October Bizarre Horror Issue

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The Hissing & Wailing
From the Resurrection Machine
by Charlee Jacob

implacable madman:
     paragon of blues shout,
     knight of dreams,
plays his records
beneath a remorseless needle,
wears them down
to a white noise
similar to grinding teeth.
porky pig doing rap
     smoking bacon.
gangstas w/no sense of humor.
counterfeit mothers of christ
crucify love songs,
holding wax images
of a cold curt cobain
in mock pieta.
nihilistic delusion:
     jargon aphasia,
     my valentine amnesia,
     your prose retentiveness
languishing beneath the radio,
bruised by suicide ballads
     serial killers penned
in iambic pentameter trance,
     played posthumously.
here he gets up
to put on another record,
moves the scalpel
     into the groove,
unwilling or unable
     to switch to CDs
because he fears the slot
     that takes the music
to an unseen place,
     a darker place
than even he has been before.

 

within the grasp and gape
by Charlee Jacob

i am a ceremony of blood,
ritual performed
     with shirt unbuttoned.
my fist plunges through flesh,
some great psychic surgeon
fumbling through bourgeois prose
     of  insouciant gore.
i examine handfuls,
immortal mush that owls
     circling overhead
show little interest in,
fragranced wrong
for the mice of their desire.
i grimace to oracle
     my own prophetic chaff,
pathetic viscera in carnelian omni,
agony's patois memorized
in suicide notes disguised
as loveletters
     to the autopsy man.
reaching for a center,
an om in abdomen connundrum
for bones i can't imagine.