A Carnal Ecstatic, Part I

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Did you have a good life when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?

‑‑ Jim Morrison

The bright lights and colors fly toward us outside the windshield,
rushing, racing, accelerated like the flashing skin of mad gods
in the filthy, trash-blown arroyos and ravines of glass and steel,
sirens wailing like never-too-distant banshees waiting
just around every corner. Gargoyles. We mutate ahead in time,
back, the petals of our possessions and friendships unfolding,
folding, sealing over, locked under leathery sepals, separating from us
all that we've acquired through painful births. Mainlining
hard experience, call it treason, never reason. Never trust, we thrust
our cracked torsos onto the hardened fence spikes where
broken glass bottles are set in concrete on tops of walls
to injure any unwelcome trespassers into the land of the free.
Plucking out our transistors, idly, randomly, one by one, wondering
what circuits might be interrupted. But neurons are wiser, and they
rewire around new lesions in legions of rebellious,
compulsive and driven awareness.

In the rising ruby and dusty dawn on pale blue highways
approaching L.A. the telephone poles make a mockery of Roman roads
lined with stinking crucifixion spectacles. We must
put ourselves on public trial, draining ichor from the selfsame wounds
so passionately lauded by Volumnia, that power-hungry she-wolf,
determined to win power. . . .fame. . . .fortune. . . .​​a footnote
in the annals of her hours. What kind of advertising is this, these
half-stripped women with arms outstretched, bleeding television
signal and the dream of the West? Horace Greely, that
infamous plagiarizer, never had this in mind, surely. Violent passion
and baby-brained innocence like spun glass cradled gently in your hand,
this Dionysus out of time, this drunken god-man twirling
on the high wire, always threatening to fall away from the stage
where we insisted he play for us night after night. So thin, these veils,
these veils, in those who seem so tough, but their hearts are delicate,
and they break them for public amusement, again and again,
night after worthless night.

Spurious transitions, not too far distant from quantum tunneling
and the Casimir effect. . . .These impossible cavorting minds
are blind fish swimming through some kind of weird dimensions,
while in darkened corners near the loudly rattling room heater
of this strangely stinking hotel a large and bloated, gray-tan form
may be seen, but only from corners of eyes, like a biomechanical tick,
lungs wispy sheets like paper, thinly wheezing, dry membranes,
creeping, creeping, with twitching antennae and mouthparts that whirl,
that lowly buzz, low frequency hum lost in the roar of the radiator,
or part of the radiator, aftereffect of our mycelial excursions,
a reflection, a mirage. Virtual photons whisper to us in our sleep.
Old Bull pauses now to mention how the stink is caused by the spread
of a word virus up out of the sink drain, and it's always too late
to clear out. That's just life.

"In the first five months of 2008, 218 confirmed cases were discovered
and suppressed in Los Angeles County alone, the majority of them
clustered around the bottling shops. The Ministry of Health
carried out secret fumigation programs to curtail the propagation of rodents,
but they continue to proliferate, especially in areas where there's
an accumulation of rubbish. Rats are suspected carriers, contaminating
bottles and other items with their urine. Unseen behind a spycam, I myself
once watched Lazarus the metaphysician at work on his porcelain table,
cold, white, cutting into his patient, which looked not entirely like
an enormous pineapple, tart yellow juices spurting out all over his gloved hands
and up his bare brown arms. Inside, the traditional xylem and phloem
had been pushed aside by the glabrous pink-brown fleshy organ which had
taken over like a fibrous, bloody, pulsating tumor, pink and frothy,
only much more organized, much more exact. You understand?
If junkies can aim to become plants, then plants can get high on the runoff
behind the bottling factories, can't they? They're attempting a
meaty consciousness of their own, growing livers, the seat of all
mammalian biochemical awareness, and I suppose even Lazarus
musta been uncertain whether he should feel awe or terror."

In cool, dark wombs and THX the movies are watching us.
Like street corner pedestrians we pretend not to notice, complacent,
participating exhibitionists under the high-mounted cameras.
Downtown, bored and inefficient civil servants watch
the undramatic unwashed dramas run on and on. They are we though,
cells in the colony organism of the city like a coral, spewing gametes
into the rushing wind, pollinating at random, perpetuating the genes,
projecting them forward through time.

This is the world she enters, newly post-adolescent, breaking crack vials
underfoot, those lights, that glass and steel, those cameras, that soma broadcast,
podcast from every channel and blog. This is the river of effluent she swims,
and it clogs her eyes and ears and gills. Where is the beauty in the
filth and distortion and disease? How far can one girl be compelled to
open her eyes before she finally sees? But it is her river and her world,
and like Rimbaud before her, and all these other guides, she's
determined to make it her own.