(a brief, in miniature)

Oh.

I’ve waited and waited and waited.

Until I can’t bear the weight anymore.

I’ve done what’s dumb.

Til it’s done.

For what’s worth and won.

I HAVE

Drilled what bores.

I

Been here I ben hur and I been a whore.

All-amalgamated.

A - MAL - GAM.

A demon.

Bred of circuitry.

Tinkling trinketry.

Dark-winged inkling.

Poseidon sinking.

DO YOU LIKE PROCESS ART?

SAID:

She was a dime,

but she played like Nickelodeon.

I think I met her in Cleveland?

Like,

at the Odeon?

Something.

Maybe Cincinnati.

Setagaya.

or Seville.

Hit the coup de grace then hop in the Coupe de Ville.

A demon.

endemic entropic

psychotic calliope

calypso collapse

a - poc - a - laugh

some lungling’s gasp

plummet plunging

putrid sound

CONSUMPTION and DEFUNCTION

CORRUPTION and SEDUCTION

You Couldn’t See the Forest

Even if You Had the Gumption . . .

Get your licks and get your lumps in.

Sequences and subsequences.

Truths and consequences.

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JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

“is”

(🙄)

a

DEMON BREEDER

from

LOST EROS, CA

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“Unusually confident.”

JQD

m.v.d.

Spoilsport/Finish Shit

1.

SPOILSPORT

█

█

█

“So the game, right, every game, every sport, it’s a proxy race war.”

. . .

“What?”

. . .

“A competition of peoples. To the victor the spoils.”

. . .

“And so what, you think you’re gonna make spoilt milk of me?”

. . .

“Spoilt?”

. . .

“What do you mean?”

. . .

“It’s spoiled.”

. . .

“It’s the same.”

. . .

“It’s not.”

. . .

“It is.”

. . .

“No you’re saying it different.”

. . .

“I insist.”

. . .

“Well now which of us of which?”

. . .

“I can’t tell anymore.”

. . .

. . .

. . .

“SHIT.”

You’ve got to find a hustle a grift or a trick some scam some plan to get rich quick some come up scheme some scummy thing pimping women mugging menacing a choral necklace tongue’s twisting pulled pink and taut relinguishing and shushed candlelight’s extinguishing —

AS PRAYERS GO UP AROUND THE NATION FOR THE STRUGGLING CHILD STAR

deep penetration dismal impersonation

describe the pen’s prescribed expiration

ALLEGATIONS OF UNPROFESSIONAL CONDUCT

and mafia ties haunted area boxing promoter, dead of a heart attack at 73.

2.

FINISH SHIT

Pilot has a gun, threatening to kill himself and everyone else.

“How does he have a gun?”

“He can’t have a gun.”

Looks it up on the phone.

“He can’t. There’s a law. It says right here.”

“But he does.”

“But he can’t.”

“He can, clearly.”

“How?”

“Because he does.”

“This makes no sense.”

“You’ve got to make sense of it.”

“There’s a law.”

“Well, where there’s a law, there’s an outlaw.”

Laughs at his own.

His seatmate’s lost it.

The sick bag fills.

And now everyone else, too.

Blarf, blarf, blarf.

Ablughughughugh.

Lasagna and all kinds of shit.

Red sauces.

Green.

One guy it looks like maybe he eats shit for breakfast lunch AND dinner.

(as it turns out that actually is (and will have been was) “The King of Scat” Joe Ortiz, who was flying in regional to “Porn Valley” to make a film with Yugunda $ummer$, you remember her — the girl who went viral last year when her “brasilian butt lift” leaked everywhere at the izakaya in Occidental Holywood, and then it got posted by OHInsiderGossip group chat and ended up on that “Ten Mile Zone” show, then like any other bargained blessing her fame rose and her bookings ballooned, now ya gal got ass like a damn cartoon, but anyway she’s got velour trackpants on in an apartment 40 miles from Lost Eros International (LEX) and this bitch is NOT LANDING cuz absolutely nobody who knows how to fly a plane’s gonna be alive in oh about five minutes, you can make that up what happens yourself, you can be useful around here you know, help out, something, anything, spare some change, spare a tire, spoil the child and humor the drier.)

please . . .

help . . .

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▶

(The world has forgotten how to imagine, therefore it mistakes the given for the possible.)

(The world mistakes the given for the possible.)

Why am I expected to absorb this?

Why is the civilized person the person who agrees not to notice?

(You—)

(You?)

Hm —

“I once met a man from . . . “

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

LOST EROS

MUNDUS VULT DECIPI

I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING

Breezy Jimmy Buffet sort-of country fills the semi-enclosed patio space:

“Missed a call from Paw - tu - cket.

But I don’t - know —

no - bo - dy there.”

You wonder if it’s “A.I.”

(It is.)

Recall a lecture from your Smart Friend ( - : about how “A.I.” is a “fake idea.”

Makes sense.

Even if it doesn’t.

There’s salt on the rim of your margarita.

You didn’t ask for it.

Want none of it.

But it’s there.

Consider sending it back.

You don’t.

Service isn’t what it used to be.

(Many things are like this.)

In square.

Encircled:

This is a fallen world.

You think to yourself.

Or so you hope.

As earth hurtles.

Hoping you’ve not got to thinking out loud.

(Troublesome.)

Shuttling along and hurling.

Thoughtlessly.

Your cadillac purrs.

Strung among relentless crowds.

Hardly played to get.

Your mind’s set.

There’s a point to get to.

A pint.

A point you could get to.

A point you can lose.

A canted angle.

Maybe you haven’t.

(You have.)

SOMETHING DRAB, SOMETHING DANGLED —

Where the filter recedes.

The tolerance for games simply . . .

Leaves?

Crumples.

Underfoot.

Blazes.

Blue-blut.

Trailing and traveling.

Unveiled and unraveling.

THE VICTIM SCRIVENED:

“Keep your taxonomy off of me!”

A symphony in synchrony.

Posturing saucily.

Bawdy and naughtily.

Downtown broadly.

Bodily autonomy.

Stacking diagnoses like gang sets.

Or teevees.

TURN THE CHANNEL . . .

Bumps and spikes and volleys.

Cars in jail.

The cries of wails.

Carcinogens.

Another body bartered pale.

The prints of tied hands and backstabbing.

The black hand read white labyrinthine.

Serbian and filmic.

Siffredi nigredo.

Castrati destructo.

Deshonrada.

Exacto mondo.

Skatole shit stank fecal and fecund.

Funk.

Fuck—

I won’t see you for a while.

Gonna be a long weekend.

Shot’s short.

Catch me on the rebound.

Who gets to decide what counts as reality?

reality-as-presently-organized vs reality-as-possible

↓

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STAGE DIRECTIONS (AND PROVING GROUNDS)

Missiles need guidance.

Don’t we all?

In whose counsel?

In whose thrall?

In which shriek?

In which squall?

Inner ear?

(Beat)

PAUSE—

Breached wall?

In whose stead?

Which line?

What bread?

Whose Islam?

Dugway, Dugway—

I have been to where the UFOs are.

I have smoked hashish with Wallace Fard Muhammad.

I have been beyond controlled access points.

And crashed cars in space.

Chariots’ godly broken spokes.

They shot my prize horse on the track right in front of me.

I sold his meat to the mourners and now I’m beyond rich.

I bought this mansion b-b-b-b-back in eighty-six.

(So GET OUT!)

Which century’s? — s-s-s-s—

NONE of your concern.

(Bitch.)

Muttered under breath.

Utter scorn.

The lined face cleft.

The lips pursed.

Eyes clutched.

The nose open to the bouquet’s blush.

Floral and aqueous.

Aquatic and exotic.

I CALL UPON

Orris, ambergris, labdanum, benzoin, myrrh, olibanum, ambrette, narcissus, tuberose, heliotrope, mimosa, cassis, osmanthus, champaca, ylang-ylang, frangipani, magnolia, neroli, petitgrain, galbanum, vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood, cedar, oud, saffron, cardamom, davana, blackcurrant, tobacco —

Satan, Satan, Satan.

Fuck me.

CARS

We will not be collecting road signs.

Perhaps “Fangboner.”

“Bong Recreation Area.”

HWY-1.

Rt. 66.

13s and 69s always at risk.

420.

The obvious.

Nostalgia for the road is dead.

Travel is tedium.

The romance seeped.

You’re a star.

Be sirius.

FX

It’s always a shock when I see his face blown off.

I browse the sex offender registry periodically.

From my hometown.

Lot of people from high school.

There’s a fella who on-apprehension took a shotgun head-on.

Didn’t want the cops taking him in.

Disfigurement’s an understatement.

The fucking guy’s a prop department.

CAGLIOSTRO RUBEDO

To write in want of reading.

Too wrong.

Too long.

(A LINE MEN!)

Tu - ra - lu.

(LISTEN!)

Hey —

Days all the live-long.

Mocked farcical sing-song.

Limp on.

Weak-assed but headstrong.

Waxen.

Wicked.

Weekend begun.

Mouth and muzzle.

Butt end we come.

Wethered edges’ bevel.

Business.

Embezzled.

Begun.

Liquidation.

Bargain basement.

A looted restoration.

Hm.

Allusions to replacement.

Bamboozlement.

Alignments and toolateness.

Fashion’s vain lameness.

When it’s over it’s over.

And it’s over.

There is no recovery.

No one is channeling you for their discovery.

I DO NOT ACCEPT YOUR EXPLANATION, EXPECTATION, OR APOLOGY

Real.

Final reality.

Really.

Finally.

EX GIRL

She looked right at my hat.

I saw it.

Gave an uncertain frown.

She felt the strength of the sigil I’m sure.

She’s a witch too.

She knows what the mark’s for.

Had her own line.

And waded in it.

You know what it’s like to sell shit, sister . . .

POSTSCRIPT ~ ( - :

Devine’s works and ideas gained popularity only after his death, and he endured difficult conditions for much of his professional life, a time in which information was often seen as dangerous and therefore hidden.

As a result, the details provided now are often of uncertain accuracy . . .

Also contributing to the imprecision of these details is the limited access to Late American archival information during Devine’s life. It was only after the Late American archives became public that scholars realized that much of what they thought they knew about Devine’s life was false or skewed, often by Devine himself.

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(Contact us directly if interested.)

COVERT OVERTURE

I don’t know what I’m doing.

But I know that the work’s done.

The die is cast.

And the whole cast dies in the end.

Andronochy.

Soap opry.

Inoperable machinery.

(CAMERA A)

Theaters of pain and cruelty.

(CAMERA B)

Painterly.

(CAMERA C)

A mite Austrian.

(A)

Miserly fried rich.

Hunksome and bunkered.

Blithered away.

Subject to metrics:

(So all I need is one micron a vermeil python and a fanged mouth to pass the poison)

(they’ve both gone up a bit but still, come on, pay attention to me, pay attention to me, here look at this, hey, hey, hey hey hey hey look over here, hey I—)

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. . .

Please enjoy.

💙

. . .

SO—

Twenty views now and nine listeners.

Jesus had twelve.

And twenty seers and nine hearers are forty eyes and eighteen ears.

So it’s all in how you count it.

I suppose.

(The swallowed pit of fear.)

The arrhythmitic and the flick of the wrist.

Like bars or beers.

Crackt open.

(Talking to yourself like—)

What if you had a panic attack in public unapologetically?

(Like, “Oh, you think your ranting’s worth something?”)

What if you freaked out and smeared your own shit all over the facade of city hall?

(Shart deco.)

What if you pissed on civility itself?

(A yellow reflecting pool.)

What if you broke every implicit agreement?

(The unchained brain’s rearrangement.)

What if rules fell?

(Resentment.)

And with them, lights?

(Deepening.)

Disorder.

(Dropped.)

Emptied pantries and treasuries.

(Pretensions.)

Raided coffers.

Smoke.

The smothering of soft.

And all become ash.

In darkness’ rise a new dim horizon.

Shovels’ movement.

Amendments’ exorcising.

Business ends.

Blunt.

The streets are unsafe.

This is a statement of fact.

Fallenness fucked.

There are crazy drivers.

Crazy walkers.

Limpers.

Crawlers.

People will deny it.

They’ve got vested interests.

And priors.

Maybe a lack of experience.

Maybe a laminated lanyard’s clearance.

Maybe a whole lot of wishes to cast.

The folk magic of the deracinated, disregulated, and displaced.

Leashed to the lash.

State the malady.

Sense’s lack of commonality.

The numbness of a laboratory animal.

Lobotomy’s dumbening.

Programmed mostly to shop.

The cliche’s sheep in a flock.

But it’s so dull.

They’ll die in their wool.

Maybe they’ve got shame to hide.

Or guilt inside.

For want of will.

Some value to uphold.

(Probably real estate.)

Some principal.

(Something really fake.)

Safe?

Safety’s an unnatural state.

Post-modern.

Safety is a collective illusion.

Softness is hard-won.

Creation’s expensive.

To conjure a comet’s instance.

Destruction’s an instant.

Safety?

Born of predictability, repeatability, responsibility, community.

Recently one of my dogs was attacked by a mutant coyote.

I call it a mutant cuz it’s more than double the size of the emaciated weakling coyotes you usually encounter.

And it has no fear of man or beast.

If you’re so damned dumb to distinguish between.

The cape and the cope.

They tried to take my little man’s fucking leg off.

From behind.

Grazed his inner thigh.

Got off lucky, and easy.

A two hundred dollar vet bill and some ointment.

To shrink from solution is cowardice.

To live a cuck’s a choice.

Predator’s aides.

City slickers without civility or slickness.

Overgrown children and whiny little bitches.

They feed the wildlife here.

Having mistaken nature.

And the misery echoes.

Every park’s acre.

Every sidewalk’s shit-strewn step.

Every awning’s appalling sun-soaked yawning.

Putridity.

And the cracked concrete’s two-inch lip.

Spoke thick:

ABANDON SHIP!

You can’t drag a corpus to purpose.

Out to sea and out of sequence.

The friction.

The frequency.

The buzz.

The habits.

The patience wearing.

AND WALKING THE DOG AGAIN . . .

Approaching midnight a woman rose from a bush in front the library fully nude proclaimed “IF you DO get to HEAVEN, you WILL be made to a-TONE for ALL of your SINS . . .”

I DRANK WHAT?

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

m.v.d.

CICUTA

The genius of the species spoke:

“Well, you see — technically speaking, murder is a subset of homicide, right . . . ?

So A - L - L murders are homicides, but not A - L - L homicides are murders . . .”

He’d had enough.

Broken glass.

Disorder.

Feces.

Trash.

To mingle the poison is the crime.

To trim the lip must ash.

The substance is insubstantial.

Tolerance crept, tolerance crept, tolerance grasped.

And soon enough the young men wore their hair side-swept.

Au-fash.

Symbols clash.

But not just as-yet.

We’re in another turning.

A different cellular tower.

Burning.

They’d killed him a thousand times over.

Women refused to walk the streets.

Children invisible in fortresses.

Hidden away from the sidewalk horrors.

Garbage huts.

Improvised hovels.

Brutish men, barking hirsute.

The imposition of order was inevitable.

Waste requires management.

Strong men and gun butts.

He’d need to distort his image.

Cloak and conceal.

Mystique’s a must.

No face, a new face.

A different gait.

Some drag or limp.

A gimmick aloft.

A character played.

Lifts in the shoes.

Aloof.

Two T-shirts under a sweatshirt under a hoodie under a loose coat.

Ballcap.

No logo.

Foolproof.

Patterns emerge.

Traces.

Signals.

Leave the phone behind.

Escape containment.

Toxic contaminant.

She was out smoking on the porch in short-shorts and a hoodie.

Spoke Russian into an open phone held in her palm.

He kept his gaze fixed straight.

Grim procession.

Death’s silent parade unknown.

Walking in the wake of scattered chance.

Little bottles, mini vials.

Infused.

You see —

Nationally, the homicide clearance rate hangs right around 60%? — something,

In Lost Eros, it was supposedly closer to 70%, though he had his doubts.

(THE) Cops had every incentive to lie and distort.

The rabble had made a roar of defunding them.

But the racket continued.

He fucking hated the cops, too.

Despised them.

Half-wit would-be bullies given license to beat, so far as he could tell.

A bunch of fat fucking retards.

He’d poison them too, given the chance.

But it’s best not to fuck with a gang.

Much easier to snuff the pigeons.

How high a kill count?

He’d never know.

Not as though you could ask.

And what’s a coroner to do?

Cyanotic burial blue.

Whiskey, vodka, gin.

Tequila.

Drink up, weary traveler.

What’s it gonna do?

Kill you?

One shot, two shot, three shot.

Four.

Heaven’s gate or hell’s trapdoor?

Forheavensake even the lowliest rake’s dragged progress awaits its fated stake.

Every impulse ends somewhere.

So he stalked the alleyways.

Powerlines whined.

The earthwalking angel of mercy.

Paranoid, paranoid.

Paranoiac.

Trace your steps and double-back.

Dust your boots and mind your manners.

Pease and ‘cuse and and crossed tease and dotted eyes and please and fucking thank you.

Better noided than dead.

Better dead than captured.

He did, after all, have the good sense to Fear Jail.

Because what was Jail but Other Men?

And what were Other Men but rape and dismemberment?

Disfigurement?

Some polyester prick in a costume barking orders?

Some horrid corridor —

Spread your ass.

Show your teeth.

Don’t you move too fast.

Don’t you fucking reach.

A mouth and an asshole without a mind between.

He’d tried to woo Suzi Q.

Susana Quiñones.

She’d led him on, or so it seemed.

At literary salons.

And garden parties.

Modest bust in sundresses.

Moderately busted in full confession.

Just the way he liked them.

Laughing.

Off.

With—

Charmingly uneven teeth.

So human and real.

Shit,

She was too skinny to effectively impregnate, which he loved.

ADORED.

He could not cordon or condone the giving of life to this world.

Of course.

Could not brook the bullshit.

Everything stuck in craw or in cloaca.

Filled to overflow.

Hate’s constipation in simmer.

Heat’s release.

It’s gonna be a warm summer.

Long nights’ scorched aftermath.

Streets seethe.

FOR YOUR TROUBLES

He got the news about Suzi Q on the fourth of June.

She’d been struck in the head.

In the hood.

Distributing food.

Hit square in the noggin.

Jaw loosened by one of the pigeons she’d been feeding.

Fuck.

One of her surrogate children had taken a chunk of concrete.

Good intentions . . .

Took the curb to her.

And withered, she wandered.

She’d crumpled silently as the attacker absconded.

Unconscious at ambulance’s arrival.

She’d been poisoned in her own way.

Ideology and its sway.

Now she’s under.

En route to the hospital.

HEY—

A VACUUM

Everything felt legal here.

A west not so wild as wearied.

Given in and over.

Streets lousy with screeching freaks.

Incivil hostiles.

Exiles.

Scabrous leprous reptile tongues.

Forking pathological.

In his hatred.

He wanted to show her something when her head stopped throbbing.

Wanted to put up numbers on the board.

Chalk dust and solved problems.

Dead weight.

Indifferent revolving.

The politicians did nothing but benefit.

Scams and scheming.

The waking nightmares of Californian dreaming.

Drug bandits and banshees’ screaming.

ILLEGALISM

He made his money electronically and vaguely.

That’s all you need to know.

And that’s all you will.

To expurgate the institutions was his prerogative.

That was a thought he’d had once.

In that rotted melon of his.

Swoll up with vengeance.

Vigilance.

Juris providence.

A sworn hatred.

A heart turned to stone.

He cycled cliches as he scrolled on his phone.

He couldn’t look up the craft of his potions and poisonings on the device.

Digital exhaust’s particles the price.

So he bought his parts and wares elsewhere.

If you know where?

Go there.

Otherwise?

None of your care.

So get thee there.

Square.

Quickly.

And with gusto.

To kill serially’s episodic.

To be serious it’s comedic.

Horrorshow hysterical.

The residuals flood in.

The memories never fade.

Even locked away.

So hand-to-hand or left in alleys.

His doctored bottles gurned galleys.

You can lead a house to order.

But its worship points to the sun of another.

Lost in space.

Rest in place.

Mice on-scene.

Rats infest.

Bodies found bloated and bagged.

Found foliage.

Bird-bones and broken twigs.

A twine in time.

Each story’s end some ironic rhyme.

A moral’s wink a hood’s shine.

A monkey’s paw a crooked climb.

You don’t think straight.

You don’t act right.

So he walked the night.

Cowled in blacks.

Mismatched.

Against the scene and its set.

Staged in judgment.

Issuing verdicts.

The dark is young.

And crime is perfect.

A PRAYER

Let the scales fall where they might.

Let my eyes free of your sight.

Let your shape take form elsewhere.

Let justice ring in bell air.

MAIDEN

Suzi’d be fine in her own sort of way.

“Rocket” Ronnie Mulligan hadn’t raised a weakling.

Quiñones was her married name.

She was divorced.

Husband left her when he realized she’d never be a mother.

Her father had been one of the most famous dirtbike stunt riders in all of Laztana Cove in the ‘70s.

Went on to open the first cidery in Old Town.

Met her mother at a Mahjjong night.

Or maybe it was trivia.

He couldn’t remember.

He drank away his pining.

In gin.

Whiskey.

Tequila.

Wine.

Neat.

Damp.

Drenched.

Done.

Deal.

And so he became death entropic.

And played with house money.

For keeps and for crypts.

To the hilt forthwith.

The wind of wane at the fingertips.

To wave a wand of transformed sand.

For all the hate the mail can send.

JUST A THOUGHT

Hey you know all this shit’s really written like you’re in prison.

Or you already killed yourself.

And it was found.

Shortly after you were.

Or maybe a long while.

Who knows.

Not-I.

You know if I didn’t know better I—

A MAN WHOLE

He went to Suzi’s house sometimes.

Despite the requests not to.

She lived in Expiration Park.

Just off the light rail.

He never knocked or lingered.

Just passed by with his passing eye.

Hands in his pockets.

Some passing guy.

Passing-by.

Smooth on his thighs.

He didn’t beat off or anything.

Like those animals in the streets.

Just strolled a good deal.

And often in repeats.

Lived his life in loops.

He thought about the collective unwashed ass of the universe and shuddered.

Stubbed his toe and muttered.

“Motherfucker.”

Didn’t speak much.

Best to keep covered.

FACTORY FLOOR

Mark your movements and score.

One-two, one-two.

Three-four.

Plot it out in advance.

Leave little to chance.

Contort as you must.

A twist of a touch.

Crack the neck, crank.

Break.

Snap the spine.

Wish and wait.

We’re all chickens biding time.

THE ARTISAN

The trick was getting it in the bottle.

He hated sloppy work.

There were easy ways to do it.

And they got you easiness’ worth.

Not that most of these sad sacks would notice or care.

But why leave loose ends?

Put a bow on it.

Let the casket descend.

MAN MACHINATIONS

Madness to magnet.

His antenna tickled.

Fleeting thoughts.

Faulty connections.

NO SUGAR, NONE OF THAT SHIT

Her name was Gerta but they always wrote Greta on her Starbucks cup.

Sometimes with two T’s.

Like ‘GRETTA.’

Her name wasn’t Gertude but some people assumed.

Her name was Gerta Vollenweid she was the Principal Homicide Investigator (P.H.I.) for the Lost Eros Police Department (L.E.P.D.).

She’d been a P.H.I. for L.E.P.D. for seven years.

Gerta was good at what she did.

Studious and serious.

She wore pressed-slacks and button-downs.

Kept her hair taut in a bun or ponytail.

Stood up every hour on the hour for backbends and side-twists.

Kept a grip strength tool in her dresser drawer.

Kept a pistol on her left hip.

Kept her phone silent.

Some would say stern.

Some “bitch.”

There’s a lot of sonsofbitches.

There are situations that call for it.

She kept her nails short and her speech curt.

Look at your budget and show me where it hurts.

Auditor extraordinaire.

A sniffing dog.

A real bitch it is I suppose.

A snuff-nose.

A service weapon greased and ready to go.

She packed in the cruiser and floored it to Expiration Park.

Call it women’s intuition.

Or bitches’ bark.

ME LOOKING AT YOU LOOKING AT

They’d admire each other in some sense if they knew each other.

Each a professional in their own way.

A procedural operator.

THE BACKUP ACCOUNT

He couldn’t use the computers at the library.

Couldn’t use a friend’s computer.

Didn’t have friends really.

Who does these days?

A VPN’s not really the thing.

Bookstores track purchases.

So how to do it?

How to learn it?

What’s the prey’s tell and how best to lure it?

I/I

I l l e g i t i m a c y .

I r r e d e e m a b i l i t y .

I l l e g i t i m a c y .

I r r e d e e m a b i l i t y .

I l l e g i t i m a c y .

I r r e d e e m a b i l i t y .

I l l e g i t i m a c y .

I r r e d e e m a b i l i t y .

I l l e g i t i m a c y .

STAKE/OUT

She was full up with bias.

Though she denied it.

Gerta spied in twilit violet.

Blotter blur.

Who’s unseen?

What’s omitted?

Hand-to-hand drugs.

Nothing in her shrug.

Sugar in her coffee.

Meanness in her mug.

A hard face creased against the night’s approach.

Lightening lessening.

Deco lampposts.

She watched for posture.

Impossible odds.

As the darkness settled the creatures stirred.

A HORRIBLE MAN AND HIS DOINGS

What is a person, anyway?

Channel surf.

Inlets to outputs.

Selfless.

Behavior, really.

To dispense and dispense with.

Loaded doses.

Pluck your poison.

Acidulous.

Lost Eros.

Dismal envision.

Bad habits and worse inhabitants.

And so he left his calling cards.

Cold and cordial.

Quench the thirst.

Cull the quartile.

With the bottom dropped ass-end into mulch-ready fertile.

Every day’s a new century spent on some other planet’s calendar.

The corpse acreep in palliative malodor.

Not quite dead but the expression’s all over.

Wastrel-faced and declining.

Jaundice and paunch.

Blood-red inner-lining.

Interior bleak clots.

The heart wants for the beat’s stop.

And so it does.

Blacktop.

Parking lot.

Death in suddenness.

Incidences.

Coincidences.

The influence of insistence.

An influx of corrosive crudity.

Houdini credulity.

Bile burbling.

Escape velocity.

Humorless body left vacant.

Confirmed verbally.

They deserved their dissolving.

They’d done themselves in long ago.

It was all over but for the crying.

And who’d care to hear it?

The victims selected themselves.

Volunteers, really.

AT HER LAPTOP

The offender selects decedents from populations whose deaths are pre-contextualized as high-probability accidental or natural. Specifically: chronically unhoused, ethyl-alcohol-dependent individuals with evidence of polysubstance use. These cases default to abbreviated postmortem investigation because autopsy findings are confounded by hepatic steatosis, seizure history, opportunistic infection, and environmental trauma. Medicolegal death investigators frequently classify such fatalities as "undetermined" or accidental acute intoxication absent gross traumatic lesions. The subject exploits systemic triage fatigue and limited toxicological budgets; comprehensive quantitative screens are rarely ordered for decedents without next-of-kin advocacy or media pressure.

She hovered her cursor over the semi-colon and thought.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Aloud.

To self.

I mean no one’s gonna read this shit anyway.

Inside.

Silent.

SOLUBLE (TASTELESSNESS IS EASILY ACHIEVED)

To find the perfect chemical mimic we must consult the pharmacopoeia.

Then it’s like you were never there.

“You?” you ask. “You mean me?”

Ha.

Ah.

Well—

Yes.

I mean us.

Not you.

You’re not alone here.

I’m right here with you.

We all are.

URSULA INGRESS

The results were inconclusive but nonetheless final.

The tenth known body.

God knows how many.

Or maybe she’s lost count.

Seems we lack oversight.

She’s looking for starch granules and latex proteins.

Scant fragments and arguments’ openings.

TELL-TALES AND DIFFICULTIES

Scan for tampering.

Scorn for temperance.

Powderless nitrile.

As long as the glove fits.

(Keep it clean.

A ghost did it.)

THE COMPLETE PRACTICAL DISTILLER

That which is fluid lacks signature.

Post-modern ligature.

You’re tied up in phone lines.

Scurvy in curvature.

Vermin’s removal’s the ambition.

“Hey man.”

Hand-to-hand mission.

Gloved non-dominant.

He maintained unremarkable grooming standards.

There but not.

Nowhere, really.

Nowhere man.

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE A DRINK?

A constellation of bonds.

Covalent.

Adhering.

Wells and ponds.

Oases.

Clearings.

COPY CATS AND FELINE REWINDS

“It would be so easy.”

“Don’t you think?”

The kids had just caught wind of The Murdering.

“Anyone could do it.”

“Right?”

“Like, how many murders get solved anyway?”

“I bet it’s close to none.”

“Right?”

The bus arrived.

THE CUSP IS A WAVE DEMOLISHING

He wondered about the Technology Coming Behind the Technology.

The near future.

And the middle ripples.

Hard to care for old age.

Crazy and crippled.

But for now to avoid the cage is the state of play.

So he checked in day-to-day.

On the state of things.

No cop’s gonna stop me . . .

ONE WAY (ONE WAY)

”Are you Susana Quiñones?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Vollenweid.”

“What’s this about?”

“You were involved in an incident some months back.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Well, I’d like to ask you—”

And that’s about where the tape stops.

It was never admitted in court.

And they’ll never admit it out loud.

M.E. (AWARD WINNING)

”Busted sphenoid. Baseball bat.”

“Aluminum?”

“Carolina pine.”

“How can you tell?”

“Motherfucker had a broken bat homerun hit at the base of his skull.”

“Homeless?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Doesn’t seem like our guy, though . . . he’s stuck to poisoning.”

“Can’t imagine. You’re sure it’s a he?”

“I mean, these days, I’m not sure of much . . .”

They exchanged a look.

BAGS

Scavenged evidence.

Scoured and swept for scurf and scale.

Fingerprints’ lingerings tell tales.

Caches of weapons and caches of keywords and caches of cash.

It’s catch or be caught.

Teach or be taught.

Tamper the evident.

Juries are bought.

TO CLOSE THE EYES OF STRANGERS

He said:

“This isn’t finished.”

And then he didn’t.

He went on and on and on.

In blistered English.

It went on and on and on.

The bruise of business.

Middennight’s frightening buzzhum dawned upon.

Doubtlessly a lightbulb flickers fake sun.

Sic sic sic.

Couldn’t be sicker.

Admit your conceits.

In the measure of mixture.

“The world wants to be deceived.”

And so it was.

And will be.

THE BULLSHIT

These are warnings, not endorsements.

These are prayers against appointment.

The flattened age of pointless short shrift.

The bullshit.

CUT IT

There are some threads that ought to be pulled.

Some sought heat ought to be culled.

So it turned out to be relevant.

In the triangular sense.

In the sense of media.

(CAMERA A)

This person wants to exert control.

(CAMERA B)

They want undue terms over the scenario.

(CAMERA C)

Gimme. Gimme.

A:

It’s not going to happen.

Certainly not in an emergency.

Dire vore and perjury.

The howls of wild in purple night.

All of these are spells in spittles’ spite.

Lick an offered paper spliff alight.

Snails’ entrails.

Chem-sex and hopped rails.

Pit bosses burnt crosses tempt trosses—

The past spails a pallor.

In spite of lightness’ frightening lighting.

Trick of a parlor.

Couple esses’ concussion’s lightening.

Gone dark.

SIMPLE SYRUP

He wanted to hurt her specifically.

For what she’d done.

To him.

To everyone.

So it seemed.

And he in his own dreams.

Felt so vindicated.

If only anything could be.

So uncomplicated.

ANTAGONISM (FINISH YOUR SENTENCE)

What the hell is this?

Where the hell?

Am I?

What did I?

Did I?

What did I do to disserve this?

This is absurd! This is absurd!

What the hell?

Where the hell?

What the hell is this?

Where the hell am I?

Am I?

Echoes lallying.

IS THIS A . . .

Trampoline park?

Or an RV’s jump start.

Hardly.

A septic tank?

Abasement.

Disabused.

Somewhere off displacement.

Disillused.

Red off the blue line.

He’s lost, he’s lost.

On-time with soft crime.

The coppers have won.

And as the police closed in he thought of all he hadn’t done.

In his allotted time.

Read philosophy in French.

Thought in Spanish.

Really broken it all down in ancient Greek.

Latin.

Precursor chemicals.

As the last of a certain animal subdued himself with coniine and his lungs locked in time chained ascending paralysis, the mind's last light lost dissolved behind fixed eyes as coldness climbs from beds of nails to depleted core to top of mind, go on and go forth, with Gerta Vollenweid’s sensible size 9 floored pressed the pedal of the city’s last Crown Vic Interceptor flat, pushing the P-71 to the max en route to a PC 187 turned 10-56 fast, and with the speed and ease of death the pursuant’s sprint returned to a cruise, the killing come to close the criminal cut loose, let slip in the night of vigilant shielding, her heart skipped a stop but her drive was unyielding.

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JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

mundus vult decipi

ƑORK IT

After the sham of democracy.

We can talk openly.

As of now?

Close your mouth.

Keep fingers’ fumblings few.

They’ve got eyes on you.

At least two.

Black and blue.

Beat bruised.

You succumb to what you accept.

You accept what you’re forced to.

Force comes from above.

Put in.

And upon.

And below.

Like most things.

At the behest of baton blows.

And from all sides.

Closing in.

Cutting out.

The signal stalled.

Verdicts overturned.

I call afaul.

The air of “democracy.”

The cheap rhyme’s hypocrisy.

This fake shit chafes me.

At what point do you stop making excuses for the piss in your face?

How many forgived-again rapists will you permit in your stay?

Whose finger and how deep?

Fist to fin?

Like some song that stinks?

(Yeah, it’s that stupid.)

And all that pretending at “work?”

As if your “contributions” didn’t make everything worse.

As if the bomb factory wasn’t going to blow up in your own face.

ACME caught you lacking and it’s closed case.

Ordered to stay-in-place.

Whose order?

Everything pay-to-play.

Whose airwaves?

Whose tight urethra?

Toward a sort of Flattened Everything Athleisure.

Well—

The indoor life doesn’t cut it for outdoor creatures.

Wolves exist.

And men too.

And words attest to the wickedness that women will do.

And have.

Words in flux confuse us.

Obvious conclusions elude us.

We’re not pointing at the same targets.

So we’re missing the point.

“Which is?”

Nothing.

There’s talk of towers about this.

A foundational sort of myth.

Lost.

SEE—

Now it’s a metamyth.

And soon enough this’ll all exist in a world where it lands as low-wrote glyphs.

They’ll point their fingers and they’ll hoot and howl.

Say “That ‘h’ looks like a guy pissing” in a low gruntgrowl.

In what remains of language.

“Ugug” and “agog” per-haps.

A pessimist’s tic.

Alas.

But as it happens your ass is gathered in bunches and fucked monthly and the resiphoned spunk is then bundled by the hundreds of cc’s mixed with the Sysco feces soiled smeared stained and streaked across Name-Branded Underwear some Other Man’s Name gathered in a band around whatever belly fat you’ve accumulated whatever low back blob from the imposition of chairs and screens Full Submission in some Other Man’s Name so like —

I GOT INTO IT

mildly

the other night

half or perhaps likelier three-quarters drunk with a guy who does high-level cybersecurity i.e. I figured he’d probably be a vaguely psycho libertarian (But As It Turns Out,) we got to Talking Thoughts About Things and my lack of belief in “democracy” (full sneer quotes (as if you didn’t know)) horrifies the polite and polity.

Comes on like a real shocker.

And I’m like:

“Have you no imagination?”

Can you think of nothing better for these people?

For yourself?

In my lowest expectations, better worlds are possible.

This is a world of insult and animal abuse.

Surely—

The organization as-is’s gotta go.

Full shovel upheaval.

Collectively buried alive.

Still breathing shallow.

Overgrown shadows.

What’s built up must flow across the meadow.

What’s accumulated ungainly.

And the gains uneven.

So we should fork it.

Fuck it.

Separate realities.

I don’t give a fuck anymore.

If we’re playing on the same servers we’re always going to have griefers and trolls bro.

Abandon the primary server.

We’ve got to “keep them separated.”

Like that stinky song.

“Keep them segregated.”

Like the Old South.

Or today’s jailhouse.

Which is to say:

I’m an optimistic cosmopolitan.

Perhaps even an Optimistic Cosmopolitan.

I grew up in the multi-cult.

And I have lived its benefits.

It is worth examining its downsides.

And long past time of discussing them.

And dealing with them.

The cybersecurity guy, he is autistic and literalistic as fuck, right, and he kept trying to seek all these outs and explanations for “why things are the way they are,” the Nature and State of Observable Physical Reality (N.S.O.P.R.), however you might see it, right, and he’s confabulating all these “well what if” x y z scenarios that just literally do not map to any such N.S.O.P.R. i.e. there is a vacuum that calls into existence the need for a Dude Go For a Walk Look at Things What Do You Think? party (snappier name needed if we are to retain the catchy Hubbardian thread of e.g. O.C., N.S.O.P.R.).

IT INSTANTIATES ITSELF.

I think ultimately he got me to Fully Qualify my statement to something like “democracy can only work with an educated population with full affinity i.e. people who generically ‘like’ each other and want to participate in a communal project with common goals, values, and virtues.”

And I’m like, shit, on reflection—

There is effectively no existing expression of this sentiment that doesn’t rhyme with “We must secure the existence of our people” but again I’m Optimistic Cosmopolitan Swine (O.C. Swine) who wants to live an Advanced Integrationist Hedonic Existence of e.g. all the world’s pleasures, all the animals gather and share their treasures, their nuggets and knowledge and tales and travails, their stories and struggles and strong-brewed ales and sournesses whines complaints and designs, their Triumphs really . . .

. . .

Speaking of thumb wrestling, Another Other Night Out in what I assume was a World Cup-related incident I met some Monegasque people partying in the street.

A Monegasque if you must ask is not a type of monkey but rather an apeman like you or I (Ed. Note: Presumptuous to assume that future audiences will be e.g. hominid or will experience the “text” (sic) as intended by “the Author” (sic) rather than through less problematic means than e.g. lexemes language or any expression of human textuality or e.g. Individuated Names Consciousness (I.N.C.)) — these ones wore velvet double-breasted suits casino fabulous with faggy little silk neckscarves.

As it happened that night I myself was wearing a F.L.S.N. and so they approached me as a familiar, due to the obvious overlap of our interests.

They were shocked that I had been to Monaco.

I was shocked anyone was “from” “there.”

Monaco being what it is.

Turns and twists.

Spurned taxes.

Their Leader — I forget his name, but it was sumptuous, not some Regular Jacques Jean or Louis, you could tell this motherfucker had gráve accents in his shit, a real particular arrangement of vowels, some Old World shit, fuck only knows.

A King’s Name.

(A.K.N.)

Anyway he wanted to thumb-wrestle me, like for real, and so it’s like three or four (I’m an unreliable witness but an honest one, I swear’s ye) of these dudes in velvet suits and three girls in full-on fur coats and Expensive Russian Whore sort of dresses and they’ve all got very particular cigarettes and I’m high as shit kind of dressed like a wealthy restomod Porsche mechanic in a camel suede jacket, Japanese corduroy cropped five-pocket trousers, and blistered Barbanera boots with silent toes and clacking heels, with the

green corduroy SCALED ALPS ‘Let the Alpine Play’ (L.T.A.P. (LT////A▶)) hat

available here via BLUE HELL.

And I beat this dude’s ass at thumb wrestling, just like overwhelming immediate victory, three times in a row.

And the girls giggled, and I wondered if I was going to be murdered.

So I suggested rock/paper/scissors.

And a new game was afoot.

Beat all their asses at that, too.

Girls and guys alike.

America, America.

Ha-ha-ha, yes.

And wanting more.

We walked up Sunset to the liquor store.

“Best bar in town.”

They laughed.

I was serious.

Pounded champagne-hopped ciders in the fog of their cigarette smoke.

Wondered how the fuck lost they’d gotten to get here.

Reckon they were probably thinking similarly about me.

So anyway, I was partying in the street.

Which is to say, I have no use or desire for certain forms of unreasonable order.

I understand their imposition — they exist to tamp down on the basest impulses of the lowest of the population.

I resent the group punishment.

And its implications.

Anyone with a fighting spirit and warm blood does.

A guy said something once—

Something about forfeiting essential liberty for temporary safety.

You’ll have to look it up.

Anyway—

Disgust and contempt are valid reflexes.

They’re culture-bound but so are you.

And as it stands or rather swirls you’re attached to a wheel that’ll break you in full.

Constraints you neither asked nor consented to.

Ties.

The collective lie of the law.

The gathered gas of stalled poison.

You’re a platelet in a river bleeding out.

So surf.

Serve.

Something.

If not for self than for god or country.

“I think you’ve forgotten something.”

Whispered instinct.

“You’ve lost touch with me.”

Intoned virility.

“Get off your ass and fucking kill something.”

WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT?

Something about—

What?

Fences and neighbors.

Masters and slavers.

They laugh at legibility.

Loaded with disclaimers.

Lying with statistics.

Whose numbers?

By what count?

Whose toll?

At what cost?

Bound, gagged and shot.

I am sorry for your loss.

Your lot and your lease.

Sorry about your culture.

But our numbers must increase.

█

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

mundus vult decipi

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I’m often in my own way.

Bearing too many words, or the wrong ones.

Too glancing a blow.

Too far gone.

Thus forgotten.

J.Q.D.

→

‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY’ IS NOW OUT—

This is the culmination of years’ worth of effort, and if you, Dear Reader, would be so kind as to endear yourself further as a Listener . . .

Available to stream everywhere.

• Apple Music

• Spotify

• Bandcamp

Digital album and LTAP Capsule 1 release objects are available at the Blue Hell Shop.

Very limited hand-numbered physical CD copies are available.

(Contact us directly if interested.)

. . .

Please enjoy.

💙

. . .

The SCALED ALPS record ‘Let the Alpine Play,’ a 16-track LP spanning, thwarting, compromising, and subverting “genre,” a quantum-entendre polyphonic monolith, Big Personality, dark and romantic, bold and dumb, lust and death’s inevitable collision, an arrangement of spells, an encounter in time, vivid L.A. psych-noir, piano flourishes and lyrical guitar phrases, martial drums pacing, rising questions and clattering consequents, full cinematic sound, reaching for the stars and digging for the grave —

RIYL: Portishead, Scott Walker, Fiona Apple, Bark Psychosis, Swervedriver, Pulp, Deftones (no but really though), System of a Down (seriously though), Soul Coughing (stop laughing), Swans, Can, Dax Riggs, Melanie de Biasio, Glassjaw, Mr. Bungle, At the Drive-In, Cave In, David Sylvian, Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Morphine, Alice in Chains (keep laughing), Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age making up and getting along again, Tricky, Beck? Fuck. Beck. Fuck it. Beck I guess. “Nine Inch Nails,” etc.

THANK YOU for your CONTINUED INDULGENCE . . .

I should have a more “conventional” publication for you tomorrow, by which I mean a questionably legible sequence of fragmentary images loosely connected by frayed nerve endings. I suspect you will find it, as always, to the Simon & Schuster standard you have come to expect.

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💙

💙

💙

𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘴 𝘷𝘶𝘭𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘪

James Quentin Devine

We have poisoned their channels with our perfume.

There is no return.

J.Q.D.

LET THE ALPINE PLAY

→

Buy the album and shop LTAP Capsule 1 →→→HERE.←←←

A LONGING GAZE

Long-gone and logging on.

Byegones by god be god-damned.

Condemned.

Debonair with the detonator.

Au contraire.

Numb thunder’s dumbening.

A-HEM:

B-D-B-

B-D-B

B-D-B

See?

Barrel steel.

Seen.

At the end of credentials?

Cold metal.

Sawn.

Eyes’ peel.

Heat’s insistence.

Ballistic.

Chemical war.

All’s fair.

Chimerical heuristics.

Acoustic atrocity.

This revolting world.

LRAD hovered.

Evola evolved.

An exploding volcano.

A revolving door.

You live beneath billboards for cults.

In legions pluraled.

Supergraphic.

In league contagion.

Films and other ills.

Discernment is dismemberment.

Come containment.

Consciousness’ cleanliness.

Yeah you knew what the rain meant.

Stubborn determinant.

And what was made of it.

The babble of baubles.

Coronal throne fits.

Brain detergent.

Virgin control.

Garbage in, garbage out.

A gig a what?- a tear a flop

a grand a father - atick atock.

Bikini atolls and crisp attics.

Carcinomal and basal.

A cathedral baritone profanes the sacral.

Cinnamon and chicory and caramel’s snickering.

Thinking:

(BRACE YOURSELF)

“The most disturbing thing you can do is make it listenable.”

You’d better pace yourself.

The chicanery’s able.

So let’s get phygital.

Mercurial sable and ford torrents.

Cherry pies and arrest warrants.

Cooling.

Cold.

And?

Starved hard.

Bare abdominal.

Ribs cavern carved.

Hips jut.

Abrupt.

Collars just.

Align.

Skip the line.

Your wait’s been cut.

Fuck all these people.

And fuck their good time.

The mind’s a mine a field.

Foil and fail.

And mine holy unreal.

Like:

W H A T I N T H E F U C K?

Genuinely.

Flecting upon itself.

Neologia shitting itself logorrhea.

High gorilla romance.

Crouched in fuckstance.

With insistence:

Take a stab at it.

A surgical strike.

Clinical precision.

Finish inside.

Life’s ignition.

Bored and rich so you paid your way famous.

Your thanatos is McDonald’s and your eros is aimless.

Paltry archery’s aspirant.

Have yourself a poison tip:

A dick pic’s worth a wishlist’s mistresses’ harsh noise recession.

And a leprechaun’s laugh will always blush you pink in blessing.

So you remember that.

Sit with it in your heart.

Those are words to to live by.

They’ll give you a start.

Now to end on all fours and put an end to the farce—

Have yourself a poison dart:

To get away is the crime of art.

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

mundus vult decipi

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→

T H I S is ‘ SEVEN LINES ’

BUT FIRST, FORESHADOWING . . .

May we suggest pairing the piece with SCALED ALPS tracks “Space/Time” or “Slow Motion,” presented here for the first time as LOSSLESS FILES (audience gasping) . . .

▶ SPACE/TIME 💙

▶ SLOW MOTION 🌊

real—

I-I-I-I J-J-Q-QQ

M.V.D.

SEVEN LINES

You’re always waiting behind the face you haven’t yet inherited.

Some suffering bastard’s rum parroted.

. . .

[change]

. . .

Drug slave.

You live too late.

Your lamp’s lit in a dark sort of way.

. . .

[change]

. . .

I lay in wait.

I’d be lying if I said I ever said anything.

. . .

[false outro]

. . .

TWO EXTRA BbBbBONUS BARS

→

I don’t think you should be alone right now.

I’ll be along in a short while.

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Couple announcements we got SCALED ALPS ‘Let the Alpine Play’ officially releasing 7.24.26, and you can go ahead and find that on your Preferred Platform RIGHT HERE and then you can send it on to all of your friends and enemies still, until we form a chain of song that smothers the surface of earth and At Last All Is Quiet.

In advance of the 16-track LP release we’ve got “Space/Time” and “Southerly” coming out as appetizers, should be live this FRIDAY so ‘PRE-SAVE’ NOW or FOREVER BE DAMNED on every platform you’ve ever heard of and on many you haven’t, shit they’re spinning this shit in the finest flossiest hotel lobbies as we speak . . .

As you are likely aware, you can hear the whole record and cop that disc at

BLUEHELL.NEOCITIES.ORG

(Future retail partners pending.)

Back to your program.

→

EXCALIBUR

The elephant as worm extension.

The card’s stacked and the account’s expensive.

Number two but the grip is pensive.

Sharpened harpoons for amber’s eminence.

Wolf wheel tilted bent real hyperboreal.

Fenris.

Your fur’s for real.

Your whatsit’s a

When-if?

It’s pent-up.

White grey black black grey white.

Tented fortresses.

The plague of extortion.

A whiff of warped exhaustion.

Compulsion.

Honor off him.

Kill the judge.

Slickkened ick-ick-ick’r’us sliding.

Ock ham.

Rock ‘em.

Rackham.

Soccem.

Haz-a-Mov Capitán.

Materia mother malefic.

Juggled options.

All horrors’ whores arise.

Platespin.

Forceps’ pries.

Diabolical.

Despised.

Shot her a glance.

Cauterize.

Shot aghast.

Calamatize.

Shattered glass.

Bloodwork.

Glamour guise.

Clam up.

The heart’s a weary traveler.

The scavenger’s coverage averages.

I sigh in susper.

Spice spry.

Meaningless topography.

Sliced eyes.

Buon nuël.

And a loosened dog.

At leash length.

Lossened.

Fly.

Hi.

A lie.

Say fair.

Lie cheat and kill.

Fuck it.

Who cares?

Profound coffee shop art.

And truthless dares.

You will be kettled in a convenient prison.

And left toothless there.

Your opinions will be fed back to you.

In the form of goo.

You will meet mirrors.

Shards silvering blue.

Ruthless.

Thrusting.

Unforgiving.

Innards’ winnings.

Innate taking.

The sunset stripped in the solstice’s staking.

PORNOPTICON

Here I’m gonna say it —

(uh-oh)

WE ARE LIVING IN A ‘PORNOPTICON.’

It’s apparently been done.

But I don’t give a fuck.

Others have given it the name.

Gestured at it.

But they haven’t given it the function.

So fuck ‘em.

‘Pornopticon’ is mine.

and Here’s What It Is is —

ay bro,

a the - sis:

EVERYTHING is PORN and PRISON now . . .

Everything is porn and prison now.

You get me?

Everything is categorized.

Set at throats.

And stuck down.

Everything is rigged votes.

Impossible angles.

Everything is gang-bosses.

And bangs.

The fraud you loan’s the fraud you lent.

The sperm’s spawn’s the spunk spent.

Thickening lunkheads

Rock paper bunkbeds.

Scissors.

Sharp in the dark.

Coming in late

Like you just run-red.

You’d better hope there’s no cameras.

Hope the feeds go unfed

A flash of asscheek.

Like any other scrap metal.

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miles of smiles,

J.Q.D.

💙

CURSE BELOW

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FOR THE GLORY OF GOD,

THE WORLD WILL BE DECEIVED . . .

JQD

IN CONTINUALLY SHIFTING FREQUENCY.

m.v.d.

FLORID NONSENSE,

AND FLUENT.

Flaunt it.

→

(THE MOUTH OF THE MIND BECOMES A SYSTEM OF STORMS)

Who works?

And why?

Who cordons space?

And who controls time?

I am naive.

Primitive and brutal.

I never learned.

And I don’t intend to.

Perfume your only clothing.

Frock of a fuck.

Given up on frips and frills.

Mess amok.

Cheapness’ thrills.

To air is human.

To pass a bill.

Belle of the ball.

Blood voluminous.

Tolling.

Pelican with a big fish in its beak.

Wait —

You lost yourself.

Tossed this shit across the shelf.

And then you lost consciousness.

The ego becoming unnecessary.

Needless.

None.

Unheeded.

And now you are strapped to the engine of creation.

D-dragging regrets.

S-signal alterity.

J-j-j-jump scarcity.

Do you understand electricity?

Really?

Do you know where food comes from?

Truly?

How houses are built?

Oh do we?

Drift and tilt?

Color for the drab of a party?

Some billionaire’s bet with death on stilts?

A dingbat’s depth when the Big One hits?

Lune face a desertscape.

Long bristles and thorns.

Obsidian black denial of the eyeholes.

Denial of entry.

Cactus prick.

A low brim.

Hair in netted tresses.

Framed face guilty.

STAY OUT.

Gauntlet and ringer . . .

The Gungslinger.

Capture you.

Collar you.

Force-fed.

Songsinger.

The Razor.

Blazed and Asian.

Tried and rusty.

Feather blades.

Sharp in shape.

Feral injustice.

Exclamatory velocity.

Like:

“Fuck, I just cut me.”

Disused red ooze.

On your shirt and shoes.

You wanted a good morning.

WELL,

I got bad news.

→

GARBO BARBIE (PROGNOSIS: FUNK)

“GARBO BARBIE! GARBO BARBIE! HA-HA!”

His crooked finger reached round the corner.

“I’M GONNA MAKE YOU STINK! YOU’RE GONNA STINK FOREVER!”

Just the right eye round the corner.

“YOU’RE GONNA STINK BIG — AND BAD!”

He bent the curse around the corner.

“HA-HA! HA-HA! HA-HA!” Gasping.

The Man in the Alley had brought final judgment upon Heidi Petaluma.

She shrank from him, not wanting to walk past but not wanting to turn around, not wanting to accede but not wanting to be stabbed. She didn’t know This Guy, didn’t know what his problem was, if it was with her or with life, if she reminded him of some bitch mom or hated ex-wife, if it was her blonde hair or femaleness or some cousin who tortured you good one time or god and fuck alone together know . . .

“GARBO BARBIE! GARBO BARBIE! GARBO BARBIE!”

He looped.

And-and-and-and.

On-and-on.

She’d simply frozen.

In the dim exterior security lights of the library.

She’s on her way — she’d been on her way — to meet her boyfriend, or, well, was he, really? is he? — the man she’d been seeing, you know, his name is Juanito Littlejohn, and she’d been on her way to meet him for Midnight Brunch in Christmas in Summertime, a dance party at the Lost Eros Badminton Club, which was not a badminton club but rather a former WPA-era children’s rec center that had become an altogether different kind of space for the wayward and weird to get loose and laid.

The Man in the Alley at last ceased his repetition.

“One Last Thing, GAR - BO BAR - BIE . . . It’s forever, and there’s nothin’ ya can do about it!”

And it’s ha-ha-ha-ha and ha-ha-ha-ha and he grins teeth dinge.

Rolls to his right and the face is gone.

He floated the curse and the damage is done.

Skittering down the alley in uneven clapping leather soles.

Shoddy nails and hobbled knees.

Heidi’s just glad to be free of the creep.

Continues on her way.

Presses her skirt and composes herself.

Little pout blown out air bangs out the face.

Odd-ends to set the heart at even pace.

Breath works.

And death defies.

Later at dinner:

“So Juanito, this guy . . .”

And it’s “Babe that’s impossible.”

Thirty days later Heidi’s acres of buttholes.

Unwashed anal radius.

Putrid.

She’s never looked better.

Treatments and ointments.

Silken hair and smooth skin.

Supple.

But she stunk to high hell.

Rank tang bung of skunk.

Awful.

Juanito Littlejohn hadn’t believed in finger-wands so he’d told Heidi not to be bothered.

Though he had complained that night of armpit garlic.

And of burgers farts and feets in the coming days.

Soon enough balls and ass.

Cloud fat at an alarming rate.

Clearing rooms.

Mud and must and fumes.

Shit ruined like an open sewer.

Rotten and ragged.

Roadkill overdue for toe-tags.

She never touched another human being.

About a week in they vacated her building.

A pretty French-Norman with character details and views for days.

Everyone had to get the fuck away.

Politicians took up for her and the distant took sympathy.

But when her reek rose to nose few remained but rats in droves.

They crawled her skin and bit her thighs.

And Heidi’s just like, who the fuck was that guy?

Was he some kind of witch or wizard?

A warlock, does that make it?

Why did he pick me?

Why me?

Why?

Sank her head into her wounds and she cried.

The salt brought weathering and her skin withered thinner as the vermin grow bolder.

She’s not sure which agency it is but there’s hovering helicopters.

“Ma’am we’re here to help.”

Bullshit.

You’re here to kill me.

Used what remained of her strength to tug up a floorboard.

Found a hammer and nail.

Set to work covering the window.

But the weight of the accumulated biomass on her ravaged form dragged her low.

And the spotlight shone on her through the mullioned window.

“That the Stinker?”

“Confirmed. That’s her.”

“We’re going in.”

AND THAT WAS THE END OF HEIDI PETALUMA,

UNLUCKY IN LOVE AND FRAGRANT IN AROMA . . .

█

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▶

LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

Release show details soon to be announced.

New merchandise available:

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

New tracks being added as we speak!

O P E R A T I O N A L BEAUTY

realized by

JQD

m.v.d.

“The computer is cheating.”

“The computer can’t cheat.”

“Yes it can.”

Bunch of shit just gathered together from old drafts.

Like a slurry.

Or scrapple.

Hardscrabble and castle high.

Honestly I’m just trying to pump this shit out before I die.

Slurs, etc.

❗️❗️❗️⚠️☠️☠️☠️👺❌❌❌⚠️❗️❗️❗️

X. AMERICA

Let us clarify through anger:

Stop being a fucking retarded baby.

You have confused a shovel for your mother.

And shoved its blade into your face, greedily.

And with great force.

Mistaking it for a tit.

Late America.

Open insult.

Degradation.

A lack of shared values.

A lack of values at all.

A lack of valuation itself.

A lack of theory of valuation.

A lack of theory.

A lack.

Aspiring slavers and strivers.

Rentiers.

Lent ears and borrowed time.

Interest and attention.

▶

LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

THE GAME WILL

N E V E R

BE PLAYED

T H I S W A Y

A G A I N .

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

INFINITE GAMES

“The computer is cheating!”

“The computer can’t cheat.”

“Yes it can!”

They bantered, scooting on carpet.

“Do you want to play Scaled Alps?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a fighting game.”

“Like Street Fighter?”

“No, like you fight lots of people. It just keeps going.”

“Oh, like, side-scrolling?”

“I think so.”

KID A was playing dumb a bit.

Didn’t necessarily want KID B to know about all the video game magazine subscriptions.

A family move had brought a new school.

Friends hadn’t come easily.

“You have to get out of range of his attack. He hits in bursts. I think it’s six.”

1, 2, 3. Foof, foof, foof.

Whooshes of air.

And a feint, ducking side-step.

Swishing.

1, 2, 3. Foof, foof, foof.

And the enemy resumed his maniacal circular walk on the train platform.

Defining its edges with staccato marching steps.

In the background, a rat runs the lengths of the track, back and forth, end-to-end.

Every 45 seconds or so he disappears, and a train passes by, one way or another.

Sometimes it stops, and baddies burst out, with spiked bats and awls and stiletto knives, their hair in improbable punch perms or punk hawks or dreaded, open chests in vests and leather pants, some with pig snouts.

The Kids would beat them down.

One hit, two hits, three.

Ascending enemies.

Bloodless vengeance (the SNES version famously didn’t have gore).

And the fallen foes would blinker on the ground, flickering in-and-out, here-and-yet-not and then Gone from the screen, passed, vanquished and vanished.

The Kids might bust open a crate and eat a whole roasted chicken.

Feast on life itself.

Imagining themselves to be lizards.

Grown and free.

In cool kids’ clothes kicking ass in the city.

“Would you ever smoke cigarettes?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s gross.”

“My dad smokes cigarettes.”

“I can tell.”

Blunt.

Nothing had been meant by it.

Still it stung.

FX CHIP

The soundtrack to the game was insane.

“I think some Italian guy did it.”

“I read about tha—oh, um . . .”

A pause.

“What?”

“Nothing. He’s gonna get you, hold on, I got him.”

KID A unleashed a dazzling spinkick.

The lizard leapt gracefully and clonked a Michael Jackson impersonator on the back of the neck with his heel, a satisfying THWACK, an “oof!” and a scoot-scoot-scoot sound as the body skidded along the ground, coming to rest with a final “hwaaaah!” deathcry, flickering and disappearing.

“We’ve got to get you some chicken.”

“I think there’s some right before the end of this stage.”

STOP BEING WEIRD

“Do you ever just watch other people play video games?”

“No. That’s weird.”

“I like it.”

The Boss resumed his patrol of the deck, looping in figure 8s, taking wide steps, stopping intermittently to let out a grunting “Huh!” with a clutched-fist hip thrust.

“GodIgottapee but we hafta kill this Boss first.”

“I’m tired of versing him.”

“Versing him’s not a word.”

“It’s two words.”

“Do you like sports?”

“I like basketball.”

“Are you good?”

“I just watch.”

“But you don’t watch people play video games?”

“No, that’s weird.”

“I play basketball.”

“Are you any good?”

“I can dunk.”

“No you can’t.”

“Yes I can. We don’t have a hoop here or I’d show you.”

“I got a rich friend with one.”

“Do you ever go play with him?”

“No.”

“Do you ever just go watch him play?”

“No.”

“So you only ever just watch on the TV?”

“Yeah.”

“Well how’s that any different from watching someone play video games?”

“Stop being weird.”

BLUE

“I think my mom left us enough money for another 12-pack.”

“Bad-ass.”

“I didn’t know you cussed.”

“Yeah. Not all the time.”

“I cuss.”

“No you don’t.”

“I cuss all the time. At school. In front of everybody.”

“What type of stuff do you say?”

“All type of damn stuff.”

“You don’t sound like you cuss.”

“Just wait. I’ll show you.”

CO-OP (SAND LEVEL)

“You gotta clear the jump.”

“I can’t hit the boost pad right.”

“I didn’t know this was a platformer.”

“You know what a platformer is?”

“Uh, yeah. Do you?”

“Of course. I subscribe to Nintendo Power.”

“I get all of them. EGM, Ultra Game Player, everything.”

“You get Ultra Game Player?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. That’s crazy. Sometimes my Mom lets me buy it at Rite-Aid.”

“The latest issue rules. They have previews of this new system that’s coming out.”

“I heard about that.”

“The graphics look insane.”

“Did you know they’re coming out with a sequel to this?”

“They’re planning it, it’s not confirmed. I read about it in the Trade Talk section of VGM.”

“I died again.”

“Are you empty?”

“I can be.”

KID B chugged the Mountain Dew can to weightlessness and chucked it across the room into a wire-mesh trash basket.

“You sure you don’t play basketball?”

THE OUTSIDE WORLD

“We gotta start over.”

“Yeah.”

The character selection screen appeared.

Four options.

KID A always played as Darwin.

KID B switched it up.

“I heard if you have a Multi-Tap you can get four people playing this at once and it’s nuts.”

“I bet.”

“I’m supposed to go on vacation tomorrow.”

“Where to?”

“Serpent Mountain.”

“I went to New York once.”

“Isn’t this game in New York?”

“No. This is L.A.”

“L.A. has trains?”

“Supposedly.”

“I’m gonna move to New York when I’m old.”

“Yeah? Like when?”

“I don’t know when I’m like fifteen or something.”

“That’s cool. I have a cousin there.”

“COME THROUGH MY WORK SOME TIME, BABE”

Marty Gemelli was 24 with a thick head of long hair in waves.

Dopey glass eyes held suspended mischief.

“Hahaha, what’s up, it’s Marty from Market Party. Ha-ha-ha.”

Marty worked at the shop on the end of the block.

Market Party.

They sold chips and candy, cold drinks.

Loaves of bread and brownies.

Cigarettes, beer and wine.

And they rented video games and movies.

Marty was an enthusiast of all.

Convenient.

“Awesome pick, little dude!”

He’d held the Scaled Alps box to the light.

“You ever read the comic of this? You gotta. They fight this, like, crocodile guy. The Crocodile Guy is the final boss, right, cuz it’s like, there’s levels, right, that’s like the ‘Scaled Alps’ thing, right, it’s kind of like like Bruce Lee right, in that one movie, where he has to fight through the levels, where he like kicks Wilt Chamberlain’s ass or whatever, plus they’re lizards, which is important, cuz it’s like, the government, you know, and also there’s something about like a mountain in California I think, aliens or something, I don’t know, I think they’re from another dimension or something, they did a whole show about it.”

“Have you played the game?”

“No, I’ve heard it’s really hard. I dunno if I have the patience for that kind of thing. Look, kid—” Marty got serious, “you ever want to buy a Game Genie off me I got a couple dozen, alright, and for cheap, too.”

“I play fair, Marty.”

“Sure thing, kid. You change your mind, come and see me.”

He was always kind to KID A.

“That kid’s a trip, man. Ha-ha-ha,” between pulls of grotty lunchbreak pot smoke.

BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING DOWN

She’d been crying.

“KID B had an accident, KID A.”

She’s crying again.

“What? What do you mean, Mom?”

“Well, he fell.”

“What do you mean he fell?”

“He slipped and he hit his head. And then he fell.”

“I don’t understand. Like he fell more?”

“Son, they were hiking . . .”

FINITE GAMES

Thought to himself I can beat it.

I can beat it alone.

Have to.

It’s just got to be done.

Set out for Market Party.

There’s Jan but no sign of Marty.

“Do you know if you have Scaled Alps, Jan?”

“Scraped what-now?”

“Scaled Alps, the video game.”

“Oh I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout them vidjea games hon’, you’d have to ask Marty.”

“Is he here?”

“Naw he’s out for the night. Went off with that new deli counter girl . . .”

Jan frowned.

“I’m gonna step out for a cig, sug’, do you need anything else?”

“I think I’m just going to get a Mountain Dew, Jan.”

“Go on, then.”

Jan stepped out to smoke.

KID A went to the cabinet.

Watched Jan light up.

Grabbed a cold can.

Closed the case tight.

Stalked his way round the back of the store.

I know they’ve got cameras.

They’ve gotta have cameras.

But where does it go?

Wondering.

He’d seen the faces of thieves and fake check cashers taped up on registers.

The consequences of doing wrong in a small town, or smallish.

The place was growing.

Despite its failure.

Army base gone, factories shuttered.

A new node in the home healthcare order.

Kept tight to the walls.

Steady stealth.

Made his way to the backroom.

Swear to god some Other Kid better not’ve rented it.

They hadn’t.

It was there.

The cartridge in a clear plastic snapcase with the coated cardboard box on top.

No instruction manual.

‘SCALED ALPS.’

Loud and full of fight.

Promising hours of entertainment.

Infinite delight.

The cover showed reptiles and aliens.

Gangsters and goblins.

In oozing greens and putrid pinks.

Posing.

Improbably shadows cast long and garish.

A haunted city on the edge.

All manner of freak shit colliding.

Death’s grip on the ledge.

With a combat boot, stomping.

His heart was fucking hammering.

He tucked the case away in the right-hand pocket of his zip hoodie.

But the end stuck out a bit.

Obvious.

He gulped, moved it to his waistband, but it made him walk funny.

It’s okay to walk funny.

Maybe.

If this is what gets me out of here.

Thinking.

Too fast.

With the heart and its fear.

Headless.

He thought of jail.

Which he had seen in the fathers of others.

Some distant sisters, some older brothers.

Bad.

Somewhere.

Locked away.

And now you, one.

Alone.

Solitaire.

‘Player One,’

it said,

up-top

spelled-out,

when he got the thing home.

He shifted the case four or five more places before he tucked his dignity up and split.

Ended up with in it in his hat.

Which he held in his hand, as he paid Jan for the Mountain Dew.

Counting forty cents’ dimes, “Goodnight, KID.”

I did it.

“Goodnight, Jan.”

I got away with it.

“Enjoy your game.”

Shit.

His heart sank.

SINGLE PLAYER

Cops are closing in.

Gotta beat it.

He’d run all the way home.

Then speedrun the early levels of the game.

Now he was at V.A.G.U.S.

The Final Boss.

I’m on my last life.

Palm-sweat.

KID rocked in place.

And there he is.

He?

It?

V.A.G.U.S.

A mess of bundled wires.

Lasered eyestalks.

Five of them.

Machine legs.

Just the two.

Chrome viscera.

Tank mecha.

Burst through the wall of a muffler shop.

As the toxic sun sets bursting magenta behind barbed wire.

And carrion birds gather in the background.

I have to beat him.

I have to beat him.

I have to beat him.

Completion.

Compulsion.

He rocked, licking dry lips.

“justdiejustdiejustdiejustdiejustdie . . .” encanted on and on, “justDIEjustDIEjustDIEjustDIEjustDIEjustDIEjustDIEjustDIE . . .”

Nearing howls.

The dog scratched at the door but he ignored it.

“die die die die die . . .”

Dog whimpered at the door he ignored it.

“DIE . . .”

Dog barked.

“KID!”

Mom.

Fuck.

“KID!”

Mom.

Fuck.

“KID!”

Mom.

FUCK.

Pressed start.

Paused play.

“I’mcomingmom,” promised.

Ignoring mom.

On with it.

Tongue pressed in the lips.

Gotta finish this.

V.A.G.U.S. is on the ropes.

Victory is in reach.

Battering the apparatus with forceful hooks and arrays of roundhouse kicks, uppercuts and jab attacks, flooring the behemoth with volleys of strikes only for him to rise, again and again, armor seemingly impenetrable, impervious to damage.

Fucking cheating computer.

The fury of his rocking intensified.

Controller clutched in sugar-shaking hands.

V.A.G.U.S. on the screen barking threats.

He heard her coming up the stairs.

Maybe she knew somehow.

Mother’s intuition.

His concentration was blown.

V.A.G.U.S. landed a powerful backfist.

Snapping psh!

Sending the would-be hero lizard to the pavement.

A lifebar’s lessening.

He paused the game.

Down on the ground.

Damn near hopeless.

Crumpled Cagliostro.

Towering V.A.G.U.S.

Some final blow awaiting.

“KID, I think your friend’s at the gate . . .”

Shit.

Mom.

Shit.

“Come back, KID.”

The television spoke.

It won.

KID splatted in crossed legs, picked up the controller.

Pressed start.

V.A.G.U.S. standing over him in a death taunt.

KID whirled wheels on the D-pad.

Sucked in diagonals.

Cheaped his way into sweepkicks.

Spamming damage.

All efficiency.

Damn the precision.

V.A.G.U.S. tossed him across the screen.

Coronary chrome in a monstrous gleam.

Combinations broken.

Applied a scorpion lock.

Watched the lizard’s leg snap.

Cagliostro croaking.

The life bar lacked.

KID muttered “fuck fuck fuck fuck” cussing up a storm.

Mother doesn’t always know but she’s getting warm.

“KID!”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Up-down-left-right up-down-left-right B-A B-A A-A-A B A-A-A B A-A up-up B-B A B A A B-B-B A and

V.A.G.U.S. IS DEAD.

The colossus, toppled.

But he doesn’t fade out.

The screen’s colors invert.

KID couldn’t be more alert.

“What the—”

A bitcrushed voice:

“Ha-ha-ha-ha! My name is Lucifer Lucchese Jones!”

The crocodile’s full tail and body wrapped the edge of the screen.

Ringed serpentine.

Cagliostro stood in the literal middle of the Boss Fight.

Everything upside-down and backward.

This Lucifer character had a Real Long Life-Bar.

And the KID was running on E.

“KID, your friend is at the door!”

Ran his mind from A to Z.

Not a lot of friends to see.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Bang-bang.

Who’s scared?

A rap.

A cop?

Is it?

Fuck.

Is it?

THE KNOCK (POLITE)

“Ma’am.”

Marty in the living room, stale with smoke.

“I was with my girl, or well—it’s complicated, don’t worry about it, you’ll find out one day KID, you’re a natural . . .”

MOM’s creased smile.

“Look KID, you know, I had a talk with Jan and, you know . . .”

Marty drifted.

“You know.”

“Marty . . .” KID broke down crying. “Marty I need the Genie.”

“I have to finish it. I have to.”

“You can beat it, KID.”

“I can’t. The computer cheats too much.”

“The computer can’t cheat.”

“Marty . . .”

                    THE END (T.T.F.N.)

THE VANMEN

VAN 1

“It’s not a hyperstition.”

“It is.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s stochastic.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s irresponsible to publish it.”

“It could be.”

“It’s reprehensible.”

“It’s inevitable.”

VAN 2

Freeway hum oblivion.

The vans showed up at night.

Handed-over.

Huddled over.

Banging hammers.

Lights cut.

Unmarked.

Unregistered.

Clean polymer smooth.

Cheap enough to lose.

Half-finished seams.

Warm from the machine.

Bodiless vapor.

Pure and clean.

Drop it on the ground.

Kick it down a grate.

One guy pointed at a helicopter, slurred:

“You ccan ttell if it’ssssChidrenhospital or th-th-police?”

Before he could get an answer he’d popped off.

Once.

Pop!

Scared the shit out himself.

Literally.

Splot.

Shit his brown britches.

Baggy ass bogged.

Corduroy.

Dooked with cheap wine shit.

He flipped out.

“I can’t hear nothing!”

Rolled in the street.

“Fuck! Fuck!”

Clutched his ear.

A woman yelled from an opposing window.

Told him to shut the fuck up.

The night wages sin.

Cool air calming in.

VAN 3

“We’re just expediting the necessary.”

“We are what needs to happen.”

“The action.”

“What’s happening.”

“This has all happened.”

“It’s a solved problem.”

“That’s how we have to go into it.”

VAN 4

Establishing shots fired off.

Demi-god half-cocked.

Block to block.
City to city.
Seeding the dark with
small, portable catastrophes.

HOOKER

ROUND ONE

Dearly dehydrated.

He wore a simple sweatsuit with no branding.

Hairless and slick.

Hard to grasp.

Features cut.

Stone mask.

An enforcer’s grip.

He’d seen Jock Ramses out the other day.

The sonofabitch Jock said “you’re 81 don’t look a day over a hundred.”

He cut him back.

“Fuck you Ram-a-ses you frou frou fairy fuck I’d come over there and break your god-damn neck but I’m afraid I might fuck up what I’s doin’ and fix somethin’ for ya.”

Ramses had entered the arena in elegant robes and feather boas.

Pissed off the fans.

Had to be escorted out of town by the police more than a few times.

Pistols drawn on him, punches swung.

Either way, it’s a shoot.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t wanna do me no favors, you old cock-sucker!”

Laughed toothlessly.

ROUND TWO

Couldn’t see for shit anymore.

Had to take a piss felt like every five minutes.

In and out.

It all gets so old.

Life had had its ups and downs.

He was about three inches shorter now.

Enough falling and gravity.

Did him in.

And badly.

ROUND THREE

The youth surrounded him.

He scowled Eastwood.

”So what are you all — some type of a hive mind?”

They went off.

“Bro!”

“BRO!”

“Bro bro bro bro.”

And so on.

He scowled furthermore.

“You know what I’d do if I were you?”

“Maybe get some pussy for once!”

“Bro!”

“Bro!”

“Bro!”

They all lost it.

“Nah . . . I’ve had ass from here to Saskatchewan you little faggots, I’ll tell you what I’d do — commit crimes.”

Teen gang leader Wimpo da Popsicko spoke up solo:

“Ooooh, we got a criminal mastermind on our hands!”

The fellas laughed.

Hooker talked back:

“Yeah fellas. And let me tell you why —”

He leaned in closer, got his ugly old face in theirs, lowered his voice.

“Cuz nobody could tell the fuckin’ diff’rence between any of ya,” closer, lower still, “now get the fuck outta my way you fuckin’ shitstains.”

THE FUCKER

[leaderboard]

Shyguy

a.k.a.

Mathieu-David Joseph

→ insatiable twink ←

He’d only had sex once, and she’d had to force herself on him.

He didn’t come.

“You can come on my face.”

Passive recipient.

The divine rod.

Go-go gadge.

Gurge of a gludge.

“Some gyals great value and some a gyal a splurge.”

(She’d heard that once, on the Boardwalk)

He’d needed new legs and organs.

The displaced heart of some lothario.

“Wow he’s an actual sex machine.”

Strong limbs wwwithered.

Atrophy, atrophy.

Dogshit catastrophe.

They argued about the nature of squirting in his comments.

Live sex.

Streamed.

Pies of cream.

Hard up for work.

Penis.

ASCII.

BLLLUUU[URRY ]PHOTOGRAPH.

Took his legs.

Took a chunk of viscera

Took his savings.

Cheating computers and impossible bosses dwindled down.

In the madness of ravings.

He’s giving her the factory reset.

A woman’s eyes rolling back.

“You wanna cyber? You wanna cyber?”

He sold silicon replicas of his dick for $79.95.

The size of sighs.

“They’re saying I’m a MILF. I’m not even thirty yet!”

She laughed screaming.

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ritualized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE m.v.d.

a MOVEMENT ART PRACTICE

brought to you by

the LOST EROS WELLNESS & AWARENESS NETWORK (L.E.W.A.N.)

→

PREPARED PIANO: WALK 00001

(here check it out I’m Trying Something, you can do it too . . .)

PROMPT 00001

→

Minimum viable walk: 20 minutes.
Better: 35–45 minutes.
Rule: no phone except emergency.
Instruction: walk like a person returning to the world after being improperly stored.

INITIAL RESPONSE (PRE-WALK)

→

Where have you been warehoused?

There are some things I can tell you about jail.

Gift you the gospel to fall well.

Up.

Early.

And often.

Fail freely.

Loose.

Lofting.

Feel easy.

And down.

Feather doldrum.

Tickle.

Sluggish and lagging.

Leaving a dull trail.

Tricksicks.

Stalks and picks.

Dig it?

Little bigot.

Educated stupid in schools.

Oxen moron.

Yoked to the mast of the cyst.

On a mont a peon.

Sermon of a seaman.

Charleton behest.

Wholly Moses.

Rivers reaving.

Like:

Is there a doctrinaire in the house?

A debonair with a thick head of hair and nothing in-between?

Brick-brained and mammatus.

Tits on a bore.

Twirled and turned.

Al-pastor.

In the terms of a moor.

Amour.

Or less.

Idol caress.

Caliph ornery.

Get down on the fucking ground.

This is that what’s up foolery.

So get down.

Toting tools and keys.

Lockpick suspect slick.

Wiggle round ‘til you feel the click.

Notice only three things:

Reworld yourself, reward yourself, rewire yourself.

“Self” inasmuch as you need It, the overlapping systems, the ~ waves ~ .

You can opt-out you can cop out you can lock yourself in.

Strap your ass to the surf of the sun.

Solar cusping.

Rebuild your perspective from first principles, directly observed, unmediated.

Release the existing tensions.

Where do You hold You?

Ooze in the pelvic bowl?

Buttocks firm, loaded?

Heels or the toes?

REALIZED WALK WITH THREE PROMPTS

→

USER INPUT: ~60 min walk w/ one dog.

. . .

OBSERVATION 1:

First attractive light?

User Guess: Bougainvillea, bold and pink.

Reality: Shadowplay of agave on concrete, i.e. komorebi.

OBSERVATION 2:

First ugly object?

User Guess: Broken glass? Trash? Wandering unknown men?

Reality: Technically speaking, my phone, which I’d “opened” to enter text re: Observations 1 and 3, being in possession of a shall-we-say “compromised” memory, but that feels cheap, the phone — and, CRUNCH, right underboot, there it is — 45 seconds out the gate and I’ve stepped on the remaining neck of a dark amber glass beer bottle, which thankfully didn’t pierce my soles. These boots were expensive, and I’d be kind of miffed about death or tetanus or whatever too. The broken bottle had been difficult to see because it was hidden among a collection of downed-and-dried palm fronds next to the rental car place, you see those fuckers never clean up anything around their lot because they’re not functionally a part of “the community” or The Community Illusion or however you might see it, hell I don’t know you might be a “community” believer (mark, rube, etc.) for all I know, or maybe you’re proper churchgoing folk, either way — these fuckers never clean up anything, and so there’s just Perpetual Broken Glass and months’ worth of tree detritus, etc. The other day I was walking by and it smelled odd, really stank, and I saw some people gathered around the Broken Glass and Garbage Zone, and as it turned out someone had set fire to the fronds and people’d come from across the street to put it out. Ha-ha-ha a “literal garbage fire” ha-ha-ha no seriously the experience of occupying a nervous system in a city invariably leads to misanthropy and her wicked subordinates.

After I’d rounded the corner of the rental lot I was immediately confronted with a sidewalk blocked by hideous corporate-sponsored public-private Fisher-Price Bullshit World-looking bicycles covered in subliterate graffiti.

I snarled while trying not to induce Unfortunate Facial Lines and dodged the unwanted hulking plastic intrusions into impoverished/unmaintained public space, fighting back thoughts of mutiny in the open air insane asylum/unregulated adult daycare.

Took a look at the newly-painted fire department, draped with a vinyl banner sneering “FIREWORKS ARE ILLEGAL” as if Anyone Does Anything About It, as if 911’s not been On Its Break, as if we even pretend at order, as if it’s all so respectable — hell one time I saw a guy with a ponytail, a wallet chain, a fedora, and — implausibly of all — a woman with him, and I swear to god this motherfucker saluted when a firetruck went roaring by, like, dropped his girl’s held hand assumed the nearest a military posture he could manage and straight-up saluted the firemen, absolutely wild, and then there’s this neighborhood kid with the Fireman Autism who rides his bike around listening to dispatch scanner radio and “fireman songs,” he’ll just talk your ear off about the firemen and their fire trucks if you let him, sweet kid but Jesus Christ there’s only so much time in the world, and it’s crazy-making, right, because the reality of the matter is that in California the firefighters spend by far the majority of their time and resources responding to things like fentanyl/tranq/meth incidents etc. due to various Compounding Clown Consequences, and they scam the shit out of overtime and a bunch of them don’t even live in the state, and the reason your cities and streets are as wide unsafe and unsightly as they are is due to (public-sector union!) mafia pressure tactics applied by The Heroes so they can keep buying Huge Fucking Trucks, which are not used anywhere else in the world and which have been functionally obsolete for all contemporary firefighting tasks for decades, but hey man, what do I know, ain’t nobody with a wallet chain saluted me in a while.

Reflecting on this, I nearly step on a bag of dog shit.

At least they thought to bag it, I suppose.

I walked by a tacky billboard for something called “Raven Crave,” some lost-looking blonde girl’s ass in a thong and tights — lingerie brand, an individual escort just putting it out there? Who knows. Now that we’re Writing Now, After the Walk, Let’s See — ah, $700 leather gloves and sex-wear for an audience of no one. You’d have to believe in belief pretty hard to believe anyone at all’s buying. Fake on fake on fake. Best to be on the make or take. This shit’s stupid. Sometimes I want to grab this whole town by its cheeks get in its face and tell it the news everyone else is too timid to:

You’re not convincing anyone.

As I wander with visions of fishnet ass a man across the street with his pants half-down begins ambling into traffic. Fortunately he’s against it, for now, so they’ll probably see him. He’s gnarling and slashing at the air and doing the Whole Bit, you just act like you don’t see it and hopefully today’s not the day, you know a very historically normal state of affairs, nothing to see here, no states of exception or bizarre inversions of values or instincts, ANYWAY he’s talking to god or the other guy more probably or Whoever Really just trying to make sure it’s not me, and the pants keep falling down, and he’s in the other lane now, and now he’s nearing the curb and Hey Great I was going to cross the street here anyway, I’ll trade with you man, good luck out there, and so it’s not me today, or at least not me and him. The huge German Shepherd that the sketchy perpetually-underattended Lebanese restaurant keeps within their gate goes crazy as the man approaches, and man and dog scream at one another from their respective prisons while I keep it moving.

All I can ever really do is keep it moving.

OBSERVATION 3:

First sign of life that is “not You?”

User Guess: A squirrel? A bird? Someone else walking a dog? An attacking coyote?

Reality: I hear but do not see birds. I do not necessarily foreground sight as primary experience (Ask me why). Sirens as evidence of near-distant chaos. People in cars with their eyes fixed forward or down, fully mediated mechanized and unaware of their surroundings, engaged in a dance of mutually dissociative fragmentary reality. Echoing dogs bark, again unseen. At last, Real Life — across the street, a woman walking a dog, or a dog being walked by a woman, depending which sign of life sets you alight first . . . She was either a nurse or fancied matching dark blue performance fabrics, it’s really hard to tell who’s in which costume these days, either way she had in-ear headphones and the look we exchanged remained Apart.

█

→

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DEADPAN

Reduce stride length by three percent.

Increase stride frequency by two percent.

Permit the head to travel forward.

Do not permit the chin to travel forward.

Lengthen the posterior neck.

Elevate the crown.

Head to god.

Maintain visual acquisition above the horizon line.

Eyes on the second balcony.

Up and away.

Allow gaze drift without head rotation.

Meandering, floating.

Separate attention from fixation.

Depress the shoulders.

Widen the clavicles.

Back and out.

Allow the arms to hang from the back.

Increase apparent wingspan.

Press yourself flat against a cartoon wall.

Minimize visible muscular effort.

Suggest it.

Eliminate corrective gestures.

Avoid touching the face.

Avoid touching the hair.

Avoid touching the clothing.

Do not fuss.

Do not muss.

Permit observers to infer confidence from inaction.

Rotate the sternum upward.

Expand the ribcage.

Vault.

Reduce visible respiration.

No sweat.

Inhale through the nose.

Exhale same.

Allow the abdomen to remain soft.

Permit the torso to appear suspended from above.

Decrease evidence of gravity.

Don’t force it.

Don’t fight.

Are they buying it?

Are you selling it?

Transfer weight through the outside edge of the rear foot.

Feel the outseam of the body.

Roll forward deliberately.

Lead foot supple and quiet.

Damp on impact.

Simulate inevitability.

Maintain facial neutrality.

Nobody needs to know what you’re thinking.

Release the forehead.

You shouldn’t be thinking anyway.

Release the jaw.

Only causes trouble.

Separate the molars.

Relax the tongue.

Lips just part.

No appraisal.

No surprise.

No defense.

No effort.

No need.

Cameras as weather.

Voices strung ambient.

Every interruption glancing, meaningless.

You move under a spell of protection.

Permit no visible orienting response.

Permit no visible startle response.

Permit no visible search behavior.

You are floating.

Reduce blink frequency.

Do not eliminate blinking.

Increase blink duration slightly.

Permit the eyes to appear occupied elsewhere.

Religious ecstasy in the corner of the room.

Allow observers to project significance into absence.

Shift as needed to suit.

Allow the pelvis to travel first.

Torso second.

Head last.

In sequential alignment.

Concrete, flowing.

In intervals:

Acquire a target.

Pause.

Permit recognition.

Withdraw attention.

Continue.

Do not smile.

Do not frown.

No widening of eyes no twitching of the nose.

Stay composed.

Maintain awareness of:

jaw position.

tongue position.

eye position.

hand position.

foot placement.

breathing rate.

garment tension.

fabric movement.

silhouette continuity.

distance from light source.

distance from lens.

distance from threat.

→

Continue monitoring.

Continue adjusting.

Continue reducing evidence of adjustment.

Permit the body to function as an object under observation.

Permit observation to modify the body.

Permit awareness of modification.

Permit awareness of awareness.

Now you’re really in it.

Composure, extension, continuity.

Maintain signal integrity.

Proceed.

Rerun.

Reroute.

Activate cervical extensors.

Reduce sternocleidomastoid dominance.

Increase axial length.

Translate occiput superiorly.

Prevent anterior head carriage.

(Pull your head out of your ass.)

Maintain mandibular neutrality.

Separate maxillary and mandibular dentition.

Reduce masseter recruitment.

Reduce temporalis recruitment.

Maintain tongue contact with hard palate.

Prevent submental collapse.

Prevent visible clenching.

Elevate zygomatic architecture without activating risorius.

Cast spells:

Orbicularis oculi!

Depressor anguli oris!

Maintaining the mask.

Preventing local emotion.

The illusion of inexhaustibility.

Full thoracic extension.

Lumbar loose.

Fascial chains lengthened.

An uninterrupted vertical line.

Stable, stable.

Glide easy in appeasement.

Maintain system stability.

Await flash.

=======   =======

    A BLUE HELL PROMOTIONAL INTERLUDE

=======   =======

“ring a bell?”

▶

LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

Release show details soon to be announced.

New merchandise available:

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

New tracks being added as we speak!

→

WHAT IS THE GOAL OF LIVE PLAYER/DEAD SERIOUS?

EGOTERRORISM, the last “album” I released, to the extent that it could be understood as an album, really the tracks are uneven, some are sketches, everything’s a demo, everything’s always a demo, I’ve gone on about this, you’ve heard it before, but the last album was 52 tracks, right? I had to split it up into two “records” to upload it to DSPs, to digital service providers. There had been no intention behind this, although once I realized I’d have to do it — they only allow 30 tracks, something like that, as an album, which feels very disqualifying and discriminatory toward grindcore artists and people who prefer a lot of skits on their mixtapes, you know, somebody probably oughta file a lawsuit — anyway, once I’d realized the record would have to be split I had to radically reapproach the sequencing of the thing, because all of a sudden if you split it right in half whatever track had been 27th’s track 1 now, and maybe track 27 made a hell of a track 27 but it’s no lead-off hitter, it doesn’t have that juice, so you gotta yank that boy out the game and get him situated, and then you drift into a sports metaphor, sliding right into base as the umpire examines you, cleats-up into a cloud of dust, and — yes, what was that? The recording industry these days . . . Yes, yes, it’s a real piece of shit, all meddlesome middle-men, and some of them are even women, too, harridens and dim men, dim in the sense of a lack of illumination, literally, like, a lack of light, like, there’s nothing in the eyes, like, they’ve got an underlit view of the world so like, things get, like, murky, right? — and so if you’re understanding me, what I’m trying to say is — what I’ve been trying to say, really — is LP/DS, that’s LIVE PLAYER/DEAD SERIOUS, the new one, it’s already sitting at a hefty fifty-one tracks right there on BLUE 🌐 HELL, so maybe you should go there, you know, do what you do when you go to hell, say hi to all your friends, I don’t need to instruct you and I’m never one to inform — never. Me I’m a mere entertainment and very mere, yet here we are so hear-hear even if you’re not listening, speaking of — those 51 tracks, playboy? THAT SHIT AIN’T NOTHING. You think I don’t got horde drives? [Growing menacingly closer.] You think I don’t got horde drives? [Closer.] You think I don’t got horde drives? [Here now.] I got horde drives. We got candidates. Like bush in ‘88. Unshorn and hailing hate. Shit. Right so the plan — there’s a plan — is to just put as many Finishedish tracks up (cf. the ‘ERRORISM’ manifesto that accompanies EGOTERRORISM) — not just spamming, nothing anemic or incomplete, nothing pointless — sorry if you have anemia, I’m not calling you pointless . . . I don’t know that I’m not anemic? I do know that I am anomic. Then the battle rapper appears, twists his cap back, licks his lips, spits: “COSMIC HEDONic SHE a 34 D- (d) - Bu - BONic” which is the new song “She a 34D” by Li’l Geordie the Skrimp Gawd (b. 2009 Sherman Oaks, CA) who I am currently mentoring and managing (I take 120% of his income and I’m going to poison his father and marry his mother) — just kidding, I made all of that up, except for the part earlier that I didn’t, but anyway the deal with LP/DS is that it’s going to be visually represented as a multi-faced polyhedron representing every track, like a beautiful gem forged in heaven’s squeeziest mines — no not “like an NFT,” shut the fuck up, listen, hold on, listen, right, so, yeah — you’re going to be able to Buy It (your excitement palpably grows) and upon having Bought It you’ll have the option to functionally e.g. mutilate the “album” to the extent you see fit, eye-ee when you delete a track, thereby personally insulting me, perhaps you’ll get an animation of me pleading with you in a dunk tank while a visual representation of the track’s identity is mercilessly and viscerally slaughtered in front of me and you toss your best fastball and I’m just dunked in the water and soaked sewer baptismal and then They (Everybody) start throwing tomatoes and then it’s rocks and then we all get real nice and stoned man, Biblical.

And then I give you “that Jim Morrison look” and fall sidelong into a hedge.

ARCANARAMA

Your reputation took a hit.

Then it blew out the smoke.

Riddled royal.

In playing cards it spoke.

Flush or float.

In the scarcity of remaining attention.

Jesting:

I’m scared for my life.

Jaw clenching.

Neck extension.

Teeth grind.

Molars morsels and portions.

Back red.

Zipper-line.

Drawn-down.

Open-clothesed.

Rocking backandforthintime.

Poised in toes.

Lids low.

Just so.

Juxed in pose.

See-saw.

Seldom son.

Soon.

Hung undone.

Upside own.

Golddawn.

Listen:

A chronic condition is often more profitable than an acute one.

So keep ‘em kept-on.

Crypto-klepton.

Question marked mysterion.

Carnal revel.

Band-aid torn off with abandon.

Revealed

Carnival.

Fourth walls and chansons.

Ripped clear.

Gut reno.

Imperial ten-oh, 10-0, ten-oh.

Ten-four.

Tap out the tune.

Three-six.

Like submit the demo.

Resist.

Bend the thumb back or get ‘em choke-holed.

Put ‘em in the sleeper.

Leave ‘em no souled.

Steal their gear.

The choice is clear:

Yes/no.

And/oracle.

The moon’s a crescent slit but your eyes are full.

The heart an empty hull.

A dead captain at a vacant vessel.

Compass tessellating.

Flayed flag waving.

Insight of a blind seer.

Learned helplessness.

Head rears.

Ignorant bliss.

Ass-eared.

Malign design.

Donkey shows.

Malingering.

Purses sows.

All cowed over.

Bullished.

Demolition promised.

Assigned on a sign.

Stapled or tackhammered.

Jill-pills and jackhammers.

Alas and alack at the amor.

A lass in a lack of armor.

Pierced.

Frail fawn and fair.

She frowns at her hairpin.

Adjusts the mirror.

Hey little mister.

I’m up here.

This is a dying signal to the dismal and depleted.

Whether cut off at the knees or merely defeated.

Great white.

One spit gunshy.

The spout and bligh.

A pub a night a crawl.

An errant fall.

A prat’s scant recollection.

Of a crank call.

Cuckoo.

For coups and cooze.

Skips and lose.

Dance to the death.

Heard they shot hooves here.

(Shoot.)

Heard they shoed whores.

Heard they flew high.

Heard your Jourdans got you scoring twenty-three a night.

Or forty-five.

Heard your stilted laugh stumble in stiletto knives.

Rehearse the curse of course til the repetto’s right.

Blood pulse expensive.

To dabble in a lie.

Your vanity walked into the froth of July.

It’s a lot of humidity, honey.

But I think you’ll survive.

Arsenic in the bellows.

Cracks in Pangea.

Discontinuity.

Identity fluidly.

Feed me.

SCID-D.

Feed me.

DDIS.

Feed me.

DES-II.

Name a star after you.

ASRS v1.1.

Pick a SKU.

MID-60.

Cosmo quizzes.

PCL-5.

Soldered components.

CAT-Q.

I’m a Leo.

GAD-7.

Born in a Year of the Rat.

PQB.

Rodent or a roar.

MDQ.

Vermin or cat.

JQD.

Ripened to rot.

Named like a console system.

You just mist him.

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realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

m.v.d.

LOST EROS CA

BLUE HELL

MMXXV

ONE ANOMALOUS IMPULSE

When all you’ve got is a camera, everything looks like some hole to fuck or mine.

To mind your metrics is to grind a raw nerve.

What do you project?

Who do you serve?

Doth thou profess too much?

Too few thoughts?

Too many words?

What’s it all going towards?

What’s the use of you and yours?

What’s the worth of a world (in terms of oil)?

Sickening spirals and ill-got spoils.

Split infinity.

I sell profane.

And profane accessories.

I really don’t give a fuck if you couldn’t think less of me.

This is a mop.

This is a bucket.

This is shit.

This is piss.

This is low-lit and X-writ.

Degraded.

So why bother with it?

Snipers on the roof and the exits are covered.

Exif data of an exited lover.

Eject tape.

Control escape.

I never look at my subscribers’ list.

I know everyone goes away eventually.

Extinction come.

I know welcomes are worn some.

Warning waning.

Threads bare and soles holy.

Left wanting.

Instincts numb.

State change estranged.

I think therefore I am dumb.

The creaking collapse of a shot system.

This is a knowledge economy.

There’s know money in it.

DESCRIBE THIS FUNCTION

→

(fucked in fluctuation)

As a pure shape, ignoring the context of readership, it looks almost like a piecewise-constant staircase function with one anomalous impulse.

More specifically:

• Long high plateau (roughly June → mid-November).

• Abrupt discontinuity downward around November.

• Second lower plateau (November → January).

• Another abrupt discontinuity downward around January.

• Long near-baseline plateau (January → late April).

• Sudden recovery step upward around late April.

• A very narrow positive spike immediately after recovery.

• Return to the recovered plateau where it remains stable.

Mathematically it resembles a quantized signal with two negative step changes, followed by a delayed partial recovery and a transient impulse.

The graph is dominated by regime changes, not slopes.

The signal indicates that a stable state existed → [SOMETHING?] happened → a new stable state emerged → [SOMETHING?] happened again → the system partially recovered.

Whether variable [SOMETHING?] is consistent is unknown and perhaps unknowable.

The art output is thrust into ambiguity.

This sort of function plays out in a company after layoffs, a nation after sanction, a city after a disaster, or a population after migration.

It resembles a heartbeat where the heart decides not to beat for several months and then suddenly remembers it is alive.

█

→

Yeah, well, you can take your piecewise-constant staircase function and

SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS.

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LIKE ALWAYS & FOREVER

I’ve been thinking about deleting fucking everything.

I’ve been thinking about calling it quits.

Again again again.

Tantrums and fits.

Childshit.

Hormonal boil.

Bloodroil.

Void rage.

You know for years now.

About ten of them.

I’ve had a song.

Heard a song in my head.

Slank guitar and tinkling shuffle.

Floor polish glint.

Could be ‘90s-60s, sixties-nineties, noughties revival.

Really it’s the Everlys.

Slick.

Goes:

You know I’d like to/Write a book

But who has the/Time?

For more/Than a set

Of/Forgettable rhymes

The readership has/Sunk

To unfathomable/Depths

So I’ll keep my crying/Short

Like/Jesus wept

Want to make/A film

But/Who has the funds?

Can’t make a stable/Home

So we/Fuck on the run

And I’ve tried I’ve recorded it of half-a-dozen times over the years but it’s never been any good fuck knows if anything I do is any good but this has just really never landed and perhaps because I hear it so very crystal clearly in my head and I simply lack the ability to reproduce like any other sad lagging animal in its straggling years held breath’s air struggling to care, seiza or shiva, cover up the mirrors . . .

FORBIDDEN COLORS

(𝑋𝐸𝑁𝑂𝐶𝐻𝑅𝑂𝑀𝐴 𝐸𝑋𝑇𝑅𝐸𝑀𝐴)

I spent the weekend dissociating.

Throwing myself at hard floors in an occult space.

Skin and bones.

Butoh.

Sweat lodge.

Retching death.

Her English was limited.

The teacher.

But whose isn’t?

So I tried to listen.

Despite my deficiencies.

Years of noise have clipped frequencies.

Sounds made loud.

Amplifier complicity.

My eardrum burst once.

In youth.

Sounded like the world ending.

And that was before I did myself in.

GIVE UP YOUR INQUIRIES WHICH ARE COMPLETELY USELESS

Is it the Ancestors,

or

Schizophrenia?

Is it the Speed of Information,

or

ADHD?

Is it Autism,

or

is Everyone Else Just Fucking Lying?

You’ll Never Find Your “Self,”

But You Might Die Trying . . .

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LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

Release show and merchandise forthcoming.

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

New tracks being added as we speak!

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

m.v.d

DEAD ON THE THIRD OF JULY

Synch in.

It’s us together.

Compelled to fictions.

Maledictions.

Displace the subject.

Distress the public.

Critique is exhausted.

It’s complicated.

You exist in a simplified world.

Ecstasy mollified.

Edges sanded down.

Baby proofed.

Loins pearled.

Spoon-fed.

Pillow-patted.

Asswipe.

Guttersnipe.

Snap.

Steal a swipe.

Flap.

Five fingers.

Thwack.

Pimp pump-faked high-handed.

“You been fuckin’ around outside?”

Then that bitchslap blow landed.

Cannibal scrawl across the bow of blandness.

To peek at which at all and I’m bleeding kansas.

(Wait a minute—)

This motherfucker over here cackling.

What did you think being in a riot would be like, exactly?

Sorry — a demonstration.

If you live it’ll have been a demonstration.

An uprising, even.

A window’s kicked.

Kicked.

Kicked.

And kicked again.

Crashes on in.

A cheer goes up.

Masks and hoods and shifting moods.

Reason’s out the window.

And you heroic.

Here lost erotic.

Outro City.

Lie narcotic.

Blood typo.

Hypnotized sound.

Sinusoidal S-waves.

Tuning fucks.

Sign waive.

Wave away.

You’re right.

Saw teeth glint.

Jill pill.

Been flicking.

All goddamn night.

The Western Knife.

Like your last life.

Switch.

If you even listened.

Dry off and reposition.

You were forewarned.

You wore torn fishnets.

In the passion of possession.

You got your car towed in sheer hose.

Been addiction and its blessings.

Slew the fleet of brooklyn’s jets.

Fuck’s it even mean?

Guess more.

Say lest.

Stifled scream of a sunk chest.

Gold doubloons doubling.

Drizzling.

From the ceiling.

Cloud of fish nonchalant in the absence of feeling.

All that load’s a baring beam.

The facts of life are a scary thing.

Sex and blood and sand.

Silica.

Teen horror.

Rising romance.

Supernatural.

For all that steams is a dream.

Hyperobjective.

Get mad and stay pressed.

From a canted perspective.

Bare end ass shipwrecked.

In the sense of cannot.

Trouser rise.

Try-on.

Size.

Immature boasts.

Immezzurable lies.

Death’s bloat crows to the cock.

Hard to the moon.

Soft half down the thigh.

God alight.

Zoom, zoom.

SLOW COME

Parasites.

Inner mites.

Nibbling.

Unnerving.

To infest is to feast upon.

Or within.

Devouring.

To hollow the core.

Greedy.

&

Gored.

Manmade martyr.

Median whore.

Low modern matador.

Farce of a metaphor.

Stopped dead-near said:

YOU KNOW—

I think we met at the Hotel New Otani?

You said something loose and drunk about shape-shifting and hypergamy?

The body contoured.

Babble on.

It’s all beyond me.

All but.

Bubble butts.

I’d thought I’d put this behind me.

All behind me.

FUCK.

I guess there’s—

Always something there to remind me.

Reverb resounds.

In reprimand.

The room’s surrounds.

The upper hand’s command.

Dizzying.

Scut.

Head clean off.

Lion’s share.

Blown.

Set-up shop.

Chopped.

Eaten rare.

Raw and careless.

Perverse and perilous.

Bareback or air-kiss?

Sorry lapsarian rigor.

Threat detection triggered.

In your tragic affect.

There’s been an accident.

Go figure.

AND A HALF

Pinhole eyes.

“YOU KNOW I DONE A COUPLE B&E’s . . .”

Shifting back and forth on his feet.

In doofy white sneakers a size and a half too big.

Hairless calves glistening in the jailhouse light.

His skin was white his face was freckled head vaguely Alfred E. Neumanoid beneath a black corduroy cap with some kind of machine shop’s logo or some shit on it, some fast looking thing zipping along, kid’s eyes didn’t quite track, not quite, they looked here and there and everywhere as he repetitively rock-rock rocked side to side on his feet like some pommeling horse placeless in a red queen’s race immoving space lostened, he grasped his hands and reversed his grip and grasp and then let slip more morsels of moron.

“I AI’E WURR’D’BOUDIT DO FOKE FURREAUGHL DO.”

He’d gone vaguely Gaelic.

“WUTCHU IN FO?”

Your turn.

“Well . . .”

Yeah, give yourself a few.

Buy your time.

Bide it.

You’ll be in here for hours.

Better not be days.

God damns.

Crime pays.

“It all started with this Facebook profile . . .”

Kid lit up.

“OOOOOOH YOU FUCKIN’ ON SOMEBODY BITCH?”

Laugh half obligatory.

“Um, in a sense . . .”

“I KNEW D’CHU HADDAT DAWG INYU!”

All came out almost one syllable.

Fuck.

Hours.

Better not be days.

“I created a profile, you see, for a fake person, a fake persona, a fake personality . . .”

“Man I know some fake-ass motherfuckers.”

New guy.

In the corner.

He’d been quiet til now.

Shaved head.

Raiders shorts.

White socks.

Black sneakers.

He came in without a shirt but they put him in a tank top.

Gotta figure some subcontractor to some subcontractor to some subcontractor to some subcontractor’s getting paid $51.48 for that by The American Taxpayer.

Son of a bitch.

Your veins throb.

“I know some fake ass motherfuckers, man.”

You ease in:

“I feel you.”

Feeling seen, he seems to go back to sleep.

Whatever he’s been doing.

Slumped in the corner.

There’s two other guys, too.

One’s properly passed out head tucked inside his own shirt.

Pissed himself.

Other one’s just been staring at a wall.

Where the business cards are.

Attorneys and bail.

All those vultures.

Circle back around.

You got the floor.

“So I made up this guy, his name was, well his name’s not important, but anyway, I set it up, the profile, and ah, you know, kind of like, made up things, made things up to like, implant memories? right, kind of? right, into other people, where, like, you knew just enough about their lives to kind of get at them a bit and you can come off convincingly enough, then you start talking with them, you know, in private messages about things, events that happened, you know, at prom, homecoming, shop class, home ec, whatever, right, and then after that I got kind of greedy, I guess, right, and so I just kept making up more guys, and girls too, and it was like after a while I had this kind of army, right, of like, um, I mean at first it was me, it was, uh, it was a solo thing I guess, and like it still was, but I had to like, to scale things up, so in order to really deploy my strategy I had to automate some of the agents, in effect creating—”

“CHATBOTS.”

“That’s right, chatbots, and so I had this whole, like, uh, platoon, fleet? you know, of like these chatbots just talking all day long with these people, you know, I started with people I had gone to high school with and then, like, well you know I went to two high schools, so like, I had two at first, like—”

“A/B TESTING.”

“Uh . . . wow, yes, right, like A/B testing, but like, so, it all really spiraled out of hand and I was giving these people all these false memories about things that had happened to them, experienced we had shared together, I was using stolen photos and manipulated photos and composited photos and all manner of recombinant strategies to create as many novel expressions of phenomena that might induce a sort of falsified qualic recall in these hopeless fucks . . .”

“DAYMMAYN YOU SOUND LIKE SOME TYPE OF SUPERVILLAIN.”

“He sounds like a bitch!”

A scream from within the shirt.

His head stayed turtled.

No poking out.

“MAYN I’ON THINK HE SOUND LIKE A BITCH I THINK HE SOUND LIKE A ENTAPERNURIAL TYPE CAT.”

“Sound like a bitch!”

Still stays.

Fine:

“Anyway, after a while, my, uh, my targets—”

“Your victims!”

“HE AIN’T LYIN.”

“My, uh, these people, they began, ah, they began disclosing certain, um, traumas? to me, problems they had encountered, ah — difficult times, you know, various scenarios, um, in life, where things don’t, uh—”

“This motherfucker out here rapin’ people’s minds!”

“I wasn’t, um, no, please don’t intonate, um, intimate, uh, please don’t say that I am, uh, doing rape or am ah, uh, a rape-uh, a rape-uh, a rape guy.”

“YOU DID CROSS A LINE.”

“You right!”

“Okay so these people, one of them, the first, uh, the first contactee, she, so — you were close, right, she told me about things, uh, early life, the family.”

“SHIT WE ALL KNOW ONE.”

“I know a few!”

“These were things she’d apparently never told anyone before.”

“SO IT WAS LIKE YOU WAS HER THERAPIST.”

“That’s kind of sweet!”

“Thank you, I—”

And just as it seemed things had turned a corner.

And you’d won the favor of the cell.

The wall-starer stood up.

Never breaking his gaze.

Flexed everything.

Every vein.

Primal scream.

Vinegar and piss.

Gave it all he had.

Fist after fist.

Lefts and rights.

Straight to cinderblock wall.

His bones broke.

Skin bust.

Chips and fragments.

He wept buckets.

Then bled them.

The guards were “on lunch.”

As they had been for an hour and a half.

The floor guy popped out of his shirt.

“Motherfucker what you doing!”

Yellow eyes.

Shaved head.

Investigation.

Underfed.

Raiders guy piped up:

“I fucking hate fake-ass motherfuckers, man.”

The staring guy, who’d become The Punching Guy, he’s on the ground now.

“Fucking hate fucking fake-ass motherfucking fuckers, man.”

“This is some shit!”

“FOREALDO.”

You could help, I guess.

You could intervene.

You could keep explaining your circumstances.

Dude on the ground’s just “uh-uh-uh-uh” over and over again, he is All Fucked Up, he will never have normal use of his body again, god only knows what dad set that off, which abuse and when or where, whose belt and loud voice, which booming television.

“AWWUHRILLY LIKE TO HELP THIS DUDE OUT BUT I’ON EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO. SHIT.”

The kid laughs.

Squeaky rat.

He doesn’t laugh like shit’s funny.

He’s just traumatized.

Like you and everybody.

The Raiders guy is staring at the gathering blood.

In a sort of incipient trance.

You can tell he has dreamed of killing.

Or perhaps dabbled.

Improbably, the heretofore mute but for kiai and war cries bleeder on the pissy floor speaks up:

“Finish your story.”

Spoken weakly.

"Please.”

He sputtered.

“I need it.”

“Man.”

“Man!”

“MAN WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THIS DUDE?”

“This dude is a real-ass motherfucker though for sure dude.”

“BRO.”

“Goddamn!”

“Um, well, I guess, I —”

“Please . . . finish it . . .”

You gotta.

“Okay, so I —”

BZZZZ.

BZZZZ.

BZZZZ.

LIGHTS WAY UP.

The cage is rattled with batons.

“ALRIGHT YOU COCK SUCKERS!”

The lazy guards returned.

“AW FUCK! THEY KILLED THIS FUCKIN’ GUY!”

Fattened with luncheons and raring for beatings.

“NUTS! LET’S GET ‘EM!”

One’s got stripmall lip filler and she wants to kill you specifically.

Good luck.

This is your opportunity to take over.

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New tracks being added as we speak!

!

a

series

of

interassociative

thoughts

. . .

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

MᴜɴᴅᴜS ᴠᴜʟᴛ DᴇᴄɪᴘI

AH, UM

Autonomy.

Wealth as authorship.

Vested investments.

Own or be owned.

Waste coats septic.

The scepter’s cyclic.

Tanks downtown.

Turrets upturned.

It’s own or be owned.

You’re on your own.

Turn or burn.

You’re one of one.

Silver-spurned.

Gimmicks.

Flummoxed.

Flushed.

Flown.

Flex in flux.

Gross flix.

Groan-ups.

Owing.

All receipts in.

Receive sin.

Deceit’s hope.

Quote end quote.

All she wrote.

Against type.

Prose antidote.

Murder’s the moat.

The western knife.

A quieted throat.

Burning roams.

Enthroning goats.

Clever does.

Stupid-done.

Stupid is as stupid was.

Stupid shit.

Stupid ass.

Eschaton.

Encephalon.

Clearance sales.

Salvation.

Cave apes pulling tubers.

Hooting.

Hopeless gapers drained of screens.

Pollution.

Skilless excess.

Mastered under.

Hijacked gentry.

Step out for a smoke.

Burn up on re-entry.

Burnt upon a bent tree.

Every arbor sags.

With the sighs of centuries.

Flags bleed cheap dye.

Rotten decoration.

Dandelion dunder.

Heads ripped.

Hextual frustration.

“She loves me,

I love the knot.”

Dependent declaration.

Clensive.

“That’s not a word.”

“Sure it is.”

Fuck it.

Get in.

Let’s fuck off into the night.

Rock and roll.

The western knife.

Struggle and strife.

A modern woman’s trifles.

Empty sets and hurtling bullets rifled.

Energy.

Gas.

Heat.

Emerging.

Mistressly splurging.

Diving pearly.

Damned dental girly.

Whirligig.

As if we haven’t done this before.

Impermanent.

Shuffling floors foxtrot.

Distraught.

By occident.

Shivved westweird.

The western knife.

Carves the path clear.

At a remove.

I’m at a remove.

I got I got I got I got—

Something to prove.

Extraordinary plenipotentiary.

Um, um, um . . . planetary?

Stars lit glown.

Evening gone.

Sateen shone.

Shown a knife.

Western slice.

HO, HUM

Bored dumb.

Wept and reddened.

Bland ambition.

Blown redemption.

Exemptions and exceptions.

Z-caliber.

Hell pops.

Heart attracts.

“I gave her the ‘K’ that I lacked.”

Simmery cauldron burbling brack.

We built this enterprise hit by hit.

Criminal.

Corny rapper picks up a pen.

Subliminal lyrical miracle.

Taps his phone and pecks it in.

Pitiful.

Extinct ritual.

Prolix in ignition.

Go on get your kicks in.

Mama’s rolling that body.

The Earth is a grave that glistens.

(A grim listen,

but there’s a lessen in it)

Low of life and high in spirit.

One-fifty-one.

Prove it.

Clear it.

I am not Man I am a vessel for sale.

A cure for your pleasure.

A curse for what ails.

Money on the mind.

Wallet on the mend.

Monetized consciousness.

Will it till its end.

Monstrous.

Hominidian.

Tunesome.

Umming all ominous.

Feint flit.

Throne switch.

The wrong record at a screwed pitch.

Febrous.

Jesus.

You knew it was coming and you swung anyway.

Waiting is a bitch.

But patience is a virtue.

A lot of it will kill you.

A little bit won’t hurt you.

Don’t cut corners cut curfews.

Asper our prior conversations.

And convictions.

Sol inviction.

Lunar mission.

A sinking realization.

A ringing embarrassment.

Erroneous arrogance.

Can you wire me for the lime?

Can you ease me a puffed dart?

The dollar has fallen.

Prizes and pushcarts.

What’s seen as strange has tamed.

Here all the air is queer.

Give me a grant.

Wish me a want.

Flood me with desire.

 🖤⛓️➰GIVE TO MISTRESS ⛓️🖤😈👢

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LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

New tracks being added as we speak!

    (the feeling of)

𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐁𝐄𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐃 𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐄𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃

 a series of

INSTRUCTIONS

&

DIRECTIONS

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

mundus vult decipi

THE FEELING OF CRYING BEHIND CENTER FOREHEAD

August the tenth.

Eight-ten.

Round and even.

So unlike eleven.

Or nine.

A plain land.

Before time.

But eight-ten?

Adds to eighteen.

Halves to nine.

Nine gets you three threes.

A perfect cube.

Anchoring a craft cocktail.

Triplicate cerberus.

Pineal tuatara.

Three eyes.

Opening marijuana.

Burnt plants in the evening.

It’s easy.

Summer’s evy.

Swerving hazily through the terrace’s fairy lights.

Outdoor seating.

Mosquito-eaten.

Displeased pleas.

“Please!”

Get these fucking things off me.

Please.

Lady walks up to you.

Chic.

Got some luxury terrier on a leash, terribly British.

Said to you,

SHE SAID:

“My dog’s name is Hockney.”

Looked you in the eyes.

Felt you.

You’re in in nanoseconds:

“Like the pool?”

She smiles, expensive.

You’ve passed the test.

Here’s your prize.

Elite.

Anoint.

Adept.

Bawl knowledge.

Christ on a carpet.

Curse on a crux.

Savior swept.

Ball harder.

Get a short sentence.

Balloon incise.

Lifting weights with the guise.

Masked up for capital crime.

Shocked to shit in a chair.

Then made to sit in it.

You want it uglier?

Bumpier?

Lemon zest?

Have you lost your zeal for life yet?

Unrealing in the years.

Neural and kneeling.

Never more apart from the core.

Prayers sprayed.

Unmoored.

Out of body.

Out of pocket.

Nothing shocking but the socket.

That product?

I don’t think we stalk it.

and now, a confession:

At one point, some point, I started writing this backward.

Can you tell where?

Can you catch it?

Shaken and made.

Well, well, well.

About the time the music hit.

And left behind pain.

Confessed, confessed.

Admitted to the ward.

Confused, deleuzed.

Nineteen eighty four.

Afterbirth’s deluge.

A century’s feudal fugue.

Trashfire’s height huge.

High.

All I wanna do is fly.

A life alone.

All I want for you to do is take my body home.

Can you tell when the weed took hold?

Gone got lost in the woods of old?

Green-gaze elation.

Remembrances and recriminations.

Obsess and compulse.

Repossessed impulses.

Head spinning.

Clockwise.

3, 6, 9.

Divine decomposed.

Exorcist cloaks.

A velt rose.

Priestly robes.

Obsess, obsess, obsess, obsess.

Two-fore.

Counting every step.

1, 2.

One-two.

Heel-toe.

Left, right?

Heretofore.

Gone.

Hereafter.

Three-four.

Therefore.

Out the door forever-on.

Thereafter.

Forevermore.

Burnt.

Like fathers and suns.

Setting.

SHREDDED LETTUCE

Great meat.

Reduced to anatomy.

Hoof in mouth.

Cattle get mad at me.

Carnality.

Calamity.

Calories the remedy.

College bodies alcohol sodden.

Emptied bars’ remnants.

The crunch of hardshell tacos.

3 A.M.

Eternally returning.

And then, and then.

It’s on:

“Your birthday will be your deathday, ho.”

Blows thrown.

The Taco Bell erupted in chaos.

Wigs and weaves and bobs and bits and heads butting and swinging fists and shrieks and eyelashes and titties popping out of club clothes, overhand strikes and chokeholds, shoes off and nails broken.

This dining room is no smoking.

CONQUEST

Deep archer’s bow’s arrows’ arrivals.

The city is a matter of survival.

They say Lost Eros has a seasonlessness.

Really the seasons are subtle.

There’s Saudi Season.

Qatari.

“NEW DRIVER” sticker on an old Ferrari.

Peddle to the meddled.

Put the red to test.

Now’s summer uneven and mostly spent.

Langor and linger.

The patio’s buzzing.

“You know we didn’t, we didn’t used to, we didn’t usedta have these fuckin’ mosquitos here, we didn’t have mosquitos.”

His nose twitches, deep tan irradiated by the fire pit’s climbing flames, four buttons deep in Sea Island cotton, mother of pearl gleaming, eyes abulge and he’s swatting at himself.

“I think it’s the fuckin’ Chinese.”

“Chinese or the Russians.”

“Gotta be.”

“You know they keep findin’ those labs.”

“Oh I know. I know. I read all about it. I read everything.”

“So you know about what’s going on in Europe, and everything?”

“Europe! Fucking Europe . . .”

“I know, right?”

“Did you know it’s James’ birthday tonight?”

“Which James? Gay James?”

“No, or — I don’t think so? The one, uh, I don’t know his last name or like, what he does, I think he might, like, be somebody’s kid? Something—”

“Not Gay James?”

“No that’s James, uh, James . . .”

“It’s like James Atomica or something.”

“Yeah Gay James is named something like that, I think he’s from Chile or something but you wouldn’t know it.”

“I don’t think Gay James is anyone’s kid.”

“I mean everybody’s somebody’s kid.”

“Yeah, but like, you know.”

“No I’m talking about this Other James, I think his dad, like, owned a casino, or something, a bunch of casinos, or his mom like married a bunch of dudes or something, I don’t know, there’s money, something—”

“Oh that guy, yeah I met that guy once, I think his name’s like Italian? Told me made his money from ‘sweets stands.’ Kept calling them that. ‘Sweets stands.’ Who the fuck talks like that? Told me he got ‘rich from fro-yo and wealthy from gelato.’”

“I think he was yanking your chain.”

“Fuck, man.”

“Well he’s got an open tab tonight. If we can remember his name, next round’s on him.”

“What’s an Italian name?”

“Uh, Christopher Columbus?”

“Wasn’t he Spanish?”

“No, dude.”

Then they got their phones out, vapes out, got distracted.

Last call of a signal collapsing.

CAGLIOSTRO’S ESCAPE

“Fuckin’ guy says he’s six thousand years old.”

“Six thousand?”

“Says he’s from the Moon. Says his name’s Cagliostro.”

“But no ID?”

“No ID.”

“So we can’t confirm any of that.”

A grim laugh.

“I mean I don’t know if it’s some new type of meth these people are on, or what.”

“Could be old stock PCP.”

“Like deadstock? Is there a market for that?”

“Yeah. Look, listen — I got a buddy.”

“Yeah?”

“Works the Fortress Unit, over in Northeast Lost Eros.”

“Yeah I got a couple buddies there.”

“Listen, look — don’t tell anybody this shit.”

“I won’t.”

“Seriously.”

“I won’t.”

“Alright, this buddy of mine — he’s got this ancient supply of Quaaludes, right? A huge stockpile.”

“Shit! And they still work?”

“Officer Ramirez! How-ever would I know?”

Captain Keenan smiled.

“You dirty dog. C’mon, Cap, I know you had to have dipped in.”

Neither Keenan nor Ramirez seemed to have noticed the ongoing Houdini act.

The back door of the Interceptor’s slipped open, and out crept a cartwheeling form, wormed its way to the ground and seemed to take an inside-out turn, flipped and fussed out of the cuffs, cast them off and made a break for the bluffs.

Lost in silhouette.

Fading.

“Alright, look—”

Ramirez smiled.

“Listen.”

Keenan laughed.

“You know all my lines, kid. But really, listen, look, look, listen. Take me at my word or take me for a fuckin’ liar. It don’t matter none to me, brother. But those pills will get you rock hard for days straight, and probably queer if you take it that way. I don’t know you that way, Ramirez, I don’t know what you do, what you get up to, into. What gets into you.”

“For real?”

“Days. And you’ll trip your ass off the whole time. The most beautiful angels. You could be fucking a jar of mayonnaise, sprawled on the floor. It won’t matter.”

“So it’s like . . . like . . . a beautiful symphony.”

“Like a beautiful symphony.”

“Shit, man, where’d that guy—”

ENTRE NOUS

“Well, I mean, it’s your birthday, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know, I mean, I just do whatever anyway.”

“Right, but like — what do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to eat?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“I know it’s my birthday.”

“So you should choose.”

“I choose not to choose.”

“But it’s your birthday.”

“I hate the attention.”

To entertain is to cohere.

To tie together the room.

To bind.

As in a spell or covenant.

The letter takes the form of a sound in hell.

Screaming, bleeding.

Entertainment.

Atlas holds the heavens.

Film at eleven.

Entertainment.

The audience's attention.

Flimsier than ever.

Days go by.

Serialized.

In the manner of slow motion spree killing.

Suspended suspense.

Upendage.

A life upended.

A limb appended.

At whose expense?

Phantom friendship.

The cost of bossiness.

Beastliness.

Sought rents.

Disengaged with the making of sense.

Fallen dollar.

Flinch of a fist.

Tick of a tock.

Tap of a wrist.

(A BELL RINGS WITH INCREASING LOUDNESS UNTIL SENSE ENDS)

It’s getting late.

It’s getting late.

It’s getting late.

“Another year.”

“No, I don’t wanna.”

Full scream.

Close and proximal.

I am coming from inside you.

All the energy just slides through.

This is very temporary.

Counting steps.

Clocking clues.

I don’t even have the time to.

Force icks.

Eight-ten.

Like a child or a disc.

Skipping.

Biblically punished.

Cyclically published.

Periodic pause.

Pause.

Stop.

Stoned.

Gone.

Raw.

Eaten.

Alone.

The staggering hour of a life half-grown.

Tinnitus unites us.

Hear that?

Needledick-to-phone.

Grooving spun bundles of ass-jazz trumpet.

Shriek and shrail.

And there you are in the Taco Bell again.

Waking up for the first lastime.

There is a new kind of Mountain Dew.

And you will live forever until you complete the mission.

A toast:

“To the end.”

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Release show and merchandise forthcoming!

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

New tracks being added as we speak!

(𝘞𝘌 𝘉𝘌𝘎 𝘠𝘖𝘜𝘙 𝘌𝘓𝘌𝘊𝘛𝘙𝘐𝘊 𝘛𝘐𝘋𝘌𝘚)

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

MUNDUS VULT DECIPI

YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE

There were signs.

Symbols.

Ruptures.

There were reptiles.

Huge.

There were questions.

Looming.

Accusations and arguments.

Guns.

Fire.

Universal truths.

Habitual liars.

Ancient blood.

Empire.

There were plants and birds and rocks and things.

There was America.

There was.

I saw it.

I saw it all.

I saw it all come down.

You should have been there.

METABOLIC ETYMOLOGY

“What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m between things.”

“Well between you and me, I’m done buying drinks.”

If he just walked for long enough he could never be deported.

If he just never stopped.

Ever.

Forever forward.

Or strafing sideways.

Walk the arteries to their sclerotic ends and turn about face.

Dead ends and one ways.

Traps and tickets.

Tips and tricks and trinkets.

Turn on the camera and turn on the spigots.

Water works well.

Scattered at sea.

Clocked-in and checked-out.

A compliant employee.

The tic of palsy.

Convenient to me.

Mister.

Master.

Morality.

It’s no mystery.

It’s masturbatory.

Gouge the eyes out the observatory.

Look-out!

Look here.

Listen to me:

It’s balls or eyes usually.

If the fighting’s done feudally.

Faithfully.

It’s quick and to the point.

A headbutt or a bent joint.

Take it blunt:

It ain’t pretty.

Scuffed and shitty.

Like a gutterboot’s brawlabout in cistern city.

Mercy me.

Cursive creeps.

Along the side of apartments’ eaves.

Another night.

In stark elegance:

‘𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝓃𝒶𝓏𝒾𝓂ℴ𝓋𝒶’

(That’s ‘THE NAZIMOVA,’

in case you can’t read cursive.)

. . .

(It’s O.K.

a lot of people can’t.)

→

You are here now.

In Lost Eros.

In the 1930s.

By way of the groaning twenties.

A 21st. c. demon host.

High in the hills.

With the movie-house ghosts.

Things aren’t ever as they seem.

The world wants to be deceived.

The last thing you’ll ever see’s your own name on the TV.

Or whatever they call it where you are.

The screens.

Media-eaten.

Committed to bits.

Torn.

Rendered.

Sponsored.

Wanted for murder or murdered for wanting.

Content spawning.

The paupers are poured and the spirits are haunting.

New Year’s Eve, again.

Champagne, Crémant, Cuvée.

Just like every other day.

And its goddamned groundhog’s end.

The butt-ass of a varmint, bung-high.

Stuck in the cup of the 13th Hole.

And you’re looking to putt.

Muddled mint.

Murderous.

Murder us.

Please, god.

Murder us.

We beg your electric tides.

Send an end.

Send help.

Send a sign.

FUCK I DIDN’T KNOW MY PHONE WAS

”Hey Siri what’s—”

“The term autism derives from the Greek word autos (αὐτός), meaning "self", and the suffix -ismos (-ισμός), denoting a state, condition, or orientation. Combined, the word's roots translate literally to a "state of self" or "being absorbed in oneself."”

He hadn’t meant for his phone to go off.

Here on the bar back patio.

Simian tension.

Pretentious.

Tournament apes.

Playing pretend.

Faking kayfabe.

Like, “Yeah, I don’t wanna . . . no, I don’t ever think about . . . yeah, it’s never occurred to me to . . . you know I’d never—”

And on anon.

None admitting.

All involved.

Conspired to silence.

A puzzle to solve.

A riddled sphinx.

Diseased love.

Like,

“[YOUR NAME] I’m afraid your sniffle is indicative of—”

And it’s significant.

In the form of a sign.

It’s buzzing and it’s neon number nine.

The love potion’s needle pines.

Cast spells.

Sildenafil!

Tadalafil!

Vardenafil!

Avanafil!

To invoke the rod of the divine.

To Go All Night.

Iron Man.

Ladder match.

Thumbtacks.

A busted spine.

Brokeback.

Brass plaques.

Gold.

Records.

Racked.

Pressed pills and slacks.

ABCD.

Cups stacked.

Off the rails and on track.

On the rocks and off the rack.

Close.

OUT →

RUINS

The Californian ruin stood tall against its battering shore.

The paint was stripped.

Vicious salt and spray.

Decay.

The foundation’s slipped.

Seismic hatred.

Mitigating time.

Hay and neighing.

Four to ride.

(Two if by sea.)

The barn burned first.

Before the damn burst.

Of electrical energy across the universe.

The cavalcade came but the cavalry shied.

Mosquito malaise and mediated lies.

Bullied pulpits bound by tithes.

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LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

█ 𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀 𝘃𝘂𝗹𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗶 █

HEY GIRL! IT’S THE WEEK-END!

Time to get turnt!

𝙁𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩❗️

▶

LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

BOY  OH  BOY  ARE  WE PLEASED

to reveal the final release-edition cover of L.T.A.P. → → →

→

Please enjoy a piano play-through of SCALED ALPS’ “I Think We Met in Setagaya (Maybe it Was Seville)” via ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

→

THE GREEN TINT

There are people who will hate you for the bare fact of your material existence.

There are people who already do.

It’s true.

Just one look at you.

Or the hearing.

The sound.

Or the sight.

Too dark.

Too light.

Too little.

Too late.

Too big.

And in the way.

Inconvenient.

Not an easy fit.

And should you pluck a crumb.

Should you find any measure or modicum of recognition success or ascendancy.

God help thee.

The slightest hint.

It’s polarizing.

The green tint.

You will be called names crank-called pranked and kicked.

You’ll have your wins knocked out of you.

By half-wits.

You will be assigned identities.

Contradictory superpositions.

You will be a leftist rightist centrist womanizing incel cuck pussy chauvinist overbearing weakling pretentious primitive fag jock dork slick hustler mark.

A fucking problem.

Imagine the creature.

You’ll need an inhaler for the miasma.

It’s unsolvable.

And me?

I am a car that eats other cars.

A cannibal car.

Voracious.

I take on their essences and steal their mass.

Reappropriate their crushed bodies to my own productive ends.

Growing and growing.

The bolus of all I devour.

Some say it’s horror.

But honestly?

GROTESQUE ETC.

Anomic comedy.

What’s seen reports.

Like a gun.

Cream.

Or any other smutty magazine.

Bled folly.

To the margins.

By any means.

She knew fame but didn’t know family.

Necessarily.

Nothing of it.

All the flames and none of the warmth.

Nunnavit.

She dressed up in furs, tortured.

Posed for pictures.

Like it was any other year than this one.

Dreadful.

Drop-dead.

Delicious.

THE FIXER.

Six-six sics her.

The Fixer.

She’s here to make it right.

Somebody made a mess.

Rite of passage.

Left on lights.

She’s here to clean the footprints.

And cameras.

To vinegar blood.

Clear the carpets of evidence.

And make the bathtub flood.

If need be.

To deodorize and stage.

Tidily.

To reorder.

To assuage.

To assemble.

Abidingly.

The narrative is nimble.

The cast system and it’s couch’s jism.

The origin of the performance lost.

The script tossed.

God’s boss’ screaming bullhorn said:

Who the fuck said you talk like this?

Huh?

Said this is your voice?

What, you think you didn’t have no choice?

Couldn’t be madder.

Ancient.

And then.

As if in a memory:

WHAT if you were someone else and then someone else and then! someone else and then—

(A crooked path to some bent end)

WHAT if doctors hauled you off and then and then and then and then then then —

(Little green men)

WHAT if you got so thin that you almost died.

(Brittle lean men)

WHAT if you showed up limping noodles and nickels at the march’s ide dimes?

WHAT if pennies showed blown-head explosions?

WHAT if Wilkes Booth shopped at Bullocks Wilshire?

WHAT if the plot of what’s writ ironed-out to naught but rot?

WHAT if you took a really odd job . . .

WHAT if other summers were sought, Mom?

WHAT the fuck, Then?

Huh?

And having no “Good Answer,” she retired to her room.

To her deafened chamber.

Away from the demon seed.

And its anger.

Closed herself up for a night or two.

Swallowed a couple pills mostly reserved for zoos.

You know.

CLIFFHANGER

A state machine.

A stately estate.

A counting error.

A courtly cape.

An inheritance of sand clasped in shaking hands.

Lossily slipping.

Grasp gripping.

The end.

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realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

m.v.d

HEART CASH COLD

“One way, you know, one way I think of it — it’s as though whole of the country was upended and everyone and everything loose ended up here.”

“Bunch of fruits and nuts.”

Lost Eros rose above the sea.

Californian sorcery.

Flowed inland in torrents and tracts.

The magnet’s attraction.

Taste of tack.

Oil.

Beaches and canyons and mountains.

Fleets of ships.

Human potential, moving.

Pictures, stars, studs.

Fun fun fun.

Fire.

Girl’s head slung back.

Convertible hair.

Couldn’t be higher.

Fun.

Thunderbird.

Fire fire fire.

An exploit of perfect weather with occasional fire.

A shaky situation at the end of empire.

A mission ashamed.

The toll of a bell.

Character maimed.

“TAKE ME TO BED WITH YOU,”

The book exclaimed.

Sidled up.

Tossed off more sauce.

“You know, you’re sitting on a goal of mine . . .”

Fuck repartee.

Fuck decency.

You’re never going to stop being lazy, so you need to smarten your sloth.

Listen to me.

Train your subroutines.

Automatic.

The perfect machine.

Got it?

I mean — you know — I mean you know — I think you know one of the reasons I, like, the way I am, the way I “am,” uh uh uh, is, uh, is you see I could change the channel, click click click, push of a button, switch switch switch, infinite-ish, preference, and now, imagine . . .

It’s funny, really.

The triumph of the tragic.

Funereally.

Here high in the Swish Alps with a 3-D printed snubnose shrouded in pantyhose.

To settle a debt of $104.00.

Because you couldn’t keep it together.

Hold up your end of the bargain.

Now I’m gonna need to find somewhere to burn these clothes.

My name is Slain Hero.

I’m here on behalf of Vinny Venereal to collect.

You’ve not been answering your calls.

“One of those.”

We’re worried.

You can consider this a wellness check-in.

All’s well that’s poisoned.

You could still have some choice in this matter.

Some agency.

Three-lettered.

Or four.

You can go home with five fingers if you slide the envelope under the door.

No questions asked.

No extra tax.

Just what’s owed.

Heart cold cash.

Beating hard.

Ice us out?

You’re zeroed.

SCROLLED APPS

”Stim City is lit tonight there’s bitches and everything.”

Texting fury.

Everyone is on.

On display.

On drugs.

En pointe.

High alert.

Knees lock in heels.

Keeling.

Killing it.

Making the scene.

Dreamscrape.

Stretching their torsos and thighs to maximize.

Reaching flowers.

The head a pin to heaven.

Dancing angelic.

Point your nipples to the balcony.

Look up into the second row.

Remember your kabuki training.

Remember your butoh.

“So wait how long have you lived in Santa Lucina?”

She pronounced it like an out-of-towner.

“Six years.”

Sipped her drink.

“So do you, like, work in tech?”

Curious eyes’ examination.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Damp contaminant.

Batted eyes and banishment.

He balls a napkin in his fist.

She’s got about three grand on a skinny wrist.

Grasps for her straw.

Fizz.

Gin.

Purple with crème de violette.

God-given.

Bar kept.

She’s onto him.

Off her meds.

Usually couldn’t be drinking like this.

Or so the doctor says.

“So, you know any good jokes?”

He’s quick.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“I do.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“What do you call a hitman with shitty aim?”

“A shitman?”

“No — I mean, you could, I guess, but no.”

“What then?”

“An unreliable aerator.”

“Oh. I get it.”

She didn’t laugh.

THE YARDBIRDS

”Let me get my heat back bro.”

“Fuck.”

They’re both gasping for air in a backyard in East Lost.

“Let me get my fucking heat back.”

Fat and shirtless in jeans.

The makeshift wrestling ring is in a state of near-collapse.

The one in the bandana calls himself C-Note and that other dude is named Fredy.

Yeah with one D.

Yeah with a Y.

They’ve long since stopped cooperating with one another.

Beats the shit out of me.

God knows why.

Turned into a slugfest about five minutes ago.

A half dozen uncles crowd ringside.

Gathered in plastic chairs.

“Kick his fucking ass, Fredy!”

“Don’t let him do that shit to you, Fred!”

C-Note’s got the whip hand.

Beating Fredy good and bloody.

Gory.

Fredy’s pissed because he can’t “get any of his shit in.”

He’s spent a lot of time developing signature maneuvers, and he was looking to unveil some of his most innovative creations in the match, really pop the crowd but C-Note showed up feisty.

To make matters worse Hector had forgotten to bring the camcorder.

So none of this shit’s even being preserved.

This is pure theater.

Raw.

Fredy’s trying to save face but no run-in’s coming.

No intervention or entrance music’s dropping.

His arms are too short to box.

Can’t scrap a lick.

“Fucking come on, man!”

A split lip and ripped dignity.

He screamed like a frustrated infant.

Constipated in all ways.

“Fuck!”

Shrieked noise as C-Note rained blows.

Until from a plastic chair a wise uncle rose:

“Just stay down, man. Stay down. Fuck. Fuck, man. Fuck, dude. Shit.”

And so it was done.

LANDSAT 5

Cue the delusion.

Deadpan satyr.

Tragedian.

Delight later.

Light and laughter leaking.

She bled red and dried black.

Got angry and looked back.

If this is it then that’s that.

She has had it.

Snaps:

“Are you FUCKING RECORDING?”

Cantatas contorted.

A fair lane afforded.

When you meet the Elect it’s fucked.

The Order.

The Ordained.

Those permitted.

Who’s allowed.

Who’s explained.

Who’s set forth when the meaning-making’s drained?

Whose distortion has the most to gain?

a.k.a. D.X.

Frasier Fussy was tipsy.

“Oh I just figured I’d . . . hide my nut for winter.”

Let’s be real — Frasier Fussy is drunk.

He’s in crisp two-tone suede-and-polished calfskin Belgian loafers, little tassels flitting about as he circles and surveys the carpeted party and its spectacles.

He’s with his new boyfriend Gio.

They’d met six months ago.

When Gio wasn’t sure Gio was a boy or a friend or what, really.

Gio wasn’t sure if Gio was Gio.

But things had sort of settled, sort of.

Tonight Gio was on G.H.B.

He wasn’t drinking.

Didn’t want the calories.

They were talking with the home-owner, a tall thin bulbous-headed man named Riordan Ryan, he’d come right up to you hunched with a hand out say “Riordan Ryan, I’m the owner of OnanDyne,” OD being the sperm storage facility Frasier and Gio had selected to secure their mutual genetic legacies, where they’d wanked with tablets in little locked rooms apart.

Frasier’d beat to scans of vintage muscle mags, shit published before he’d ever been born.

Seemed appropriate to bring some conscious element of the old world to the new life he might pass on.

He’d never thought to ask Gio which intention he’d cast.

Riordan was holding court.

“What was that, did you ask? . . . do we keep all the cum in crystals? No, I — hahaha, yeah, no I — one big crystal, right, uh, no, no. We don’t do crystals, see — Yeah we’ve just got gallons, gallons of cum in there . . . it’s like an aquarium of billionaires and geniuses in there . . . not necessarily a lotta overlap . . . not, like, I mean, we make the cum touch, or whatever, you know, but like — yeah no it’s not like rosé or anything, we’re not producing blends, at least not yet, but . . .”

The process had been terribly expensive.

But at what cost, life?

Continuity.

Frasier Fussy made his millions with KRYONIC KRUNKTA$IA, a legal cannabis brand in which he’d partnered with South Lost Eros hip-hop legend The Digital Exquisite, a.k.a. D.X.

“Man, I started out as a conscious rapper, man. Man, I got tired of no money, man.”

Dude said man a lot.

Spent 30 years in studios chain-smoking blunts in and out of bottles.

Mind has a way of going in loops.

“Man, I got tired of no money, man. Man, I got tired.”

Never took his sunglasses off.

“Frasier-Man how much we selling this shit before these cocksuckers figure out we just sold them a bag of shit?”

“X, you can’t be saying that type of stuff around the phones—”

“Shit. Yeah, you told me. Shit.”

“If we can exit to Kanjigaga—”

“Them Canadian motherfuckers?”

“Them, yeah.”

“Right.”

“We’re looking at eight to ten.”

“Shit man. That’s alright.”

“That is alright.”

“Light one to that.”

D.X. sparked a balcony blunt.

Fussy didn’t partoke.

Had to stay more or less awoke.

“We exit to Ganjakugi—”

“That’s, what, Idaho?”

“Idaho.”

“They nazis or what man? I mean really I don’t give a fuck, long as the hitlerdollars clear the goddamn bank man.”

“Reichsmarks.”

“What?”

“The national socialists used reichsmarks.”

“Shit man. Well what’s our mark-up?”

“Idaho’s coming in with a lot of money from somewhere. They’re chilly on the meetings. Hard to read them. Could be twenty. Twenty-five, even.”

“Whoo. I walk away with that man, even after the taxes and all that gay shit—”

. . .

“Sorry Frasier. You’re cool man. You know you’re cool.”

“We close this deal you can slur me all you want, X.”

“Sorry man. Sorry, man. Shit. Sorry.”

“I’ve heard worse all my life.”

“I bet.”

And back to it:

“You know one thing’s really pissing me off man.”

“What’s that X?”

“These fuckin’ political campaigners man. Man, they come around trying to knock on doors, talk to you about whatever type of bullshit, you know man, bothering you all damn day long. So man these motherfuckers come around opening up my gate on my house man they don’t know if I got my dog in the goddamn yard, coming around man trying to tell me I need to vote for some dumb fuck—”

“You’ve got a latch, right?”

“I got two man! They fuck around with ‘em.”

“Well where you gonna buy in after we offload Kryonic?”

D.X. puffed, thought.

Frasier tugged his blue ballcap low.

It was fashioned in the style of the Kansas City Royals’ ‘KC’ hat.

For KryoniC.

D.X. had advised against it.

Said it meant “Crip Killer” or something.

They did it anyway.

Fuck it.

Bang bang gangland.

“Well to be honest with you I’m fucking tired of some of the shit in my neighborhood man. They made it nice and shit but it’s still too much stupid shit going on man I think I want out.”

“Ocean or the hills?”

“Sometimes I think about the desert man.”

“The desert? You don’t seem like the type.”

“Just shoot a gun at nothing all day long man. Target practice in my underwear if I feel like it. Dress up in all type of cowboy shit. Really get up to some shit man.”

“You tired of people?”

“Damn tired.”

“I get that way, too. So check this — we sell to Gokubong Labs?”

“That’s like — . . . the fuck is that man, Goku’s Bong, Japanese motherfuckers?”

“Strangely? Israeli.”

“Man.”

“That could be fifty.”

“Shit, man.”

“Right? You could have a whole compound out there.”

“Man I could buy half of East Death with that.”

“True. Especially after the — . . . . what was it?”

“Chemical spill.”

“Shit, yeah.”

“Heavy metals, man. Radium and shit. Uranium.”

“You’d wanna live out there?”

D.X. laughed.

“Fuck no man I was just fucking with you. I’d be down in the Sunk Coast man.”

“You like that beach town bustle?”

“I like bitches man. And Jeeps. Get my ass a place in Bahía Perdida, just get fucking lost man, lost in the sauce. Shit, I don’t have kids, fuck it.”

“I can relate. I’d like to get lost.”

“Fuck yeah Frasier Man. What about you? You already got that big-ass nice-ass place, you staying put?”

Frasier sighed.

“You know, honestly, I think I’m tired of it, I think I’m over it. Vernal Heights, all of it. The kids, the kids they come in on the weekends, they got the shitty outfits, it’s just depressing. And ever since Simon split and fucked off back to England.”

“Y’all still talk?”

“No.”

Final.

“That bad?”

“Yeah, man.”

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To installate the night sky.

J.Q.D.

mundus vult decipi

💙

▶

LISTEN to SCALED ALPS’ ‘LET THE ALPINE PLAY.’

LISTEN to JQD’s ‘LIVE PLAYER DEAD SERIOUS.’

As many of you know SCALED ALPS had a (not so) secret show planned for 5.22 to mark the release of 'Let the Alpine Play.'

There were "difficulties" with the venue, to be brief and polite.

We're finding a new one.

Anyone who’s pre-ordered gets their copy 5.22 regardless, and the wider release will follow the show.

If you want in on the pre-release you’ve got a couple days.

Come and get us if you want us, if you’ve got a room or a stage or a floor.

Otherwise we’ll be knocking doors.
— S.A.

🦎

THE KEY IS 3

realized by

JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE

m.v.d.

Head-spun like:

mooz dog esrever

mooz dog esrever

mooz dog esrever

You got me forgetting the rest of the room.

In here.

James’ brain.

A joke explained.

Thus ruined.

Pride in veighn.

Prybars and prey-tells.

A circuit of shame.

Big catskill.

Lying and tame.

Prudent or prurient.

Lurid torrents.

She sits astripe.

The lap of the current.

The curious spike.

Stroked prick.

Curio.

Chewsome mastic.

Queerie.

Sheer hose.

Shot elastic.

This is today’s selection.

Fresh-caught and brought to you live.