Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Automaton Moves 3. (A Proper Water Monster)

Jesse S. Mitchell

part 2 here.

Let us not bear tender witness to every debilitating crisis,
To every glassed over, frozen stare.
But to the things still warm from blood-rush,
Receptive as the heart is beating.
Because here we keep all that has been spilt,
The evil moments shuttering and fleeting.
For today I am atrocity
And tomorrow, gentle memory.   

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Mutually Assured Destruction (a brief excerpt from "Pieds-Noirs")

Jesse S. Mitchell

below is a brief excerpt from the novel, Pieds-Noirs, set to be released late 2014 by Oneiros books.
this is a link to their Facebook page for future news. Oneiros Books  

dreaming
Proteus
Proteus-dreaming
Proteus was a slippery devil, living at the bottom of the ocean.  Shape shifting, shepherding, could answer any question…and he had to be honest, all you had to do was hold on, never let go, tight-gripping.
The Braxton-Hicks of the Higgs boson, almost giving meaning to a thing, adding mass but just barely and then passing, time is up.  Dreaming dreams, vision-seeing, blurry, out of focus, depth perception sketchy, broken.
Dreams.
The sexual frustration of creation.  The hand wringing, the brow sweating of the working, waking philosopher.
What she had told the doctor was this, she told him that she believed she was nocturnal.  She told him that she only believed in nocturnal things, in dreams, in whatever happens in the nighttime.  The long wonderful nighttimes, wrapped around the awful daytimes, the never-ending daytimes, long-houred and solar powered, the glare and blaring sounds, the nighttimes, quiet but not silent.  Not silent like the mornings with the deafening definitives.  Just quiet.  Night quiet.
She said she didn’t believe she was meant to exist in the daylight hours.
But now as she sat up in bed and looked around at the rough and random yellow streaks of light pooling up on the tossed around sheets, the glowing through the window, filtered by half drawn curtains, she could tell she was now fully within the morning’s dominion.
But this could quickly be medicated away.
Goodbye.
She got out of bed.  She was alone in the house.  Lindsay had already left for work.  Medea slipped on her jeans and socks and shoes and grabbed her crumbled jacket, did a check search of the pockets, grabbed some things out of an inside hidden pocket.  She tossed the jacket on, over her shoulders and then carefully, one arm after the other.  In her palm she held a few little bags, wrinkled, plastic, transparent.
Tossed a handful of pills in her mouth, held them under her tongue for a few minutes, tossed her head back, held it there for a second and then swallowed.  Took a small pipe from out of her jeans pocket, filled it, lit it, smoked.  Big draws.  Big puffs.
Clip-clop klonopin, marijuana, Adderal, tip top, mountain top, fire blaze, the mind’s alive, lava flow, one way outta here, outta here.  
She walks into the living room.  Strange chemicals hitting her blood stream.  Her poor teeth on edge.  Her mouth dry.  Grabs her canvas bag off the coffee table, hard black plastic video tapes clacking together as she tosses it over shoulder.  Kurosawa, Truffaut, Ferrara.  Rashomon, 400 Blows, Bad Lieutenant.  Who is ZoĆ« Lund?
The world gives way under her feet, by degrees, incrementally.  Life is made of equal parts absurdity and terror.  This used to  tear Medea’s mind apart.  But as soon as she figured out it was all about strength, it never troubled her again.
Through the door, the big golden wooden-framed apartment door, ablaze with light.  She dared not touch it on her way out, carefully locked the knob and gingerly pulled it shut.  Adrift now.  Tethered to nothing.  In what was steel and glass, cold nebula gas, cosmos.  Between the planets she roamed, all on her own.  And as soon as she blinked her eyes, the science of everything died away, the inorganic burn died down.  And she walked past fuzzy warm comets, plush.  Ceilings above, floors below, she could hear her feet on the soft carpeted ground…but barely, all the echoes were eaten up.  Tin foil stars hanging by wires and strings, yarn ball Jupiters and cartoon safe Saturns, Martian red red radiance.  Every constellation, a chandelier,  candlesticks yellow and orange.
   She came out of it all, on the street, two blocks from her building, puking stringy vomit in a green metal trash can next to a bench and in front of a vacant lot.  Two teenagers vandalizing the side of a red brick building stared for a moment.  The fascination passed.
Overcast.
Not as sunny as the past few days.
A chill on everything.
Hunting knife weather, sharp wind, cold rusty steel, carries sound so well.  She could hear taxis chugging through the streets, feet pounding the concrete into further submission.  Dizzy.  Couldn’t collect her thoughts.  Needing to eat.  Power low.  Energy gone.
Violence, violent thought takes over the mind on the coming down, especially on an empty stomach.  Visions fly into the eyes, visions of old Abe Beam, John Lindsay’s Vietnam Fun City, Ms. 45, Son of Sam, bullet guns, firing squads, end the war, here we are, all pixilated, purple-bruised, Times Square hobos, hipsters.  Medea wasn’t even in the city back then, she wasn’t even alive.  But somehow, the psychic imprint speaks to her, she can scan the still stained, still standing buildings and read all the history, everything before it all goes down the drains.
She pulls a cigarette out of her pocket, rests it on her lips, lights it.  Takes a drag.  The red ember crackles at the end, glows gold, glows crimson.  Second wave hits her brain.  Warm.  The smoke is nouvelle vague, series noir, dark, crisp, goes around her head in circles and spirals, halos.  The next few blocks home are nothing but light, jardins remarquable. The sun ablaze.  The sun, Anouk Aimee.   All the trees alive, Tuileries, directionless, the branches creak above her head.  The sounds save her, give her something to hold on to, a little lifeline, a cable.  Her feet barely touching the street as she rounds the corner and in the front door of her building, careful this time not to touch anything, any sensation could be gigantic, could cause enormous consequences.
Terrible.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Automaton Moves 2. (A Clear Midday)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Automaton 1.  here

And god, I hope you find me weathering the storm
All alone
Lying prone upon my bed
Underneath the day, the sleep, the death, and the sun
Not completely undone, gone to shreds, nor left for dead.
And if the distance of altogether time
Has not cut my throat
Bled me clean, made me mean,
I shall avenge, I shall remain
A subtle song upon your lips,
A little sigh, a just slip of breath.


Saturday, October 25, 2014

Fire (a few lines from the first part of 'Cavanaugh, Perkalev, and Me')

Jesse S. Mitchell

And down the road came a great billowing fire, encased in frozen steel, folded over metal, light twisted aluminum, ready to explode but held in delirious suspension.  Eating gasoline, pure petrol licks of flame, internally combusting away, dragon blaze inferno, coughing stones, and dirt clods, and clouds of black black inky smoke, the soot drenched sky behind drifting away faster that the tiny deteriorating-dying string thin seconds, time so weak it barely was perceptible at all.
And the innocence of naivety, the naivety of innocence, the brain-dreams floating in the super-heated updrafts of our minds, frayed singed bits of mental paper  escaping fire, that the serpentine asphalt that unwound below our rubber tires ate whole with unhinged jaws, swallowed down, totally reptilian.
Saying prayers.
Saying prayers, vulgar vulgar profane prayers of lascivious moments most lewd, moments when the soul and body become unglued, the disembodied joy of self-defacing self-destruction, youthful roaring in the wilderness, prophetic moments of humanness to come, reaching deep and pulling back, filling up the vessel with lusty mercy for the conscientious and sensible life to come.
Listening, intently, listening, hearing inside our chests, our heroic swollen hearts, hustling for the blood pumping through our veins, pumping rapidly, metrically, the music of exhilaration.        

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Automaton Moves (part 1)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Fear My Lai, like unshaven face-blood, like revenge makes prefect
Fear Abbie Hoffman, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, like the devil Sandinistas.
Fear whatever hides in Palestine, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like Sacco and Vanzetti are dead.
Fear Nazism, like Spanish Flu, like Catherine wheel.
Fear the torturous returning, like flames extinguished-smoldering, like red hot ash.
Fear metal collapsing on runways, like we the bones disembarking, like voices trailing off.
Fear decompression of the skull, like leaking tyranny of thoughts, like body-pornography, the bad sorcery.
Fear Guernica, like Passchendaele, like hell.
Fear Guernsey, like channel isles, like Manhattan.
Fear harmatten winds, like great floods, like apres moi le deluge.
Ut recorderis.  

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Click: A link to an excerpt and one to the book.

Jesse S. Mitchell

an excerpt from one of my plays is featured on a very cool site, IndieBerlin, check it out here.

and here is a link to the book it is from, Sea Snakes (Hydrophiinae)

thanks.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Anda-lew-see-ah, Anda-lew-see-ah, the end, and the end.

Jesse S. Mitchell

previous part, Fear of Mannequinshere

Shakespeare
Robosphere  (get your machinery out of here)
Robespierre
Troposphere
Abyssalsphere
We are all lucky to still be alive after everything we’ve put into the atmosphere, the words spilled into the ether, the actions decending from good intention to convenient to complete comfort.  The distinctions disappear.  Complacency poisons.  Wisdom weakens.
Aside: and let the rivers all be called Boudicca and Bar Kochba and every other thing like those stories through time, just rushing water through the Roman rock.
But Rome always won.
But time always wins.
But still it goes streaming through, coursing blood, flood, we love a rebel.
And utterances are small and use so little breath.  But they can take the life right away from us.  Steal the day, rob us blind, like bits of leftover fire found in the cinders and embers.  What was once thought smothered can flare out of control with the littlest air.  Feed the thing and demands more fodder.  And then everything is a blaze.  
Oh heal me, heal me modernity, the wound split open me, spilling out dust and ash.  Hollow. Empty. Heal me.  Become sewn up, sealed shut.
Erudition, let us praise everything now.  Let us praise Heathrow.  Let us praise JFK, LaGuardia, LAX.  Let us praise flight, expansion.
Erudition, let us praise lies and hopes of the future, illumination, advancement, new beginnings.  Let us praise fear and faithlessness and bitter hands and never looking back.  Let us praise potency and potential.
Let us praise tomorrow.
And never yesterday, never again.  La porte de l’enfer.
Conceptus tome.  So close and now we all dream together.
Soulless things and ridiculous voids and over repeated words, old bad blood stymied in the clotted veins.  Satisfaction too dear, cuts too deep, gratification too costly, frozen too solid.  Static and noise.  But fly, but fly.  Like the birds in the air.  Like the maddened insects before the storms.  Burst into the ugly calm surrounding air and explode to life and when you land again, it will be in a brand new world, remade, reformed, so totally new, assailed by ravaging winds and uncontrollable moisture.  Rebirthed like memories and fresh rushing rivers.  No shadows of clouds.  No one else’s blood beneath the mud nourishing your flower beds, your green grass.  Open-eyed visions of open-eyed Earths.  Everything alive.  As alive as life.
A blaze.
A fire.
A real fire.
and the end.
the end.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Those terrible gods triptych (all three parts)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Plate 1.
This is how we all move, like clockwork, craftwork, piecework, sewn tired calluses, wretched hands in waterlogged tenement rooms all by humid moonlight, Hell’s kitchen midnight. And so, swollen orbits and gaped mouthed awe-inspiring swings and death defying flings around that grey, that listless sun a’slumber in forever perpetual motion and never failing and never drowning in old yellow starlight tides, the random, the raucous, the red-hot iron, the neon gas, the sleeping, the never ever sleeping, but by dreaming, but by wishing, the stiff limbed reverie, rowing languid across the mottled skies.
Plate 2.
Let there be light,
Singular.
And then we are born, were born, straight away alive
Young things, beings on masturbatory journeys of total endless discovery.
And then the wind blows.
And there is nothing of us but billowing ash, quaking ash, birch branch
Lipstick stains on old teacups and conversations we never seem to finish.
And there is nothing remarkable anymore of this world except that it is remarkable and still it remains that way.
A hair’s breadth between monotony and divinity and profanity.
Extraordinary.
Plate 3.
Lines and lines of small plastic action figures, icons,
Made in China
In dedication to Biafran martyrs.
So, sizzle went the sun as it fell,
And flare went the hundreds of votive candles, all red.
Pyre like the moon, thin sliver light,
Sati, the wife-church, thrown on the flame.
Self-immolation as indigenous rebellion,
The peasant revolt,
The clinic entrance,
The trumpet blow, the car park,  and the total
End.