the lingering synthetic waft

A new story, "How to Find a Flock," is up at Monkeybicycle.

Your dad's dark lips curved like pomegranates

 Patricide: A Romance

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. 

The Natural Order

Walking home from the annual get-blitzed-and-forget-my-breath mixer at the Victims of Female Waterboarding lodge, my father and I heard some dirt talking to a tree. 

It said, “I can discharge you from this cortex, or collect your organs like raindrops with colors to spare.”

I thought that sounded beautiful. 

“That sounded beautiful,” I said, tugging on my father’s Cuckold Klein unlimited edition denim jacket. 

He gave me this look: Your teeth and eyes and maladjusted thyroid are from the left-handed side of the family, meaning, Liquid should be illegal, she slid too fast, or simply, These summers are moot.

So this is what my father did: he went back to Walmart for the fifth time that week, bought a power saw (Only $149.99 – Don’t miss a single Rollback or special offer!), cut the tree down and pissed on the stump.

Then he made me do it.

“That sounded beautiful,” my father whispered while lighting my jacket on fire.

We Always Managed to Have the Same Teachers

Carl didn’t see the piñata-bashing club as I cracked him with it on the back of his dome piece, knocking him out for a solid two minutes. And I didn’t see the two massive parental hands that grabbed me from behind and spanked my learing, chubby rump until I apologized to Carl, our non-offensively biracial god and the president. “Crappy birthday to you” is an understatement. Honey-bearded Jesus and George Bush 41 just kept staring at me from behind their picture frames on the plastic, Pine-Sol-colored mantel, and I wouldn’t be getting my new Super Nintendo until the following year, when the only thing anyone really wanted to play with were Stretch Saddam dolls and Branch Davidian Big Wheels. But I would be seeing a lot more of Carl. Until the next time he touched me where it smelled funny.

so slow to find the good stuff but I found this

Kill For Love by Chromatics

Label: Italians Do It Better

Release: March 26, 2012



I’m going to preface this by admitting that I know next to nothing about Chromatic’s previous oeuvre except for a couple songs, like the excellent “Hands In The Dark,” so I’m no expert on the Portland band’s progression to get to where they’ve gotten on their latest album, Kill For Love. What I do know is that this album is fucking awesome, which is a word that gets overused to death but the first gut feeling that comes to mind when I think of this collection of sounds really is awe (and indigestion from the Spicy McChicken I just ate). If “ominously joyous” is an oxymoron then fuck you because that’s the current running through Kill For Love like said McChicken through me. Relentless beats that, refreshingly, aren’t in-your-face electronica, lush and spooktacular keyboard arrangements, gritty guitar sparks, pop-adelically obscured vocals of both the feminine and masculine persuasion. Stuff for going out and looking at people, before bed quiet time, during bed loud time, hangover cures in a dark cave. Anti-anthems like the title track and “Back from the Grave” sound like clever Cure/Human League/New Order/Crystal Castles/David Byrne-on-Percocet mash-up records. Which means: wow. Fuzzy instrumentals like “Broken Mirrors” and “There’s a Light Out on the Horizon” are testaments to better and darker adventures than you’ve ever had with people you wish you could meet. The album’s best song, “These Streets Will Never Look the Same,” (perfect for driving to a keg party in a sparsely populated forest region) represents one of the few acceptable uses of Auto-Tune in recorded history. And I know I mention David Bowie in every post but there are more than a few hints of The White Duke lurking like a coked-out specter on the fringe of the tracks, especially the sanguineous “A Matter of Time,” which doesn’t really sound like David Bowie at all. I guess all I’m trying to say is do yourself a favor and check Chromatics out. And if you see me nodding at you on the Subway, it’s not because I’m acknowledging your presence as a distinct, hardworking and respectable member of society, it’s because I’m jamming out to “Lady” and trying desperately to free myself from the confines of the banal, joyless world you call home. Also, there’s a pretty sweet Neil Young cover.

The baby elephant gagged on it a little

Just finished the first offering of what is sure to be much awesomeness from Plain Wrap Press, Janey Smith’s Animals. This unassuming creature sneaks up with major oh-you-think-this-but-really-uh, like, you wake up at the crack of dusk, casually chilling, when, excuse me, a giant polar bear sidles up on its belly all who’s-the-boss and totally infiltrates the Zen of your nose-picking and self-dithering session. What? Many more pleasant oddities ensue – the plight of the Joey (the infant kangaroo, not Lawrence), a bossy pet pygmy, more baby animals feeling the sting and shirk of that bigger beast, Capitalism – all in a neat 66 mini-pages. Animals’ super-cute, compact and pale packaging (and isn’t that the best kind) almost made me feel bad for putting it down when I was done, as if to say, “Dude, you’re going to ruffle through me, leave my pages all dog-eared and finger-moist, and you’re not even going to spoon with me for an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras?!” One of my friends thought the book would make a nice coaster for his PBR tallboy (damn hipster). Another tried to use it as an effective, if far-from-deadly ninja star. Some of my friends don’t read good. But if you do read, you should do yourself a favor and give this little guy a scratch. It won’t bite too hard.