Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

The Holy Ghost

The holy ghost came to her when she was a child, only six years old. For weeks preceding the actual event she awoke in the night screaming and crying as the result of having had a nightmare, a premonition of what was to come. Each time she was told “ Its just a nightmare, go back to sleep.” by one groggy parent or the other, so that on the night that the plane did crash into the house she almost believed it was only the same nightmare come to visit her once more.
It was a private plane that carried six passengers, and the pilot and co-pilot. They were all dead, spilling from the wreckage into the fiery garage like guts bursting from a wounded bird. Her father wanted to help them, but they were beyond his help, and her mother was saying,
“Oh God.”
Her older sister was screaming,
“What is it, what happened?”
Helen knew what had happened. It was the plane, the same plane that had been crashing into her dream every night for the past two weeks.
“Get them out of here!” her father shouted. But he needn’t have, because mother was already grabbing them roughly by the arms and saying,
“C’mon.” in her brusque way thick with the Oklahoman accent.
Then they stood on the street in front of their home in Lake Wood California watching the flames spread, Mother and sister and she, all in their white night gowns like three ghosts. Father and a neighbor were dragging bodies out, just in case someone was yet alive and merely unconscious, but at the time she hadn’t understood that. It had seemed that he was taking them out so that even the dead could be spared the horror of being eaten up by the flames.
They were laid out on the lawn and soon Father had turned a garden hose on to combat the hungry fire. Then the wailing sirens came and the flashing red lights bouncing off the dark smoke billowed from the mouth of the garage.
Mother had been saying all along,
“Don’t look, you hear? Close your eyes.” And she tried to press their faces into the folds of her night gown, but despite this they had looked. They saw.
The nightmares, like Gabriel, had come whispering, and now here it was. The spirit that sought to inhabit the body, burning it mercilessly. The plane, a desirous phantom, had seized hold of the house and now it was devouring it with its passion.
Mother kept saying,
“Oh God.”
And yes, it must have been so. Dancing before their eyes with wings of flames spreading over the roof top lighting the night sky and obliterating the stars with its smoky mane, here was the Holy Ghost, the spirit of heaven come down to visit its rage upon them and see the bodies laid before it in neat rows like finger sandwiches.
After weeks of practice, she now found that she could not scream, nor cry, but only observe with eyes as round as saucers, peering out from behind her mother’s night gown.
“Oh God.”
The nightmare had not ended this time and every detail was startlingly clear. She was awake and the dream had swallowed her.
“Oh God.”
And it would never let her go.

The Elsinore Princess

I have lately made very good friends with a big green reptile with razor sharp teeth and a hefty appetite. What he hungers mostly for is watermelon, and purple cabbage, and green grapes, but now and again he pretends to want to eat from my hand just so he can get a taste of my fingers to determine whether or not he’d be better off just eating me and forgoing all social niceties. Here in this special place, he looks at me from behind alloyed bars and nods to his empty food dish while I try to press all of the stray voices out of my head…
I am the lake Elsinore princess, imported from Long Beach to be made a spectacle of in a mud hole imbued with mystical powers. From my glass bottom, the denizens of this fair town have enjoyed looking down past their sandals at the murky green water fed by over 300 hidden springs and the San Jacinto river. When it dried up before 1880, Charlie Sumner still lived in the old adobe Machado house, built by that late great Californio, Augustin Machado himself. Then it transgressed to the rank of puddle, lost at the center of a pestilent pit of mud laden with decaying fish, their eyes eaten out by the very gnats that they themselves had once supped upon. The cattle got stuck in the muck in search of water, and there they mooed mournfully until the heat did them in. Then the gnats could start on them too, joined by the turkey vultures and crows, who cleaned away the carcass until only the bones gleamed white under the glaring sun, before returning to their post in the big blue sky, circling and waiting for the next bovine to expire. At the heart of the puddle a small geyser erupted and a fount of sulfurous water the color of blood gushed wretchedly, flaunting itself before the thirsty herds.
The Mexicans and the Indians had the smarts to stay clear, they know the work of a demon when they see it, but old Sumner wasn’t fazed. With a bit of British tenacity and a fair helping of humor, he set to poking around the choking little valley with a walking stick striped from a water starved cotton wood. Determined to make the best of a curse, he engaged in an exploration of the dried up lake bed, taking care not to get swallowed up in the gunk like a common cow, and thus he discovered those more than 300 secretive springs.
Oh, he had known about one or two of these geothermal water holes before the lake up and evaporated. He’d even tried to fence one off to keep the cows from drinking the hot stinking water, but one of his Indian vaqueros kindly informed him that the water was good for the cows, and that they were drinking it because they were sick, so Sumner bottled it up and sent it off to Los Angeles to be analyzed by a bonefide chemist, and lo! The chemist verified officially what the native had known without the use of a test tube, (which just goes to show- there’s no better way to get good help than to beat and enslave an indigenous people with a little help from the Catholic church).
At any rate, no Mexican has ever set foot on my clean glass bottom, except for the woman that cleans it and her son, a clever handyman. Only clean white feet have had the honor of dancing around on me after a wedding. I am after all, a movie star. Well, I was in one movie anyway, and the stars delivered their lines to one another while standing on me, and that is probably more than you can say. They dragged me overland to set me down on this little pea soup lagoon, and here I’ve been moored ever since.
Once upon a time, I ferried folks around Santa Catalina Island and the briny sea lapped at my chops. They retired me though, and sent me to die where everything else dies, here at the bottom of this valley. Everyone, every creature, every thing that has come here and died, came for the water and got stuck in the mud. This is how we have all met our fate; in search of water. They come for the water, and the water comes up from the hot depths of the earth, smelling of sulfur. How is it that no one has put two and two together? Didn’t they think that the devil would ask a price for his warm life giving elixir?
They used to cart people down here in wheelchairs to dip them in the lake. The hot sulfur ran from the tap in every house in the valley until the 1960’s turning the children’s teeth yellow. At the bathhouse built in 1884 they built a swimming pool in the 1920’s. A little boy drowned in it though, (I’m told he was an idiot anyway) and after that they filled it up. But you see, he came for the water too.
And what is water, my precious? Tell me that. What is water in a dream? The water and the sun set to work on me long ago, eating away the paint, rotting my wood. I fell apart in the wetness. They had me dismantled, because the water had made me unstable, unsafe. Now, if you want to see me, you will have to look through ghost eyes. Pick any that you like, those of a cow, those of an idiot boy at the bottom of a pool, those of an old gambler that died alone in a trailer near the lakes shore, or those of a prostitute wandering away from the old rodeo grounds where her remains were hidden among many. Look through any pair of dead eyes that you choose and you may see me moored out on the Laguna Grande, a phantom on a liquid bed of diamonds, paddlewheel still and silent under the moon’s ivory glow.