Revolution on Canvas, Volume 2

by Rich Balling

  Before the tree gave up all hope and lost its will to thrive and cope

  I gave it sight right the ground and it saw roots connecting down The same roots that were there since birth into the ground unto the earth

  The roots that stay vanished from sight but with the earth gave the tree life

  The tree then saw its roots are one with fellow trees though separate trunks

  And then it knew though separate leaves its roots belonged to fellow trees

  And it then knew when one tree falls that every tree holds a slight pause

  Because trees are one in death and birth connected by their roots and earth

  The tree learned that along with sight comes the pledge to use it right

  And not to judge based on what’s seen because trees are not such selfish beings

  Although sight would have them stand alone when eyes are closed each tree is home

  Each tree alive unto the earth sharing its roots in death and birth

  Humans are trees with different leaves

  With differing shades of which each one perceives

  And as sight has them think they’re alone in the breeze

  Their roots form the words of soft prayers on their knees

  DANIEL MURILLO

  Lorene Drive

  For the Rest of Us

  It seems like everybody knows

  You’re running in circles again

  I fell into your perfect smile

  No one should know about this

  You keep your smile

  I’ll keep this to myself

  You’re a wonderful thing

  And that’s obvious but

  Don’t light that cigarette again

  You don’t need a second opinion

  About anything or anyone at all

  Seems like everybody knows

  That you’re not going to be around

  This time next year

  Front line demanding activity

  The cash flow slows

  And now they need your dream

  You’re giving me a heart attack

  But we’ll keep this to ourselves

  So what was learned from this lesson

  As I walked right through the room to you

  COLIN FRANGICETTO

  Circa Survive

  “HUMILIATING SOBRIETY” and the MISSING LIMB (a godless prayer)

  PART I: Lying Asleep.

  Woke up to feel something

  missing like a limb.

  Numb and black, the ever-growing void.

  Like cancerous vines that strangle

  the throat of memory.

  Misplacement of the metaphysical microscope.

  Overlooking closeness and

  purpose like danger

  and its apparent absence;

  our hilarious helmet.

  Dreamless and dry,

  Sleepwalker countryside.

  Suicide culture.

  Bottle to the mouth.

  Parasite to its host.

  Pour into our bellies,

  empty us out.

  Plastic newspaper television warship

  of the hijacked “reality.”

  Commanders in chief,

  so-called “leaders of men.”

  The blackest of magic.

  The blackest of hearts.

  Gray-eyed demon tricksters.

  Circus showmen selling flaccid insurance.

  Insurance of madness. Insurance of fear. (keep angry and afraid)

  Selling the mirage of a vanishing god.

  Brought to our knees.

  Abandoned we feel

  everything in order

  now faith is placed into them. (removed from our shoulders)

  Enter through exit.

  New objects of worship.

  Meaningless logos,

  the name-brand mentality,

  toilet-water ministry.

  Cut and paste, clone-like communities.

  Terror alert watch, pepper-spray stock market.

  Scared of the inevitable crash and ourselves.

  Speeches of freedom in united division.

  Social insecurity.

  FeNcE after FeNcE after FeNcE after FeNcE.

  Invisible families, impossible values.

  Darkening spiral,

  crystalline

  cellophane, our religion.

  Descending detachment,

  most brutal of drugs.

  Consumption of distraction; from ourselves,

  from our language, and from communication itself.

  It seems that words never reach quite far enough.

  PART II: Alarm.

  Importance: the perverse arrangement.

  Buried potential in deep, unmarked graves.

  Forsaken, our families. Forsaken, our love.

  Wearing ourselves like masks in the ritual.

  Custom closing our circles, seemingly sealing our fate,

  concealing the next notes of the octave.

  Time: the unraveling string.

  The knot twist eternal.

  Intestines with wings.

  Infinite loss. Infinite gain.

  We wait for this war to be finally over.

  We wait to be together again.

  We wait for the rebirth.

  We can no longer be waiting in vain.

  Whispering to wizards,

  Screaming to scribes.

  Asking of artists,

  the modern day shaman. (the most needed, the medicine man)

  “Bring us back to life.”

  “Paint us back to life.”

  We long for completion,

  begging the infinite questions.

  Their answers are elegant.

  Naked but secure,

  The truth as it disrobes.

  Hideous beauty. Complex simplicity.

  These solutions sleep with our struggles, internal.

  They breathe with and speak through

  The mud, grass and trees, the swamps and the seas.

  The sands of the lands and the stars never seen.

  PART III: Lying Awake.

  And they say …

  “Remember your families.

  Remember your love.

  Tribute the ones who were here before,

  you will join them like mold.

  Teach to the young who will soon be the old.

  Call out the cowards who claim falsely to lead.

  Return to origin.

  Return to intuition.

  The sacred reunion.

  Humanity and its soul,

  the function of the wave.

  Perception of the particle.

  Beyond the subatomic quantum mechanical.

  Passing through flesh. Into the blood. Under the cells.

  This once was a ‘flat world’

  There is more to discover.

  Although we fly, it ends in land or crash.

  The freedom of flight means eventual choice.

  Fall to the earth.

  Look to the skies.

  (Those streets that hold our spirits inside,

  like lips that kiss for the first and the ultimate time.)

  Our standards, our structures, (both physical and non)

  must be torn down, seeding the future, cement to the past.

  Lest it be forgotten, forever remember to always rebuild.

  This time, build to last.

  (What seems redundant is most likely just urgent.)

  Resist what is known,

  It betrays what is learned.

  Resist what is owned,

  It betrays what is needed.”

  Something is missing.

  It seems after all,

  that in fact we are all part of both

  the limb that assumes disembodiment

  and its forgetful owner gone numb.

  This would have to mean …

  we are all somehow missing each other.

  ANTHONY GREEN

  Ci
rca Survive

  Look—Look

  That’s a shitty thing to say man, you’re a shitty dude, you know that? Nobody’s special—and nobody changes. It’s rare when we can even tell the difference. I can’t say I’m always happy with who I am. But daily I’m at battle with a personal sense of defeat I feel everyone’s born with. Original sin. We are a result of shame in motion, wet friction, fear, an impulse control board located low, and underneath the belly. Processed—(pray for forgiveness) and nurtured from what would seem by any child to be a giant tittie, or denied the tittie. I’m not sure which is worse. But I am sure that defeats the whole idea of special from the get-go-----------------------------------------------------Unless you’re retarded. Canal. Every sound amplified. Coming through. The pulls and pushes. The air and bushes. Warm feet rub against my feet. Small and walking with me passed our fifth year. Look look—see that sleep drug commercial. Where all the fluffy puppies rest curled up in the doggy bed. That look—look! Like they’re dead.

  BRENDAN EKSTROM

  Circa Survive

  “…”

  The ringing in our ears was almost incidental. But the smell, as it slipped through the bathroom door, was too much to take. We stood there, crippled by silence, the smoke and sulfur stinging our eyes. And though it would take the Shockwaves ten years to bring the arthritis to my knees, yours turned to stone that day, crumbling onto the tile. If only your son had been enough to keep you standing.

  ERIC FREDERIC

  Facing New York

  hands are lightbulbs

  shattering from where they dock

  every instant illuminated

  on trains cutting through fields of boyish hair

  inviting world leaders to walk on the glass

  fingers are shards sprinkled in the shallow mud

  refracting light with precision

  so we can work after hours

  this morning

  i woke by the river

  troubled, uneasy

  i reach for my sneakers

  totally soaked

  and a boys’ choir starts to sing

  in a language i don’t speak

  because it’s deer language

  hundreds of faun

  high in the branches

  of the redwood trees

  no expression, unmoving

  just staring down at me

  i’ve had a rough transition back into the states

  japan was a bird i wanted to eat

  but could never catch

  let alone digest

  once i’d seen another — of the world

  i cried for my parents

  in their modest home

  just how my eyes grew eager to spill

  at the movies

  during the previews for that summer’s blockbuster

  i don’t want to think about this anymore

  MATTHEW KELLY

  The Autumns

  The Pale Antechamber

  I once read a book entitled House of Leaves. It was, not surprisingly, about a house, though not an ordinary one. This house’s interior measured larger than its exterior. On learning this, the owner was naturally spooked. This rather enticing opener was shortly derailed and the plot soon ramified to a delta of dead ends and failed twists. The anchoring of the uncanny in things as banal as a house and tape measure, however, was a stroke of genius.

  Lately, I have started to wonder if the author might have been writing from experience. I will explain why in a moment. But first, some background is in order. We begin with what I assume is a rarely expressed but widely appreciated truth. People enjoy listening to other people having sex. It sounds nice. It pulses like Urstoff on a clear blue morning. It is warm and inviting. This is not to say that everyone is an active voyeur, only that everyone is a voyeur. I, for one, am always pleased to have neighbors who screw loudly and often. I especially relish listening to the girl.

  I noticed a few months ago that I have once again been lucky enough to have such neighbors. They get going late at night, usually between two and three in the morning, suffusing the walls of the apartment building with such a fever that they seem to sweat. I am certain their young moans raise the temperature of all in earshot.

  One morning, I mentioned to my wife, “You know, our neighbors fuck like mad. Just about every night at the same time.”

  “You enjoy that, don’t you?” she replied insinuatingly.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Do you know which neighbors?” she asked.

  “On the other side of the bedroom.” I pointed. “You can hear everything. These walls are like paper.”

  “You’re confused,” she stated nonchalantly. “An old man lives next door—very old. And he lives alone.”

  She then reminded me of a recent occurrence that, on reflection, threw my theory into disarray. A vagrant had wandered behind our apartment complex early one Saturday and began banging on doors and rattling windows, looking for a handout. Our aged neighbor made his way to the back door noisily and scolded him. “I’m an old man. I don’t have anything for you. Leave me alone!”

  “Give me a hat!” the vagrant demanded.

  “I don’t have a hat!” barked our hapless neighbor. “Why do I need a hat? I don’t go outside.”

  This did seem to discredit my claim. It was hardly plausible that this fellow enjoyed a thriving and utterly punctual sex life. On consideration, I figured that the sounds were probably coming from upstairs, or maybe from the apartment that stood cattycorner to ours. But after a few days’ reprieve, the stirring and moaning began anew and, to my surprise, the action was definitely happening in the room opposite ours. Doubly intrigued, I raised myself on one elbow, placing one ear to the wall and plugging the other to fully exploit my auditory powers. I suddenly heard nothing. Reclining again, I could just make out a news program blasting from a cheap, tinny radio. And there beneath the coarsened hum of today’s events were the unmistakable sounds of you-know-what. This time, however, there was a distinctly pornographic tinge to the proceedings. The bad music was an immediate giveaway. Add to that the boilerplate naughty chatter and it became clear that the old man was, for whatever reason, orchestrating a Janus-faced news-porn symphony. Maybe he had a crush on one of the anchors. “They are getting sexier,” I thought. On the other hand, he was easily eighty-five. I now faced the gruesome specter of an old, old porn aficionado. The mystery was solved, at any rate. No young couples were tangling on the floor of this ailing character’s apartment.

  Or so I thought. Months later, it started again. This time, the porn hypothesis was jettisoned straightaway. No music. No dirty talk. Just those familiar and eminently alluring sounds of pleasure. It was, to repeat, all transpiring on the other side of the bedroom wall. Lounging in my bed, imbibing these sweet sounds, I realized something: my head was attached to the wall. Curious, I removed it. This yielded silence. I reattached, and the sex returned. I repeated the exercise several times more, perplexed by my ability to toggle so cleanly between the two. From my limited knowledge of acoustics, I could gather that such proximate sounds should at least have been detectable without my having to place my head against the bedroom wall. I could not account for it, and trying to fatigued me. I soon fell asleep.

  I had almost forgotten this bizarre nocturnal quandary when I ran into our landlord one afternoon a few days later. Half the power in our apartment had mysteriously flickered out. The landlord and his affable engineer friend came by to investigate. Unable to help myself, I asked at what seemed an opportune moment, “Who lives next door to us?”

  “You mean there?” he said, nodding hastily in the relevant direction.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He stared at me quizzically for a moment and then replied, “No one lives there. It’s been vacant for over a year.”

  Dumbstruck and a little breathless, I heard myself ask, “Who is the old man?”

  The landlord shot me a bemused and vaguely condescending look, t
hen rejoined the electrician without offering a reply.

  I was, needless to say, unsatisfied and now deeply perplexed. I challenged my wife. “You see, something weird is going on. We saw an old man come out of that apartment!”

  “We didn’t see him, we heard him. He’s probably from one of the other apartments and it just sounded like he was next door,” she reassured me.

  I didn’t push the point, but I knew something was amiss. I tried not to let curiosity get the better of me but it was no use. In short order, I found myself outside the next-door window, peaking through the blinds to catch sight of the old man. Our apartment building sits on the corner of Orange and Franklin in Hollywood, in the shade of the Magic Castle. One can look into the apartments either from the Orange side, which opens to an all but fixed concatenation of cars and the occasional red double-decker that line the street.

  Alternatively, one can view the apartments from Franklin. From this side, many of them are tucked out of sight, their back windows winding behind the building. For several weeks that summer, I could be glimpsed out front in the early morning hours, pretending to water my phantom neighbor’s flowers while furtively peering through the front windows. I kept such espionage beneath the umbrella of night, of course, but partook so routinely in this mischief that I remained eminently vulnerable to detection (and perhaps eviction, having already made a fine impression on the landlord with my impossible line of inquiry).

  In retrospect, though, I can hardly fault myself. I would lie down in bed, begin drifting off, and then, like clockwork, the noises would rouse me. I would press my ear to the wall to no avail. I would relax again, letting my head touch the wall, and there it would be. Some nights I would only hear the blaring of news programs or sitcoms. Others it would be the sex. Still others the pornography. Bewildered, I would invariably sneak outside and peer into the old man’s apartment, only to stare vainly into a hopelessly darkened room.

  And so I was forced to reckon with a rather inscrutable set of facts. One: the adjacent apartment was vacant. Two: an insomniac, porn-addicted old man resided there, occasionally playing host to live sex. Three: this was detectable only when lying face up on the bed and touching the crown of one’s head to the bedroom wall.

  Later, a fourth pear-shaped premise would be thrown into the mix: the head had to be mine. When my wife tried it, she heard nothing.

  The palpable presence of unreality did not persist long without consequence. I was soon unhorsed and scrambling for inconceivably scattered first principles. Such was my state when the still more unsettling solution dawned on me like the rising sun of genius. I had, I realized, stumbled upon a portal to my own mind. Indeed, the portal was located exactly four feet and three inches across and two feet and seven and a quarter inches up my wall. I marked it with a pencil. It was also time-sensitive. Touching the top of my skull to the penciled dot between two and three in the morning would unfailingly do the trick. The room next door would briefly double as the chamber of my subconscious. Not being a psychologist by training, I could not unearth the deeper meaning of its occupants: a three-legged octogenarian, pacing the pale antechamber of death; a young couple, entwined in the sunlit ecstasy of sex; and the fuzzy ambience of porn, news, and indecipherable chatter in which both bathed.