08.27.06
From an Unsent Letter, 1990
1/9/90
(from a letter never sent)I picture you down there, in bed with a lizard. As its claws dig at your freshly tattooed arm — red, green, blue — a black wind pounds like Kong.
Shapes with rifles, somehow impervious to the 100 mph winds, walk the streets choosing corners and doorways to guard at random, and only for brief periods. Ghost automatons guarding mythic booty, while you clutch the reptile for comfort. The bed shifts at times from the from the force of the wind through the wall crannies and door gaps, jets of fine mist erupting from the key hole.
In the navy yard there is dim glowing and a thunderous hum.
Moloch condenses, solidifies, and his jugular visibly clenches as he rises. The wind and rain turn red and entrails fall like sleet.
The howling wind explodes through wood into the house, and you can see him towering in a blinding anti-corona, eyes a solar blue. The buildings all dissolve in the drenching rain gut blast and you see, beyond the horizon toward Virginia, another glowing dome of entrails and plasmic darkness, a rising humanoid.
The night splits in two.
The Molochs fuse; quantum leaping — an exponential growth; the earth itself is shrieking with exploding boils.
in the church, there is laughter
somewhere, inside a mountain, a
circle of priests smile
into their scanners, watching as the ГњberMoloch
blip drifts eastward hungrily toward the
rising sun.The lizard, its head buried bloodily in your arm, screams as you wish pray you would could must lose consciousness, or better…
awake.But you cannot.
I’ve been rummaging around in old folders, and discovered this piece of writing from 1990. In real life, the person in question had written after recently surviving a major hurricane along with his pet, a large iguana. During the storm I had seen footage on the nightly news of troops from a nearby naval base patrolling parts of his city.
Meanwhile, chaos was in the air in those days. Eight months after this was written, with the Soviet Union collapsing in the background, Iraq invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf War was on. As if in resonance, my personal life and creative community were also both in disarray at the time, and I was writing a lot. I did mail back to my friend in the end, but sent a different letter (without this journal excerpt). We lost touch sometime around or after the Gulf War, though I remember him fondly and still wish him well, wherever he may be.
