one of us will have to destroy this shell

No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear

By J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods

Jaded Ibis Press

Released January 13, 2012

124 pages

Reading J.A. Tyler is a hardcore meditative discipline-inducing experience like that grizzled old dude you see in the park sipping from a brown bag and staring at the same chess move for several decades until his head explodes and leaves a pulsing trail of elegantly jarring (i.e. read this 5039403832 times because it’s that good) and unsuspected verbiage leaking onto his idle opponent’s scuffed white New Balances. It might not be the easiest shit to get into and you might not remember any specific phrases once you’re done, but once you’re in you’re sucked in and you will leave scarred – in a good way. It’s like this cumulative dosing of deceptive emotional wreckage that sucks you, all unique-like, into a frantic level of whoa, a story told around a story around a place you’ve never been but where you think you might like to sit down and chill for a while but you can’t because it’s that hot. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear is no different and no joke, although there are a few of those. The book is “about” maybe some conjoined twins or maybe they were stapled together in some time before time, or something.  And they split. So basically a love story. One of the most wrenching. I know this because:

The words I am using are a scream. The words I am using are a mask. I don’t want to be the mask to your mask. I want us to wear the same mask. I want us to mask the same thing, to be the same mask, to think that when we move our fingers we are moving our fingers.

This us and we that we are or are not anymore.

But it’s also a messed up death-slumber neo-ghostly riot that might make you sad because severed ghost twins is relatively heavy subject matter these days, I hear:

Cradle me in your bones. Cuddle me in the wind of your lungs. Grapple my eyes into your head and bring this back to how it used to be. Bring this back to when we two were one and there was no link between except and everything was a link and there was no wreckage, we were absolute. Go back to there. Be in the past. This one of us two now.

Am I of us the only me that wants this back?

The book has sky-blue pages and flowers and other amazing images drawn by John Dermot Woods – boy in blue hat cunnilingus-lover to a TV goddess sporting disengaged man-mask, Jesus procuring pulsing heart-candy to bystanders, re-entering a mother’s womb to lovingly bomb it in the hopes of relegating past abominations to a more savory unreality – so you know these are no companion drawings but text enhancements, visions within a distinct vision. I stare at these still. People think I’m weird. I think not staring at this book is weird.