The Gorko Gazette

Horror

Have you ever experienced the horror
of making love to the woman
who loves you and then,
after separating,
and you are standing with your back to her,
choosing which of the shirts
she has given you to wear to dinner
you realize that the reason
you held onto her for so long
was that you could not bring yourself
to look into her eyes
because of the wordless truth
which had flowed through the knowing
length of your naked body
and which now, as you rub the cloth
between your fingers,
has finally reached your brain
which cannot help but
form the words of betrayal
and you are thinking, ‘Please,
not now,’ but it is now,
and you turn to see her sitting
on the edge of the bed,
bent over her stockings,
humming to herself,
and you call her name and she looks up
and smiles, saying, ‘Yes, love?’
and you say it
with a weird open grimace
and she dies then and there,
a slow, struggling, blinking
death but death just the same
and yet, to hide the murder,
you insist on going out
and you drag this bloody corpse
around with you,
sit it on a chair and feed it
while thinking you might, at any moment,
scream into the air, and then finally,
finally she leaves and you are left
with one more bloody notch
on your cock, trying to consider
yourself lucky,
not guilty,
the majestic preventer
of future unhappiness when
you know you did not choose
to fall in love
just as you did not choose
to fall out of love
and you lie there,
thinking of murders to come,
murders to receive,
and you feel the best thing to do
is simply lie there forever,
unmoving, saying, ‘I prefer
my moments of torture to arrive
in easily-handled,
infinitely-disposable
packets,’ but
they cut so deep, the quick ones,
and you do not know
how many more you can give
because to give is to receive
and all you seem able to give
is the right quick cut
to the undeserving
and you roll over, away from yourself,
but sleep will not come,
will not relieve the hell of awareness
so you stroke your leg, your hand
moving up to the Mindless One,
the Great Hypnotist!
and you think,
‘Ah, women!’

---

The Deep Machine

My God!
Something to drink!
There must be something
strong enough
to induce the fluid rooster
to crow through my veins
once more!

The deep machine—ah,
but I am sure I would
stammer and stutter with an air
of excuse—it has been so long!—
if even offered the controls.

And I, an old hand at that.

Rarely do I descend
to that cauldron of hissing
pipes and clangor of which
so few are aware—am I blessed
or cursed to have discovered
it within my own house?

To work! Yes, I work,
waste my life in mindless
effort-sweat and grief-grubbing
until I am too tired to work
the deep machine.

Stripped to the waist,
sweating, curse-working the levers
in the dark bath—there!
guiding Nations,
Races!

I, the unknown!

The levers are many, are hot—
only youth’s brilliance
can withstand the metal a while,
a short while.

All too soon the levers
are pushing, pulling you—if you
hang on, stupidly.

And upon the influx of wisdom
and pain? The sizzle-slow
slide to a lizard sleep’s
moment of poetry making
such as this—

my hour of worst labor!

While below, the machine works on,
mercilessly.

Are we not then necessary?
Can it not be influenced a bit
by the very strong?

I will leave! I will go!

Far from this sinkhole
of repetition and you—tremendous
seduction!—will not go
where I go for you, in the present,
do not satisfy me.

O victim of my demonic
refusal of surrender, do not
ask me to share my cave of desire
or expect me to sink to your
depths of normalcy—

I stare straight through.

---

ABOUT THE ARTIST

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