As The River Runs Through It

Only a fool

walks in winter,

he hears them say.

Then only a fool

catches the loose amber city

glow, walking over the bridge at night.

An Old Poem for H.D.

Why is it we

Seek the portal

To immortality

In the charred hollow depth

Of the quiet willow tree?

It is here, brother,

In a drowsy summer breeze

Weeping for forever

The death in me.

One Afternoon in August

Two peaches

Were picked.

And plenty else,

Packed in pairs,

Prepared for her.

w.f.

A framework

So I've been thinking more so than writing these days, doing some research on what direction I would like to take the longer stuff I've been posting. It's all various parts of the same thing, just hard to keep track of as it skips around in time and it probably won't all make sense until it's all on paper. But I'd like to toss out the macro level ideas for a little feedback.

Title: A Eulogy For My Father - This stems a from both how I stopped believing in God, as well as my own father.

Main Character: I'm thinking what I can do here name him Lucifer, but refer to him as Luke and not reveal the full name until the end.

Plot: Basically, invert the roles of God and the Devil in regards to good and evil, but have God played by the sadistic father [Michael, for a play on the archangel Michael], and the Devil played by the altruistic son [Luke/Lucifer], but still try and maintain the other aspects of their traditional religious roles, i.e. that God is not to be disobeyed and absolute etc, and the son is cast out to wander the earth and is the great tempter/betrayer. I guess there will be some challenges to the "lowercase" father/son relationship as well.

There is a lot that I need to get out of my head onto paper, but I'm starting to get the feeling that it will take perhaps a few years to get it out since I have to do this in my spare time. Any biblical references that I should look into would be appreciated. I've found that Lucifer is never actually used as a name for the Devil, merely a misinterpretation of the Latin in an old testament passage, but who can ever pass up on playing games with cultural misinterpretations...

First chapter of a story

Carcer

The story of Adam Johnson was destined not to end well; but neither were the stories of the other ten hundred and ninety four forgettable bastards at this facility. We all had names, stories, fears, first kisses, but now more than anything else, we had crimes. Because of those crimes there were numbers and letters; Adam’s was 094-AJSN. He used to joke that it was a barcode, like he was some can of food in the local grocery store.

“See this number?” He’d smirk a smile so wide you’d assume he was half retarded.

“ Put it into a register I bet the price would come up vehicular manslaughter. And if we scanned your code it say…?”

“Derek Pons, Assault with a deadly weapon, possession of an illegal firearm and resisting arrest.”

“Welcome to the real world Derek.”

That’s how I met Adam Johnson, with a firm nod. Under the steel grey sky as we stood on old concrete watching the other convicts, pretend their life were meaningful. That every cigarette they traded, each dirty picture they cranked one out to, and every bench pressed pound made them just as normal as everyone else.

Adam got to me early. It had only been a week on the inside and I was already starting to unravel. The first and only morning I distinctly remember is my first day on the inside. I was terrified of what was to come, the gravel shifted under my feet as the steel gates towered high above me as to meet the parting dark skies above Attica. Once inside I could feel the sharpened stares of the inmates, following me, searching for something, maybe something they wanted. Whatever it was it was lost somewhere amongst the steel grated floors, and the collection of souls locked away behind those iron bars. From then the day became night, and so the cycle came not in hours, but in sunrise, sunset. Day breaks and the cell gates open and the rest is a blur, a blur until the night falls. At night you can hear the stone walls bleed the sounds of collective broken spirits wailing , wailing for a life that was. That’s when I realized jail was nothing like they would have you think. It’s not the conflict that breaks you. It’s the loneliness. It’s the silence. It’s the sound of breathing at night that will bring you to the edge. Thank God Adam caught me from falling off.

Adam grew up in Hauppauge, NY and for most of his life he managed, by what he deemed a miracle, to stay out of trouble. Adam was of average height, with long jet black hair that hid most of his pale thinned face wrought with experience. Adam first and foremost was an incessant talker and relentless cynic, but moreover than that he was a procurer of rare and needed objects on the inside. Ever since I met him he had been the importer of contraband for most if not all the inmates. Anything from cigarettes to the Holy Bibles and Quran, perhaps Adam’s ability to please most of the cattle of the prison was in his education. He went to Johns Hopkins school of nursing for two years under the pressures of his parents Dan and Mitzi which slowly began to dissipate before his junior year as his mother and father went through a relatively abrupt and ugly divorce. By the second semester of his Junior year, Adam had already made up his mind that proper schooling was no longer for him. For Adam more important than his formal teaching he learned at Hopkins was what he learned shortly thereafter, when he moved to West 127^th street in Harlem. Much to the chagrin of his family he was convinced that the transition was needed for the next phase of his life. The only thing that moved forward, however, was his Chevrolet Cavalier through a stop sign and over the abdomen of a fourteen-year-old boy who died two hours later from internal bleeding in the ER.

“The prosecutor gets up there with this big blown up picture of this kid, in his 8^th grade graduation shit right, walks past each juror. Starts looking at each of them in the eye and starts spouting off shit, with his chest poked out like this saying: ‘Darnell was an A+ student; he loved his family and his friends, and he aspired to play second base for the Mets. He had a future until Mister Johnson took Darnell’s future in his own hands. Now you have the chance to at least do the same for him and bring forth some justice out of all this.’ So immediately I start thinking ‘man am I fucked sideways.’ Then I really start thinking, If I’m going to jail at least I took a Mets fan out of the equation. Does that make me a bad person, Ponsy?”

“Yes. Yes it does, Ant.”

“You know I hate that nickname right?”

“Yes. Yes I do, Ant.”

“Then why use it?”

“Because I know you hate it.”

“Touché.”

That was the highest brow conversation we would ever have, and I was fine with that. It simultaneously cut through all the bullshit of outside life and walked around all the eggshells you had to avoid keeping yourself from getting fucked or fucked up. I didn’t have anyone else in here but Adam, and I use to lie to myself that he didn’t either, although I knew he did. He despised the thought of being one of the guys who lived for the mail even though Mitzi sent a letter every Friday.

“Six days of wondering whether it not got there, a day hoping they read it, then another twelve days hoping they write back and that it gets here. I think I rather not be one of those people. I guess that’s why I bother you all the fucking time.” He would tell me, but I didn’t mind it though.

As a child, I did not have the comfort of Adam’s privileges, I was born to a fractured but relatively unbroken home in Northern Philadelphia on 71^st and Lafayette streets. I knew the darker side of the dealings, I saw the users obtain their fixes of the cracks of the pavement; heating cheaply manufactured baking soda cut with cocaine on blackened aluminum spoons. Perhaps that’s when I realized I needed to get away. I went to a school outside of the city, away from trouble in at the State University of New York at Cortland I graduated in the scheduled four years with a degree in accounting. None of which matters now, I was here and I was to remain here for as long as my sentence dictated.

In a place like this, time no longer has significance; it only takes two or three days to stop thinking about hours until lights off. After that it takes two weeks to stop counting the months and so on, and so on… Here it’s easy to forget about time, at least until your sentence starts seeming feasible to finish. Adam could start counting again. It was an ugly eight plus years for him and it was only four months until it was time for him to leave on good behavior. Once he started going to church, the parole board started saying he had remorse for what he had done.

The two of us every day would walk into the chow hall, and sit on the steel benches that were just as cold as the New York winters outside. Adam loved the cafeteria food they served us, and would lap it up like one of those starving Somalians on TV. I never liked the shit they gave us though It smelled to much like the crap in the toilets that wafted in the air a couple of hours later.

“The shit looks good today doesn’t it Ponsy?”

“It looks the same everyday. Cold Chicken and cold beans”

“Where’s an attitude like that going to get you?”

“Hopefully out of here in five years.”

“Or back in here in five years.”

“Optimistic.”

“Yeah aren’t I, speaking of which you ever going to tell me what got you in here Ponsy?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Actually, probably not.”

“You’re some piece of sh—“

The force of an intentional, unintentional elbow interrupted him as the throbbing pain lingered in the back of his neck.

“Hey! Watch it asshole!” he said as he rubbed his head quizzically. “Jesus, the people in here huh?”

He muttered to me while pointing his thumb in the general direction of everyone. We laughed it off and we ate every piece of crap they threw on our trays.

Everything was fine, or as fine as they could be inside a correctional facility chow hall. The all familiar buzzer sounded bringing us all to a slow rise. Funneling towards the tray return I couldn’t help but wonder, “What am I gonna do when you finally get sprung out of here huh?” I joked, but with no response.

Suddenly I could hear the sound of wheezing covered by the collision of a plastic and metal. I turned and looked into the face of Adam who was clasping his neck and staring into my eyes. Blood was straining through his fingers onto the collar of his shirt as he dropped to the floor next to a sharpened piece of blood stained bedpost.

I screamed for help into the crowd, but not one person cared what happened. In the distance I could hear the guards shouting something unintelligible, but all I wanted to hear was Adam. I wanted to hear something, about how much he hated the Mets, or about the food, anything. Anything but the sound of loneliness scraping against my ears.

The medical staff tore me away and took him away in seconds. I visited him in the infirmary later that night, he was laying there with a blank stare and a bleached face, his heart rate dropping steadily. His eyes opened widely, as he gargled something unintelligible through his throat. “I just came here to tell you something.” I responded, he nodded his head forward as much as his wound would allow. “After I got out of college, I moved in with my girlfriend of three years, who was living in Buffalo at the time. One night after work I came home a little early to surprise her with something, and the door was unlocked. So I went upstairs and found her lying in bed with another man.” I was choking up at this point “Anyway, I look at her in her eyes and she mouthed something along the lines of ‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’ So I took it upon myself to take the closest thing to me and start screaming and swinging.” I could feel tears welling in my eyes as I scratched out one painful memory after another. “I kept thinking to myself, she couldn’t hurt me if I was hurting them, they can’t hurt me if I was—“

An all too damning sound of Adam’s ECG flat-lining sent a team of nurses into the infirmary. Then they sprinted to his side and huddled around him screaming obscenities and medical jargon, slowly amongst the noise and panic he faded away. That was the last I saw of Adam Johnson.

I could still smell and feel the blood soaking my hands. I cried until my throat burned and tore at my hair until I couldn’t feel anymore. Above me in my bunk I could hear the sound of grunting as I assumed my cellmate had a hard time masturbating over the sound of my whimpering, and so it goes. Adam was dead, and I was alone.

A short story

Je Me Souviens

The story of Andrew Gilbert is like any other, he was born in an age of decadence in a city that no longer calls itself a city in Sainte Foy, Quebec; his residence lost somewhere in the wailing wake of jet planes, mass produced fashion and the swelling spine of the Saint Lawrence river. His upbringing wasn’t unlike any other child born of the 1980’s, he had a father, Marc who often lived his life vicariously through the television after coming home from hours from what he so affectionately called “shit shoveling” in the internal affairs department of the royal Canadian mountain police. His mother Karri Desjardins who was a self-described burgeoning feminist who spent most of her time walking around bra-less around downtown Quebec City in flowery dresses counting how many men would stop to undress her with their eyes and stroke her sinuous supple skin. She would then make sure dinner was ready by six, three neat table tactically lain, much like a spider would cocoon its prey before decapitating and draining the blood from open wounds.

Andrew’s family however was not abusive or loveless, actually to be honest the Gilbert-Desjardins had a respectable relationship with one another. Andrew and Marc spent many weekend nights sneaking away from home and travel hours south to Montreal to watch Les Habitants De Montreal skate circles around the Boston Bruins. Andrew loved those circles he used to listen to the sounds of the cold steel slowly fissuring the ice leaving trails of water behind the blade’s edge. He would often fall asleep in the car on the long ride home under the lightly dusted black skies above the Saint Lawrence river while his father sang along badly written 80’s pop music on the radio. Nights like those would be the highlights of Andrew’s life for 20 years.

He never enjoyed peeling limbs off spiders, torturing animals nor did he spend summers laughing while ants slowly were engulfed in fire by corralling the sun into a magnifying glass, he never had strange sexual deviations save for one time a girlfriend asked him to punch her while he “ravaged her body”. Unfortunately she spent the next fourteen days in the hospital with a fractured orbital bone. To be honest Andrew never really thought that he’d be married to a girl who thought a Mai Tai was a personal assistant. By the time he was 24 Andrew had graduated McGill University and was hired by a mid range accounting firm outside of Drummondville a small city of 67,000 a few hours south down the spine of the mighty river Andrew had known all his life. Despite the change in scenery nothing really had changed, He still had a mundane everyday routine and he still spent his weekends sneaking away to Montreal just like he did as a child.

The winters in Drummondville were especially cold, the frost bleed over everything it touched as soon as September began. Although most would dread the first signs of the northeastern winds that would soon sweep through the chasms and valleys, Andrew relished in the fact the skies would soon open up with white ash and blanket everything it touched without prejudice. Not for the beauty of the snow lying on the barren earth, but because it meant he could drink at local dive bars to keep himself warm. Warmth was something that had eluded him for quite sometime he had spent his the last four months alone in his home which still retained the smell of unopened cardboard moving boxes and plastic containers. Andrew considered himself to be a simple man who required little possessions however the loneliness… the loneliness eventually became unbearable. He listlessly raised the glass to his lips and began to imbibe the last of a poorly made White Russian consisting of 1 part milk and 9 parts moonshine grade vodka.

“I think I still can see the corn husk in here Claude.” Andrew stated wincing painfully as the one hundred and something proof milkshake left his esophagus grasping for analogies to describe the pain. “You can still see eh? Well I guess I’m not making it strong enough for you. This one is on me.” The milk stained alcohol slowly filled the glass swirling and folding into itself as it swelled over the lip of the glass and onto Andrew’s.

“Speaking of sight who’s the pretty redhead who has been giving the bedrooms to anyone who will listen?”

“Some piece of work ain’t she? She’s a regular fucking bender Drew, I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick, she’s bad, bad news. ”

“Ah well thank god, I opted out of giving you custody, I think I’ll give it a shot.”

“Better bring one over there too then.”

“Make it two shooters of three wisemen and add it to my tab.”

“Your money is no good here to me, Gilles.” He said as he slid two generously sized shot glasses forward, with a distinct look in his eye that only can be mimicked by mother gazelles allowing their offspring to run directly in the sightlines of cheetahs.

Andrew wasn’t exceptionally good with most women, nor was he proficient at the art of small talk however, tonight was different, tonight didn’t have to be like some other night where Andrew would spend four hours mustering strength to walk over to some busty blonde from the backwoods of Rimousk,i in town from to watch the Voltigeurs and the Oceanic play. He slyly made his way to her side and set the drink next to her hands.

“For you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Andrew Gilbert, I saw you looked kind of lonely so I’d thought maybe—“

“You could get in my pants with a drink?”

“U…uh, I just thought you’d—” Andrew stammered searching for a retort

“Like to spend the night looking at your ceiling?” She smirked as she downed the conglomeration of whiskeys and bourbons “Well, I guess you’re cute enough for a Frenchy anyway, I’m Holiday.”

“Nice to meet you Holiday.”

“Et toi Andrew.”

Holiday was not classically beautiful her hair was ragged and unkempt much like some starved art student and fell below her ears and kissed upon her neck gracefully, her skin was attractive and rough with tan from years of sun peering through car windows, burns from jersey cotton bed sheets and unmentionable abuse from men and women. Lips and nose rolled forth from her face softly as accents to her naturally beautiful green eyes that you had to delve for, through the glare of her designer glasses. Their relationship that night began with the taste of bourbon as the air wafted smells of cheap beer and old sweat into their nostrils sending the need for physical sensation into a some sort of feral frenzy lost in the sway of human pheromones. The night was destined to end with the taste of flesh and reproductive satisfaction, fated to go home they made their way to the coat racks and out the front door dying desperately to find their way to his forest green four door luxury sedan, with what was now surely frigid leather seats.

Speeding rapidly racing down crowdless streets tearing showers of snow into the night behind them like cannons leaves gun smoke lingering in the air after burst fire, Holiday sexily unbuttoned his shirt as her hand touched him sensitively along his chest while she whispered half moans and suggestions into his awaiting ears. Her arousal strengthening with the speedometer climbing higher and higher nearing its threshold, ecstasy filled her lungs as he pulled into his garage and tore her from her unoccupied seat, and placed himself in front of her while firmly holding her against the entryway to his house.

They found themselves in a tumultuous whirlwind of falling clothing guttural grunts and groans until he finally threw her upon his bed, as she awaited his weight. Unfortunately he only uttered one word “Wait.” And she did, as he left the room momentarily Holiday closed her eyes still drunk off of sexuality she felt the cold plastic covers on his Andrew’s bed scratch against her hands roughly she turned to look at the sterile room with little and no furniture and suddenly felt cold as there was no electricity surging through the house. Holiday soon became scared and then limp as two surgically silenced nine millimeter bullets pierced the occipital portion of her skull immediately calling a halt of all brain function from running down into her body save for the four or five twitches caused by post-mortem synaptic fire. The blood ran in fissures along the odor proof plastic draped over the bed. He wrapped the sheet over her sinuous curves much like he had before and threw her over his shoulder to carry her into his un-insulated cellar, which during the cold Drummondville winters served as a natural refrigeration device.

Gently placing her body on his work bench he began to do his normal routine, of sharpening all of the surgical equipment before he would make his first four strokes. The sounds of skates crackling the ice could only withhold him for so long as a substitute for the sound of scalpel delving into the softness of human flesh. Andrew smiled as number 30 and her 21 pieces fit into the incinerator along with that night’s clothing. He had to hurry and not savor the victory of this moment. For he had a long drive to Chicoutimi in the morning, adhering to his code, 6 bodies per year discard all belongings then transfer along the river to a new firm who would be just as willing to take him.

No, Andrew Gilbert was not subject to a broken home like most serial killers, he was not abused or disturbed, he didn’t abuse animals, or have strange sexual fantasies. No Andrew Gilbert normal, normal except for the fact he killed people for fun.

one more poem

Oh To Be Lost

Dark dwelling, deep in it's own despair.

Marred meaninglessly in its essence.

Cold, coarse, fleshed tiles spanning

Upwards into struts

Of splintered weathered wood

Smelling of stale Sap and Oak

Into sullen, sweat-stained sheets.

Concealing constellations.

Within You and I-

Intertwined within one another;

Amongst the stars.

Our words Lost somewhere between the rhythm of our heart

And the nature of our nerves

To touch.