Eden Underground: Poetry of Darkness Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE LAST PREY

  THE MONKEY WITH THE BIG HEAD

  PIECES OF EDEN

  THE DEAD CIRCUS

  GREEN APPLES

  KOO-O

  INTERIORA II

  EASTERN HEAVEN

  RED MONSOON

  A MODERN BERSERKER

  THE HALF BRIDE

  EDEN UNDERGROUND

  CARLOS, DIEGO,VAMOS!

  THE WRATH SINGS, GODDESS

  THE RIME OF THE MAD MARINER

  LACRIMOSA

  THE PAWN SHOP

  THE COCKROACH KING

  THE GARDEN

  DAMES DE VOYAGE

  ELECTRIC MONKEYS

  THE TENTH CIRCLE

  ALMOST TO THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright 2015 Crystal Lake Publishing

  All Rights Reserved

  www.crystallakepub.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9946626-7-5

  Cover Design:

  Vincent Chong—http://www.vincentchong-art.co.uk/

  Illustrations:

  Paolo Di Orazio—http://paolodiorazio.wordpress.com

  Back Cover Design:

  Ben Baldwin—http://www.benbaldwin.co.uk/

  Interior Layout:

  Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “The Monkey with the Big Head” has been previously published in the Spring 2015 issue of The Horror Zine Magazine. “Interiora II” has been previously published in the second edition of the collection The Shaman and Other Shadows. “Green Apples” will appear in the June issue of the Disturbed Digest.

  THE LAST PREY

  Eva has a snake tattooed on her arm

  and a blue orchid in her hair;

  fossil ovaries

  are carved on the buckle

  of her chain mail belt;

  her hands are full of blood.

  I’m hiding in the tall grass,

  grey as the sky,

  as the rats show me the way

  to escape.

  I’m the last man

  in this heretic Eden, in this game preserve.

  I’m just a flesh trophy,

  an aquarium of dried, floating sperm,

  poisoned by a powerful pesticide.

  I crawl like a worm.

  I hear Eva’s steps

  trampling my trail,

  her hallucinated chants;

  the smell of female and nightmare

  spread all around,

  dripping on dry branches.

  There is no horizon

  to reach.

  The land is endless.

  A rustle behind me,

  then in front, left and right.

  I’m fucked, surrounded.

  I stand up unsteadily.

  I give myself to the cloned Amazons,

  to the many copies of Eva,

  singing as sirens without a sea,

  rubbing male skulls on their thighs.

  THE MONKEY WITH THE BIG HEAD

  The man with the big head

  crosses the gate of the asylum.

  He leaves behind himself the smell of iron,

  the rough sheets and the fleas’ claws,

  the walls of his too-white room

  scrawled with numbers, broken lines,

  roads dangling from the ceiling,

  small one-eyed faces—

  his son nibbled from memory.

  The man with the big head

  gets on the bus.

  There are too many people around,

  too many thoughts rustling,

  that buzz, those moths—

  those black scribbled wings—

  who live in his brain,

  confuse him.

  They make the same noise—

  a blender of souls—

  of those people crowded,

  sweating, looking at his big shoes,

  at the round scars on his neck,

  counting his bestiality.

  The garden, the exhausted willows,

  pots filled with snail shells,

  a bike without chain, the new roof,

  his sister, her big boobs,

  the nest of a spider in her red hair,

  long, tired as the willows,

  agonizing on her shoulders,

  a crucifix that can’t breathe

  in that niche of flesh

  beneath her goiter.

  The man arrived home

  smiling, toothless.

  The TV is on, blaring.

  A pissed preacher

  covered in black silk armor

  shoots large caliber prayers

  with his baptized Kalashnikov.

  His sister doesn’t smile;

  she sits back down in the chair,

  her velvet spaceship to heaven,

  and whispers to him:

  There’s something to eat in the fridge.

  Get what you want.

  The man with the big head

  sticks his head inside.

  He looks at the lights, the colored packaging,

  the bottles of beer and holy water.

  He feels the fresh sting on his face,

  then the moths resume flapping their wings.

  Those flying bastards

  have formed a black halo around his head—

  they came from his brain,

  out through his mouth, nose, ears.

  They want his sister now—

  to go into her holes.

  The man grabs a knife

  sunk in an apple pie, a holy cake,

  turns off the TV and moves close to his sister,

  still hypnotized by the electric preacher—

  a noiseless electroshock.

  He rips her throat, freeing her from the moths,

  from those dark insects that have eaten the brains

  of the family Stone for generations.

  She will not cross the iron gate

  as he did a long time ago, entering Hell

  as their son did,

  the boy whom everyone called

  the monkey with the big head.

  The deformed angel

  flew away

  after the last electric shake.

  The man opens his backpack,

  pulls out a silver frame—

  there is no picture inside.

  He puts it on the belly of his sister,

  which should always remain empty,

  then he leaves the house and

  slowly approaches the bus stop.

  PIECES OF EDEN

  Many rats live in my Eden,

  in this garden full of millions of empty boxes,

  of cut cables, of rusty circuits.

  The silence roars in my Eden,

  while the cries are closed off,

  sealed safely in a vault,

  hidden with flesh’s bullion—

  my many Eves torn to pieces.

  Her head is in a glass jar.

  Her bust is on the table,

  painte
d blue, glossy and glazed.

  Her chopped arms and legs

  fill an oval copper bathtub—

  this is the place where I dive

  into her purple marmalade,

  where I dream,

  where I rise and fall to fish—

  at the bottom,

  the black pearls of my madness.

  My Eden is an old abandoned warehouse

  between the crooked streets of the suburbs

  where ghost cars are parked,

  where I drag each new Eve,

  still in one piece.

  THE DEAD CIRCUS

  Around the circus,

  the ground is black.

  There is no life for miles.

  The tiger without a tail, without teeth,

  growls at the shadows

  that lick its nose.

  It has a lock around its neck

  and a ghost as a master.

  The fat lady

  exploded two years ago,

  eating her husband

  and the bronze diamonds

  of her stage python,

  its radioactive skin

  green, like the mud from the Apocalypse

  fucking the city.

  The dwarf, the tightrope walker,

  who has never been afraid of anything,

  married a young sow

  and now goes to the slaughterhouse every morning

  with his sons still alive on a leash.

  The owner of the circus,

  the great Hector,

  the magician who could make

  the faces of the audience

  and their wallets disappear,

  now continues to dig,

  finding pieces of his daughter

  trampled by the elephant’s feet

  beneath the dirt of the center ring.

  The bearded lady

  is chained

  to her throne of thorns.

  At her feet is a long line

  of petrified lovers,

  carved from the curse of Medusa

  by the acid rain of the Apocalypse

  frying everything.

  The knife thrower, Modì,

  still wears his mask of death.

  He is the only one to continue the show.

  Ghosts applaud from the stands

  while he launches his blades

  toward the wooden wheel that spins,

  empty, without its flesh target.

  That squeaky wheel is the only noise

  of the dead circus,

  of that show you bought the ticket for

  when you were born.

  GREEN APPLES

  Juanita wobbles on her heels, earrings shaking like rattles,

  fifteen years old,

  fifteen customers a day,

  a father swallowed by the couch,

  and a mother, a hooker like her,

  chewed up two years ago

  in the village of worms

  underground.

  “Juanita!”

  He wants his cold beer.

  “Juanita, holy shit!”

  He wants to celebrate his gods

  with steel helmets and numbers on their chests.

  “Juanita, I’ll kill you one of these days!”

  The screen turns on to the Super Bowl.

  The temple is open,

  but the customer honks.

  —Fuck!—

  Juanita must hurry.

  She has to open the fridge,

  and then her skinny legs.

  The pig in the suit waits for her,

  out there in his sticky car.

  Stories of skinned knees,

  curses, and drool

  dripping down her back;

  stories of Sundays in a January

  of quarterbacks and crumpled dollars

  tucked into her panties—

  green, soft bullets

  planted in the depths of the soul.

  Juanita runs down the stairs.

  She stops on the first floor

  and sticks two green apples into her empty bra.

  Now she’s ready.

  “Juanita!”

  The father starts to yell.

  He finished his beer, again.

  His empty green bottle roars.

  He hates his skinny boy,

  without real tits,

  who earns a third as much as the mother.

  —Fuck!—

  He spits another day on the carpet.

  “I’ll have to go back to work,

  sooner or later.”

  Juanita opens the car door.

  She smells of fresh fruit,

  unripe, peeled,

  cut into thin slices.

  “Ten dollars.”

  Love can be so green.

  KOO-O

  The cage is on the beach.

  Koo-o raises his scepter of bones.

  All the others kneel,

  while the neck of a blue parrot

  twists right and left,

  toward the ocean that touches on

  the edges of the new cemetery,

  the plantation of burnt human heads

  emerging from the sand.

  The plane sank into the ocean long ago.

  Grey morays live in its iron armor,

  darting through the windows

  with purple eyes

  and pieces of men between their teeth.

  The survivors had reached the island,

  wading through its algae guts,

  coming up against the white eyes

  of Koo-o and his clan.

  The man in the cage

  has a long beard

  and two parrot wings tattooed on his back,

  carved by a shard of stone—

  wings that bleed again—

  above a nest of deadwoods.

  Koo-o orders the others

  to bring the torches,

  to inflame the body of the man

  who can’t shout his thoughts,

  who can’t hear the drums of death;

  his tongue, his ears

  have become trophies

  hanging on Koo-o’s necklace.

  Survivors fallen from heaven

  were welcomed to the island,

  like angels, like divine birds.

  Koo-o and his tribe

  wanted to see them fly again

  from the rock towers at the top.

  They wanted to learn, to discover the secrets

  of the people who live between the clouds,

  still able to see the sun

  hidden from the eternal eclipse

  of the radioactive dust

  of the Apocalypse.

  The man in the cage burns.

  Koo-o approaches the bars,

  smells the acrid stink of cooked flesh,

  motioning for the others to approach

  to see how a fake angel dies,

  just like all the other gods

  who can’t fly anymore,

  buried on the beach.

  Koo-o is the emperor of the island,

  of the latest Eden,

  with his crown of blue parrot feathers,

  with his dead necklaces.

  He will pierce the clouds,

  the green siege of the Apocalypse.

  He’ll discover the secrets of the sky

  and teach all the other gorillas

  now that he has learned how to kill,

  how to burn angels,

  to enjoy and rave

  between the black thighs of Death,

  the queen of the murderers.

  INTERIORA II

  Lightning. The sky is pissed.

  The suburb of Rome

  is an appetizer of the Purgatory

  you can see on the high tide of asphalt,

  broken bones, corpses of sirens,

  fish bones, and remains of oceans.

  It’s raining. A dog limps

  toward the tent o
f an abandoned circus,

  looking for its master—

  a clown without a head or a smile—

  with dust on his tongue

  and black grease on his rump.

  Venus is sleeping

  in the yellow building.

  She’s polluted, as are her dirty sheets.

  Her flesh is gone.

  Ribs and bones triumph,

  waiting for someone else adrift

  on her solitary raft,

  floating on the edge of reality.

  Two hundred dollars for a whole night

  with her, with Venus,

  with her remains.

  Then comes the morning light—

  so sharp—

  along with the roar of a mower.

  The client wakes up

  and opens the window.

  The stink of gasoline and sadness

  enters the room.

  He looks out

  toward the cemetery of cars

  waiting for souls, drivers.

  Venus is still in bed.

  She’s without armor now.

  Her teeth sparkle,

  showing a skeleton smile.

  Her flesh is gone,

  along with the subway of her uterus,

  the generous glands,

  the Byzantine back, and the skin of a mango—

  all that she was yesterday.

  “Where is my Venus?”

  thinks the man leaning against the wall,

  eyes popping out of his head.

  He tries to break down the door

  to get away from that velvet-tongued monster.

  Two hundred dollars for a night

  with Venus’ sister

  (Death? Life?),

  for her black ring and white bones,

  for that damned room,

  close, immense,

  sealed by an old welder.

  The subway swallows its passenger.

  All the church bells ring together,

  making the ears of the dog prick up,

  holding one of its master’s bones

  in its rotten teeth.

  EASTERN HEAVEN

  Heaven is overbooked.

  There is no place for anyone else.

  Outside is a great borderless Hell—

  above ground, underground,

  there is no difference.

  A trident made of stone

  rises among the peaks of the Himalayas,

  a tail jutting out from the

  sulphurous ass of the world.

  Heaven is now protected by a wall,

  by cement guard towers,

  by checkpoints and loaded machine guns.

  Off Limits

  If you die—

  and one day you will—

  and the mollusc of your white pearl soul

  tries to crawl to the entrance

  and pass the red line,

  the guards won’t think twice about shooting you.

  Everyone will see through