The Underground Tavern (poem)

The boys were sharing a tampon     
as large as a crepe,
one of them had found in the dilapidated washroom,
earlier, when they still bothered to use it.
They cut the tampon with scissors,
chewed bits of it, sucking on the gem of the menstrual blood,
chasing it down with beer, vodka, rum,
whatever came in handy.
At this point of the night
they stopped using the john
and pissed freely on the dirt floor,
shriveled dicks hanging out the flies of the jeans
of the ones who cared enough to unbutton.
On the floor littered with dog noses, tongues,
and mandibles with rotted teeth,
The urine mixed with coagulating blood.  
The waitress paid no mind to the wasted customers
this was an underground tavern,
no pigs.
She played a crossword puzzle
and rubbed her bean in the flickering light of a lamp.
The youth in the corner
hung his head between his hands
and started puking
the dirt floor in front of his shoes bubbling like a yellow volcano.
The alpha grabbed the gun next to his bloody machete
and shot him in the head.
The crumpled face lifted
only to catch a second bullet.
One eye popped on the soiled floor
and the snoutless dogs tried to eat it
but only managed to push it around.
The waitress stumbled to the middle of the tavern
lay down on her back and spread her heavy legs wide
her clit was a wrinkled plum,
infested by lice from her black, wiry bush,
growing between things stained with feces and blood.
The eye wormed inside her warmth
and she threw her head back
and gave an ecstatic, guttural moan,
sagging tits shooting jets of milk
the mangled dogs tried in vain to suck on.
Tongues hanging out
the teens laughed and barked,
beating themselves.

The Defective Animal (short poem)

Out of boredom, I trick my dog:
I knock on the wood of my desk
and pretend it came from the door.
“Sic Rocky!”
The dog jumps from the couch,
tail rigid in the air,
barking savagely,
raised hackles,
barred teeth,
ready to tear the invisible intruder to shreds.
There’s no doubt clogging the wheels of this perfect machine,
as they keep turning inside the placenta of causality.  
A dark thought hits me:
The dog barks at nothing thinking it’s something,
But us humans, we bark at nothing
knowing it’s nothing.
us lowly humans,
we’re only capable of
barkings of sighs
and resigned charges.

 

Dry Winter Spleen (poem)

The winter holidays are here, 
psychiatrists are booked solid. 
My co-worker told me
his radiation treatment went well
but that his wife was diagnosed with cancer;
Liver, late stage, spreading.
As if his fear has spread the sickness to her.
He escaped only with diabetes and no thyroid,
no energy.
I looked at him thinking:
is man just a knot of nervous ticks and rotten entrails? 

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
A customer told us,
The elderly woman who complained about the price of groceries
was pushed by a junkie in front of the train
and cut in half.
She was wrong she’d die of malnutrition.
On my way home, at the intersection, a collision.
A woman puked in the bag of her face
Spread on the frozen pavement,
Inert lips scraping against the grit,
One dangling eyeball iced in panic,
The other missing.

The winter wonderland is here at last!
At my neighbor’s place,
under the plastic Christmas tree,
the kids counted their bills
smoking, grunting, hissing,
like feral poker players,
while their parents snorted white lines
from unemployment lines.
Back at home,
The eggnog tasted like a long January hangover,
the only buzz was a drill through my skull.
Through my window, suffocating grayness, brown grass.
they reminded me there was no snow this year.
No whiteouts blasting forgetfulness,
no shrouds of ice
to hide us from ourselves. 

Review of Kristopher Triana's Full Brutal

Thoroughly enjoyed Kristopher Triana’s Full Brutal. Good fiction always gives me ideas so I decided to jot down my thoughts on this beautiful novel. From the start, I was enchanted with Kim White, the novel’s main character, a teenage psychopathic cheerleader bent on demolishing those around her both physically and mentally.

I loved the premise of violence that springs out of boredom or depression, echoing Kierkegaard's idea that “Boredom is the root of all evil.” Triana points out that his experience with bipolar depression bled into the first pages of the novel, when Kim is described as suffering from suicidal ideation, and seasonal affective disorder among other things; she loves that darkness of winter and hates summer, which might seem weird but I can relate to. Everything seems gray and repetitive to Kim but the only thing that brings a splash of color and joy into her life is torture and sexual depravity. After fucking one of her teachers she becomes pregnant but that doesn’t stop her from ruining the teacher and his family. Now, one of my ideas was that Triana could have stopped here and delved into Kim’s conflicted psyche. Fighting depression with violence and dealing with an unwanted pregnancy has all the ingredients of a solid horror story. The pregnancy and unavoidable arrival of spring and summer would only intensify Kim’s dark moods which, in turn, would require deeper plunges into aggression and depravity. Also, given Kim’s elitist outlook, getting impregnated by a nobody would amplify her self-loathing and make her have an abortion, even a self-induced one. These are severe issues that are bound to plague a conflicted teen like Kim and aren’t fully explored in the novel, which detracts from his value and plausibility. Instead, Triana decides to up the ante by adding that the fetus growing inside Kim is a cannibal that would eat her from the inside unless it’s fed human meat. I sensed that the ante didn’t need upping with such a far-fetched addition, and all the psychological drama and horror were there to be explored even if the baby was perfectly normal. While the addition of cannibalism to the story might increase its shock value, it takes away from its artistic value and plausibility. The first part of the novel opens up some narrative venues that are abruptly closed off when the cannibal fetus enters the stage. The ennui and anguish that plague Kim are always mentioned but never shown in her actions. She’s always engaged in sadistic planning, she’s never empty, paralyzed by meaninglessness, zombified, lazy, and destitute like the truly depressed. Triana doesn’t delve into that nihilistic outlook like he does in his novel They All Died Screaming. And that, I think, is a missed opportunity.

This brings me to a point about splatterpunk in general, an idea that echoes some social media posts by Wrath James White. Novels like Jack Ketchum’s The Lost, or The Girl Next Door, or Red offer exquisite psychological portraits that expose the evil in human nature in a realistic framework. Now, a lot of newer splatterpunk, let’s say, Aron Beauregard, sacrifices that psychological realism for the cheaper shock value of the fictional equivalent of ‘80s horror movies. There’s definite artistic merit to both of these trends but they seem to be very different writing paradigms, despite the gray area in between. I feel that Full Brutal started in the first paradigm and then switched to the second one, failing to live up to the more complex and promising beginning. For lack of a better analogy, it was like wanting to see Amadeus and ending up with Basket Case. 

Trailer for Strangled Epitaphs

The Mourners

Raining,
people in black were gathered
in front of the house on the corner.
A man died by suicide,
One or two days ago,
My mom told me.
Poison? Hanging?
I couldn’t remember.

Later that night,
I woke up to a cacophony of screams,
bangings on the doors and windows,
and crazed dogs’ barking.
The mourners were trying to get in.
My parents were asleep upstairs.
Couldn’t they hear this bedlam?
Was the outside door closed?
I couldn’t move.
The uproar stopped abruptly,
they found a way in.
Stealthily, dark silhouettes moved toward my bed,
holding candles,
their faces pale blurs,
feral small eyes shining with hunger.
Their whispers rustled
like wind-blown autumn leaves.
I wanted to tell them I wasn’t dead,
that they must be looking for the suicide
in the house on the corner.
But maybe I looked dead to them?

The old hag in the lead
had her gnarled hand closed in a fist.
I opened my mouth to scream
but only a throaty hissing sound came out
and my jaw locked open.
Dirt trickled from her fist into my mouth
like sand through an hourglass.
My tongue fought the falling soil
like a cornered worm.
The mud choked me,
and I burrowed deeper
into darker slumber. 

Dog Days Attack

Summer is here, and all your teams have lost;  

your jerseys are but shrouds in the dusty closet.
Summer is here, the sun spits its venom,
chicks show more skin,
those coltish legs and round buttocks
are bitter poison down your throat
spreading paralysis.
Even the diabetic woman with a cane
and a cesarian scar,
has ghosted you.
Your overdrawn account puts a toothless bj
beyond your reach.  
These dog days have ambushed you,
and stole your breath.
The sweet stench of fresh-cut grass
turns your piles of movies and video games
into distant graveyards
suffocated by hazy loneliness.  
Summer is here, the vast blue sky
is a noose around your neck.
All your teams have lost,
nothing left to cheer for,
no bullets left.
It’s time to wipe off your anxiety sweat,
and throw in the towel.