Chapter II

The detective 

I crack open a beer and look at this shit heel of a case on my desk. It’s a front page headline of a newspaper and I know it will be my responsibility to figure. I fondle my badge and think how I am the smartest man on the force and how everyone knows it from the janitor to the governor. There is something about this case that irks me. It’s on the black side of town.

First thing I see when I walk in is the red on the wall and the first thing I smell is the iron smell of fresh blood. A mouse skitters behind a mahogany dresser and I reach for my holster. Like a rush of blood to my eyes I notice the dead woman’s flush red lips.

To regain focus I light a cigarette. My armpit drips sweat and I scratch the top of my head. The room is too dark. This room gives me the creeps. I refocus my mind on the sound of a mouse behind the dresser and try to remember what I had for breakfast.

I had a bagel and cream cheese with orange juice not coffee because I was going to get a Red Bull on the drive over to the crime scene. The dead woman with the red lips lies on a queen sized bed. I can hear a conversation downstairs. The toe nails on her feet are the same color as the lipstick on her mouth.

Black people talking downstairs make it hard to think. This place reminds me of places I had been to as a kid. When you were a kid you could go anywhere with anyone. If I was a black guy I could come back here tonight and have myself a time. These aren’t bad guys who run this joint and obviously it attracts good looking women.

I light another cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke these things. I also don’t know why this woman is dead. I also don’t know why she is so attractive. This room smells like piss.

Or is that just the smell of this cigarette? Cigarettes always smell of piss. Why do I smoke these things? What would the woman look like without the sheet over her?

It looks amazing. The perfectly white sheet over an immaculate woman lying on top of a blood-stained bed sheet gives off a very pleasing aesthetic. Maybe the murderer thought so as well. The room smells like my cigarette and reeks of lye. The floorboards although old are the only thing clean in the entire room save the top bedsheet and my record.

I could use a whiskey at the bar downstairs. A pressure is beginning to give me a migraine. Is it bad juju to share an ashtray with a murderer and his mistress? Anyways the husband is back at the station with his high-dollar attorney and wants a report more desperately than my superiors do.

Oh, the ceiling is clean as well. I like her perfume. God, I am tired, I could use another Red Bull. I could use something stronger than a Red Bull. Too bad I won’t ever know what kind of perfume that is.

A beautiful day

To walk down the street

& look at trees

But there is murder in the air

Let us laugh &

Let us joke &

Smile shit faced grins

All is good &

All is golden

With this new murder in the air

The Deputy

She was shot through the stomach. She was shot through the stomach in this hotel room on the black side of town above this bar. She was shot through the stomach in this hotel room on the black side of town above this bar during the day. Then the murderer went down the stairs and killed one of the black owners at the bar and stole money out of the cash register.

Full ashtray. Mahogany dresser. Blood on the wall. Floor washed with lye.  Clean bed sheet. Blood stained bed sheet. Clean ceiling. Mouse under dresser. This seven-figure looking broad on the bed, dead.

Marlboro and Camel cigarette butts in the ashtray. One must be from the detective. Why do people smoke cigarettes? I’ve always thought they reeked of piss. This mouse under the dresser probably knows the whole story but he is talking as much to the cops as the black guy who runs this place.

I’ve been on the police force for a couple years and never been promoted. Stuck with each grunt job that they can make up. Sometimes though they can come up with some dirty shit. “Eat your wheaties today, we have got a body we are going to need you to throw in a river.” Like I could eat a bowl of Wheaties.

Wheaties are just a step above grape nuts. Being a grunt police officer like myself is a step above being a mobster. The police ain’t as bad because they don’t run the entirety of the organization off of causing crimes, just some of it. Like us cops didn’t kill this woman but we are dumping her body into a river instead of taking it to forensics.

This is a nice place. Shame this crime had to happen in an establishment like this. Good decent black folk run this show. If I had more black friends I could come down here and have a time.

I might get some cigarettes after this. The woman only weighs a couple hundred pounds. She ain’t fat by any means but she is dense. In this body bag it’s like I am taking out the laundry. Husband left a hefty donation for the chamber of commerce.

“Appreciate it if you would clean it up nice and tidy like.” “Things were great when it started.” “Can’t stand to see my social status slip farther than it already has.” Yes sir Bob, me neither. That’s why I carry your wife around in a body bag in my trunk.

In the tv shows when a guy does something like not have his wife’s dead body sent into forensics it’s a big blaring clue that he is a prime suspect for the murder. She was and is dolled up real nice as well. Did he fuck her and then kill her? Or just kill her? What a creep show.

No one says a damned word about anything. The detective. The husband. The chief. The black guy at the bar dressed as a white guy. The mouse. Just that I should eat some nasty cereal and tidy things up. 

“You have a job to do and you had better let yourself do it.” Like hell. The detective could tell the chief that the mouse told the black man dressed as a white guy that the husband had told him that I was the one who slept with and killed his wife, the black business partner and took the money. Since it is me and my squad car and a woman’s body sinking to the bottom of a river I wouldn’t give a damn if a mouse did tell a lie like that.

The husband killed his wife and then because he had just killed his wife he went and made love to her, aces high like, and since he was shitting in high cotton, he killed a black man for kicks downstairs and stole money to feel like a teenager again. Don’t give me a raise or give me a title though because I’m untrustworthy and I’m a loose cannon. What am I going to eat for lunch today? KFC or Popeyes? Maybe I’ll just get some smokes and eat KFC or Popeyes for dinner.

Morbid eyes

Morbid lips

Morbid breath

Morbid kiss

Morbid sex

Morbid legs

I can see morbid thighs

Morbid lung

Morbid tongue

Morbid dreams of Jung

Morbid loss

Morbid cost

Chapter I

 Piss fills my lungs. In the dead silence my match was lit and still hate the taste of tobacco. The bed is filled with detachment from fulfilled attachments. The exchange of niceties rise from the floorboards. Back and forth, back and forth like a gentleman’s game of ping-pong or skilled tennis players. This cigarette is yet to impress me.

The niceties don’t slow as I wonder how they do it I reach for my holster and exhale smoke into the room, a la French, and prefer my skill set to theirs in general although the familiarity of their banter beckons me in this moment.

In fact I have come to hate this room more than my cigarette. I cough as smoke is stuck in my lungs and remove the gun from it’s holster to balance myself. Cigarettes. I swear they put piss in these things. I wish she was still here. An angel by my side never disloyal and as close as a sister and a better fuck than any porno.

Red on the wall and smell of iron is what the mouse tells me. Into the room she greets me with the kiss of death. Her lip lock demands I listen to the story of her murder.

The mouse sees that her ghost has got the story from here and retreats to it’s home beneath the mahogany dresser only to comment from time to time with slurries within the wall.  

Her lips suck the life out of me as she places my cold hands on her deathly frozen breasts and the icy tips of her fingers close around my warm cock and I know she wants me inside her dead carcasse. Her bloody body draws me towards the bed. Suddenly I get the sensation of being naked little boy in the presence of a mature older woman.

He eastern star of my great great grandmother comes to mind unexpectedly. I wish I wasn’t alone in this woman with this gorgeous still figure lying disgraced in front of me. I feel as though I am in over my head. If she was alive she would be beckoning me to fuck her without a condom so as to give her a child and a future but she is not alive, so no seductive calls associated with movements occur. 

A wave of confusion overwhelms my mind. The loss of life placed in my hands is staggering. I stagger like I have been hit in the chest and my hands flail without the command of my mind. I have to get out of here. I need to get out of this room.

I will die in this room with her if I can’t pull myself together. Her naked body has lost it’s glow. I have no idea who she is. Her eyes open. I jump. I check her pulse because she is not breathing. Nothing. I close her eyelids. I open her eyelids. I close her eyelids. The door slams behind me.

I just want to fuck her one more time. To eat her out. To kiss her mouth. That is all over now. The only passion I will know now is to fuck a man. I have never even touched a man in a sexual way before. She was all I’ve ever needed.

As I walk out of the room a tear falls down my face as I look at my beloved, wife of ten years, bloody corpse one last time.

I walk down the stairs and there are two black men wearing white face. I walk over and shoot one with my gun. The ceiling above the cash register is dripping blood. The other man puts a glass away and takes a shot of Hennessy and washes his face. I empty the cash register and light a match.

The door to hell

Is always there

It cannot be destroyed or hid

The door to hell

Is always there

With an open lid

The door to hell

Becomes the cross

A man carries all day long

The door to hell

Becomes a ring

Inside a woman’s dream

Poetry II

 I am glaring at my co-workers.

Which is about as bad as a sign of the disconnect between mind, body and soul as any.

Something is off if I think I am happy while I glare at everyone.

I think I am happy and in love while I am pissed off and full of rage.

My soul is like a corn husk.

There is nothing in my mind.

My heart is a robotic whore.

My spirit may be well.

My body is healthy.

Existential crisis II

He took his girl into those dark rooms in the back. Hundreds of dollars were blown by the time he came back to find me in a horrifically dark mood at having unlimited drinks on his tab but no other prospects. We were both nearly blacked out as our aggression led us outside of the club. 

After binge drinking through the night and the next morning and afternoon I punched my friend in the face for saying something I found offensive. In shock he received multiple punches landed successively and successfully to the face from my fists. When he finally collected himself away from my abuse he took me down in a chokehold for the kill. I stabbed at his face with my keys as I yelled bloody murder. My thumbs were putting pressure in his eye sockets as a random bystander ran from the parking lot and knocked my friend off of me. With bruises and blood on my friends face we took off in my car for Lincoln to see Waylon Jenning’s son, Shooter, play at the Bourbon.

From the interstate I took the turn off airborne into the divide between the interstate and the pull off ramp. As we hit the grass dirt flew in the air and the car made it back onto asphalt as I pulled up to a gas station to fuel up. At the beginning of the concert my friend got kicked out for walking around with a handle of cheap vodka right in the open. He talked with a bum in the alley way as I listened to Jennings sing, “you couldn’t hit country with a baseball bat” and “if that ain’t country you can kiss my ass.”

Into the tailpipe of the rv went the half stick of dynamite. We were running as the explosion went off. An overwhelming boom drove us into the trees. With urgency we were attempting to climb into a tree. Once into the security of the branches I saw a squad car driving at the top of the hill. As my friend swung up onto the top of the first branch the spotlight of the squad car swept the ground and trunks of the trees beneath us. 

Blood dripping in spots from my head all the way down my body I stood at Memorial park pleading with a group of older guys not to beat me up. A blonde classmate of mine had smashed a wine glass over my head because I had put my shirt over her head while it was still on my back. Then I walked home as my friend watched from across the street.

Theology

 There I was on a roof with the last of my possessions in the darkness. I had got here by climbing a fire escape. My last possession was a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Earlier in the evening I had taken a salamander out of my pocket and let it out near some cattails in ConAgra park. In the dark I walked by moonlight and read passages from my book by artificial light.

Throughout my last two years of high school I had published a zine called Bad Taste and had been the entertainment editor of Omaha Central High Schools last print editions of The Register school newspaper. The zine collected artwork, writings, and interviews of my friends around town. My contribution as entertainment editor included an edition that took half of the paper up with DIY design collage artwork of my friends around towns artwork and interviews with their bands.

I had a guitar, a collection of records from working at the local record store Homers on Saddle Creek. I had a stereo and a vinyl player that I would create mixtapes with. I had a typewriter I would write with. I had a recording device for interviews and Lo-fi music recordings. I had a bicycle to get around town with. I had literature books from Pageturners book store, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, Kerouac and art books and magazines from Borders Books and Gifts. I owned spray cans for graffiti.

I would throw parties that attracted people of all social disciplines. Kids would be smoking on the balcony while others would drink at the dining room table. The new Lil Wayne album, Jimi Hendrix or Yes may be playing from the sound system. An NBA game or the Westside story would be on the 13 inch tv. The place could be crowded with boys and girls before or after they made a round through Memorial park. We would jam on my keyboard and guitar before going to a concert, thrift store or bike ride. At night I may go skateboarding alone or to a friends place for a hangout or hit the streets to go tagging.

That was all gone now as I had divided my most valuable possessions between my two best friends and put the rest of my record, books and other collections into a dumpster. I had moved out of my mothers and outdid myself within a day by moving out of my new place. With the money I had saved from Homer’s record store and having completed high school I abandoned my earthly possessions and was gone to wholeheartedly seek God.

From the rooftop in the Old Market I read Ivan Ilyich’s story about always doing his role and playing his part in society only to feel on his deathbed that that wasn’t where it was at. He looked back with regret that he had never stepped out on his own and taken what he actually wanted for himself. As I got on the Greyhound bus leaving Omaha, NE for New Mexico I did not intend to not go after what I wanted: God.

 

 

My graduation was happening as the bus was driving through desert of southwest America. I had turned my phone off so that when my great grandmother, grandmother and mother tried to call me with their Sunday best on after the ceremony was over I would not be bothered by them. None of them know where I am until a week later when I return.

However I did not intend to return ever. One thousand dollars in my pocket and a backpack in New Mexico was my deposit on my future. I had already made a new friend on the bus and got a hotel room with her. In the middle of the night I had already left her behind. In the morning I left behind my backpack, wallet, and clothes.

In the middle of the New Mexican desert walked a six foot tall white brunette male naked and alone. The prickly pear and other spiny and sharp vegetation cut my bare feet. I made a kind of footwear out of a large piece of canvas I found buried in the sand. The rest of the canvas I draped and wrapped around myself in various ways as I continued my pilgrimage.

As I made my way towards the mountain ahead of me, that I felt God, water and food was located upon, a motor sounds in the distance. Someone is motoring towards me. I am not walking along a road but the car is maneuvering through sand and around cactus. When it pulls alongside the driver and I stare at each other with incredulity and bewilderment. 

The driver assumes I am an angel. He tells me he drove out into the desert to kill himself with a machete. He produces the large machete before my eyes. He tells me that I am an archangel sent by God for the deliverance of his life. God was surely saving two birds with one stone.

Men who hold angels captive are very excitable. He tells me why he was going to kill himself and outfits me with new clothes, water and food. As his car runs low on gas he drops me on the highway to return home. I put my thumb out and an old cop car picks me up. I assume I will spend the night in jail but it is a hippy family who thought that the car was ironically cool. They drive me into the mountains.

At a campfire is a bare breasted woman who gives me wine. I drift from camp to camp looking for God. At one point I stand in a prayer circle and the man saying the prayer is naked. At one point I am naked again. Suddenly realizing I am not comfortable being around kids with just my boxer shorts on I find people who give me more clothes. People give me food as I scamper like a stray dog.

Eventually my desire for God is sated and the epiphany is that my only purpose in this life is to be responsible. An older gentleman drives me to my backpack and wallet that I had cached in a storm drain. I catch a bus back home and get my job back at Homers record store and register for classes at community college.

Apocalypse

 

 

This deer is a ghost deer.

This werewolf wants to be a good citizen. This terrestrial plane of twilight enjoins ghost deer and werewolf as equals. At first they frolic, race and touch teeth.

A shadow passes over them.

The mystery of the shadow belongs to a Jurassic bird. Flown out of an underground Jurassic world on accident, the bird was attempting to avoid conflict. The bird returns to the crevice it escaped from just in time for the crevice to close the jurasssic world in on itself forever.

The mystery of the passing shadow made the pair of twilight celestials begin to think.

For time before the werewolf had a mind racked with anxiety, worry and problems of how to be a better citizen as he rushed into the woods to satisfy his desire for fresh prey. The ghost deer had been pushed on by primordial instinct to find his company.

A feeling was in the air that left the future to frolic, running, and touching with teeth until the shadow of the unknown passed over the pair and made them think about what they really desired.

Human flesh.

At that moment a gopher offered them a potato.

Twenty racist whites hunting for raccoons began to sing as they came out of the pines.

Twenty more gophers with potatoes popped out of the ground.

A ring of rocks with lumber in the middle was struck with lightning.

The potatoes were roasted.

Black men sang on the top of pine trees.

The white men ate the gophers and potatoes and then they shot the blacks.

Out of shame the surviving blacks shot each other.

The whites went back to their places in society.

The ghost deer and the werewolf ate the carcasses of the blacks.

There is a black baby.

They decide this black baby is why they are meant to live. They tend to and take care of the black child. In order to not eat the child they promise one another to not eat the child or any other human flesh ever again.

The black child has a gold star as a part of his forehead.

Gloves are on his hands, Nike dunks on his feet, and clothed in white arctic fur.

In the North Pole he evangelized eskimos, traveled the stars looking for extraterrestrials, and read the Greek classics. The Eskimo don’t treat him any different than a living god. They don’t worship him. He drifts in and out of their lives healing and helping and talking of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

The black man is a son of God and can neither go into the city or be satisfied by the country. He lives in the North Pole because it is unsettled.

He likes eskimos because they are his kind of people. They are frontiersmen. This black man is a god of the frontier. When he goes to space nobody knows. There is no one for him to talk Greek with except Santa Claus and a couple high elves. When he speaks of Jesus no one listens. The Eskimo love him for his heroic qualities of generosity, kindness and authority. He is an authority on all Eskimo things. Always helping them improve. 

Some of the Eskimo women begin to believe in Jesus. Among them a particularly attractive lady one day breaks through the ice and has an experience with a Narwhal. With a long horn coming out of her forehead she discovers the depths beneath the ice.

She has sex with the god of the frontier by putting her horn into his gold star.

A real skull fucking.

The process kills them both in 1972.

The substance of her mind goes into his bloody dead skull and like a seahorse a daughter is encompassed in the man's bosom and shoots into the sky like a shooting electron.

A star now exists in another dimension that is populated by civilized narwhals.

The carcass arises with a cavity in its stomach and forehead.

The carcass speaks.

“There comes time when I no longer think about myself as hole. 

Something in life has defeated me and my focus is up. 

I have never been known to mood, if there was ever any. 

Honest in clever picking kind of way that takes the air words to mystery, doubt to faith, reason to unexplainable and disaster to miracle. 

Becoming so detail-oriented, self-obsessed and unworthy that woman labels me creep in public. Other times I am in love without falling. As a preface here I started out with just the type of thing that destroys any bond: a cold analysis. This is a cold analysis of myself.

Do I have the style to be able to speak to you?

Nothing is better for that Hollywood relationship then the style of two people being in love without love.

The falling in love seems to permit the being in love.

I like to think of friendship as love only if it has crossed the line of risk. 

There was a girl and I had a crush on her and she became my friend. Then one night while watching a movie she kissed me on the mouth. 

Then I considered her not only a friend but a friend that I loved a friend loved.

Same with a family that stayed with my family while going through a divorce. I had to be brave for them so I came to love them in a paternal way.

Different kinds of love.

Some women I only trust for.

Sometimes I only want for their company.

What is the difference between love and love and lust and desire?

I tell many lies to women that I want.

I have had this problem of asking myself what for 

did I tell you I was going?

Did I tell you that because I think you are silly?

Instead it was like an opposite that I think you want and I think I am silly.

I think it would make you to be happy if I visit. Any part for any reason. I think it would make me happy to do the same. I think these would give mutual happiness to each other whether we saw each other when I was there or not as well. What would that mean that we are both happy for me to be in the same place as where you are whether together or apart?

I guess it means we like each other.

What else?

There is tragedy in why I told you for. I think it very serious mean for you not to come back. I was in when I wrote that to you and I was not planning on moving back.

If you went when I was not there it would be to much and I would not want to miss it so I would return. Then, this is the bad part, I would not have anything to show you of myself that was a new accomplishment or improvement. I would have no proof that my love for you had changed my life in any real way. Although you were beautiful you had not inspired me to change.

I could not let you in on the fact of just how dense I was.

Also to reveal my cowardice, my whole non chalance toward you while you were here both times was completely contrived and I was constantly on the bare tips of my nerves because I thought you were the most.

I didn’t make a move up, down, sideways. I cannot lose you if I never did.

Though. I don’t think I could not make a come on to you three times in a row.

You are much more desire object if I don’t.

The trouble with thinking of you as an object, although a wonderful object, is humanity. What is it about our humanity that has anything in common?

I like the fact that you are because I like culture, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, politics,etc. With all of that passion I do not have any friends that live. 

It is easy to place my passion in a lens that points towards passionate world like a connection.

It is easy for me to forget about you as well though because I am mostly a nationalist.

I don’t ever want to tell you that I like you, love you, admire you, or want you because that is unfair.

Our friendship stays.

I like it that way. It is magic. It is breathing underwater.

It is flying with wings through mountains. 

What is this about you digging a hole to China?

What is it like?

It is like nothing.

There is nothing between us, never has been and never will be.

It is better to be happy than not.

Those are my needs.To be fully autonomous with some woman, now go make me a sandwich. Extra Mayo.

You have escaped me forever?

This and one more level of self-doubt to collapse this letter into shame.

It is this: what about the needs of a woman?

Inside of that question lies another question relating to apathy.

Is it proper to care about people?”

Carcass then descends to Hades

Erupts into a sprouting flame

Ascends as the Phoenix

Incinerate globe

Narwhal puts on a tie and sings to the Phoenix.

“Take a last glance in the mirror and walk across the room to open the door for my lady. She looks amazing and so do I. The taxi is waiting. We are going to the city.

First we eat then we must dance . We have been making so much money. In times like these it is like we dance right from the dance floor into the bed sheets.

I help her father with the farm in the morning. I make business calls in the afternoon. She has been working on her clients website since 6 am. I put on my tie and do it all over again.”