I sleep with a black machete beneath me, flat and cold against my face when I toss the pillow aside and rub its sharp steel blade. The reason: A fulltime core of hard-asses with unfathomable motives have placed me under surveillance for over five years and twisted my genial personality and kind disposition, transfiguring my finer characteristics, turning me against the better angels of my nature.
Let me make it clear: I'm not paranoid. On the other hand, William Burroughs said, "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on." Hmm.
Vehicles stream down H Street (Hate Street), their street, not mine. Only during the morning rush do so many vehicles go past my place. When I walk to town, instantaneously a huge vehicle posse sweeps and roars past me.
I speak to them at night, telling them to cease and desist, that's an order, shouting under my blankets to quit judging every scintilla of my quotidian life, a life that would nod out so-called normals. Why bother with boring folks such as I? I, Homo iuguolo, human-throat slasher, will activate and swing that machete at human targets if they conspire against me much longer. Counterinsurgency is hip these days.
I will take it to the streets because what we have here is Arcada's mafia. The only way to deal this is to make homicide optional. Gangsters need proof that an active opposition exists: Me.
Or have I lived so much in solitude that the only recourse is megalomania? They respect no law, no morality, no humanistic mentality. When drivers malinger too long in cars parked within sight of my window this means only one thing: they are terrorizing me. I cogitate my fate: I could take the machete, knock on a driver's closed door window and jab the schmuck in the face, then gouge out his eyes and poke the driver's throat with the tip of the blade. Question: Will I actually do that or am I fooling myself into thinking I'll carry out the propaganda of the deed? Am I that important? I have always considered myself a nebbish.
They'll drool blood, feasting their fangs of surveillance upon the withness of my body, "the withness of the body," an epigraph to a Delmore Schwartz poem. In 1966 he died of a heart attack in the Columbia Hotel in Manhattan, I down the hall from him. We never spoke to one another though I did write poetry those days. When I hear booming clicks on my walls I call the digital-mind rapist who does it, Cunt. That same summer of '66, published in the infamous magazine, Entrails, the first lines of my untitled poem goes, "Lady Cunt Vortex gobbled Cock Forever off his feet." I allude to this because that was my first use of the C-word, a word I incessantly now use to put undoubtedly a cop in his/her place. "CUNT" I spew out throughout the day and night. Everything finds genesis in art which makes precise and clearheaded residual claims of unwieldy oppression.
Those who hate me have stolen my former music and I no longer write poetry, the voice gone, its rhythms disappeared thanks to the local despisers who desecrated my brain's right hemisphere, sneaking in their destruct-virus while I listened with earphones to online music at Spotify.
Prognostication: These neighborhood manslaughters will address my secret vices, perhaps mentioning that I had sex with mentally feeble girls with Down Syndrome (I thought at the time that that was erotic, so making whoopee I found gratifying). They will whet the public's thirst for vengeance. It will go viral online. They'll place my corpse in a tumbrel, march with delirious crowds to Arcada's plaza, every citizen relating anecdotes about me, never once will they state that I had been oxygen deprived at birth, the obstetrician closely related to Arcada's police chief.
Daily, vehicles park curbside on Hate Street for minutes, for hours, and then drive away, bloody tracks beneath their tires my blood. I see them constantly from my window as I drink ginseng tea to concentrate my mind.
Conclusion: The Inquisitors/Surveillance Bringers initiate an auto-da-fe, moving beyond mere penance to death by burning, eagerly awaiting my murder. Arcada, in Northern California, the only municipality in the USA that allows parasitic beasts both the license to drive as well as license to kill.
I enjoy soothing music online to disarm Hate Streeters' grasp over me, a 21st century misanthrope straight out of Bruegel's painting, "The Misanthrope," except without his long black cloak from head to toe, "Because the world is so faithless I am going into mourning." I'm not the shepherd in the background, stoic-like, attending sheep. Those who loath me do so out of fear that I may be right, that people ain't no damn good.
I have often told them that if a great 9.5 earthquake were to strike California's Bay Area, Arcada 300 miles north, these same puke-haters would still maintain their vigilance over me. How can one individual as punyesque as myself be so evil? Impossible, but not to these al qaedaesque freaks of nature.
You can only manipulate a person so much till his DNA turns foreign, till I become a complete stranger to myself. I'm not talking existentialist philosophy, more like flesh-and-blood action/adventure movies concealing nothing but what's seen in films. Arcada's legions have voided my natural-born right to privacy. I stare into the toaster's electric coils which comes to life and shocks me every time I have thoughts going beyond the range of ordinary thought. At Montaignean heights, I plateau. Then I holler at them, "Let my people go! I'm the new Black, the new Roma, the new Jew!"
Firefighters the worst offenders, the man who installed a smoke detector on a beam in the living room, its nano-camera spies 24/7 on me and listens to every word I speak, I an actor reciting lines they've implanted in my neocortex. I should demand royalties. The police have warned me not to destroy the implanted device. The Captain came to my apartment and lifted my earphones only to heard Diamanda Galas scream-sing "Gloomy Sunday," jump off that bridge, bitch, you're alone now, give up. The Captain ripped the earphones away and cut the cord.
"We know you've perpetrated huge crimes against the state, haven't you seen your full-frontal images enlarged that covers the two-story wall downtown?"
"TELL ME WHAT THEY ARE. Fuckface, that's your mother's buttocks on the wall, don't you see how its rancid, naked flesh jiggles ugly on that couch. You've stolen a work by Lucien Freud, his signature is a flabby, ultra-vulnerable torrent of flesh."
"Who's he, that shrink?" the Captain says, squinting at me, measuring my reaction.
"He's friend of mine. We e-mail one another. Your mom posed for him."
"You lie, punk, you're a nothing man," he says and spits out a wad of chewing tobacco at me. I walk away and then send an email to Lucien and ask whether I can sit for him sometime. Immortalized and mythic, would art then nullify the mind-slaughters? I fear not since their Faustian bargain with the Devil prevails.
Fabrication: Police sirens turn to its loudest volume. They have a noise machine to penetrate my hippocampus and erased pleasant memories stored and replaced them with murderous thoughts, the old boomerang effect. Nightfall, sirens scorch my ears. I follow the Captain as he walks to a nearby saloon and sits on a toilet in a stall. I sit in the adjoining one. His pants fall with a gun-clunk in the bathroom stall. I slip my arm under the stall and snatch it, and fire a few bullets into him through the partition, then track down his wife and three children and shoot them in the head, then machete and butcher them, offering cadaverous steaks to local markets, the meat so toxic that 30 Arcadans die.
Truth: I did follow the Captain as he walked to his squad car. I walked back to my place. "When You Wish Upon a Star," that Disney song ain't that syrupy after all... anything you desire will come to you. My wish is to destroy those who wish me dead. The cops have a national organization called "Wish Upon a Star," doling out wishes to children with life-threatening illnesses. What about me, I'm at least emotional stunted. Can you imagine what a hideous front group that is? The Captain sits on the board of their public relations corporation.
In bed, I raise my voice near the window before sleep, "Mr. Machete may do some serious damage to a civilian of my choice. I'll maim, mutilate and decapitate the weakest link on the chain of complicit citizens," but my detractors never verbally respond. A few loud cracks splinter my walls, letting me know I'm a Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God ( thank you, Jonathan Edwards ). Substitute "Innocent" for "Sinner."
Fantasy under the influence of too much caffeine: I've graffitied "ATE" on corner signs along HS. The cops see them in the morning, using homeless men to scrub off the truth. As I wrote, "truth," oxygen suddenly ceases its flow to my heart so I rest in a rocking chair, its gentle motion soothes me till I reclaim my rage against these Digital Interlopers, their hate crimes against me so horrendous that I develop angina pains.
Cracks bounce of my walls to instill the fear of Al Qaeda, Arcada's hardcore legions' favorite website. I will never surrender to these Nazis. Or, in the famous remark of General Anthony McAullife, "Nuts," he too would not surrender to the Nazis.
I buy potted cacti at a florist's shop and practice daily, cutting off slices with Black Beauty, sweeping arcs dramatically framed on camera, my voice as enraged as was John Brown's at Harper's Ferry, doing battle against the slaveholders. The curve of the blade, the whooshing of steel, groaning, and a deep sigh of relief, I rehearsed to facilitate human remains on the rug: momento mori. Not afraid of blood, I stroke the weapon, its nocturnal emission blood I conjure later in dreams.
Before sleep, I listen to Ralph Stanley sing bluegrass: "I'm death I come to take your soul," and I shout as I lie in bed sheathed in darkness, "You can take your dirt and death and shove up your ass."
Unscathed, Black Beauty unbloodied, I awake, shower, eat breakfast and the day creeps along as if a total eclipse of the sun had blackened Arcada, perhaps darkened the whole world.
George Sparling says, "I live on the North Coast of California. I like the death of rain, each drop blood from the Void. I'm currently reading Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling. Suffering and pain bleeds on every page. My real life is the space between words on a page, a blank. Though an atheist by default, I have a print on my wall by John Martin, a 19th Century painter of "The Great Day of the Divine Wrath," fiery red flame, its dark, catastrophic clouds cracking earth apart, relief at last that our stinking entrails have sunk into oblivion."
del.icio.us
