New York

Standing hunched over keyboard in this apple store
Tap tap tapping away before they catch me
Spinning words on the fly, stolen
From the crackled energy of this city

I look up to see buildings whoosh up from the ground
The trees here are not kings but servants
They serve but to green the
Feet of the true masters of this city
Those glorious scrapers of the sky
Shaving off the majesty of high flying birds
And flinging it back down onto the masses below

I see potent mixes of blacks and whites, olive and brown
All packed in the ovens of the underground
The subway so hot that everybody perspires
Their sweat melts, merges and pools in
The hidden arteries from Harlem to Soho
To Wiliamsburg from the hispanic busboys
To the dolled-up girls of fashion school
To the grizzled Italian bar-man serving
As much attitude as alcohol

And the beating thudding heart in that
Neon black-hole of times square
A bear-trap for the epileptic
It ripples and flirts and entertains
I see dancers and singers and poets
And tourists looking for that elusive something.

Godless Sight

The eye that I see God with
Is the eye that God sees me with

~ Meister Eckhart

I am the eye
The all-seeing eye
Worlds fall in my ken

Who then sees through that
Shiny plastic screen
Screwed inside the cone of the cramped cockpit
Diving screaming
From the vacuumed air above
Into the thickened smog below
A vertical prayer
From eye to screen to cross hair
To the phosphorescent green trace below
A trace with legs scrambling
A headless chicken
Your daughter's head
Scrambled at the sight of you
You squint harder into the screen
And with greater resolution it might even show
The creasing of the skin
As their face contorts at the moment of sweet impact

I see with pure electricity
The wires that fall away
It is an action as easy
As banging a cartridge into the hole
Joining hardware
to software
to joystick
To hand
To eye
You see through the eyes of another
Carrying some oversized triple-barrelled double-loaded shot-gun
Spraying pixelated bullets in technicolor death and fury
It is a pure expression of the soul
It is a divine handshake
It is an armored tank on threaded tracks
The hand that slaps the ground
And leaves plutonium dust in its wake
That corrodes the lining of the lungs of all who pass by

I see with eyes bloodshot from desire
Just as he, our god, desires
Not from on high
But from below
Like a trick in a peep-show
He shoves another coin into the greasy slot
The window opens
He watches
It is the dance of the seven veils
As each piece of fabric falls to the ground
Another patch of skin is exposed
Luminous and white
That burns into his far-gone eyes
And then the glass rises up again
The circle is complete
The cycle ended
Until the next coin drops

I see the stars through a telescope
A slivered tube of metal
That cups a piece of frosted glass
Calibrated crystalline
It scatters my vision amongst the stars
Grains of light
Balls of fire
Touching off a finger of corona
A strange filigree of light stretching
From star to telescope
Filling my head with starlight
Bursting my skull, a throbbing migraine
The pain
Reminds me that I
Are here but also there
The same point but far apart
The lord giveth the lord taketh away

To see is to perceive the naked
Peel off the eyelid
With a rusty potato peeler
Expose the viscous fluid to the corrosion of the air
Do you see better?
Unending sight
Blinkless
Without interruption your
Inner eye reflects off
The surface of the outer eye
The two converge
The light becomes the dark
You must realise
It is darkly
As it was in the beginning,
and ever shall be.

The Soul of the Box

Sometimes the body just sits there, floppy
Cupped around that second-hand sofa
The bones jutting into rusted springs
The eyes dangling on
The face twisted to face the television set

There is a relationship, symbiotic in nature
Between man and cathode-ray tube
The two joined in communion
Through physicality and intent
The electromagnetic waves fizzes and spurts
through the air from miles away

But we would otherwise be so much colder
Than now, transfixed by another episode of friends

Blood Theater

The Chainsaw Massacres - The Stage Show.

Yes. It can be done. You can depict chainsaw weilding flesh-flaying, gore-inducing action in a stage show, and look good in the process.

Recently I went to Cell-space, a kind of community-based theater/performance/gallery space, where everything from new-age hippie conferences to pyro-technic gore theater is put on. It 's a bare-bones kind of space with exposed girders and cement.

Whilst I had a little inkling of what was to take place there, the plastic-sheets covering every square inch onf the floor and walls should have given me conisderable fore-taste of what was to come.

The idea is redicuously simple. Construct a simple genre pliece that enables plenty of opportunities to dismember body parts in front of a live evidence, and use that as an excuse to spray the audience with as much fake blood as possible. The blood, really some kind of watermelon kool-aid had a sticky sweet consistency. And considerable ingenuity must have taken place to design the squirting equipment, because there was definitely method in the madness of gushing blood. No part of the audience was spared, as the blood was squirted to all corners of the room.

Of course, I had bought a plastic bag to be safe, but even then the bag couldn't keep the blood out. I walked out of the theater with streaks of red all down my eyes and splotches that looked like chicken pox covering my face.