huddled in rags in a Kingsport alley . . .

huddled in rags in a Kingsport alley . . .

for Julia

She, Eva a slight few named her, O (for Object) to the (many) others who used her and cast her out, sleeps outside of poison-clad doorways. The black and white and grey and sick-green world blur by—flicker—journey to The End . . . She, bitten by traitors and knives—and unwholesome inventings, remains . . .

Cold.

alone

Slight. Worn thin, barely frail. A scar surrounded by cracked, empty bottles and unusable things and the venereal residue of desiccated words . . . and crawling maggots . . .

The graininess here responds to nothing . . . The arsenal of faces, carnival monsters with siren-bullhorn throats erupt—Cough—Wail—Belch and bluster—Call out for proof, but their hands are empty.

And their eyes, bound to THAT darkness as surely as the constrained hands of the prisoner are tied to the jabbering teeth of punishment, rake and plea at the Door of No.

Their puppet mouths move, repeating the same worn down phrases of babble, and stretch across the wide, cold back of irreversible consequence . . .

Disenchantment squatted here last year before drowning in a thunder of thorny last words . . . Eva lies in its echo. Raven-shadows, chilled by the wind, offer no pillow, no murmuring crumbs . . . She pulls her cluster of soiled rags tighter.

Behind closed eyes, her mind, rooted in things vanished, searches for prayer, finds nothing scrawled in the wounds.

Time is a bitter stain. Zero a rite, a massacre . . . that has no end . . . it echoes and gropes its victims, scatters morals, suffocates tomorrows . . . It would laugh if it cared, if it had a voice . . .

Nothing here moves far from the sanatorium hourglass that spills its dim hysteria on the street corner. Nothing crawls very far from the sorrow of blackened fingertips the turbulent road swallows . . .

Eva has not moved. She opens her ash-burdened mouth and her tongue makes all the gestures of a stone. In harmony with her voiceless nightmare, Night’s silence drones on . . .

She remembers the green lights and the ceiling of balloons and the girls—they kissed, protected her, carved hills of snow and fire and bridged the waters of shame with sweet-scented birds of spring.

But that time did not last. They too were taken from her . . . Taken to the beds and tables of the ugly-hearted Corpse Men—put under (and inside) bulbous bellies . . .

It’s all teeth. Hammering their graveyard plans. Twisting, pounding, tearing, chewing. Moving in the narrow streets, destroying everything between the windswept steeples, drawing even memories to the Forest of Dismembering.

But she has not forgotten . . . naked and abandoned, impaled by merciless violence and disaster, Eva lingers, thin fingers trembling. They cannot contain the wisp of hope she has tired to keep safe . . .

Slowly circling a sleep she knows will be filled masks of unmentionable design and dust, dire dreams of corrosive festivals under battered skies, and things—scratched by the grasp of the leering Dog Star, roaring fire and erupted from phantom nests, she shutters . . .

Here in Kingsport, under archaic gables, in sight of the churchyard of the great white church, in the mass of this condemning, inhuman blackness, she, innocence broken, worn by leather tongues, hides from the wolves of ice and murder . . .

Hides in the shadows and rags, hoping . . .

Hoping for the ways of flame-fire sunrise, as if she could swim away from the pain that burns and shatters.

There is a sound, a defect externalized. A disfigured croak of mad laughter, an enemy’s narrative. Its wanting squall is an act of war. It seizes her heart.

A draft of its carrion technique leaks out. Its grey-rumble/ghost-gait scent, stolen from a nova, ambushes her blood.

Hand to mouth to push the coming lurker’s black wings to other events, she tries to backtrack, but there is no tight corner this vulgar Babel-trellis of teeth cannot inspect . . .

Afraid to look . . . more afraid not to, she opens her eyes . . .

This alley is a tomb.

At its mouth the street is the Pit itself . . .

In the stripe-tinted light of midnight the lurid Shadow Thing comes . . . It—some wild part of it shimmering—dips to erase . . .

No one is spared.

Little but the noise of the moon survives.




(after MorganScorpion’s reading of H. P .Lovecraft’s “The Festival”)



Copyright 2009 Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.