distance is up static is down


Otto Dix, The Nun, 1914

What The Hieroglyph Said To A Pauper Formally Known As Morris
-- by Dennis Mahagin

Must have been New Year's Eve, nineteen ninety nine. Remember?
We sat around a booth in that dive bar called Kelly's Olympian,
tossing Alka Seltzer pellets into a big bowl of red wine. Plop, plop, and the hooker whose giggle was like a sizzle, like a wheeze, who kept asking you pretty please to say "tutelage" and "effervesce" in your phony Canadian accent, like Peter Jennings with an axe to grind, -- gently, gently cracked that poor girl up, especially when I confessed to impotence

engendered by meth, and what William J. Clinton had done with his cigar. Couldn't stop thinking about it. Right? Uck... "Yeah well, I'm all through with sex too," you said, "my own brand of nihilism..." You tossed a white pellet into the stew, then some kitchen matches and a torn-up scratch off lottery ticket. "But what about your backed-up ducts? Your moans, jismic goo and student loans?" cackled the drunk-as-fuck Party Girl, (she called her
self Monica!) tilting a cleft chin up, up, into overhead fluorescence. Believe it

must have been a couple hours later, when I climaxed crisply upon her cleavage, her bobbing-for-apples. At the stroke of midnight, I turned celibate, like I said -- and stayed that way, ever since; don't you dare call me fucking ... don't you dare call me Prince ... Honestly, some men, they stare straight into the abyss, they whisper "Spodi - Odi ... Spodi - Odi..." ice blue slates wiped of memory, but my newest name most resembles a medulla oblongata, whorled
by foam, wrought by flame. Still the same old shudder; dig, shredder: I'm about the music, so please wear it ... well, at least try to hear me out.

Fair Trial
-- Frank Stanford

The undertaker went his bail
And the chauffeur lent him
A jacket to wear
A sea blue tuxedo
It was all he had that would
Fit him
And all his friends
Showed up
Not that they carried any weight
In the town
But they came
To give him soul support
Because they knew
He didn't have a whore's chance
In heaven
You can't touch
The wife of the Law
And expect to get away
With it hell
The paper's bound to be against you