Bolts From Core: Sparring with words

The demand in me will take control;

This prostrating power.

Builds stealthily, then surpasses me;

Intent of secrecy.

Feels like blood rage, burns like my gin days. 

Only smoke, I'm not blind.

Hear the crackle, the adamant hiss; 

Rattling the eardrums. 

This quill will slay you, tear out your truth;

Bleed me till I'm dry.

But this here, this is maniacal; 

More savage is the need.

(I write so I won't kill you.)

From down below, would they look up? 

received only with contempt.

From the onslaught of blow after blow;

Debasements strike lingers.

Let them lay upon the blizzard stones; 

Winter is more cruel each year.

Wake them up choking before sunrise; 

The toxic yokes of shame.

Vile yank up from throat, expelled through mouth; 

Daily exorcism.

(I write so you don't have to.)

With callused hands and grime beneath the nails;

Deaths eye's, cold and vacant.

All reflection has no resemblance; 

Forgotten anima.

All that was precious, once held so dear; 

Values, love. truth, all pursuit.

So insignificant and careless; 

a matchbook or a sock.

(I write so I don't kill you.) 

The comfort rots us inside out;

No vanity found here.

A secret unforseen, my scars shed; 

A reptilian me.

Open the cage to bestial wails; 

Tis' only just begun.

That sweet music is a symphony here; 

The dregs of remembrance.

The prodding of all I have endured;

Kindles all I've witnessed.

Did you hear the click, clank of the latch?

See my steel, smell her smoke?

Blood runs cold yet wild is our fire;

We ravage your refuge.

(I write so you don't have to.) 

My brethren the lost ones;

We fallen seraphim. 

The rage of the downtrodden now rise;

Flank us in formation.

Bareback and bare-chested, bolts from core; 

Mute scream for love unborn. 

(We ride so you don't have to.) 

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen. 

2nd Ave Churchyard: Memorium

Friday the 13th of May

 Graveyard 'Exquisite Corpse' Prose

" ...The idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished..."

~ Kids fuck in graveyards?

All day and all night.

They tantalize the corpses,

in her imaginings while

concrete scabs lock the

wounds of Rape Way,

that ugly alley that

you thought you wanted.

Dumpster fruit, kisses, narcosis.

Oblivion is unattainable fantasy;

snake swallowing its tail,

Ouroboros come to me,

give what you suck!

(and he sucked all)

my favorite whirlpool, 
my only lover; 
a corpse grasping 
at kids fucking...

One horror is preferable. 

Another is debris, fragments

that I constantly puke

on to your grave,

you pitiful man, undead!

This won't hurt

at all he said,

his eyes inside out.

I pray mine close. ~

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen

& 

Erin  Mazer Burley

Sestina Renaissance

Sestina Renaissance

I was the thirst. Living as thirst; dried up, lonely and withered lust.

What a fool, what a wasted life; body alone; piss, vomit, bile, my ruin.

A brutal display to my ignorance of true value, no means to redemption.

Pleading to a taunting flicker, my contemptible tears; this betrayal

of a true self. This wretch (false self) who lived as I! Safe to predict

they knew her too well. Casting shame; I bled shame, anguish, now fatal?

What horrific calamity is this? A pathetic display of D.O.A, that final fatal

sip. Pupils? Gone, I don’t see; and the slow burn to boil cold blood. That lust,

give me more, waking sleep, apathy, and unearned nirvana. Poor fools predict

this came at no cost. The steep sum of my errors: an irrefutable ruin

everlasting. A mockery of value and principle; long lost, now only betrayal.

Crane and wolf, Snap jaws, take my idiot head, I expect no redemption.

With tremulous phantom limbs, shriek and sing for your redemption.

Vanishing, that flickering light, perhaps galaxies, or only the fatal

toxins between us? I couldn’t know. My thirst! My Bounty! My betrayal.

Of god, of truth and all mankind, I had no reverence, no thought, only lust 

for alternate reality, and different realm; Now I’ve found it, fallen to ruin.

Sixteen years of atrocities, turning away in conceit. What did you predict?

Will the feeble cerebral exercise prove inadequate in what they predict?

Small, simple creature; the errors are numberless, that’s not redemption.

Living with cognizance, truth and forgiveness.  Not here, not now, in ruin.

I wish I could pity you, truly I do. To be mortal is a brittle wing, so fatal.

Not only for you, but all mankind and kin. You met death, life full of lust

so valued. You have cheated yourself out of nirvana too soon with betrayal.

What do you know of such things? Come, tell us of nirvana and of betrayal.

What mockery you made of your values, did you ignore, could you predict

the consequences,  that would inevitably come from an insatiable lust?

Give you more. A poke in the arm or the neck, now you seek redemption!

On your way down, you knew those poisons you consumed were fatal!

You knew you were rushing to the door, a gateway to only your ruin.

The hypocrisy, inconsistency and fascism you found in church; is a ruin

made of steeples and shame. It does not belong to you. Another betrayal,

that one; to the Gods. Follow simple universal truths, then your fatal

mortality, your innate humanity, is nothing to fear. You can safely predict 

living in those truths, the soul recognition truth, is the way to redemption.

You lack nothing, whole and complete, you are! An imaginary need; lust.

Since conception your condition was fatal, a finite mortality. If your ruin

is what you desire, it will wait. Lust for truth and you will find no betrayal.

Only through this death; I predict the magnificent possibility of redemption.

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen

A Transcribed Narrative of 'The Between'

I can hear this marching,

How I knew I failed –

With sound- then rivulets -the dark would come –

A door I kept avoiding –

Pleading with gods because I knew I failed
but never why – gooey, black rivulets of tar

seeping through that door, seeping through

where the hinges were –

darker darker darker –

silent mercy cries –

tiny light flicker taunting,

not to guide, it’s how I knew

I failed – like the sound made

When someone dies, the death toll –

The varied tests – decisions to save

This or that person –

This young beautiful girl – with a man,

It was revealed she was his mistress,

They both died in a car crash,

Illusion of her innocence stripped away, (that’s how I knew

It was real because they were total strangers, how could I know)

They were two souls passing through

the realm between worlds when I was, several others, not all at once-

One of many (tests?) – loyalty test, patience test, perseverance test –

“how long til she collapses from exhaustion?”

they were relentless with their digging – and terrified,

what was I doing wrong? Maybe a childhood imprint –

when the light I couldn’t look at went away – a darkness

not to be believed, an entity underneath the darkness,

light, lush grass and full blossoms wither- receding under that dark –

stuck in a tunnel, they’re drowning me, to test my will to live,

a flooded sewer system – a maze – rising water – move move move –

I got out – but – anyway – eventually succumbing

To spiritual exhaustion like invisible ropes,

They slowly lowered me – surrounded by blank morose people –

Lost souls? – watching me being lowered on a pulley – they were people

From many ages, watching in the bygone fashions of all eras and regions –

Someone (merciful fellow soul in limbo?) pointed me in the direction

To go –  then I Came Back? – after hundreds of failed tests –

In soul trouble, doomed – I gave up on the taunting tiny flicker –

-The deities expected me to figure it out

And they kept leaving me to grapple alone –

I wasn’t prepared to go with that thing

Where all was and was not – the nonexistence

Of fear and suffering but everything else too, a force

More powerful than the dark that wouldn’t stay with me –

I kept failing – I’d see people I knew, to test where my loyalties laid –

I was told my daughter was in an accident, car crash, urgent,

But all my street friends were going to die – had to choose –

The government was going to blow up their squat,

Instant demolition, Nickels was in there – had to choose –

I knew war songs by the time the EMT was there –

My body foul but I am not in it – I’m singing

These nothing battle songs I could’ve never heard before –

I said, “Lights in my chest, long as they’re there I’m okay,

They’re guiding me,” (the nurse didn’t understand)

Thought I saw a rat

But it was darkness

Chasing me –

Melodically humming then the hospital –

I was wearing my Zeus T-shirt –

Holding it, a circle not a circle –

That sound, those sounds, those eyes –

Manipulative eyes – speaking in language

I somehow understood – tricking me, being something

they weren’t – they said I had to do

ihis One Thing,

and that this thing, and not the light, would protect me –

they did a ritual, they were all dressed in ( I don't know) Asian attire?

I’d never seen before in life, closest thing I’ve seen were those monks

over in Chinatown asking people for money for this or that

Noble Cause, they concealed what/who was behind them,

didn’t tell me whole truth of what was behind – I shrunk back

(if the spirit can recoil in horror that is) finally I saw it –

couldn’t look away from its eyes – such power over me –

it revealed its non-genitals – “Now take of me" - don’t know

how I got away – O my God – that’s what I’ve been doing?

So wretched, so horrified, and it tricked me, it wore

Gold, shining, necklaces, the false ornaments

Of another world, like industrial chains, false bright

To seduce me with how easy it was (undeserved respite?)

The light off him came from artificial source –

Male not female, they were all male, those taunting beings

Giving me the test, lusting after me obscenely, awful,

There was even one when I was supposed to save

A demolished building – I chose wrong – “my daughter

doesn’t want to see me anyways” they all fucking died, all my street friends –

I chose wrong – anyways – severed corpses, dead after all,

Nickels- other streetboys, friends- that I knew from real life.

It speaks to you in your own language see?

The thing behind all others, hidden- 

the circle’s movement -

sounds like helicopter blades whipping through wind –

Force yourself awake! Thought it was a dream

But I couldn’t wake from it –

Thought it was D.T's but it wasn’t –

Horrifying – no one will believe this –

Just toxins in my brain? – everything.

Dark damp dreary – like being under a ship, moist,

Unpleasant, there were no smells –

Straw perhaps? everywhere, straw beds, people watching me –

On straw pallets, they were not scared or sad just watching,

another one fall- a human form.

Pulling me downwards past them – 

humming that odd between worlds song –

If I didn’t keep humming that song (chant?) making those circles

With my hands, then this golden light

That still kept me bound to life –

Some ancient shit –

Would snap, darkness kept chasing me –

Language doesn’t do it justice

Even if I use my entire lexicon-

It was just was far more vast – no words –

Have to use simplistic words –

Words that don’t quite cut it –

They are just closest words

To describe-

everything 

how the blossoming light would vanish and why.

Everything it touched became so pure, pretty –

Pretty’s the wrong word but there isn’t a right one for this,

---------------------------------------------------------------------

What was the trick? The darkness? Or the light beneath?

All I know is they were in total opposition.

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen

Transcribed by Erin Burley

MARY CATHERINE- By Robert La Force

Gasoline Rainbows

Flaccid lips slap banal tea, only the body is in torpor.

The mind has spoiled the night, that stillness has no true name.

Angst, I understood as part of me, an accepted useless appendage. 

My sixth toe on the left foot.
 I feel the weight of its existence; secret callous of torment.
 And heavy are the steps of trepidation

 mammoth is a heart hindered .

Oh sweet purity of long ago and forever after;
 I remember your name!

Your esemplastic chords pull me close, leading me home.

You linger near the quiet, tender haunting, an eternal murmuration,

it starts like this, a patient crescendo.
“Come. You will see.”

Four piles of ash of ages ago, just yesterday.

Bound upon your stage for a cruel audience you try to ignore.

The only set of keys is in your back pocket look and you’ll see.

Shackled there, the entire world is an insipid shade of grey.

The gasoline rainbow, a complete ignorance of colors existence.

Still have an attachment to that script, that misery is familiar.

All those creatures, those destructive and misplaced demigods.

 “Shake and rattle the cerebral to wake the sleeping spirit!”

If only she could save herself. “To what end?” the fool asks.

Storm clouds give way for more agreeable conditions in time.

“Rejected” in a thought,  in spirit “Ejected”- to higher places.

Incessant chatter, intermittent chatter, "Phone call, line two!".

The arrogance, so futile, so exhausting and I would like a seat.

Remembrance that life is one visit to the cinema as spectator!

To leave limbs and bones behind and bear witness; up and out.

Time does not exist in this place, it fades away; all save the beat.

You know how to express your existence, once in your solitude.

You breath, you feel, you see. You are a creator, you exist.

The great suffering and contemplation to simply breathe.

To have for a time, a unification with unsullied territory.

Grains of sand beneath her feet; all is malleable and enveloping.

When I am the child, frightened child, what am I to do with her?

“Forgive" reminds me with the first wave to kiss feet.

In the all quiet, the midst of glass shattering screaming cells.

It is beyond tangibility; the berating torture of the ego- deafens.

It starts like this, speaking through silence, a whisper,
 "Come. You will see".

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen

A Very Odd Year

My arms akimbo, I stand with burning eyes at a picture of me as an innocent. 
 I study the golden rivulets of hair that cascade to the base of crooked spine and the painted, on standby pseudo smile that I've already mastered.
 I contemplate your year of birth. 
 The very the same year Adolf Hitler died.
 an odd combination in the year of 1945. 
How many times must I remember? 
I want to be Jessica Rabbit. 
Fleshy lips, jutting pelvic bone to the right and swinging,  golden hair. 
Victoria’s Secret's were mine before I was even in grade school. Dancing for Daddy's friends at the bar age approximately eight. I don't like it when you kiss me on the lips. That's not fucking normal. Tony said so. I saw him pretend he didn't see when you smacked me on the bottom. I am twenty-one years old and still afraid to tell you that I don't like that. I wave and give a fake smile as my boyfriend and I drive off.  A real number you did on me Terry Randall. 

(I think of the photographs.)

 I loved Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop. 
 (I want to be loved by you, I am mini skirts and smile, smile, sing!) 
My hair was still damp and clung to my back. The outfit is obscene, one of many that your girlfriend made. She works as the dressmaker and seamstress for the strip club her daughter works at in West Palm Beach. I'm only eleven in these pictures, wearing a skirt that has a slit that goes up almost to my pelvic bone. My legs are crossed. Someone tells me to lean my head back. (Why do you cry when you listen to John Lennon's Imagine?) Put your hand in your hair Mary and lean back a little…. Okay. Now just a little turn that way… Right there, hold it…. That's my girl! Good... all right now look at the camera (vacant eyed stare). 

Perfect, that was great baby! He grabs my head and kisses the top at the roots of my hair. 

(I smell the booze).

 This is what a good 'girl' is. An error occurred in the brain of an eleven-year-old girl.

A little attention, a touch of rouge, some of her father’s paltry affection and the rare gem of praise. That was all it took, she cut that red tape before she even had the red visit. This is what one ought to do. "Your life is over." This is what you say after not seeing each other for five years. I am seventeen and I introduce to you my infant son. You were always so funny though, like George Carlin. You sang like Sinatra, a crooner Mom had called you. We sang together. You made up the most fascinating stories! You told me how beautiful I was and showered me with attention and compliments during the weekend visits. You had your girlfriend sleep on the couch and me in your bed. You did that. That was real. Not a good combination. Just like your black coffee, ten cigarettes and five screwdrivers-eighty percent vodka- twenty percent orange juice all before the noon. Not good for you. You’re dead now, a corpse man, ash man, a couple of years I guess your carbon now. You were born the same year that Norma Jeane was discovered... An odd year, that 1945.

Mary Catherine, Cowardice Queen

To Rectify with the Departed

Dearest Grandmother, 

Ms. Mary Francis Roberts,

I am writing this letter because I am trying to stay sober, to understand, acknowledge and take responsibility for my harmful behaviors so I do not ever repeat them again. I am finally trying to do the right thing, I am trying really hard grandma. I love you and I know for certain that you loved me. 

I have written and vocalized it before, but you truly are the only one that every made me feel genuinely loved. I have few memories of my childhood, yet every one I have of you, is warm and pleasant, yet my remembrance is bittersweet. 

That is exactly why I am writing this letter. I want to apologize to you. I do not know that you feel angry or hurt, or disappointed now, but I know that I have regrets. 

The end of your life I was fifteen years old and spiraling out of control. Seeing this must have been a bit like watching your most precious cargo spin from the sky in a downward and doomed billow of smoke and having no power to stop it, stuck as a pained spectator... I wish I had spent that time getting to know you better instead. So many questions, so little time.

I apologize for being so selfish. I spent your dying days off on my own nihilistic, self-destructive storm. I wish I could take that time back. I suppose many people could and quite often do, reflect on their lives and think “If only I did this rather than that” or “If only I had simply known…”  The truth is we cannot know until we know, however long, by whatever means. Why all the suffering in between? How much torment and pain must we endure and inflict before stumbling upon this precious bit of wisdom. I suspect that we will never truly know the answer to that, not while we're stuck in these bodies. I only pray I cease to harm others and myself in the process of what is left of my fleeting life. All things are fleeting, all lives are fleeting, like catching a snowflake only to watch it dissolve.

I am only thirty but my health is quite poor for my age. I have an infectious disease called Hepatitis C with a rare genome. I currently take two very strong medications that are attempting to rid my body of this virus. I was also diagnosed with stage four cirrhosis and nearly died in August 2014. I am taking medicines to do what a normal liver does. I would die if I didnt. the doctors made that perfectly clear. You may already know all of this, Perhaps your spirit was in the room with me when I was in purgatory, when it happened.  Perhaps you tried to help me. 

I survived, but far from unscathed. 

In case you do not know already, I’d like to tell you what happened, what I did, what I failed to do and what became of me.

Shortly after you died, your daughter, my mother, gave her parental rights away and I was in  state custody. I lived in and out of what they call now group homes, an orphanage.Then a little less then a year after I was impregnated by a man ten years my senior, the first when I was just sixteen. It was a boy.  I gave birth to two of his children. You have several great Grandchildren now, Cousin Lisa had a baby as well, thankfully her marriage was out of love and maturity and the child will have the blessing of growing up in that environment.

 Mitchell and Devin are my children’s names. The father made a cruel and spiteful decision when he absconded with them from FL to New York. My beautiful son was not quite three years old and my daughter was still nursing at my breast. It was beyond traumatizing and I did not handle it well. I worry for Mitchell now as he is now about to enter his teen years, in the same way I can only assume you worried for me, A trouble in his eyes, a heart broken too young, a boy who seems very confused and boiling just beneath his surface with anger. I wish I knew what to do to help him, I wish I could ask you. I only know that I can stay sober. I simply must at the very least do this or else nothing will be accomplished. I can do my best to take care of my health and my serenity so I can be emotionally available to them.

 I wish that I could ask you why I was always so sad, so angry, so lost, so frightened? What happened to me grandma; to have made what was once whole shatter and peirce? 

Please forgive me for causing you worry and perhaps emotional pain while you where still within your human body. Help me to do this, watch over me please. Sometimes I think you have been. If that is the case I hope there is no suffering where you are, so you only saw with a loving detachment me kill myself and slaughter what was left of my spirit for all these years. 

If you are not an angel yourself, please send one to me so I can do this. I need strength; I need to know what you loved about me. I need to know how to love. I apologize for not being the granddaughter you deserved, perhaps I will make it up to you now, if I survive this.

I always loved you even if I did not know how to show you.

I still love and need you, perhaps more now than ever before. 

I like to imagine that you able to see somehow that I am not in distress anymore and that you rest easy. For you to finally see me smile with my whole heart. To one day, see me feel joy, at peace with myself and to witness me love another as I still have yet to do. If you can somehow sense me trying to communicate this too you, then perhaps you can assist me with this endeavor.

For I believe you would agree that it is right and it is good. 

Forgive me for all my youthful selfishness. 

Your blonde haired and blue-eyed granddaughter;

who still walks this lonely planet.

 Who bears the name of you and your sister.

With love, scars and truth, 

from this realm to yours,

Mary Catherine

 Cowardice Queen