September 1, 2022
Music…
Eye in the Sky, (Alan Parsons Project Cover)
by Matthew Bailey
Words…
Happy Birthday, Buttercup
Loneliness and heartache are like cold turkey heroin withdrawals: death is possible but its likelihood scant. I mention this for liability purposes - if that is how liability works. It is a warning label on a cashew: THIS CASHEW WILL CHOKE AND KILL YOU! (OK, I take liberties with the aforementioned declaration; but how else are you going to learn to fear EVERYTHING?) The real issue is our perpetual engagement to life. This seemingly unsolvable existence, or, burdensome “reality” (life), is concerned with our feelings as the planet Pluto (it’s a planet - Fuck you!) is concerned with my Aunt Donna’s pension. What loneliness (heartache), sadness, and heroin gifts is a deep desire to absolve oneself from - Life. And, well, I am going to live a long, long, time. I’ve always known this; I just can’t seem to stay dead. My name is William Buttercup. I am 41 years old, without a wife or children, and, due to my semi-peripatetic nature, a stateless man.
Sometimes I think I tired the whore. This is not a compliment: my sexual prowess is not so that the gal has to take the rest of the day off. I am the last guy in a long line; nothing about our experience energized; it enervated her; I am the one who made her realize in a moment of clarity: I don’t need to do this anymore.
And, what’s the saying: “Don’t look behind you because the residual wake(s) of your behaviors might provide insight into your present something or other…” My peripatetic 30’s fueled by guilt, shame, disappointment, desire, longing, and a bunch of other varying degrees of weird shit - most poignant - emotional connection (or disconnections). You see, on two occasions I’d spent time in death’s waiting room, but it seems death was too busy to process me: think of the paperwork - for cryin’ outloud! This is no hero’s journey: for I am no hero, and this is no journey…a hero, nor journeyed. I am present.
When shadows stretch from a yellow-green sun, does their color’s permanence facilitate ails? Or, does one simply present as sick? (Did conception enact your perpetual nocebo?) Where do the green shadows sleep at night? I’d like to believe they inhabit a green planet with green lands and green men speaking verdantly with exception to grace in its entirety. Atmospheric vibrations fill green tinted air with lush ethereal tones: cricket leg stridulations crescendo in D major arpeggios in unprecedented verdants - the night is warm, and we all, in some way or another, are limpid and on fire. If your mind’s eye has seen this scene, you are capable of rewriting history and can predict your future - your obdurate eyes christened unflappable. If your visual recall is now humbled by its conspicuous nascency; not only can you not see it, you possess its vivid incapabilities.
I could lie. I could be conventional. I could hope to be molded into the shape of fermented starfruit - or an obstinate aloe plant sapped of healing properties - or an obsequent surfeit (again) - or a dragged down and philosophically drown tumescent obelisk midst public castigation (stentorian anti-fascit incantations) - or tease out my veins and hang like a chime. Maybe I’ll return to rock dust and travel windward to embrace my silicosisistic end. And, at this, I will not talk (nor breathe easily - anymore). Grace may seem garrulous (window dressing); I assure you it is mute - for there is truly nothing left to say. Words are flecks of cotton on gushed lacerations. Words are archaic biblical misfits. Words are symbols lost in their meanings. Words are the burgeoning printing presses of American currency. Words are swirling plastic pieces fisting unsuspecting dolphin holes. Words are a walnut’s ribbon in telescopic view - a great distance and convincing. Words have no proof. They have no proof; no proof and no meaning because only truth permeates the Grace - and inside it is silent.
And I am not trapped. I am static and inert like a vietcong’s phantom limb - post battle Gia Dinh. Just as the Brother’s Hitler (there are three) of Long Island, they long to cease their DNA. I beg for Grace. I am the sanguine heir to their humanity, and I cannot in good conscience continue - mind fraught with disgust and intergenerational trauma; it wriggles in my albumen heart and chalazae brain - much like how I imagine the Brothers Hitler feel (genetic madness in a moment’s clarity). However, Hitler’s descendents are innocent bystanders when pressed against the burning world. And what is left? What is left is the world’s greatest view from the bottom of a Crowlian enveloped well. So what to do with these beautiful and brilliant flowers losing petals feather by feather, like eyelash shedding or a snake’s molted plates?
(A comeback is not a rebirth; conceptual “rebirth” is a misused, misled, and lazy mulligan - once something is birthed, it cannot rebirth - except for Slick. Anyway...)…the electrical current, which has been dormant since last spring, has returned - or is at least making what feels to be some sort of comeback.
We are witnessing the world go insane and die around us
. Workers are overworked and underpaid; children are either over parented and underloved or unparented and not loved at all. Most people think the wrong thing about the wrong thing, and time has never, nor ever will, give a fuck about any us (well, maybe the Clock clan of Winchester, but that’s it!). God is a concept lost on the substantially malnourished fanatics living in mirrorless mansions or less flamboyant domiciles. We are eating it all up, every last crumb, and we all pay for it while wondering how things got so fucked. Money is entering the nascent phase of being thrice removed from valued backing (whatever that means), people are killing people (seemingly for sport) and most do not think racism, climate change, insect, or animal extinction has anything to do with them. I watch people plod around with either trauma they are not willing to address because of shame or guilt, trauma they struggle to find the courage to tackle, or a divisive combination of external passive aggressiveness and anxiety - all coalescing like Mother Teresa on bathtub LSD and trailer park crank. Lastly, it’s like the country has a personality disorder in denial; But I remain grateful. At least I am humble enough to avoid the pitfalls of self-involvement and self-righteousness.
But, sometimes I am the tired whore.
by Ryan Stout