The missing soundscape

I guess some people fancy me a decent writer, personally I think most of what I put on paper is mediocre at best, then again, I guess most artists tend to think their work could always be better. Lately I’ve been wishing I was a musician. I’ve been doing allot of writing lately that has really been more lyrical than strait forward poetry, or short pieces.

I’m reminded of my crappy band back in high school. We really were horrible, but we didn’t really give a shit either. It started out as something of a Punk rock/Metal kind of thing, and quickly morphed into darker voyages into sound. Inspired mainly by Skinny Puppy and NIN we did put together a few songs that at worst, were as good as your average crappy Goth Industrial band would put out.

I myself was not a musician, I fumbled my way around my guitar. I think a certain frustration grew out of my inability to actually play and my lack of patients of taking the time to learn. I had ideas for music, and sound and I wasn’t going to let a stupid thing like not knowing how to play an instrument get in the way.

So I began to experiment with just creating sound from my guitar and bass. I spent my money on various effects equipment and just started playing around. Eventually our band got together again for a practice, and while fooling around setting up our equipment I got lost in my own world creating sound from the keyboard and my guitar. Before I knew it the band had picked up on it, and we delved into a cascading frenzy of sound that can only be described as a hollow anger.

That first session with our foray into sound ended up creating the few good songs we actually ever did. I’ve been thinking about that allot lately, I miss that excitement of doing something that I’m not fully understanding, but that somehow is magically working. So I wonder, would I appreciate music as much as I do if I had learned to play in a traditional sense? Would I care more about proper structure and songwriting than I would about how the sound is conveying emotion and energy?

People look at me with a very peculiar face when I explain that Beethoven is my favorite musician. But he wrote his music based purely on what he heard in his head. His idea of the how the sound conveyed emotion. Stone deaf when he was older, he produced music that still has yet to be rivaled.

In many regards, it’s that same sense of music that attracts me to NIN and Skinny Puppy. Cataclysmic clashes of sound and feelings one minute, and beautiful melodies the next, hammered out in unconventional ways. I wish I had the ability to do that.

So, to get back on the original topic, I have been writing allot of things in a lyrical sense these days. Playing sounds in my head, building the music there and trying to piece it together with what is going down on paper.

At first glance the “poetry” seems to skip it meter at points, or to loose it all together. But there is a reason for it, there is a missing piece of sound, that sadly no one else can hear. Maybe one of these days I’ll get over any nervousness and insecurity about not knowing how to play an instrument, and take a plunge back into it, and maybe who knows, maybe others will be able to hear the music that accompanies the writing.

A Look Back

I was going over some of my older pieces, and I wanted to revisit a couple.

The upcoming piece was written as a challenge, a cry for help if you will to everyone in my life that hurt me, or thrown me away somehow. People whop should have loved me, but for whatever reason choose to abandon that, in some cases use me as a scapegoat for their shortcoming and aggressions.

Much of it centers around the habit I became accustomed to of hurting myself, before others could. This started as a child, centered predominately around my mother, and my family life at the time. I was often humiliated, and put down to an extent that my self worth was ultimately destroyed by the time I was nine or ten years old.

It was so bad that I looked for ways to stop those who were abusing me from doing harm to me. What seemed to work was to punish myself, often physically, before they could. I can recall whipping myself with electric cords (which is detailed in the piece below), and as I grew into my early teens I turned to cutting myself with sharp objects, and even punching myself in the face.

I would do it to make them stop. The physical abuse I had grown numb to, it was the mental and emotional anguish that ate away at me. When I would be assaulted with that mental and emotional abuse, I would transform it into physical abuse through masochism. If they could witness it, or the scars left behind, sometimes it would garner me a relief from the torture my heart and mind were going through.

This is a particularly horrible aspect of my life, which I have shared with only a few people in my. Some have seen it first hand. At the center of it, is my own personal demon that rises anytime I am made to feel I hurt someone, or I caused others pain even if indirectly. I feel I should suffer instead.

But grown directly form the abuse I suffered as a child is a burning hatred, that is saying, “Look what you made me do, now stop hurting me”. I wanted those people to see that all the times I was told I was worthless, I would never be anything, all the times I was made to cry, that there were real affects for all the world to see.

Even I grew older, I came to think it people a certain sense of satisfaction to hurt me. That they somehow relished in their ability to keep me down. Again lashing out at myself in a manner that was more brutal, more out in the open than emotional or mental abuse would maybe hit home to those people. Maybe if they saw how bad it hurt, if they saw the bruises, and all the bleeding they wouldn’t feel happy to see my in pain anymore.

There is allot of anger in this piece centered around my mother, but that anger also applies to love itself. All the times I felt this way, I felt unloved. In many ways, I was angry at God, why would God do this to me?

Ultimately the masochism resulted in wanting to cause the ultimate harm to myself, to commit suicide. My thoughts always were, “Maybe when I’m gone, I’ll mean something to you”. That perhaps, maybe then people would realize what it was I was going through. Mayeb then they would see how I hurt, and what parts they played in it. But ultimately, it would forever stop the pain.

With that said, here is the first piece:

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A Final Goodbye

I was a little boy, just a little child. The sting of the electric cords whipped across my back. It wasn’t your hand; it was mine that guided them. But I did it for you. Did it make you happy to see me hurt, to see me punish myself? All those times, I was just a little boy.

Why did you laugh when I cried? And where were you all the times that I died? When I was bathed in blood in the street; on the gurney, Drano stopping my heart; over dosed on the livingroom floor, choked on my own vomit. Where the fuck were you?

Did the blood on my arms make you see? All those times, just what it was you did to me? The cut of the blade, the sting of the needle, isn’t that what you really wanted? Didn’t you want to see me hurt, for all the bad things I’d done? Didn’t you want to see me cry? Isn’t that what you really wanted?

Fucked me up for good. Fucked me up beyond repair. I wasn’t perfect enough for you. I was you’re burden; I was everything in your way. I wasn’t your child; I was your living abortion.

Older, even more fucked up than before. Unworthy, easily replaceable, lifelike and pose able. Dress me up and tell me lies. Parade me around, and show the world your toy. Beat me, abuse me, control me, I am forever nothing.

I’ll beat myself to sleep, cut off this rotting meat. Render me to pieces, isn’t that what you really want? Guide my hand to the bottle, put the pills in my mouth. Choke me till I swallow. Pin me down, and watch me cry, watch the tears run dry. Watch my body die.

Isn’t that what you really wanted?

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When I was 17, I committed my first real attempt at ending my life. All the childhood trauma had come to a head that summer. I had run out of my Mother’s house, because I finally stood up to her abusive lover the year before, and was now living with my father. I can’t really blame my Father and my Step Mother for how I was treated there. Having a royally fucked up 16 year old kid dumped on you isn’t an easy thing to deal with.

It seemed I was punished for things that were so petty it was ridiculous. Leaving my tooth paste out on the bathroom counter, not putting my water glass in the dishwasher. I wasn’t just yelled at, my freedoms were stripped away, I was told how bad I was, and it just ate on me.

This piece speaks for itself of the state of mind I was in. The hollow empty feeling, like my head and my heart suddenly became detached from reality. If I recall I had been grounded for the entire summer because I was late getting home from school one day. I was laying on my bed in my room, my father was arguing with my Step Mother and was trying to give my little sister a bath. She was of course screaming.

I started crying, I’m not sure exactly why, but I know I cried for a while, and then suddenly, it was like a lightswitch had been turned on somewhere, I knew what had to be done.

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A Trail Of My Footsteps

The screaming was too much to bear. I could feel the walls of my mind and body closing in around me, smothering me. I had crawled out the window, and walked blindly, dazed to the store above the highway. Just past the overpass. You’d miss it, drive right past, if you didn’t already know it was there.

The sound of the cars passing below was like the wailing of suffering souls. The cries of the damned spiraled up off the pavement and soared up over head into my ears. The world was collapsing, vision was surreal, a patchwork of images overlapping others, time out of sync.

There was no pain, no feeling, for a moment my vision was clear as I watched the skin separate, crimson shooting out into the street, splattering on the window of a car as it drove by. They wouldn’t stop, no one would. A spray of their washers, a quick swish of their wiper blades, and my suffering was washed away from them.

Red dots littered the ground at my feet, like rain they fell. My hand ran red, the warmth of my soul washing away the grime. Everything was silent. The cars stopped their wailing, the trees made no noise in the breeze, the birds were sadly mute. I walked, each step another release, another moment closer to god.

My boot began to run thick with blood, splattered and stained; my shorts clung to my leg. The chain about my wrist glinted now and then in the sunlight, a flash of silver, stained red. I started to feel myself slipping away. A trail of crimson dots had marked my passage.

Past the happy houses, and gardening gnomes I walked. The world closed in more with each step, the colors ran drab. To the street, that house, that one there, that’s where I walked, nearly a mile from the store above the highway, to here I walked. My legs buckled, I fell. My face turned up, my vision fading. In the narrow tunnel of light, heaven unfolded it’s arms, and in it’s embrace, the pain disappeared.

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Obviously I did not die. The little sister of my girlfriend’s best friend had apparently seen my collapse. My girlfriend was t their house which was just a few houses down the street from where I fell, and was actually walking back there from my best friend’s house. I’m not entirely sure in what order things transpired. The paramedics were called, and I remember vaguely my girlfriend holding my head in her lap as I was slipping in and out of consciousness, her crying, begging me not to die. I was unconscious for the ambulance ride, I had lost quite a bit of blood. Later they told me that if I hadn’t been found when I was, I would have died.

I still bear the scar of that day on my wrist, and tucked away in a box is the chain bracelet I wore on that arm. My girlfriend had the key to the lock, it was something of a peculiar irony that she happened to be there. She took the chain off my wrist before the paramedics arrived. In a box it still sits, flakes of blood still adorn it.
It was not my intention to be found, especially not by my friends, or my girlfriend. In hindsight, perhaps God couldn’t just let me die, and God made sure that people were there to rescue me.

A happy note.

Well, I think I’m done with the morbid poetry. I’ve been listening to Nine Inch Nails “With Teeth” allot lately, and I find it very inspiring for writing. I’ve never been good at writing “happy” things, always seems to worry people. I’m just better at writing sad, morbid, somewhat angry and sexually violent poetry than shit about flowers, and puppy dogs.

NIN has always been a great inspiration for me to write. Something about the music that hints at parts of my life, things I went through, that allows me to focus on what I am writing. I was reading some older stuff I wrote, years back (I recently rediscovered some poetry in an old blank book). It’s funny; my writing style has never really changed. It’s always about being heartbroken, or horribly depressed, and often a bit angry.

I think it just fits me. It doesn’t even have to pertain to how I actually feel, it’s just how I like to write. Things are actually starting to look up again in my life. It’s a great feeling. I actually hate being depressed, despite what my writing may convey. It’s good to be out of that funk finally.

And on a happy note. There is this little girl who lives next door to us, that has this adorably cute puppy. I was walking out to my car today to go to work, and she was I her yard playing with the puppy. I don’t think there is anything happier than a little puppy. Something about their pure innocence, and they way they look at you and give that puppy smile, it just breaks your heart in a good way.

I want a puppy so bad it hurts. Two actually, one for each of us so there isn’t any fighting over who gets to smother it. But, we have three cats, already, and that’s like having little monkeys running around your house. Last week or so they have taken to various naughty escapades in the middle of the night. Sometimes its cute, they climb into boxes, or try running into the closets, but they still aren’t puppies.

Heaven is a place that is an endless field of grass filled with puppies.

A wound that never heals

The breeze, echoes all the little woes
Standing alone, in this place
Its dark and it hollow
And sometimes, yeah sometimes
I forget I’m alive.

It’s broken open again, and it throbs and it hurts
Just a big black gaping hole
It’s the wound that never heals

I think there used to be a time when I felt a little better
But now I can’t remember
No now, no, I can’t fucking remember
Is it lost or is it dead?
Maybe it was all, just in my head

But I don’t think it was, I don’t think its true
I just can’t remember a time when it wasn’t fucking you
It always was, yes it always was
As shitty as it seems, I can’t figure out why
Why I’m alone now, I just wonder why

There is nothing now, as far as I can tell
And I can’t help to think
That I’m just a little scab
Picking me apart, to get at what’s on the inside

And It’s broken open again, it throbs and it hurts
Just a big black gaping hole
I’m the wound that never heals.

Love is Murder

She’s made of silk, and honey
And wrapped in pointed teeth
Her breathe, whispers
Something deep
She’s got hands on her face
To hide her wicked smile
She wants nothing more
Than to dine on me a while

She’s got scabs on her knees,
Blood in her hair
She’s a slut and a whore
But, she’s starring at me
And she’s hungry for more
She gets fucked when he wants
And she gets all that she needs
She’s just missing one thing…

Reach in, pull my heart out,
Smile wide, and squeeze with your mouth
I may not be worth your time
But I’m good enough to eat
Love is murder.

She needs to bite, and suck,
And rip this heart apart
Probe with her fingers
Inside this aching chest
Trying to decide
While knifing around
Which parts of me
She likes best

Here I am,
All tattered and torn
Love’s last gasps spurting
From this hole in my chest
She’s leaving, not saying goodbye
Just a farewell finger
Stuck in my face
It's my fault I’m in this place

Tear it some more, juicy and ripe,
Strip down, and fuck on my heart
I’m not good enough
And now there’s nothing left to eat
Love is murder.