the archive

[scottermite]

i want to sink my hollow teeth
into the blue cables hidden beneath your skin
and sap the red from your pretty face

the splintering rivers
will guide my eyes
up your arm
curling around your bones
tunnels bored through your flesh
to the thing which thumps all dulled

& follow you back out.

[scottermite]

Hi. Can I send you a plea in the shape of a paragraph about
The scars which stretch across your skin in continents of dark pink
And the obvious truth I discovered beneath my dermis just the other day?

The shared catastrophe
Mutually assured destruction

The whispers of the leaves above us spying
There is no hesitation in your fingers
There are words spoken, a most sacred promise
Bound in spit or blood, I admit I don’t remember

Forgotten
Trodden on
The leaves above us sail to the ground as the world continues around them
Crunching underfoot
Resigned to the past

[scottermite]

emerge from the choking smoke of the late night, come an angel
all dark feather wings and dark long hair.
his sin is the colour of coal.

stuttered, stunted words tumble from between the yellowed teeth of his maw
blood drips off his lips like punctuation.
his words are the colour of his sin.

this scene has unfolded many times, before many eyes.
this is the oldest narrative, birthed from the first of us
which we are doomed to repeat, for ever until the last of us succumb.

[scottermite]

the cold crawls all around and through me,
it stuns me but not enough to kill my viciously lucid, increasingly selfish thoughts.

my rotten soul overtakes my humble, coy mind and paints the walls of my conscious brain
with images of a beautiful angel,
so bright it blinds me, its face eclipsed by the lens flare.
it threads its appendages through each gap between my arms and my trunk,
and heaves me out of the freezing water.

I imagine the angel wiping my face,
fingers colder than even the frigid wind hitting the liquid cold which soaks me, or the ice which cradles me.
I imagine the angel wrapping a towel
and a blanket around my legs, to keep them from shriveling up and falling off.

[scottermite]

am i wasting my adolescent love affair Am i wasting Am i wasting Am i wasting
Will i regret not wringing myself until i am love-able
Will i regret not forcing myself into those tight spaces
Will i regret not making it as perfect as possible, will i regret being the stagnant animal, sick to death with the inertia of rot
Will i regret not taking great pleasure in the baby teeth, Because every body else seems to think their own were so pretty
Will i regret myself

[scottermite]

Love me (like you are contractually obligated to), the stupid thumping toddler.
Stupid thumping toddler, I cry throughout the night. You will be used to it soon.
I cry because I cant speak; I cry because it hurts and my words don't work yet.
Love me, my reaching, stretching muscles that twitch from the fatigue of
spending the night thumping and crying and screaming
and beating the floor around me in my foggy terror and tense-- unchewed candy, tense.

[scottermite]

"Would you look at that! I can see right through the place! I could have sworn it wasn't like that yesterday. It's a real wonder how come this tall, tall, concrete office building doesn't need any support pillars at all!"
I perform my diligent shock; my practiced dumb glee at the same Mysterious Discovery as yesterday and last week and last month and last year, and I hope God's not watching close enough to notice.
My eyes appear vacant, with the way my pupils swallow up my dirt irises. Anybody could make the false assessment that they flicker about randomly, but I make sure they move with hair-fine precision. They skirt the holes in the carpet which betray the concrete beneath.
I can complete the sum in my head, and it tells me to lean all my weight on my own poor marks at school-- put my faith in my own penchant for egregious mistakes. If this sum were a person we could look each-other deep in the twin vacant eyes and revel in our inevitable doom, but it's not a person, it is a sum. Sums have numbers, not eyes, and perhaps if I had someone to pretend with, my greyhound brain's marriage to this cruel truth might be post-poned.
It logically follows that the hole in the carpet is matched on three more sides, but logic is not my shepherd. If the hole truly is one in an eerie quartet, then surely the seventy offices above would have collapsed and crushed me by now?
A sum is a sum; the lonely man is only privy to the right answer once. What luck, then, that he must forget it for his own miserable safety.

I am sure that if i hesitate I'll end up an ant punished with knowledge of things so big they'd never fit in the mind's vacant eye.

[scottermite]

i've been talking to someone who reminds me a lot of you
same unsavory desires... with less the courage, or less the claws
both evangelizing You'll Never Leave.
my cousin got married but i stayed at home, too busy, desperately studious...

two windows like lights, twins but,
one decays and one is snorting thoughtless breath
like a sneezing dog and that behaviour (easy and cruel).
i get scared and-
ah, i spill my drink and stain my papers, such the sage fool.
(i get scared; i am the novice born blind and terrible
selfish binoculars herald the barrel of a rifle desecrating little rabbit's burrow.)

Yes, i've been studious; i've been straining my shoulders reaching. the effort is giving me full-body aches.
i am trying hard to listen, to force blessings of attention.
it says,
"these are the symptoms of you
making me sick and it gets contagious".

(Time To Be Merry, it says.)

[scottermite]

inebriation cools my summer throat as it descends &
warms your winter stomach when it lands;
and we are coddled by guitars that sing & shriek
under calloused fingers like weeping women.

i dont want to see you sometimes
i want to see you all the time

so unacceptable and swaddled, will you
reach your finger in to stir my frontal lobe?
find the entrance next to the lobotomy scar
from when i was swaddled and berated; unacceptable.

do two banished dogs collect up dead rodents in a pile
and call it their glorious kingdom?
they roll around in their dirt and press their faces into each-other;
into soft necks with fur five inches thick.

[scottermite]

the rain snuffs his cigarette on his walk to that studio he takes for granted as home,
to put out his second song.
the next morning he blinks away dreams of champagne and pretty girls and that coveted chain & lead ball
to pick up his T9 phone.

he finds that his producer's phone rings dead,
his label executive's,
his connection at the radio station's...
and he feels like the unworthy soul left behind who didn't even notice the rapture.
the days stretch longer and longer, all alone in the world 'after'.
survivors wriggle out from under the rubble to rebuild what was, and still
he stakes his life on the claim he dreamt a tug at his coattails that night.

eventually he finds himself calling up those radio stations from a different number,
taking advantage of when they ask listeners to phone in (he must have done this a hundred times by now).
they leave silence on the air for his request, and he prepares to soak in the last of the splendor
afforded by his doubled voice coming through a tinny little speaker.
he pushes that death rattle down below his diaphragm, and his voice is strangled as he asks to hear his song.

He has set up tall mirrors, found a disco ball by chance at the bins
and strung it from the ceiling; it fits between shock blankets
and the sun reflector which used to live behind his car's windscreen.
he sets his kaleidoscope glasses on his face, he listens to that little speaker.
he's gonna watch himself dance and sing, and play air guitar, from a thousand angles... he's going to be those eyes.
He's gonna blow that speaker out. He's gonna punch the mirror until it shatters,
He's gonna knock the disco ball down and it'll shatter too; He's gonna rip off all what he's taped up.

And, see, he's come to realize he had one thing to offer this world.
he can imagine couples kissing, teenagers crying, miserable people rubbing their sweaty bodies together,
staring at one another with their wide, beady eyes, locked in an esoteric facsimile of dancing;
all while his disembodied voice drones in the background.
And, see, maybe if he were a better son or friend or lover,
there would be eyes wet just to hear him. there would be hearts lost in guts plugged into brains
that find themselves stuck on the practiced way he ran his fingers down a fret board that day.

(he pawned that guitar, early on a freezing and rainy saturday morning, just a week before it happened...
early enough that he could watch the young and beautiful clamber drunkenly out of hole-in-the-wall bars
that he's no longer young and beautiful enough to be in-the-know about; places warm and wet with alive, loving bodies...
and it was like they just did it to taunt him, vacantly watching and never recognizing, that torture he's lived since time 'before'...
...maybe just to keep him company, just to entertain his solemn, wasted mind
on the bleak drive from the cash converters to the life pharmacy on the corner).