'He transfered his soul/ To his imagination"

[jack_babalon]

Gifts of the west winds
Dark and deep
In secret sunset
Places creep
Lock up your hats
Lock up your hats
Progress with a vision
To practice with at home
A schism with an ism
To practice with at home
A collision with decision
To practice with at home
He transfered his soul
To his imagination
His atoms were excited
And he glowed in the dark
The boiling boy
Was a picture of confusion
But he had the advantage
Of a cold start heart
~WIRE
The Boiling Boy



I'm chain smoking under the starless sky of the Winter Equinox. Behind a chain link fence lays the dead tracks of Terminus. A rust river frozen in the flow of ghosts. Sharp air crackles the cough on the breath. I'm sitting here down here in the ghetto down the long drop of hill that's John Wesley Dobbs Ave. I'm sitting on a loading platform to the wharehouse that is acting as the lodges temple. There's four of us out here and the two strippers are giggling while a zit faced teenager paces back and forth too nervous to ask me for another cigarette. We're waiting to be inducted into the temple. To be initiated into the lodge and hopefully begin the baby steps of our slow evolutionary crawl forward out of ourselves. Well that's what i'm waiting for. The others? Well the two strippers are giggling and doing bumps off their compact sitting in the front seat of their Datsun. They got on high heels, denim skirts & metal head t-shirts. They got the big hair thing going and my guess is that the weight of all that aerosol is to compensate for their silicone chest adjustments. No big hair and they might fall flat on their faces from the sudden shift in gravity.
"Y'know what I heard?" Frater Zit face is asking anyone who'll listen, which is me because the strippers have turned up the radio in their car.
"What's that?" I say playing the devils advocate, offering him that smoke he's too shy to ask for. He talks in sudden starts & stops and watching him pace back in forth is like watching a reptile in the zoo that's freaking out because the kids keep tapping the glass.
"I heard that when we get in there... that they're gonna... strip us down... then line us all up and..." he looks around in case someones listening "...sodomize us! All of us... while they read from the Book of the Law..."
"'Sodomize'? Who told you that?"
"I know things, man, believe you me!"
Do I need to add that he's an Emory student here or is that obvious?
"C'mon it ain't gonna be all that..."
He leans in, confidential like, whispers...the 'Order' might have the platform bugged.
"Man, i'm telling you...it's gonna get rough in there..."
"I doubt it" I say with an exhausted sigh looking back up at the sky.
"What makes you so sure?" he asks now offended that anyone would dare question the authority of his paranoia.
"Well let me ask you this then. If you know we're going to be 'sodomized' why're you here? Do you want to be sodomized?"
"No!"
"Well nows your chance" I nod up the gravel driveway "RUN!"
He just looks at me with the pinched up face of a foiled weasel. The wharehouse shutter rolls open suddenly and a man in a black robe steps forward.
"It's time" he says in a deep voice meant to convey the beginning of solemn situations such as this. Zit Face looks around nervously while the strippers step out of the Datsun shivering & sniffling. All three make their way up the platform and disappear into the wharehouse.
"It's time!" The man in the robe repeats louder and I take one more drag off my Camel. One nice, long drag before I flick it like a renegade comet over the chain link fence into those dead tracks. I get up and unzip my leather and stroll in.
...............
...............
It's almost 11 years later and i'm standing on the same platform. It's Saturday night and the partys winding down. I'm here at the bottom of John Wesley Dobbs with Berny,Steve & William. Two of the main alpha males(actors) in my theater group and the rogue scholar who got us the invite. The show was for Animal 13. Not a bad band and they laid down a pseudo- Buzzcocks vibe that I found easy to bop my head too. I'm pretty well drunk and needed some fresh air. I find myself channeling ghosts involuntarily, time tripping as Billy Pilgrim might say. The temple has changed, gentrified & petrified, it is now a very expensive loft space filled with expensive cars and tweenagers vamping bohemian while they wait to become the future ad men, assistant managers, middle managers, shift leaders & web designers. They're actually butterflies in reverse, bright wings of imagination that will one day soon whiter into a thousand tiny little legs scurrying from cocoon to cocoon. But this is going on in every city in America, even London. One day though the money will dry up and destitution will come waltzing back down here and the ugly truth will shake off their cookie cutter architecture and reveal themselves as the perpetual shitholes that they are. Meanwhile my friends are all off doing their own thing and since this is the first moment i've had to myself in the last few hours I stroll over to the lodge door. I activate my 'Phantom Vision' and watch Zit-face & the strippers mull around waiting for the man in the black robe to appear, waiting to 'take their fill & will of love'. I wonder what kind of ghosts we left here. I wonder if any of the residents see strange things crouched in the corners of their expensive kitchens. I wonder if they can smell the orgone-orgasm energy waft through the air vents. It's here that I began writting my 'Adam' stories. I remember being a 21 year old little punk and I was ready to light the world on fire with the power of my genius. Instead here I am broken hearted and wondering where along the labyrinth it was that I lost the thread to my true will. Sometimes I look back and can only see the stubborn insistence of my identity. Sometimes I look at another man wearing my face and try to figure out what it is he's doing.