The Loser (Ode to Emil Cioran)

When puberty hit                                                                             

I resigned from humanity,
and applied for the job
of full-time ghost.
Raging hormones
made me hang up my cleats,  

and exile myself in libraries                                     

to quench my thirst for losing.
I painted graffiti with my cum
on bathroom stalls
in the language of boredom.

Even as a ghost I was shy and clumsy,
couldn’t perform a decent haunting,
a small part in a nightmare,
or even a mildly unsettling apparition;
I was mostly slacking, killing time,
In the backrooms of the night.
Being a ghost ended up scaring me,
haunting me,
stressing me out.  
Naturally, I’ve been demoted from full-time ghost
to casual phantom,
but even that minimal responsibility mortified me.
Next step, I quit being a specter altogether,
and pursued a fulfilling career in nonexistence

Dementia Games

               

The two grandparents play hide and seek

with their meds and memories,
inside their cabin,
at the heart of a distant winter.
 
Surrounded by mountains of fog,
they pet their broken cats

and play fetch with their frozen dogs.

They play makeup with feces
and formaldehyde.

The holes in their brains are for their children,
and the depressions in their bleeding gums
are for their grandchildren.
But the thieving wind stole their marbles,
and they can only count between zero and minus,
between nobody and gray.

 

Their children are unconcerned:
the two loved each other
and have passed away together,
hugging.
No one deserves to die alone!

 

 

Cemetery with Falling Teeth (vignette)

Illustration by Thomas Stetson 

I was on my way to school on that ashen morning when my teeth started coming loose. My backpack was too heavy and my head bowed down. I spit out a tooth and it landed in a puddle of mud at my feet, its white like ice, like hail. I swallowed the next ones out of fear and shame. I avoided biting and kept my mouth slightly open, but my tongue was restless and it kept pushing at them. On my way, I met two of my classmates, my usual companions, and gave them a tight-lipped smile. They weren’t talking much anyway, burdened by their packs, not fully awake. It was foggy and started to drizzle. We made our way down the familiar streets, between the usual gray apartment buildings, mud sticking to our boots, as heavy as silence.

There was construction on one of the streets. Beyond the orange barricades, the street was now a giant crater, extending to the foundation of one of the structures. Was that building sinking slowly? I couldn’t tell for sure, but it didn’t look straight. When we negotiated our detour I remembered I had to recite a poem in class. My heart sank. How was I to recite with no teeth? I’d be a laughingstock. Panicked, I lagged behind my classmates and darted inside one of the buildings. I ran up the steps to the top floor and huddled up in a corner, my tongue still working at dislodging my front teeth. Doors opened and closed below me, steps descended, whispering shadows, people going to work. 

I waited as more teeth fell. Their roots snapped and sent jolts to my brain, like earthquakes just behind your eyes. I pressed my lips tight and fought back tears.

When I felt that the class has started I went out on the muddy streets, my legs unsure where to take me. I couldn’t go back home. My mom would yell at me for skipping school and losing all my teeth. She’d say I must be contaminated and would take me to the hospital, leaving me there with strangers, needles, and scalpels. Those green walls and nauseating smells, the eternal waiting. It was worse than being on the playground when no one wanted to play with you. The hospital was a deserted playground with barbed wire.

I found myself in the cemetery. The rain picked up, hard. Through the deluge, I saw a hole waiting in front of a marble cross. The earth under it softened, and the cross started to lean over. Finally, it fell inside the muddy hole with a wet thud, just as I spit out my last tooth.  

Axl Barnes' Strangled Epitaphs

Review of Curtis Lawson's The Envious Nothing

I  remember having high expectations for Curtis Lawson's The Envious Nothing. They were surpassed
and pulverized. This is a rare treat for horror fans as Lawson expertly integrates elements of body horror, psychological horror, folk, and supernatural horror in a style firmly rooted in Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  In his earlier volume, Black Pantheons, Lawson claims that "Cosmicism is a literary philosophy that suggests we live in a vast, indifferent universe, devoid of any cosmic father figure. If you take it a bit further it is the view that the universe and any higher intelligence within it, is actually malevolent in nature." That early volume features many stories of trickster demons and other supernatural entities bent on torturing humans both physically and mentally. 

In Devil's Night and The Envious Nothing, Lawson departs gradually from that initial characterization of cosmicism and offers a more complex picture of human nature and its relationship with the supernatural. There's a certain moral ambiguity that permeates some of these stories. In "Orphan" or "The Rye-Mother" the main characters are misfits who want to find a place to belong, a place outside the confines of the ordinary world, and beings from beyond the natural order offer their help. In addition, evil becomes more diffuse, so much so it turns into nothing, but it's a dynamic and dangerous Nothing. Lawson doesn't go as far as B.R, Yeager in Negative Space, to strip these otherworldly forces of any human characteristics. Nothingness is described as envious, hungry, vengeful, although those properties are immense and grotesque in comparison to their human counterparts. Lawson here echoes ancient creation myths from the Sumero-Babylonian to the Norse traditions.  The goddess Tiamat is famously described as a primordial abyss, beyond space and time, life and death, both life-giving and vengeful and destructive. By introducing Nothingness as a malevolent force Lawson takes us to the limit of our conceptual scheme, to the realm of paradox, the point where ancient mythology merges with modern physics. If Nothing is envious isn't it Something? Isn't envy a property or a predicate that requires a subject, a substance to have it? How can something be envious while outside space and time? Don't emotions have duration, a certain feel to them? Lawson's power as a horror writer lies in being able to weave imaginative, evocative stories around these perennial cognitive cramps and conceptual dead-ends, and to vividly express that which cannot be told.

I enjoyed all stories in this volume as the author not only spins original tales but uses a variety of literary techniques and forms to deliver them. The reader is never bored and kept on his toes. Stories like "Elvis and Isolde" are so well-crafted that you probably need a strong cup of coffee before delving into them.  The stories that will remain tattooed on my brain are "The Happiest Place on Earth" (it reads like a mix of Stephen King's The Mist and The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon, steeped in deep, thick melancholy), "Secretes of the Forbidden Kata," The Rye Mother" (I have a soft spot for amoral elitist characters and the imagery is stunning) and "The Truth about Vampires," (this one's aggressive weirdness and demented depravity reminded me of Nicole Cushing's "Mr. Suicide") As a small lament, I think some of these stories deserved a larger canvass, maybe a novella or even novel treatment. For instance, "Monsters have no Place in the World to Come," a story about the Hitler Youth, could easily grow into a novel in the vein of Lord of the Flies set against the desolate background of a ruined Berlin. All in all, I warmly recommend this darkly beautiful and challenging book!

Trailer for Stillborn Gallery

Intro to Stillborn Gallery