1.The far unlit unknown

“It’s all gone to Hell,”
the dark silhouetted figure on
the edge of the undistinguished
shape moans, then vomits. Sick.
Just on the verge of blankness
and misdirection, his stomach
twisted up with whiskey, cigarette
smoke and a loss thick as
syrupy maggots; fragments of his
life far away, unlit; in the unknown.
Drowned:

And drifting [absorbing the smell
listening to the darkness...] drifting
and vagabond. Guitar strings
tied around his neck with a
broken crucifix, dangling and
wet in the liquid light. An old
hotel yawns; its art deco entrance
boarded up and disfigured,
like his bent eyes; his bruised
guitar that hangs down his back.
A maze of empty balconies hang
precariously from dead buildings
above narrow streets, in a decay
black with rust. Edifices of nothing;
twisted metal; vacant windows. A
thousand fractured scenes of the
desolate city around him reflected in
the splintered shards of glass; in the
mixed texture of dark and metallic
light. The shadowy facades ephemeral.
Spilled oil and gasolene in the
cracked streets like congealed blood.
“Fuck,” he breathes through his
gritting teeth; wondering. Wondering
(listening to the darkness):

All gone, the pendulous nothing
of the city now a wet ruined oculus;
a blind metropolis of rats and scurrying
insects; confused and disgruntled
dogs feeding on the putrefaction of flesh,
the intestines, of found corpses rotting away;
of lost souls scavaging the remains of life
like misplayed vampires, relentless zombies.
The city exuded a bitter, filthy sweet scent
beneath a borealis-faint layer of metallic
silver clouds and a wakeless fall
of black snow like television static
(listening to the darkness):

The city was there, a misshapen form
with disjointed geometries and
a surreal complex architecture or curiophilia
in a deep, creeping rage occluded by the angry
weight of shadows and fog. A few lamp-posts,
some half-bent or twisted down to street level,
remained working, casting dull light
indeterminately down abandoned avenues
through the labyrinths of the dark city:

Black snow fell ghostly grey and white in the
carbide and halogen glare, paradoxically
metamorphosing in the faded neon. Blakk’s
tired breath came out like liquid aluminum
as he walked. Searching. “What am I looking
for? What is there left? My heart is torn into
a thousand bits of bloodied ribbon ...” his
cold voice trails away as he stops beside a
fallen structure; something almost familiar. An
old statue he liked as a child, visiting to
see with his long dead father:

(mutilated and scarred:
revealing dead Romans, beneath
giant birds; the soldiers
torn out eyes clawed by the metal
talons... rusted dead-orange
paint peeled away, now; crushed beer
cans in its poisoned shadow...and,
other things...)
 and deeper still,
this curious reflection drifting;
some kind of Byzantium tapestry
reminiscent of California
or Venice. A monumental wasteland
for Blakk, his bruised eyes some-
where inside this reflection,
buried,
(absorbing the smell):

Like a romantic rock god poet
(long & lustrous hair; face:
delicate, pale and sepulchral;
Gothically androgynous )
with a guitar;
somehow unamused;
somehow disillusioned.
A gangrenous smile smites
his unwashed face: dirty
in a pornographic sense,
and wild:

A baroque crackling of wind,
of dying electric distortions,
crawls Bacchanalian and like
Death’s funeral;
then scatters. Dead leaves in
its ebbing wake. Swirling toward
the collapsed facade of rain-stained
cathedral; a tortured mosaic
christened w/ Hell’s children
like disfigured or forgotten martyrs
in the enormous oak doorway;
fragments of dead gargoyles lay
dismantled, broken, w/ torn wings
splattered in the cracked cement
and between felled trees. There is a
terrible silence in the moaning
wind’s breath;
a taste of metallic smoke in the air
(listening to the darkness):

Ashen-blue smoke falls ghostly
from Blakk’s
convoluted mouth as he drops
a cigarette on the wet ground;
his imagination calmly
fossilized by the absence of Death;
tho others of his family...
Bass-Bass, Blossom, Gothic, Violin...
and...
her... and her... memory of her
plush lips pulling away from his...
and his memory spirals, downwards,
twists, burns in cinematic ashes;
crashes...
becomes juxtaposed with the filmic
memory of Ribbons dancing
and her thin desirable curves
bending & engraved in his grey eyes:

The taste of her flesh and
the movement of her green eyes
fractured & splintering in the
dust of colored lights as his band
burned music on the warehouse stage;
in the brush of jungle velvet
and silken rhythm how she moved,
how she danced, in the red lights,
like ribbons of blood in spectral rain,
how she spiraled, buzzing in the
metallic wings of the symphonic beats
metamorphosing as she moved
pulsing like delicate veins,
a vision of beautiful desperation
(he sees her and despairs)
how she bled & sweat to the
heavy palpable sweating of Gothic’s
violent drum beats; the down-pounding
of Bass-Bass; Violin’s wicked
arpeggiations & speeding trills; through
the minor scales and diatonic
harmonies. Blossoms’ synthesized
samples of backward sounds. How the fading
edge of saturated neon burned &
melted in her bright red hair:
delicious silk wavering as if w/
their own Gorgonian mythologies
& snake-like movements... and,
her voice... as the death of angels...
how her tongue moved those words:

 “memento
mori...” a vision thing...
“.. ignotium per ignotius....”
...a vicious thing. How she was
the unknown by way of the more
unknown, and such was the
passion in that which so moved Blakk...
and the dangerous synthesized
vibrations of drowning agonies: pure
sounds peeling away from the very
flesh of the soul;
and how, through Ribbon’s orgasmic
breathing, Blakk would scream vulnerable
& painful as his fingers bled ghostly
across the biting metal strings of his
Schecter Black Omen, feeling the
beautiful intensity of its lilting breath,
undressed & unbound;
simmering in the eldritch cadence of
the naked shadows inside
(listening to the darkness):

In the Omen Blakk Warehouse
(now a ruined tangle
of ghetto-jungle darkness cocooned within
the mad religion of civilizations descent
into apocalyptic despair. It stands, now,
an atrocity exhibition of serrated shapes:
 dismantled, disfigured, disillusioned,
& destroyed.) From a far unknown distant
Blakk can see the cobblestone thick smoke
that hangs like some perpetual toxic ghost
above the jutted fragments ... glints of
dirty silver light reflecting
off the twisted debris...
he drowns,
drifting...
a lost candle melting; black flames
drowning in the burning wax of dead dreams
everywhere, and nowhere, and everywhere,
and nowhere; and nothing
“it is all gone.” As if it never was,
ribbons of the unknown
(just walking on through nowhere):
 
“the unknown by way of the more
unknown,” he whispers into the
decay of his rotting memory. In
the columbarium of his smashed soul
he can still hear & feel the shades &
hues of their music like
the metalwork of ambiguous devils &
Judaic cherubim
molesting sound together; joined in
black fascination. The arpeggiating
undulations of electric intensity
amplified in burning violins & guitars.
All these things gone:

Blakk’s Omen hangs like spilled lichen
across his back, over the soiled leather.
Around him the world lay dreamy,
drowning. Rotting. Deserted.
Spanish Moss fall from vast nothingness
in the bruised sky above; writhing in half-
awakened death. Distorted bats and
nighthawks fight each other above the
geometries of telephone wires and rooftops
in the forever night
(...and walking on air):

And drifting,
(listening to the darkness
absorbing the smell). He walks.
The polarized snow falling black
down his bent face, vibrating
and electric in his wake. A
cachophony of violent wind
erases his footsteps, like deleting
the memory of his shadow;
as if he's never
been there. A lonely ghost,
cast adrift.
“It’s all gone to Hell.”

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