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—)
❗️
HERE DO THIS:
Available to stream everywhere.
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.
💙
. . .
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.
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE
mundus vult decipi