickly come true? Suddenly the only alternate reality that seems too far fetched is star trek and that's only because humans as a species are still sickly bastards who could never play the hero. Apostles of rotten apples. Cannibals are we, marching drunken down a soiled dirt road. Where does the road end? At the beginning of a novel by someone or someone else. In the dust of your horror film society - in a blood bath or something more sacred still. It is fashionable to excess, to exist as the living dead. We are so marked by death that we fear it in all forms of reality. It may only come to us in dreams and in the form of warped violence on a celluloid screen. Maybe if we butchered our own meat or eviscerated a young man in his prime as his comrades clean their bayonets all around you and the air barks with gun fire, and in the sky bombs fall as if stars. Maybe then death would hold no allure and romance for death would be left in the stains of our fatigue. People die, yet the more ridiculous the death the easier it is for us to laugh. A dog dies and we weep and we cry and we damn the mind that put it into our path of vision. Our culture is a breeder of crazies. What pathogen, what poison, what energy emitted from the waxing of the moon? There is no need for it. People turn to murder all on their own. Maybe death requires a little more sanctity. Maybe the realization that we are nothing but bags of skin was the worst thing we could have ever done to ourselves. I don't wish to alarm anyone, but a soul with no strings attached is better than that cool abyss that turns men and women into monsters.

"free sex, free violence, free rock and roll."

The son feels (as does the daughter) that to suffer through the dimension of orgiastic violence (as viewed through a video screen) is worthy of his time. It is a test that he will be subject to because it will make him harder, more real. Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. In a manner of speaking he is no more real than the splash of red food colouring that is running down the hot blonde's castrated face. We don't learn things from film we relate to it, and through our relation come answers that have already come to pass in our own lives. That is the power of art, to unearth what already lies within you. So what is art? Forget about it, it doesn't really exist as anything more than a word. Forget about love for that matter, or god, or Jean Paul Sartre, or democracy. The real thing is chemical vapour that circles some distant sun. But the son is being tested by other brothers and sisters who rely on his power of regurgitation. It is not a sin. He absorbs and then he opens his mouth and vomits up society into the chirping mouths of the lesser thans. His friends. So he must take from this cornucopia of media and he must recite it and memorize it and spurn those who have not read from this same plastic bible. This is what it is to be fashionable.

One thing I will say for the fashionable is that they have a tendency to be extremely life affirming. They fuck and fight and live life as if they were trying to fill some bucket that has no bottom to it. Their vapid faces are a testament to a lack of knowledge, knowledge is a testament to suffering. Suffering is how one is aware that blood is really coursing their veins and that thoughts are not just fizzling out like shot fuses in their mental circuitry. The fashionable do not suffer so long as they remain the fashionable, so in this sense they are not truly alive. How then are they life affirming? Merely hold up the mirror. This is not to say that they are happy, but happiness has never been a true reflection of anything but the passage of time. Sadness will never give you a soul for sadness means nothing. Especially not sadness that is meant for the video camera. What is life is mere the absence or presence of satisfaction, your feelings on the matter are superfluous. Your feelings on the matter are what make you human, as such superfluous. Your feelings on the matter merely mean you are thinking, as such superfluous. Living in the moment makes satisfaction obsolete. This is what it is to be dead.

Speak no evil toward the son, for soon enough he will either come back to life or he will be as forgettable as the rest of us.

closer to the bone

There are lone cemeteries, tombs full of soundless bones, the heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel : like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul. There are corpses, clammy slabs for feet, there is death in the bones, like a pure sound, a bark without its dog, out of certain bells, certain tombs swelling in this humidity like lament or rain. I see, when alone at times, coffins under sail setting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids, bakers as white as angels, thoughtful girls married to notaries, coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead, the wine-dark river to its source, with their sails swollen with the sound of death, filled with the silent noise of death. Death is drawn to sound like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer, comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless, comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat. Nevertheless its footsteps sound and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree. I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see but it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets, violets well used to the earth, since the face of death is green, and the gaze of death green with the etched moisture of a violet's leaf and its grave colour of exasperated winter. But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom lapping the ground in search of the dead - death is in the broom, it is the tongue of death looking for the dead, the needle of death looking for the thread. Death lies in our beds : in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets, lives a full stretch and then suddenly blows, blows sound unknown filling out the sheets and there are beds sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral. P. Neruda

Heart of Darkness

http://www.myspace.com/gerilja

The Neon Violence

between the sea and sleeping, a joyless harmonium of stimuli. the mind pops and percolates with varying degrees of intellect and flash delirium. I am the nerve hunter, tracking the last pieces of my burned out resistance to the edge of the forest that shifts in my head. Some days the blue plastic tarp that is the sky is torn, or ruffled by the breeze, and a radiant glimpse of natural sunlight pours down as the spotlight eye of material god. Without such incident I am the hungry apostle of the dark. Without such incident I am forlorn between the sea and sleeping. Waves of sound and words without lips that carry my voice that never once broke from my throat. Somedays the brain is like a balloon that is constantly being filled with air and it grows and stretches and the rubber is eaten by all the tension in its body and the mind explodes. The earth is an eternal bicycle pump. The earth is a broken swing set. I have noting but hope for the earth. I have nothing but love for myself. Some days I wish to end my life, but something says "what a waste of your time." Dying is too much effort, you know? Of course you know because you are me whether you know it (or like it) or whether you don't. Maybe I am cut with a busted pair of safety scissors but we are all snipped from the same piece of pink construction paper. The doted line plays no favourites. Days of splendour; days of blood. A mood strikes the atmosphere and instantly the sky changes colour. Black to brown to smoke grey to gun metal to blistering hot red. Violence in the air. Neon Violence. All at once the clouds spell out destruction.

But, believe it or not, the earth is already destroyed. The universe is a stringless harp playing its way into oblivion. We are the children of a starless heaven. Rotating from right to left to diagonal fields of inexperience. What blasted planet? What moonless void? Growing ever more distant from the factory sun. You speak of the apocalypse. We were the apocalypse. This is the post-mortem life of humanity. A thing is born a thing dies a thing is born again. This is a message of hope that wears a robe of space-age black. I was born on the altar of fire. I was fed on the milk of corruption. You won't see the bullet when it nestles its nose between your eyelids, but you will see the face of god. It is a seamless dark landscape of twilight trees and phantom wildlife. The spirits of men hunt the spirits of animals. It is heaven and it is beyond your reach for life is beyond your reach. You grasped it once when you were spit from the womb. You grasped it as your lungs grew wet and cried out for life to fill you up. You grasped it when you soaked your loins and when you raised your fists in anger. Now a bottomless rope dangles by your left ear and you stare into a subliminal screen of light. Devils sleeping in the subtext.  

I'm talking about the real apocalypse. The one that already happened. I am not a doomsayer for doom has been murmured in the footsteps of humanity. It has been woven in bone and blood. Women menstruate it, babies eat it, young boys rub their little pecker's at the sight of it. I am a doom knower, for I have seen it. I was born in its decade. 1980, the decade of catastrophe. That's a crock. Every decade spells murder by the moonlight. 1980 is merely the the year the mountains began shouting out the obituaries: GOD DEAD, HEAVEN DEAD, EARTH DEAD, Time & Space collapsing in on itself. Humanity marches onward into Hades. What will the shade of Heracles say as he cups his hands and pushes the ram's blood to his lips? "I was once a man of power." he croaks, "I was once the hero of legend." his voice grows stronger as the blood grips his vessel and substantiates his form, "There was no chthonic monster I could not slay, nor no labour I could not overcome, yet my end was met by the mistrust of the ones I loved." Now we see Heracles, the shadow of the man, his voice booming with lust, his eyes shinning with the memory of glory, "And as my flesh blackened and burned away I was dead and a part of my soul, the part you see before you now, slipped into Erebus." Now his voice echoes hollow, now his skin grows thin, "The rest of me," he chokes, "became a god." 

Some horse bottomed bastard has sold humanity the means to its own demise. Who do we love? Ourselves. Who do we mistrust? Ourselves. Who buys the poison? Who supplies the poison? Who applies, and complies, and dies from the poison? Ourselves. Now the world is burning down around us. I can feel my flesh bubble and grow sweet. Can you smell it? Can you smell the aroma of a slow-cooked species sparkling out of existence? This is the end of the human age. The ignition has already taken place. Now, as we smoulder away, I wait to see who shall be counted among the dead and who shall rise as gods. Between the sea and sleeping, the narcotic army of walking dead. Televised scripture. Digital heaven. Flesh men and women turning to stone. Are we sleeping? I rarely sleep, for to sleep would be to dream of a golden throne. My eyes are flooded with neon violence. My brain is filled with the silent screams lurking in the faces of my friends. Are we sleeping? Or are we the dead.

S. Sparling