31st August 2008

Ok, so I died back there. So desperate was I to escape from the mindless churn of work's grind that I protestingly abstained from relieving myself of piss to such an extent that three days in, my irises flooded with a rancid yellow ammoniac dye, my kidneys heaved and wretched and quivered, my skin pustuled into a doughy, porridge veneer, and as general fatigue toppled me, my body handed in the keys and whacked out. They found me with my head in the dishwasher, having just completed cleaning it upon dying. But that's all absolutely fine, because I've found a new narrator to guide you through this panopticon of oubliettes. His name's Nick, I found him the pub last night at the after-show party - I played a gig last night, highly successfully. One can generally gauge a character by the nature of the stories they spin within the first five minutes of conversation, we all have them, the definitives. His was especially uninteresting - a few years back, after five months of solitude and speed addiction, he wrapped up work on an unauthorized autobiography and proceeded to sue himself for libel. I figured he'd be ideal to take over from me, being a) alive and b) interested in suspending his life and living exclusively through the medium of his own unauthorized memoir. Apparently, he'd won the libel case and been awarded three-hundred-thousand for damages, and had spent the last three years dealing in bad drugs and his own drooping, abused arse to earn the money with which to afford himself this damages payload. I fucked him myself right there in the pub, shot a wad, tainted with soluble low-grade explosives, right into his vile, stinking hole and sat back, awaiting detonation. When his eyes burned up from behind, all halloumi moons, I stapled his nipples together, stole his ideas and wrote a haiku on a beermat, alluding to the awkward situation I'd manifested. He burned to death before even reaching the age of thirty. But that doesn't make him a bad person.

Advertising gurus have it easy. Being cultivated into a condition where literacy is deemed superior to illiteracy, from a tiny age, we're compelled to read every sequence of juxtaposed letters presented to us, in the pursuit of this superior state, to such an extent that when literacy has been attained, it's almost instinctively embedded that everything that can be read, should be read - aside from literature, which nobody anymore patronises than they do masturbate over Tarkovsky's desolate cinema - hence the maniacal proliferation of advertising, particularly in musical, rapt, neat slogans. We're doomed to be sold ourselves unless we rear a generation liberated from literacy. Aside from Bulgrakov. He requires literacy. He's an author.

So I'm going to present a production of a dismal, low-grade Ibsen play cast entirely with the mentally retarded, but only those stymied with such an affliction that their symptoms kick into pause when they take to the stage to deliver a line. I've started auditioning with very specific demands in mind - I'm hunting out the most deliriously crippled, club-footed, spasticated, dribbling, incoherent morons across the country - fine, abundant, you might say, but they each have to possess the very rare, fleeting capacity to deliver high-brow Scandinavian dramatic works with great passion, empathy, clarity of enunciation, grandeur and conviction. I can net retards in any pub in town - but to snare one that can render theatre's driest texts captivating, takes some rigorous persistence. So far I've found two, and I killed them both. Boringly.

August 28th 2008

Puck - Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

'Arbeit macht frei.' - A Life's Work? Or that ungainly sacrifice so many of us make five days out of seven, eight hours out of twenty-four. I've resigned from the realm of the sleeping in order to maximise the potential of my day. I rest now for brief, intensive periods, the same way morning commuters knock back caffeine shots en route to The City. Atrocity makes you free. The crest of ecstasy only glimpsed at the apex of the most intense experiences, the iron maiden, the hot needle through the cheek, the form ballet, persistence of its insertion, the glorious symmetry as it pervades the next cheek and re-enters the world, using this augmentation as a device on which to support one's head as one watches the news, reporting that a million and three illegal immigrants have been found to be closeted high-powered participants in state control, possibly Jewish, possibly amphibian, but definitely more than the bellowing Slavic labourers they appear to be on cursory interaction. The cheeks contract around the needle as anxious brow is furrowed upon acknowledgement of this revelation. Yes, come over here, steal our wives, our jobs, probably piggy-back our wi-fi with solely their slightly dumb smiles, but more than that, ladies and gentlemen, they steal our freedom. Our new work is annihilate all forms of governemtn and re-educate those each with a finger twitching at a red button, that the only sustainable, honest governance is self-governance, the discipline of the hot needle through the cheek, the form, the ballet, persistence of its insertion, the glorious symmetry of this prose alone is perceived by certain parties - politically mobilized - to be 'dangerous' or 'toxic' hence my next trick is to labour the latent anarchism of the free text with immeasurable weight, invoking Thor's Hammer, juggling thunderclaps and bowling with the darkest, densest cumuli, directing these ethereal colossi as though boots in a cupboard or automobiles in a pile-up at a junction whose traffic lights have been possessed by Puck himself. Puck is alive and well and living in Kansas, one day he'll erupt in each of you, and you'll arrive at your offices, marinated in your own piss, hair aflame, proceed to extract your fingernails with pliers whilst participating in a conference call with The Barclay Brothers. Every secretary's fantasy ideal is for her superior to lay her out on the desk and to shit toxic waste in her mouth, for her kidneys to be injected with liposuction waste as he hollers, spittle-flying, 'I LOVE YOU'. All she's ever wanted. Love conquers some. Bloody, indiscriminate, rampaging, cudgel-wielding conquest of everyone between yourself and death, conquers all. But this is a life's work, and who's to say life works at all when most murderers don't even possess the decent courtly grace to whisper 'I love you' as they saw through the last sinew of their prey's neck?

August 27th 2008

Chatting to a dear and avuncular friend whose interests lie somewhere spectacularly in the vicinity of extreme S'n'M, tonight, I've learned of a splendid new technique, practice, transaction, whatever, known in the argot of this trade as 'Rockerfellering'. Essentiall, this factors the carving off of one's fist, the freezing of said fist, and the subsequent employment of said fist as a rather potent anal stimulator. The beauty being, it has to be an autoerotic practice - in Rockerfellering 'circles' the substitution of a rogue, exotic or phantom fist for one's own is severely frowned upon, not least maroonly obvious. It's a commitment at worst.

Walking to work on tuesday, I found a smashed ujp drunk tramp, leaned up against a wheelie bin, obviously fucked up on booze. I always carry a razor blade around with me, useful for so many things - severing plastic tgies from garments, levering accumulated dirt from narrow grooves in the dishwasher at work - I took the blade to the vagrant's face, gently sliced through his lips, carved them off piece by piece, then repeated the operation on his eyelids. I then opened the half-empty bottle of Gulag 19 vodka cradled on his lap, stuffed soluble codeine into his mouth, doused his head in vodka, and happy that his whole form was adequately anaesthetized, loped onto work, and made it on time.

I received a further letter from michael Alig. Within its ebullient folds he details amongst other things his desire to mount a fairly provocative performance art action at the expense of the slimy bespoke goons peddling impeccably soulless show apartments bordering Central Park. Rather than detail precisely his intentions, I'll refer the honrouable reader to an idea of my own. I'm gonna secure a night at a notable local theatre, and gather a troupe of inside fellow hoaxers to mount a a shambolically awful, trite, underrehearsed staging of a minor classic play - something respected by the genteel, sub-bourgeoise musical theatre cocksucking lapsed angels. Perhaps a lesser-known Ibsen, something to compel a seam of the most cluelessly middle-class, hetero, beige, home improvement-fixated, towards attendance. Midway through the performance, and we're really gonna stretch the tiresomeness of this - missed cues, fluffled lines, collapsing scenography, rogue and faulty lighting - the auditorium is violated by the intrusion of middle-eastern attired banditi, who wrestle select audience members to the ground at 'gunpoint', coinciding with the release of an 'biological' agent in gaseous form, as the director/maitr'd frenziedly instructs everyone to lie on the floor and cover their heads with their cheap coats. Fake a terrorist action. Manipulate the audience into being bored shitless of a play they really should, according to the prescribed etiquette of their kind, respect, and upon breaching a previously agreed threshold of yawns and bored shuffling, initiate Act II.

I'm absolutely exhausted today, only just woke at two pm after having crashed out on a high dose of codeine at three this morning. I'd forgotten how codeine compounds the effects of alcohol, and given Bacchus factored in my evening, and Jesus, occasionally a night with Bacchus feels awkardly like I'm interacting with a future incarnation of myself, the evangelical bug-eyes, the wholly expressive physicality - we each employ our entire body to articulate, or lend further nuance to every syllable, and when talking to others, lean intrusively into their space, as though hypodermically insisting our point, sandblasting our missionary zeal into their moons of docile consternation. I intend at some point to abstract Bacchus into novel form, so as he exists purely as a sequnce of words, sentences, paragraphs, available for consultation at any wanting juncture, rather like the time I spent a fortnight sleeping discreetly in a British copyright library, hoping to assimilate the entire collected works of the library, to upload every logged cypher into my consciousness, in my quest to become universally encylcopaediac. I Though I was never accosted by the door attendants, I failed to assimilate little more than a trifling cold and the characteristic chill of uncarpeted marble upon one's cheek. Still, by day, I did autistically bulldoze my way throuigh the collected works of Genet, and related hubris - my particular bent at this period in my autodidactism was early-twentieth-century highbrow French porn, a grounding whose molecules I'd subsequently reconfigure according to my own fixations, programming and narrative interests in a sequence of pieces presenting intensified and sustained sexual violence, usually featuring myself as the passive protagonist, though on occasion inserting a fantasised incarnation of a famous dead person, Rimbaud, James Dean, Jim Morrisson and having them annihilate a boy into an ecstatic puddle of formless flesh, through the abominable administering of knives, penus, fist, teeth, nails, and any other available implement as manifested in the envrionment I'd previously created - a school, a windmill, a cellar, a woodland shack. My intention with this sequence of stories being to render this sexual violence, through repetition and sustained intensity, meaningless, devoid of ecstasy, emptied of transcendence, just words.

I met a guy on thursday, who revealed through gentle probing, that his sole objective in remaining alive - against all manner of indications that he really should self-murder, not least of which my own suggestion that he's professionally charmless and stinks of a thousand dead guy's piss - was to save up the cash so as he might have the image of his younger, happier self tattooed across his existing face, in a Dorian-Grey-like literalised wish-fulfilment bid, his rationale being this might engender the immortality of a long-exhausted vital spark. I told him this was a plan destined to succeed, bought him a drink, donkey punched him in the face, set fire to myself and ran from the pub.

August 26th 2008

So last night saw the opening of my new club, The Abattoir, just off of Marine Parade in Brighton. There's no DJ, all four walls are giant speakers, pumping musick of a fixed harmonic value, perpetually, albeit with a fragmentary delay between walls, creating a clockwise quadrophonic revolution. This musick is manifested by a piece of software wired up to sensors monitoring the heartbeat rate of every dancing punter, an average is calculated, this being the tempo at which the musick pounds; naturally, this tempo modulates constantly. One thing I've recognised is that this synching of tempi, this synergetic feed of rhythm certainly ensures the punters remain ours for the duration of the night. Anyway, my involvement in this club encompasses only financial and conceptual capacities. The day-to-day operation is manned by disenfranchised Aboriginals whose dependency on the drugs I feed them has been delicately measured. Employees for life.

I think I've contracted spinabifida. Having just concluded eighteen consecutive days of hardcore physical labour at the organic wholefood cafe where I've toiled now for two years - and this eighteen day stint incorporating a Bank Holocaust weekend - I've noticed my shoulders coagulate into calceous yokes, chains dangling from the rotator cuffs, chilling sinews of kelp snacking on my back. Impossible and worse - difficult - to raise my arms above my head. And then as I near the end of todays shift, in my catatonic and unballetic fug, my head collides with the corner of the dishwasher, the subsequent aggressive retraction, slamming my elbom into the main chef bench, a deep nervous seizure ensues, my entire right arm quivering in bodyshock, three of four fingers heading numbwards. I'm weeping, then, cursorily dragging my left hand across my back, as though in a surrogate embrace, I notice my vertebrae are starting to protrude through the skin, desiccated welts having formed at the base of these protrusions. Apparently in my habitual codeine stupour I'd been anaesthetized to these eruptions. Having never directly touched my own skeleton before, teeth aside, temporarily distracted from the pain of my elbow blast, my headspace folds into a coccoon dissolve, a pocket of contemplative calm, where softened tv static permates the texture of every image, insufficiently to obscure its form, but present enough to soothe and disengage from every tangible hurt. Perhaps tomorrow I might wake with my bone and flesh inverted, viscera borne externally. I wonder how feasibly and to what extent we might evolve within one incarnation if our physical developments are directed with tungsten will and the visionary clarity of a mountain spring. I'd gladly invoke the tail I lost some millenia ago, and perhaps too my gills.

August 25th 2008

Apparently there's a pink dog in London. I intend to visit Paul next weekend, who's been systematically divesting homself of all core ego via the ingestion of Alexander Shulgin's entire pharmacoepia - specifically those shadow phials hitherto untested by human palate. I gather that last week in the pursuit of further cosmic excellence, Paul hunted down and killed a shaman of some prestige, hacked him into thousands of corpulent, illuminated little morsels, extracted an eye and had it sewn into his forehead, directly over the part where the pineal gland lays, literalising the third eye, and his since been experiencing some form of compound-identity syndrome. So, I'm hauling my weary, fatigued self up there to assess just how Benway things have become for Brother P.

In Poland, the new trend is to have prominent internal organs tattooed. Wozchjiek, 18, died in Zakopane last November, suddenly, without any apparent cause; upon autopsy, the surgeon found entire paragraphs from the literary works of Stanislaw Lem emblazoned across his uncoiled colon, specifically certain pivotal sections from Solaris. This, I gather, is not an isolated incident.

I've been working the entire weekend, my energy unspools at a trickle, and I'm entirely inclined to sleep upon return from work, hence the absence of two day's entries. My arm, thus far, has not yielded to a web of spidery red lines, so I'm assuming I'm clear of infection for now. I painted my nails with boot polish and wound a hundred-ish paper clips into my hair last night. Tonight I'm gonna attempt to write an entire journal entry onto my torso - backwards - so as it can be photographed, if this is successful, I'll post the photograph here under the designated entry heading.

22nd August 2008

LS tried to coerce me into communication a little earlier. She'e not even the most diabolical cretin of the bunch, contrarily, she's a beautifully stoic mentalist, still, the fact remains, in ignoring her openings, I'm cementing my protest against the drab migrant scum I'd have previously deigned 'friends' and whom, illumination later reveals, have less in common with my true friends than leprosy does a slew of plankton. So, my arm wouldn't yield to the cleaver - and this is supposed to be a commercial kitchen - I cauterised it shut using one of the gas hobs from the stinking kitchen at my house. The drearily arrogant cunts with whom I cohabit have somehow managed to idly prise a cupboard door from its hinge, so now it dangles, obstructing the thoroughfare through the kitchen. Preemptively, I announced my resignation from kitchen use upon returning from a brief sojourn to see it had deteriorated, as suspected, into an unsanitary holocaust of accumulated crockery and stoner-grub residue. So my arm's sealed with fire. I'm taking grangantuan doses of codeine on an hourly basis to curb the pain and ensuring my fingers remain active so as to maintain bloodflow. Every time I visit a new place with an expected stay of around two weeks, I'm gonna establish a bank account, which will remain dormant, merely so as to provide authentification of address for library registration (say I'm staying at a hotel, I just state the number of the street, omit the hotel name), enabling me to exact enormous and serial library heists. I need the money, so I'll purposefully select towns reputed for their repository of first editions andrare titles. Bacchus called; regrettably I ignored the call, but only because I'm in alcoholic rehab, and he's one of the most careerist dandies I've yet gathered to my circle. Jesus. I even got bored of carving off my own forearm. I wonder what no-brainers, non-sequiters and non-events might stir my opiate apathy to spasmic deliverance tomorrow? I guess my jettisoning of the socially-lame scabs I'd good-naturedly invested so much in prior to this recent breakdown, is something of a pre-emptive strike - having had two days off of work and nobody but Uncle Patch attempt to contact me and lure me out for shindigs, tomfoolery and/or skullduggery, - I figured I'd counter-reject them in a way more wholly nitrous manner - total annihilation of their existence to my conscious being; contrasting my entirely conscious rejection of them to their mindless, careless, thoughtless rejection of me. At least my action denotes a choice having been made, rather than an absolute negation of choice. I used to care about being liked. Being loved is far more desirable, I've erased the former from my Christmas list. 'Like' is such a saccharine compromise. To 'like' is to evade commitment to a cause, to veneer one's surface approval over a matter perhaps worthy of further investigation. It also pays lipservice to that hideously outmoded Libran deity The Dichotomy - some pedal-powered vehicles have more than two wheels, okay? And 'hate' is not the opposite of 'love' any more than 'unlove' is the opposite of 'unhate'. Fuck, is love a process or a state, or both? This is why I take codeine, I find my mind submits generously to a plateau of higher symbols less awkwardly grounded in semantic ping-pong. I guess 'love', needing sustenance, air, flow, like any aerobic organism HAS to be a process, in order to stave off stagnation. The illusory notion of love as a static principle is doubtless the seed of so many whithered romances, degenerating nuptials, as though the wedding band and accompanying legislation becomes a substitute for the essential glue, frisson, maintenance, that initiated the whole marriage process in the first place. Jesus, I wouldn't want to marry anyone any more than I'd want to score my abdomen from the perenium to the septum and fold me in half like some Siamese Only Child of Self Love. Fortunately, you see, I can barely suffer myself as much as I can anyone else. And this vital distinction between me and any other nameless, pontificating loser is significant, in that it means I truly cannot lose, the only conceiveable loss being, in whatever dimension, I happen to be granted the mantle of immortality. We, humans, depend on death to justify our lives as much as the inverse of this is accurate. These twin bookends of pre-mortality and death contextualise our daily endeavours, and lend their acting-out some momentum, if not urgency in those in pursuit of ambition's wry folly. If death didn't factor, the ultimate end, then the only existing tense would be present. Ok, I gotta sleep. Tonight's homework, contemplate the notion of Death Dependency. I find if you situate an idea at the forefront of some imaginal landscape, - the terrain on which ideas are realized, or at least tangibly rendered, as though a terrain emanating from every angle beyond the sphere of one's brain, I guess where Rimbaud and Blake meet Neuro-linguistic Programming; for me this place is visual, geometric, mountainous, deserted, pastoral, arrid, exotic, perhaps akin to my understanding of Australia's landscape and climate - immediately prior to sleeping, it will frequently feature in that night's dream. Fix an idea or image in your dream capsule (directly before the pineal gland?) and watch it grow tentacles and exact gleeful polynarrative mangling of your dreams tonight. Steaming eyeballs of the captives, karamalata irises, burnished skin, hair bunched in a fist like the stem of an onion, he who dares glance into the cauldron prior to immersion is the recipient of great and dismal wisdoms...

21st August 2008 - Journal Entry

So I'm hacking at my arm with a cleaver I stole from the kitchen at work, alternately slamming it into the bone, and gnawing at tendons, just below the elbow, trying to lever the hilarious appendage off. My rationale - life's too easy, and if I can afford to complain whilst in a presently healthy and un-impoverished state, then I'm only grotesquely in accordance with the vilely-complacent middle-class shits whom I opt at every flagging second to lambast and conceputually annihilate. The resistance offered by my flesh and bone to this nobely savage endeavour only serves to labour how deeply viral my malaise has become - I'm one of them - only an acutely self-aware specimen in a cesspool of blanket-myopic blue-collar mitochondria, sucking at each other's gilded tendrils in conditioned subordination to every want they've ever been sold. Because I refuse to suck at these deadly crescent labia, I'm left with all the impotent self-doubt and titanic paranoia, without the cosmetic assurances and superficial Pavlovian rewards. Once this indulgent appendage is lopped off, I'll at least harbour tangible complaint and have thus broken through the fallopian veil of auto-digestion into the realm of benefit abuse, pharmaceutical dependency, empty, drifting, opiate days. I'll have attained the status of suicide watch leper boy, and ideally nobody within the cynical monotheism of product will lend me a glance, as I birth the spoilage of their self-congratulations.

GatBrghtn1:47am

Inane train conversation,
Woodpeckering my brain
Dispels post-gig elation
Til I'm cynical again.

The Asian in the Nike gear
Lambasting his colleagues:
He's in this game for chicks and beer.
I remonstrate, fatigued -

"You're not the King of Siam,
You're a Thai fishcake at best.
If this sounds xenophobic,
It does so at your behest.

You've botoxed your veins with bulldog piss,
And shed your native zest,
So hate is cheap and war is bliss.
Army soldier: Be The Best.

Ebay your ideals for indigenous credits.
Homogenize your genes.
The tabloid mother superior said it:
Suckle at The Queen."

And such drab ranting quickly tires
As does my writing hand,
Of wry political misfires,
And soon the train will land.

And I will slyly slip to bed,
My rising bile redeemed,
In knowing nothing ever said
Comes close to what we mean.

Jericho

I'm sorry for the little deaths I spent at your expense.
I guess I'm too impatient to stay sitting on the fence.

When you think you're capable of love we'll reassess.
Til then with every stroke I'll render your appeal less.

It's not just me who wanes with these diminishing emissions.
The seams of your allure begin to blur with repitition.

Til we're both beached on the same dead shore, indifferent, alone.
For every climax self-destructive seeds of guilt are sown.

I'm bored of boy-next-door bullshit and tepid yapping hope.
I'm no more a dog that shed it's leash than soap that slipped its rope.

As long as I give up on love I may as well on hate.
Could I, the gulf between my head and heart, eradicate?

Right now the chance of romance seems so tritely far-afield.
I can't sustain the notion there's a jewel somewhere concealed.

I love my friends, that's where it ends, I'm happily resigned.
The binary love I once dreamed of, indulgent as cheap wine.

If this sounds harsh, deluded, in denial or insane,
Then fuck you, I'm just trying to sand the edges off my pain.

Allow me these delusions like a cut allows a scab,
These Rorsasch Test contusions rendering my heart a lab.

I hope you're happy languishing in love's sweet leprosy.
It's not I'm bitter, more the case I'm simply better, see?

I Dreamed This Two/Too

I declared a war on nothing,
Just to let it win.
Two-foot Uncle Bingo
In his bumper widow car
Dictates the letters of the word
That spoils the air
With purple spores
That barely care about the
Dawning of the eve
Of the affair that
Makes us widows of the world.

The mirror sleeps in subterfuge
As swelling tides ashore do creep
Condemning crimson cripples,
Wastrels insulate their nipples
'Gainst the gastric milk of death
With each breath a toxic tipple
Granting blindside to the
Birthing ot the wake of
The mistake that
Makes us widows to the world.

When Siamese septuplets separate
The seas collide, and so the torrid orgy ends
And Uncle Bacchus
Holds aloft his glory friends
Whose mantra swallowed by the wind
Is putrid as the dogs who sinned
And barked their syrup up the U-bend
Choked on junk while others grinned
At the irascible aroma of the
Waking of the woe that
Freezes over our denial
That we're widows to the world.

When sultry, sleeping seraphim
Arise and mail their blessings
To the Pope, all decent residue of hope
Dissolves in thick and foggy bruises
Buried in the skin like mites
Chanting an archive of abuses
In an alphabet of nights
That spell the bloodsport
Of the Blackened Knight
Crusading 'gainst the
Quivering, backstabbing,
Broken widows to the world.

When decorated soldiers
Where their barcodes like medallions
And the feted falcons blush
Their blueing beaks and peal
'They told us' will we pluck a quill
And tell it back, or paint
Our future canvas black
As tumours gobble up the times
And humour can't assuage the rhymes
That sing of poison coarsing through the lines
Of sonnets speaking of the certainty
That we are only widows to the world.

I Dreamed This

The scene of a car crash.
A vast rural underpass.
Flowers dried by the verge.
Dried blood on the curb.
A pair of crisp jeans.
'Levis' '73.
A bell tolls through the breeze.
Stark rays beat the trees.
A diminutive cross
Indicates something lost.
A phantom wife kneels,
Prays that memory heals.
It doesn't.

Codeine Dispatch

Today has been a ghost day.
The sage has gone to seed,
Pronouncing only half of what you
Want is what you need.

The rafters bleed piano chords.
The air hums like a string
Along which hang the memories
Of long-gone distant wings.

The Halfway-House is lurking
Between terraces that glow
Like fireflies dictating
Why you care for what you know.

The distant kings are fading,
Sabres sabotaged by sin.
Who cares enough to save us
While we beg to be let in?

The tiles are ravening mortars
And the alleys, barrels cocked
At the empty sons and daughters
Who's epiphanies were mocked

By the corset of conformity
Upon the bride of gloom
Whose chastity, not charity
Corrodes the cruel schoolroom.

All fathers, undertakers,
All mothers mortal urns
Bequeathing death's exuberance
To those who will not learn

To cast aside the lover's yoke,
That grimace through the bones,
Of loyalty borne of the genes,
Not of decision honed.

Us lowly saints decrepit march
Through heathen fields of tar,
Lament the song of pilgrims proud
To know not what they are.

We're the suicide watch leper boys
Whose anthem's weary choke
Sings we're the offspring of the punchline
Of a long-exhausted joke.

So on Katie's comedown cradle,
Silence swaddled me in sweat,
That I sip from at the table
Asking have I been born yet?