Category Archives: prose

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

28 November, 2012

Posted under

determination, fiction, prose, storyteller, writing

Comments

Leave a comment

Tick Tick Organic Bird Machine

Because sometimes even nice dinosaurs need to roar.

Paradoxodynamo
JCD Kerwin

I am suspended. [I have suspended time.] I can move the pieces of the universe around with my fingers and feel the earth ripple beneath my toes. The world is slow-moving and the freeze frame rotoscope turns around me. I can feel the planet breathe.

I am organic machine. I’m flying in and out of your aviaries like a mechanical bird with a ticking heart—nickel-sized—ready to fit inside your pocket. I have no particular place to go, but I want to hide from the everyones of the world. Let me bury my head in the sand. Let me tick away in the dunes.

Let me dream, invisible.

I am ten thousand voices screaming directions to a mannequin. I close my eyes because when I open them I might finally be real. Do you ever fall asleep at night, wondering what pills you have to take to wake up normal? Do you ever look in puddles and spy dogs you weren’t really meant to be? I laugh over coffee as Irish blue hues say it’s all because I’m a writer. You can act like different people when you’re a writer. You can write fifty different ways when you fuck words all day, having had a bittersweet love affair with them for years. It’s okay to be so many people, then.

But it’s not me to be them. “It’s not me,” I want to say to that Irish grin. “Don’t you see? I smile three ways and you think it’s okay because you love who I am inside. But sometimes I don’t know who I am, so how could you?” (They just smile, but I don’t think they can smile wide enough to save me anymore. I might need shock therapy instead.)

I fade, sometimes. I drown out existence with methodic reverberations. I run with my eyes closed. (If you listen with your eyes open, you suffocate.) So I walk around the city, holding out my hands. I hope if I touch so many ghosts, I might start to feel their heartbeats through my fingertips. Maybe I’ll start to feel connected to the same oxygen-breathing creatures I walked forth from murky waters with, once upon a Mesozoic time.

If God were here he’d laugh with me, I think. I’d buy him a drink and he’d flip quarters into shot glasses while telling me I’m right: It really is a big fucking joke. He’d tell me to have a laugh and to suck down my Jack before it gets old. Then we’d throw crumbs to the pigeons and he’d cry when the taxi cabs and buses run them over. He’d pick up the bloody messes and eat the carcasses, making them whole again in his form. And I’d stare while he’d put a pair of Oakley’s over his without-a-color eyes, kiss my forehead, and light up a cigarette for the way back to Heaven. He’d give me a thumbs-up, tell me I’m a moron and that it’s all okay, and I’d believe him.

I scream, voiceless. I make a billion mirrors shatter because I hate to see myself in their reflection. I’d rather stand myself atop pedestals in my dreams, and follow voices of gods superseding fairytales my mother sewed into my pockets when my eyes were full of stars. They tell me I am dynamite. So I’ll let loose the vibrant chromaticity burning inside of me and it will set the skies on fire. I’ll make the Aurora Borealis explode in the chaos saturation of my soul.

But I’m not dreaming in the cosmos; I’m stuck in grey raindrops, and that’s okay. I’ll just grab a five dollar fedora that some old man wore in some other life and follow my Chucks to wherever I’m supposed to go. I can’t be certain about anything, but maybe when I finally decide to stop thinking, the stars won’t seem so damn far away.

Nov., 2011, rev. July, Nov 2012

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

1 November, 2012

Posted under

fiction, prose, writing

Comments

Leave a comment

Bloodshot Detours

Bloodshot Detours
JCD Kerwin

She gets bloodshot eyes and follows railroad tracks from her head. She follows them to memories he laid for her when he left her cold, forgotten and skin and bones when he said she wasn’t worth the warmth of a lesser man. She blinks dead, glazed eyes and sees black birds on the tracks, pulling off the flesh of all the friends she left behind. [She pulls at her own skin, hanging loose against her ribs, sticking puncture-like from her body while she wonders when the birds will come to claim her for their final meal.] She follows tracks to the town she remembers, but doesn’t, because all she wants is the life she never had, the life she almost had before he kissed her lips and drove the blade into her heart. (Her salty tears across the metal: tarnished silver made it rust the faster.) She walks at Dawn to find someone who can keep the train away for one more day; someone who can keep it away until she finds the way home.

Nov., 2012

Broken Bells made me do it. That’s my excuse.
[End]

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

30 October, 2012

Posted under

fiction, prose, short story, writing

Comments

Leave a comment

How Horror Movies Start

[Untitled]
J.C.D. Kerwin

I stared at the fluorescent light tube nestled in the panels and furled my brow. It blinked and buzzed electric, and I pissed alcohol. The dank bathroom reflected back dirty tile in-between the grey light, white light flickers. The tap was running. This was how horror movies started.

I had offended the pretty pair of legs I was with when I bravely suggested we go back to my loft. She “wasn’t that type of girl.” Well, I wasn’t that type of guy, but she was the one wearing fish nets and a skirt so high I could see her ass. Besides, I just left Lisa. Or rather, Lisa just left me. So I was lonely; I needed someone to tell me I was still worth a damn.

The bar was half-empty and it was only eleven. Some crappy country song was blasting through the speakers and I frowned. I dropped bills onto the scuffed wood before waving goodnight to Jim and pulling my collar up around my neck. (Rain falls heavier when you have nowhere to go and no one to see.) I lit a cigarette and slopped five blocks to my broken hole in the world…

 

The beginnings of another short story. I don’t know where this guy is taking me. I hope it’s somewhere good…

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

15 October, 2012

Posted under

prose, storyteller, writing

Comments

Leave a comment

Made-up Words Like Thundercane

Sometimes it feels as though you could stomp your feet and make earthquakes erupt from fault lines coming from your insides. Sometimes it feels like mountains in your lungs are crumbling into oceans, making sea foam turn into hurricanes.  Sometimes you think if you were to open your mouth those hurricanes would escape your lips in a supernova. Sometimes you’re sure if you were to prick your finger, your blood would run India Ink instead of plasma red. And then suddenly, all at once, you realize someday you will, most certainly, burst into a thousand, shining letters because you are made of thundercane stories.

Also:

…because currently I’ve been replaying it fifty times on my mp3 player. I’m slightly tweaked like that.

I’m gonna go put my goggles back on and pretend I can fly.

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

15 September, 2012

Posted under

fiction, poetry, prose, writing

Comments

Leave a comment

Winter Comes in Autumn

I’m still playing with punctuation, but…

Rorschach Monster
J.C.D. Kerwin

She says. She says I shouldn’t bring up the bad memories, the bad thoughts in my brain about all the yelling and the screaming and the fighting and the times when she didn’t look at me at all. The times she hated me. The times she called me “monster” and said she’d rather be with Jimmy at the bar called Jungle Jim’s down the street. She felt ice cold, then—the times we made up after, because I knew that though she whispered “sorry” in the dark, I knew she meant it when she said she wanted him. Jimmy wasn’t me. Jimmy was better than the monster that clawed to hold her in the night. She calls me sentimental, though, because I draw to many sentiments; draw too much sentimentality from too many songs long gone. She says. She says I try too hard to match our lives to pictures, try too hard to match our steps to the movie stars on the boulevards. She doesn’t know she is my Hollywood dream. So now we take the morning train to the shipyard and as the whistle blows three times, we know that we’ve arrived. It’s our goodbye. She says I should wear a coat when it’s cold. I watch her go to Jimmy as I sit along the bank and cut valentines from my heart. The red droplets stain the snow, but I think the patterns are Rorschach mementos I’ll keep to remember her in summer when the sun gets far too high. I like how cold she used to be. I remember what she used to say. She used to say “monster.”

Sept., 2012

That is actually based on this old thing:

Winter in my Hemisphere
J.C.D. Kerwin

We can take the morning train to the shipyard.
The clock will chime four times
and we’ll know that we’ve arrived.

We’ll crowd the docks
and fold tugboats out of paper
we’ve cut from one another’s heart.

You’ll think the red blots ruin the snow;
I’ll think they’re Rorschach mementos
I can open in my head
to remember you in June when
the sun makes it far too hard to see.

You’ll like me running through ice barefoot,
and I won’t care because
if it makes you laugh,
I’ll be okay to cut up my Achilles.

So I’ll bleed in the shipyard;
I’ll spill myself on the canvas—
you always said I’ve never
had the guts to be so weak.

Your eyes will hurt, but
it’ll be like singing in the darkness:
There’s no one there to hear you,
even though you sound like you could fly.

I’ll just pray it’s good enough for you,
because my scissors are too rusty
to cut a new me from your heart.

July 2011