Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Hendrik in Utrecht, Netherlands #101 (Transcendence)

Couldn't leave the house. Couldn't drive my car anymore. Couldn't hold down a job. I was afraid of everything until this miraculous thing happened. I began to want to die. When I no longer desired to live, all my fears left me and I discovered life's dark consecration.

Benjamin in Prescott, Arizona #100 (Sexuality)

I dreamt of licking and biting your thighs. Searching for an orgasm with my tongue in the split between your legs. I took off your panties with my teeth and you kissed my sexual organ that surged with blood and ecstasy. Union.

Autumn in Laramie, Wyoming #99 (Violence)

I think the crops wouldn't grow inside daddy's arid body. Maybe that's why he wanted to kill me? Treat me like a human sacrifice to appease the unnamed gods inside his shadowy self. All I know is that after he finished kicking the shit out of mom, he'd start in on me. After he finished throttling the meaning and mercy out of me, he'd lock me in the hallway closet and it was in there (as I cleaned the blood off of my face with the spare linens) that I learned the value of violence in a forsaken world.

Shane in Florence, Kentucky #98 (Banality of daily life)

My girlfriend and I tried to knock over a liquor store in 2007. The plan was, she manned the door while I held up the cashier. We rolled into this ancient spot off of the parkway that I knew wouldn't have cameras and I stuck my gun into the face of this older black guy who had a bad stutter. He stammered out that “the money's in a drop box under the register” and he reached down there, raising up quick as a cornered rattlesnake with a shotgun that blew a hole in my right shoulder. Then he turned the gun on my girl and shot her in the stomach. He walked over to where I was leaning against a wine rack and started smashing my face in with the butt of his gun. When I came to, I was handcuffed to a hospital bed and they told me that my girlfriend had bled to death on the floor of that joint. Bet that nasty old prick waited a while before he called the cops, sat down in the middle of the floor and just watched us bleed.

Elle in Elko, Nevada #97 (God)

This fucking idiot suburban housewife who I volunteer with at the soup kitchen with is all the time going on about how much “peace Christ brings into her life.” I feel like telling her that Christ wasn't peaceful. Love isn't peaceful. He didn't wander this tortured earth to bring peace to our lives, he came to challenge and destroy us with reckless, rabid, otherworldly , annihilating love so that we can be reborn into a kind of auroral transcendence.

Bairavi in Nagpur, India #96 (Love)

That pain stayed hidden even from me until I met you. The pain that was unconsciously birthed when the agony of love called the cosmos into being. I love you more in sickness than in health, more in sorrow than in joy.

Jason in Harrisonburg, VA #95 (Hyperreality)

I saw stray dogs devouring a deer carcass the other day when I was driving. I saw children being stoned to death for the sins of their fathers. “Drink that fucking pondwater and die like an animal longing for light.”

Andrew in Jellico, Tennessee #94 (Self Evaluation)

I mangled your gentle heart. Tore through the ventricles and atrium with my merciless teeth. I've burned the crops and poisoned the water. You thought you could redeem me with your warmth and safety and love but I'm too reckless to be saved. Hunger and thirst.

Cliff in Pierre, South Dakota #93 (Hyperreality)

Dying fish are stapled to my wall. Children are on fire and are vomiting dark gray nimbus clouds. Hundreds of suns are in the sky and the earth has been rendered sterile from the overwhelming heat. The wicked creature that ruled the earth before the flood has returned from the abyss to wipe out the animal mistakenly called human.

Ken in Decatur, OH #92 (Banality of daily life)

There's a lot of flooded roads in this county. Been raining for 2 weeks straight, thereabouts. I don't give a fuck. Lost my job 6 months back. I don't have to get out. I've been sitting on the porch in the afternoon, getting shitfaced and watching this whole fucking town get washed away.

Porter in Martin, KY #91 (Hyperreality)

Did the serpent in the garden flood the forest or fertilize the soil? I've seen miracles in muddied water. An old lumbering beast rotting in a shallow pond in the cat tails, thrushes making a nest in his hair. Children crawl from his stomach covered in gore to look for mercy and love in a lost and forsaken world.

Anna Lee in Cayce, South Carolina #90 (Transcendence)

Is that a fire? I set one of those. It has left my bruised vessel in ruin and scorched my broken body. I don't want to feel better. I'm not afraid of the little death that is all of ours to share if we strive to claim the destruction that will be our salvation.

Willy in Lafeyette, Louisiana #89 (Sorrow)

Frost and weeds arriving to strangle and lacerate the flowers. The frailty and innocence of Bellworts fills me with horror and a kind of somber awe. Man's estate.

Katherine in Rockville, MD #88 (Sexuality)

Hands between her legs. Out bodies throbbing with love. I lick and kiss her thighs while she pinches my erect nipples. She turns me toward the walls of the cave and claws my back with her jagged nails. These are the kind of things I dream of. The fall of man.

Angela in Elizabeth, OH #87 (Sorrow)

Water flowin toward my loss. My girl on the banks of Storm's Creek after a heavy rain. Wonder if she saw her reflection in that muddy water? I was yellin at her from across the yard while I was weedin the garden “Get away from that Crick, girl; you're like to get kilt” and as I was yellin I saw her lean over too far and get pult into that surgin creek. They found her face down and on the shores of the lake with algae and frogs eggs in her hair and spirit delivered from this world.

Kelly in Teays Valley, WV #86 (Dreams)

I had a dream last night about an aged preacher trying to plant a garden in a cemetery in Mexico; tearing into the barren desert floor with a rusted pitchfork. The sky was shuddering like film that was decaying and the preacher sat down on a tombstone. He started speaking in a grave, moving Southern dialect but I forgot most of what he told me. The last thing I can remember him saying before I woke up shook me in a profound way: “Be the announcement of God's love.” I woke up feeling incapable of doing that.

Larry in Kitts Hill, OH #85 (Self Evaluation)

You know that dog that's blind in one eye, always on Rosewood Drive eating trash? That's me. Wandering this world without vision or meaning, just trying to not get killed.