NADA

the dada magazine about

noth

ing

12:30, stomach growls right on cue. Plan: Headover to the casino, grab some conference food, sitat my desk and watch pussy power videos. At the door I hear my boss calling after me. Hesays we’re on lockdown, that no one can leave thebuilding. I turn and look at him in dismay.He says an inmate escaped from his transfer offi-cer and is roaming around campus. This is on thesame day the crime report came out; stating nocrimes had been committed on campus for the thirdyear in a row.(Some asshole with a gun is trying to ruin my

lunch plans.)Pushing through the doors takes little effort. I’mhungry dammit. My boss yells after me that it’sthe rez, things are dangerous here, which is hi-larious coming from a Midwestern white guy whodresses like an Easter egg. Anywhere else there would be guards patrolling ordoing something else officious. But no, two secu-rity officers sit at the casino entrance lack-adaisically chain smoking, waiting for the bad guyto show up. They tell me the building is on lock down. That nocan leave and no one is admitted until the guy witha gun is apprehended. The door is barricaded andeverything. Guy walks up, panting, taps on the glass.‘What’s up cousin?’ Guy slips in the door and hugsthe guard. Door shuts. Then everything became really funny.

I had to. It was juicy and well seasonedand my ramen packs were freshly emptied.After all – everyone knew Greg had no future.

It’s not what you ‘d expect,There was no mountain, or alcoholno culturally relevant slicing of flesh,I was just hungry, and he hasn’t paid rent in monthsSo there we were,Him – asleep.

Me, digging a fork into my his side,It was so easy. Too easy.

All the energy he pouredinto ear-screeching Aerosmith covers,loud phone sex, and marathon eatingrendered him deep asleep.Now a deep roasted dead.

I knew he’d taste good becauseHe’d eaten all MY FOOD.

One bite and I was sold,I got it, I understood the shady chefs who ordered human heads off Ebay.I felt a kinship with the countries and towns still openly sacrificing their own.Greg tasted more tender than he ever acted,and this marked a rebirth for both my morals and my taste buds.

All it took was a forearm to fill me up,So I Tupperwared the rest, marking it“FRESH, CITY RANGE MEAT.”

I felt new! The graveyard was now my limit!There were black market offshoot websites to visit!Seedy older men in bars to solicit for organs!Babies to poach!

I Ate Human Flesh,and I’ve never looked better!

I saw you as the sun in a field that housed

a steel mill amid acres of mental hospitals

spilling over an endless welter

of stone

* After that day

I've been throwing away all of my possessions,

crying in closets, beneath sheets,

and in random spurts in the middle of the day streets.

murmuring litanies about the absolute perfection of your skull

on the subway

* I saw you in medicine cabinets

of the sentences that I try to tease out of cheese cloth or idiotically smash against stone

your eyes rearrange the insincerity of my

words into the diamond thighs

of a bionic

Cervantes

* I would be less than nothing without you

* (A ghost imitating the crude maneuvering of starlight)

* blood on fresh snow

*

Proust, in all his wisdom,

gave a lecture on the

cowardice of

a caress

* Gertrude Stein on the futility of love

* and finally Rimbaud on

the ecstasy of losing yourself

to 'the psychopathic murmurs

enhanced and made lucid

by the bones of a tongues

bite.

* I saw you as you

faded and then appeared dressed in brilliance between a staircase and a lepers colony

Florence Nightingale riding your coat-tails tracing

your shadow,

you were lonely, like a wrinkle

and lovely

like a crow.

* Your eyes create the Alphabet

( I could say it for an eternity and it would get old)

I saw you in the old churches of Norway

having a seizure or overcome

with

the h(a)oly spirit.

even

Merce Cunningham's jaw bone

couldn't complete

the cycle,

I saw you

me weeping like a toddler lost in a supermarket to a cement ocean

all the while trying to cut myself a cleft lip,

and when all is said and done,

we weren't really that

good together,

anyways

- like tandoori chicken cooked in a broth of coke cola-

all wrong from the start.

* There are things

worse

than the grave,

vultures grazing on your scalp, boredom, loneliness, telephones, and death.

*

we just can’t put our mouths around the names.

* We chased each other into the basement of an abyss or the

sleeping quarters of an abandoned factory,

and in certain dreams-

I still give chase

over a (rambling) mountainside inside the

stilted stride

of a wounded SANTIAGO

the

eternal return

* the maze of Seattle could be the maze of Connecticut and always this dance with complete strangers

* I chase you and then you chase me

our

hands in our pockets and none of this is any fun.

* It wasn't until Shakespeare came along that anyone could correctly utter the word:

snake.

A couple of tears, semen

and drops of

blood

stern like a field

of lettuce

among the pillars of Bed-Stuy - seen from the view of a hospital.

* Furniture that is in bad taste.

* Your nakedness was whittled beyond flesh

and I laughed

(in that moment)

in the weird

joy that we

would lose

each other

in skyscrapers and the panels of the Pentagon

our electromagnetic pulse sputtering at

centipede speed.

* but also at the pace of a whisper

* irreversible loss covers everything in tones

Him with his foot in his mouthYes, things in his mouthSevered tongues’ leveragepushed around her shoulder,Overexposed in cold window airthrough the thin junkie blanket threaded to her left side.Right hands, small, tugging at the foot in his mouth, still.

The radio’s on,repeating one song all night long

She’d make a better man than him, Rhyming leaden with lady or woman:

His leaden chest on hers, his arms a hymn of taut fiber, contracted tendons.

Something to hold onto.

He ought shave those features off for her to find yet another place

to rest her hand.

The radio’s on, repeating one song all night long

We’ve come to the end of a line. Forty awfulcanyons lined up one against another like cutsfrom a cosmic butcher’s knife. You could crawlthrough them on your hands and knees if you wanted.It would take days to get to the otherside.

There’s a predictable cycle to the days here:The wind comes in. People wake up. Everyone goesabout their business in a predictable way. Thingsstop, people eat. The afternoon is spent loungingaround. People eat again. The evening grinds to ahalt. People pack in. The wind changes. Theysleep. The world revolves like this in such an ut-terly predictable way. This is just the overviewof course. Within these cycles are smaller onethat complicate things slightly, but you’ve essen-tially understood the pace of life here withoutlosing much at all.

No, I am trying to think of how to describethe people that live here. Let’s get this straightright off the bat: I’m not one of them. I am moreof a documentarian than anything, a journalistfree floating. They’ve accepted me regardless.They are not rejects, really, as this would indi-cate that someone out there noticed the peoplelong enough to reject them. No, they are sort ofthe people who have fallen through the cracks in ahorrendous way. The people who have been so lostto society that any niche they might have carvedout in the world had simply shriveled up into noth-ingness. They are human wisps. Bits of smoke thathave congealed for a short time into somethingthat can be kicked around and overlooked before itdisperses back into nothingness.

I could say there was a sadness around themor around this place but this would not be totallyaccurate. They have accepted their place in theworld and, I think, feel more comfortable herethan they would elsewhere. The feeling is a bitdifferent, a bit more nuanced and certainly moreaffecting that mere, simple sadness. Of coursehere lies the issue: I never would have noticedone of these people in the outside world so I haveno benchmark from which to compare them. They arewell aware of their place. It could even be de-scribed as an affliction as, from what I can tell,most of them have done nothing actively to deservethis. True, there are a few that actively seek outthe anonymity of this place. There are the peoplewho enjoy the emptiness of this place. It is insome ways considered a noble burden here. Theirattitude reminds me of the one held be certain doc-tors, in that they feel that they are somehow nec-essary for the continuation of the world. It isalmost a haughtiness. Some feel this superioritywhile others have a deep sense of being much lessimportant. It should be noted that a small groupfeeds a strange sort of militarism, more blusterthan actual fighting gumption.

Would you be surprised if I told you therewas a lot of sitting around? Idleness is a way oflife here and holds a central importance. At firstI found it excruciating, the hours spent justwatching the world go by. I think I’ve come to growused to it now. I think it’s important to note (andmaybe a few of you will find this contradictory orimpossible) that laziness is abhorred here. It isnearly impossible to get across the nuance here tosomeone from outside their community. For example:it is expected that one sit and watch the world goby for hours at a time, perhaps speaking a littleor playing a game with a child. It is consideredvery bad taste however to sleep these hours awayor simply ‘lay around’ inside. There were morethan a few times that I found myself being scoldedby a matronly type for breaching some minor vari-ation of this rule. It seemed that the prime com-ponent here was observation. Not necessarilywatching for some threat but more for the simpleact of watching.

Nada

dada

maga

zine

tumb

lris

suu

@gma

il

Rockwell Press Collective

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I Ate Human Flesh