War

he talks with his hands, and moves in exaggerated dances when he gets excited, so that every conversation is a kind of performance, in whihc what he said, and the way that he would have acted are blurred together into a sort of spastic onrush, an endless torrent of imagined violence. he has a wooden baseball bat with "nazi tool" written on it in sharpie, and a fondness for pain pills that started with purloining his mother's sleeping pills, her antidepressants and pain medication, we'd drink on my roof, forties from scraped change, robbed wishing wells, car drink cups growing warm in our hands, listening to the coke dealer fight with his girlfriend downstairs, the fake dawn of the city glowing yellow against the clouds. he is filled with boundless energy, and so he likes to get high a lot, to soften the edges, the hostility from being the small kid, the kid with delicate features, the white kid with the curly hair, the dark complection. we call him rosanne rosannadanna when we want to fuck with him. from the way ti sticks out on the sides of his head like a cleopatra wig.
He likes megadeth, Exodus, Metallica, and Nuclear Assault, so i show him DRI and the Misfits. he wears a ratty old "peace sells but who'se buying" backpatch on an icewashed denim jacket that smells like bongwater. the walls of his room are covered in pages torn from circus and hit parader, he's got a spindly pot plant, probably male, growing in his closet under a fluorescent light.

chapter 6

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. 2And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. 3And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. 4And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. 5And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. 6And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. 7And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. 8And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. 9And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: 10And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? 11And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. 12And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; 13And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. 14And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. 15And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; 16And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
17For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

waiting for the end of the world

there's always a fire, and you and the three gathered around it, a pinjoint going round, warm beer and creedence and the river. the catfish jump and fall into the water, the coal barges roll past with foghorns and spotlights, down on the muddy bank on the Kentucky side, and the shitty town lit up like a poor kid's Christmas, long bars of light across the black water. they found the old copper axes not far from here, the sunrise sights up along roads plowed over the tops of mounds and the mud and gravel beech is littered with bone beads, the flooded fields behind you littered with pottery shards, sometimes the plows turn up skulls, or lead shot.
you are waiting, waiting for the Russians to drop the bomb, for the war to come that will swallow the boys trying to fish, for the bottom to drop out. you are waiting for a blue fog of crushed pills and heroin and coke that will make the pin joint, the fifth of Beam, the Keystone light in cans seem innocent as milk.
someone is always fucking somebody Else's girl, someone is always hustling someone out of a few bucks on a bag of dirt weed, there is always a reason for someone to be looking for someone else, for shifting alliances, and bullshit drama, for fights over who is controlling the stereo in the car that runs, doors open, radio blaring out over the foghorns and the river, headlights in the fog.

this is the era of spraypainted pentagrams and shoplifted black candles and misformed prayers to a destroying angel who will not deign to come, it is the season of denim, of gutteral screams and invocation and apocolypse, and the four horsemen arguing over speedmetal and Creedence and Hank Williams and Danzig and Venom and the girls just want to dance under the big ass moon, and tonight , at least everyone is content to wait, for the world to hang on the edge of the black river, that line between never and always that feels like dying, and you never know there is a place for nostalgia for this waiting, this anteroom to your life, the fish dropping liquid int he dark, the taste of cheap beer, the sound of your friends laughing, and you are all dying, sick with smokestacks and yellow fog, sick with hopelessness and the hunger for anything outside the damned bowl of these hills that girdle round the horizon and the hollers and the pigshit and garages with poached deer hanging and going to school with pigshit on your boots, with stealing pills and smoking shake and waiting for the black curve in the road that will be the one where you finally shake the hills off for good, where you finally will shoot out onto the plain towards the city, over the rim of the world like a ship on the ocean, like a coal barge on a black river hurtling towards a light that might be a fire, you are staring into, the speedy blotter acid spinning behind your eyes like a kids toy, you pupils eerie and big and the stars all pouring in, or houses in the fields beside the road, the lights of something spinning around your head, and you wait, and a ball of fire rises in the east, and it's done.