content warning: extended discussion of suicide, suicidal ideation, and depression



Ben, be careful at your work for it is Her work: if you leave out but one letter or write one letter too many, you destroy the entire world

Christina rescue in ghost rhythms and ghost letters     Christina repeat robust ghost letters and ghost world: her abandoned world rewrites world world superimposed her words

Christina not careful kiss allworld crisis an allwhen wins     Christina cut not careful but kiss deadly nightshade: Christina cut nightshade lighthouse body horror (The nude mutilated bodies of eight missing girls, each found hanging from a tree, her throat slashed.  A mind-blowing story of satanic evil and demonic power.  It will make your blood run cold.  THE NAKED WITCH)

Christina not careful bewitch     Christina witch not careful but cut across bodies ghost languages (Yeah, that was good too.  The whole record was good.  But that one song “Devil Got My Woman”, I mostly kept playing that over and over.  Do you have any other records like that?  There are no other records like that.)   Devil got my woman; Devil got Christina but she fucking devours     She devours devoured devil the devil volley face (her intestinal villi impale devils absorb demons)    I”d rather be the devil than be that woman man

Ben, be careful with your work, but Christina crash witch witch word the entire world destroyed     Christina chomp skull scope this language and Christina catches her own ghosts     (Christina arrives witch absence and she resides in my skull rhizome arachnids: spirit legs, revenant thorax, autophilia abdomen)

Ben, be careful but Christina creep meat moss melted candy ghosts   (I laid down last night, tried to take my rest got mind go to ramblin’ like wild geese from the west from the west)     Christina wears wild ghost geese / Christina the cross uncanny     Christina meanders the strange edge of human phenomenon, and she enters uncanny ghost and she exits uncanny ghost     Her absence still frequently appears to me ghostly, an accumulating series of Marian apparitions     Her ghost or apparition avalanche larger amplitude big apocalypse

The apocalyptic palimpsest invades my brain an eerie Christina ghost (Teo Macero invades my membrane and I sculpt text from hours of rough jams long language)

Christina frequently appears to me as absences and the absences rewind me to the absence of God.  She exists as a paradoxical present absence, the call of the Eloi Eloi Lema Sabacthani by Christ on the Cross.  I chant a polyphonic my god my god why have you forsaken me; I improvise florid counterpoint to the lament bass named Christina.  Christina still naked impresses her absence on the text, on the very Book.  I still worship Christina's word and weird and her invisible faces flash nude page: her apocalyptic palimpsest.  I know her ghosts as her ghosts: I know her ghosts like book body horror hauntologies.  Her weird ghosts cry wild Eloi Eloi Lema Sabacthani.

Christina disguised as Teo Macero invades my brain and I sculpt immaterial texts from horror hours     My body rough rough jams long language lost     I listen long language her lost host her word     I listen long language duplex longa verb desert     Her verb desert body rubble bolt salt soda pop language     Language pop soda stone bake body verb her: her verb ghost Christina     Her verb body vowel versions viscous vellum invade membranes brawl palimpsest

I prepare the palimpsest as a scraped earth rhizome language.  I prepare the palimpsest as an alchemical pumice or obsidian ouroboros.  Narrative plays palimpsest stretch palimpsest and palimpsest stinks palimpsest (Christina’s ghost body secretly decays in the empty tomb).  I soak the prepared piano palimpsest in my blood and pus, and its imaginary pages fill ink white mass peacock feathers.  Palimpsest propeller pulses horror punk splashes, and harsh melody encodes the cryptographic hash.  The palimpsest encodes the narrative multiply and narrative white mass piano sonata.  Piano performs prepared piano as wire palimpsests.

I word palimpsest splatterpunk (DIVINE MISTRESS  a novel of love and torture, and a doctors search for truth in the days of the Spanish Inquisition)     I word palimpsest splatterpunk wildcat woman     Palimpsest wilderness whip woman washing machine metamorphosis     I live washing machine blues UFO lights live hive machine     Washing machine hypnosis torpedo washing machine metamorphosis   (I molt my machine wash only exoskeleton)     Whip woman machine metamorphic granite not granite but upper and lower nile

Did you have any thoughts on my writing? I ask Jamie.  Vigilante angels practice hamon line alchemy, he says.  I don’t know a lot about modernist or postmodernist poetry, but I like it.  I like the rhythm of floating in and out of cohesion or linearity.  Some strong lines.  It’s like idea disassembles in front of you and the idea is cool to me.  I kind of get a William Gibson feel from it.  Like not that it has anything to do with him or his writing but the feeling I get of data structures adjoining or re-querying makes me think of him, he says.  Could you elaborate more on the thought “it’s like idea disassembles in front of you?”, I say.  You have statements, right, that lead to single word evaluations.  Like we’re reducing to the smallest element of the statement to analyze its core.  Some repeat and lead it different iterations.  Like we’re exploring the idea through dissection.  That makes sense, I say.  I like that analysis.  Would it be OK if I incorporated your analysis into my work?  Absolutely, he says.  I was telling my friend Asia – who appears in my work often – that I had a friend who read my work for the first time and describe it as kind of cubist multiple perspectives at once kind of writing.  I interpreted what you said a cubist approach, I say.

I careful my work and I create worlds and destroy worlds through letters: the transgressive Sabbath of the letters: the transgressive sabbath of the letters and the antinomian writings of the letters     I careful my work large lager letters and small salamander letters     I lengthen larger letters legerdemain cursive slate serpents (successive utterances of the divine names produce the four worlds and four words / Taryn Tetractys)

I write Open Book and Open Heavens     I riptide rhizome Open Book into and onto Open Heavens     Asia Among Rivers rap ripieno open book from through open heavens     Write witch stone creative heaven and I come upstream in the red canoes salmon

I open the book and Christina still resides between the spine, thread and glue     This sometimes surreptitious suicide resides in my spine latent tapeworm latex     I study suicides and suicide opens and closes the Book (I wish I could write songs about anything other than death, sings Julien Baker)     I have felt intensely bipolar and these intensities (these intense rays strata rhizomes rock hocket) flood mud mad hatter fleshes     Christina sticks in my flesh a bee stinger or engorged tick, and her teeth ghouls feeding on my blood     Suicide bores and it inks terrible tedium, a long scrawl tetragrammaton     Yet suicide seduces a long tendril splash orgasm, an orgiastic creative death     Death exudes a rhizome real, my ben hinnom valley cut body without organs     I study suicides split Christina torture spirits (to write my suicide as an interesting and creative performance     To archive my suicide beginning middle and Book) (Not a subtle suicide but an absurd theater and graphic violence cinema) (He didn't see himself as human; he saw himself as a creature from another world.  He said he had many visions that his blood had frozen in his veins, that he was dead.  That is the reason he took that name.  He knew he would die.)

I miss Christina and I wish to die without Christina     I miss Christina but I word palimpsest splatterpunk wildcat woman     Woman wild mash wind-up mechanical watch or odd work / Jack of all trades lily rosemary and the jack of hearts

I word raw whip palimpsest rhizome     I word splatter nonsense or anywhen word verse word     Her worse wildcast Christina cross coraline busy signal at suicide hotline     I word splatter-punk suicide bodies Christina body without organs     Her non-organs cell saw ghosts soda pop horror (Her horror hobbles to me music box pop goes to the weasel)

I word raw whip palimpsest     Her word whip raw strip skin hen to pan summer evening suicide     I word soup animal mall organism (an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism)     I sup word Christina last supper: supper shades palimpsest eucharist

Palimpsest incest scratches insets etched if earth etchings

Palimpsest insists on immediate suicide and suicides but my suicides occur in inconsistent termite fragments     I kiss suicide punches with Christina fangs

Palimpsest incest scratches insects etched if earth etchings     Palimpsest candle wick wildcat woman breve bereshit (I begin and end with the strata of my suicides     I needle language middle suicide bereshit and blessing) (I just… I just don’t understand!  Why did he kill himself?  Why was he walking along the tracks?  It just goes around and around in my head.  Why do you think he did it? …  The sea has the power to beguile.  Back when Dad was fishing, he once saw a maborosi – a strange light – far out to sea.  Something it was beckoning to him, he said… It happens to all of us.)    

I don’t know why suicide – not completely, I mean.  I have lived with this mental illness, with anxiety and bipolar disorder for more than half of my life and that certainly plays a significant role.  I feel an intensity and frequent anguish within my head that feels impossible to communicate with others:  Christina understood it, but Taryn and Asia do not.  So difficult, to live in the absence of Christina: her not-here pervades most of my waking moments.  Christina not-here scratches hatch patchwork ben skull palimpsest.  The quotation from the movie by Hirokazu Kore-eda from the film Maborosi in the paragraph before –  its text sluices suicide mystery and honey sweet mystery, and I too feel the seduction of suicide and my future death bewilders and beckons.  Sometimes in my future death I see Christina.  I imagine we have a suicide pact together and we enact a radical death, a sensual seductive pair of suicides like a dead man’s hand.  I sleep in the long sword of suicides and I don’t understand why either.  I just continue walking on the tracks.  The sea calls to me: her sea calls to me.

Palimpsest insects snack human skin scripture     Palimpsest sex insects scratch etched if earth etchings     I like if etch splatterpunk     I etch earth splatterpunk the sea has the power to beguile     I sign sea beguiles body without organs door hinge hatch egg acid

Would you care if I died? I say. Do you think my friendship with you is a bad thing in your life? Do you think you’d be better without my friendship in your life?  Yes, I will care, says Asia.  I have answered this question multiple times and the answer hasn’t changed.  You can’t assume that I don’t care just because I don’t respond for a few fucking minutes.  No, I don't think your friendship is bad.  I enjoy your friendship.  That is why I’m your friend, she says.  The answer can change though, I say.  That’s why I asked.  Have I said or done anything to make you think it changed? Says Asia.  My actions change, I say.  That is what is changing.  It doesn't have anything to do with what you say or do.  It has to do with what I say and do.  But mine haven’t, says Asia.

I realize something in my writing about my suicidal ideation and writing my friendship with Asia: my friendship with her – our friendship, the Ben and Asia friendship – makes it difficult to die.  The level of unconditional care and unconditional love we have for each other astounds me, and our friendship makes a more effective antisuicide treatment than lithium

Palimpsest incest scratches insects etched if earth etchings     Palimpsest candle wick wildcat woman breve bereshit: I bow bereshit break bit-off bitumen   butte semibreve bark rhizome     Palimpsest tar pit pitch bottomless pit line lime minum cut minimum

I write Open Book palimpsest and Open Sky palimpsest