The Bad Magician In Summerstock

This time the piano jumped. This time the drums beat back. This time the microphone--the microphone--started screaming at a glass fog. Wake up. No one can wake up today. Wake up.

The Bad Magician crooked an elbow and jutted a chin. He stole a glance from the third row of the umber theater, in furtive posture he protected somebody else's misunderstanding. Everyone has to leave sometime or other. He left right then and there.

At the stage door a mercury lantern ran at all the shadows. The Bad Magician glided onto the street and was attacked by bricks. He rose up, up, up. I am out, said the Bad Magician. The last showing revealed no conscience in the king to catch. I am the arc of centuries, said he. The Bad Magician became a leaflet on the windshield of nobody's car. It drove along. Vroom. Vroom. We are on our way, the way, a way. It bodes of bad epitaphs and ill reports.

I am not out, said the Bad Magician. I am in.

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Goddamn Theaters! They're everywhere! Clap, clap, clap. The Bad Magician smashed his hands at all the heads. Clap, clap, clap. Like doors slamming shut in a metal house. They have entered His House. He tries to shake his audience but they only mingle. Deep in the lobby he spies the case, a glass box of reason and magick. The paper inside is torn, bleeding. Bad actors eat the words and shit the meaning. Is this the longest running show on the Beltway? Will everyone please be seated?

There it is, on the marquee: One Night Only, the Death of the Experiment! Gather all who dare. The Stockholders take all the seats and eat the arm rests. Critics crawl upon all fours and snarl like gilded robots. The Curtain catches fire, and the First Act unfolds. Three Witches find Seven Warlocks and Two Imprints alone in the calamity. Two wanderers return their corpses, but the ground is sealed. Twelve mirrors and Fifty Lavender Gnomes adjust their sockets as a Great Casket is carried onto center stage. Inside is the Word Thing, of Law and Right Denials. A shot rings out. End Act One.

In the lobby a man made of popcorn cannot stop popping. Priests cry as he explodes on the carpet. Salt is offered by the Suits. Everyone in line begins digging into him until the floor is all that's left. The lights flicker, and the carpet blinks. Act 2. Come on Act 2. The Man becomes a poster. Run to your seats! Act 2! Act 2!

Act 2 is wild. Guns are fired. Rapers are raped. Half of a century is blown apart. The audience gasps, eats, gasps, sighs. Blood is shed until it is only water. Water devolves and there is not a dry eye in the house. A governor whacks his head with what appears to be a very large jawbone. What is this nonsense? asks the audience. After that the ceiling accelerates and seat belts are offered. The Great Word Thing is stripped naked and burnt offerings go upstage, downstage. The Voice cries Democracy is Dead! All hail Democracy! A pile of straw grows until the orchestra pit is buried. The Conducter smirks and floats above the cello section. Gravity is a mistake. Thus ends Act 2.

There is no intermission. The audience exchanges skin for fibers. Part of the sky is thrown out by ushers with ornate light sticks. No one dares die.

Act 3 will be the Final Act. Everyone claps. Claps. Claps. The Curtains return in the shape of impossible birds. Roman columns throw their shadows into steel bars. The audience is amused. The Great Circle of Fire rises and approaches the Great Word Thing and snickers. Hee-hee. I will burn the Experiment! I will burn the Fever Dream! The audience pretends to gasp and the Fibers rise and fall. The Great Experiment is on Fire! It burns the curtains, the chairs, the orchestra, the sky. Nothing is left. The last popcorn kernal lies inert. This is the place where applause used to cascade down like rocks from the mountains. This is now the place where children raid the till. The show is over. No one leaves.

Mondays are dark at the Theater. The Bad Magician is trembling in the wings. He's on next.

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The Bad Magician Inside the Mind of the Killer

It sounded like a baby crying, shrieking, a concentrated beam of primitive rage, pure and piercing, breaking glass along the lower walls, at the top of his reach. The Bad Magician woke with a start and the blood of his dreams receeded. He descended from his sleep to travel beyond the gates, taking to the road, not looking back. A small pebble of this Universe was in his shoe: he removed it and saw everything. He placed the small rock of the Universe in his pocket.

On the nearest broken highway a transformer spit and hissed on the weeds as furtive mice darted beneath it. The Bad Magician stopped and organized the clouds, then reached upwards to the sound of power and caught enough electricity to spin himself into the grid. He alternated east and north to arrive at the awful place. The Bad Magician had no choice. He shut out the sky.

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The Bad Magician arrived and was everywhere in the room, and then only in the One Place. The Killer was in front of the camera, the Bad Magician shot through his nerves but could not feel them. He listened to the mind of the Killer.

The voices told me why they had to die. The voices came like rocks down a mountainside, crashing onto me. Bad things were being done to me. Bad things were being done to us. The voices continued their avalanche. Kill them, for they will kill you. Your case is made. Do it. Do it. Kill them. Show them. Kill them.

The Bad Magician fell out of the Killer's head and tried to vanish but could not. He scrambled up the Fourth Wall and lingered. The Killer knew what to do. The Killer always knows what to do: kill. Kill. Kill. He smiled, and the bright lights of attention dimmed, and the cameras turned away.

How was I? asked the Killer, as if it mattered. How was I?

You were good, Mr. President. You were very, very good.

Thousands and thousands were preparing to die in the head of the Killer. Their shrouds were laid out, and small bits of earth were gathered, to be sprinkled on their lifeless corpses. The Children wanted to play in the graves. The Killer saw them.

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The Bad Magician remembers the Killer. He reaches into his pocket and fingers the small rock: he places the Universe beneath the skin of the Killer. One day, the Killer will see everything the way a rock does.

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The Bad Magician Visits A Tree Two Miles From Crawford, Texas

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The Bad Magician made a rope of bones and hair and walked like a spider crab to Texas, where the sun is a powerful ember, burning the eyes. The Bad Magician had to die in a dream of Texas.

The Bad Magician began to collect the debts on the ranch: a thought here, an empty smile, a blade of withered grass, like wheat, like a blonde child. The President hid in a tree and licked his fingers. He was the boy.

Two miles from the President a goddess carries the heart of her dead son inside herself, in her womb. She is constructed daily. The wind picks her up and carries her away, but she does not move. She stands among the ancient stories but cannot be mythologized.

The President sees a tree where the goddess weeps. It won't stop growing, it comes into his life and grows backwards out of his skull. Branches and crows make idle chatter. Bark replaces his tongue. A man from Canada carries away his hands. The goddess does not smile but holds her arms out, she does not ask why but how and for what?

The Bad Magician cannot stand outside the story, and cannot get in the story. The light is bending as the moon waxes in the sky. The President turns and sees his face taken up by lizards and fashioned into parachutes. He has nothing left: his head a crown of thorns growing skyward, he towers achingly, for he cannot exist.

Two miles to go, and the tree replaces his mind with a set of graceful gestures, over and over, in the wind. The goddess releases her dead son into the tree where he lays down and sings about the shadows. The Bad Magician climbs next to the dead soldier and carves his name lamely in the wood.

The President wakes up. His arms are on fire.

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*(image of World Tree from here.)

*(The Bad Magician previously existed only as an unannounced guest at Corrente for as to relay his various and sundry Orphic and seemingly abject adventures. I decided to let him out of that box today, hence this posting, originally submitted in the comments section of Corrente)

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The Bad Magician Takes Tea With Babs

Tea comes from books, which grow out of the heads of corpses. The fine weathered print is dried and placed in the folds of silences, then rolled onto vast, Korean slabs. Many children gather to watch the merchants trade their fingers for the cognizant herbs: they are drinking you as you drink them. A bell rings: Babs has farted in her tub, as per her routine. It is time for The Bad Magician to convert a few hours into steam, hot iron and mordant honey. The bell rings again, and off he goes.

Deep inside the compound, a rhino woman stamps her hooves against the tile floor, shattering her veins. The Bad Magician manifests in the dead air: he plays shadow puppets in the blind spot as the flood waters of The Big Easy break the Bush Family levee, spilling onto the floor, bleeding uphill and up the stairs. The smell offends god. Babs, finished with her bath, tweaks her beard and scrunches her face into that of a giant rat, tapping her hollow yellow fangs lightly against the mirror. Her gut descended, she rump-waddles towards the kitchen. The Bad Magician smells a very large rat.

"Tea?" says The Bad Magician to the gray-skinned rodent as she sprays her head with plastic cheese. "Tea, indeed," says Babs. The waters of New Orleans splash upwards in funnels, scale model twisters of the toxic juice propel the refreshment into their cups. Babs smiles and drops a turd onto one of her shoes. The pace quickens: sugar is eaten, biscuits are crumbled and forgotten, the tea is consumed until Babs catches a whiff of her own rotting insides, looks at The Bad Magician and tsk, tsk, tsks the Dark Inn Keeper. Trouble arrives stoned when the tongues split into differing factions. More trouble when Babs cuts open her rat stomach and out jumps the young George W. Bush, cradling a dead frog beneath his chin. "Tea?" asks The Bad Magician? "No," answers the beady-eyed boy, but the tea careened in a wild flight of air and arc, raining down and soaking the memory of George--the lights flicker, demons confess, and more rhinos trash the kitchen. Jesus called, sends his regrets, maybe some other time, does enjoy a nice tea now and again.

The waters recede, light pours in like razors, Babs devolves into a puddle of foam and tree stumps. The young George cuts his heart out and gives it to his mother. She spits it out. Sirens wail and gunshots are heard. The Bad Magician enjoys a good tea now and again, but takes advantage of an insect deity and clicks his way to Fargo, where the nights are already cold. Babs rolls over and vomits up hush puppys and beer, and is still. George wants mommy to be better. Be better, mommy. He will go out that day and cut a doctor. Bush opens his eyes and finds his teeth have become long and yellow, and his speech is hard to read. Karl Rove congeals on a plate as George asks where Babs has gone off to. He suspects his father has had her murdered.

Rove snaps his fingers. George blinks, stumbles, hits his head on the sink. Blood pools in the sink, turns black, hisses at George. A new day dawns.

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Image of rat's paw from here.

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Crossposted at Mortaljive and at Corrente.

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The Bad Magician Remembers Something

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The Bad Magician forgets where he puts things. He even forgets the things themselves. A memory comes in anyway.

A package of waves arrive from an old beach: The Bad Magician remembered the way the drowned man was carried ashore, gray and blue was his skin, his body bent, hard like stone, a woman screaming in the sand. A crowd gathered and the man perfected dying: a back broken, a lung submerged in salt water, the horrible shock when clear sky and warm air painted borders describing the defeat of our blood, our ways. The Bad Magician remembers: He turns the memory into the President's flesh, which jerks against his will. The surf floods in, and we ride the curl.

In the East: Coffee is served on the President's face in the Amputee Wing of the White House. Iraqi children, stubbornly dead and hollow, bring him toast and beer, dragging their feet in wagons behind them. The President presses a button on his neck and fills his throat with sand. 'I must get out of me,' thinks the President. He looks at the ceiling: the Pacific Ocean surges in convex waves, cascading upwards, then down. The President turns to me. I cannot help him now.

"I am the President!" says the President. His eyes twitch, watering, weeping portals on the sea. A wave knocks him down. Laura smiles from the beach. Where is the father? The father is gone.

America carries the broken President onto the shore and lowers him onto his towel, a confederate rag of Old Alliances. Lifeguard Karl dissipates into thin air, a Tempest vapor. Norquist looks up from his bathtub and cries. Cheney falls out of the medicine chest: he cashes checks and eats a doctor. "I am the President," repeats the President. A crowd surrounds him, winks at him, "You're doing a heck of a job there, Bushie."

What happened to the man on the beach? Sometimes, we curl up like dead things, and rocks become our home.

The Bad Magician calls the Coroner and sends him to America. "Check out the Lincoln Memorial," says The Bad Magician.

The rest is silence.

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Crossposted at Mortaljive.

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The Bad Magician Mixes Kool Aid with the Blood of the Savior

The Bad Magician is hot, cranky. He turns his head and breaks a window: he falls outside and keeps right on falling.

The battle for America was fought by Romans on Golgotha: they won but turned away and the Savior jumped off of his cross and tap danced in a dream all the way to Washington D.C. Information littered the hallways in vast, moaning piles. Arms flailed inside the mounds, withered, died. The capital building smelled like Crisco.

The Bad Magician spies a large punch bowl that men in suits stand next to. They are talking and laughing and dying. Inside the punch bowl the blood of the Savior makes a Sangria. Everyone drinks Vintage Jesus and spits it out and then drinks it in again. The heads of the men become the Kool Aid icon, and they crash into each other whenever they turn to make a point. Broken glass is everywhere, and the sticky blood of the Savior mixed with the Kool Aid turns the floor into a bus terminal. Large buses arrive and drive the Glass Head Men into the sky where they burst into firework displays, and ash falls like the dust of history all over the cars in the parking lot.

The Bad Magician pours himself the Kool Aid mixed with the blood of the Savior. He dreams that everything is God.

Karl Rove outs Jesus, and smirks and toys with his horns. The lights come on in the city. A judge is born.

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The Bad Magician In "The Aborted Quest"

First practice a condition. Then:

Cord, lots of it. Wriggling lengths of nerves, coiled for the descent, the myelin sheath of electrical bursts along the War Hawk. The Bad Magician sticks a claw hammer in the air and flesh is torn in dream tones. Pushing off the mucous, he falls above the angel depths--next he climbs down the jingle jangly of the white whale and into the heaviest smoke of sorrow. The Bad Magician does not want to be here. Nevertheless, the Bad Magician descends. Into limbo, into Limbaugh.

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A strand of hair is grabbed, the Bad Magician swings, and into the ear he flies. Deaf. Deaf. Deaf. The walls of the ear swollen, pink, sticky. Journey to the brain, empty bottles of dopamine line the streets, and wild children turn chiclets into the bump and grind. A pill is ingested and rabbits eat a little girl, then to the center we wander, and then to clouds, ether. Rush chortles into the mic and the Bad Magician dives between the cells. Down, across the mordant bellows, swinging, falling, to essence, the essence.

The Bad Magician came to attack. With instructions for gordian knots and a schematic of Limbaugh's nervous system, an Indian Rope Trick was to be performed beginning at the basal ganglia. But on the free dive, a horrible scream, and then arrival in a white room, empty. The secretaries (there were 12 of them, 6 male and six not-male) perfected their nails and yawned. Where is Rush? "That doesn't matter. Would you like a magazine?"

The Bad Magician sat, sinking in a fluffy bean bag chair--a white bean bag chair--and waited. A television screen showed a fat man pretending his body was suffering from spasmodic nerve activity, twitching and jerking. It played over and over. His face was bent like cheap metal. A thousand years passed. Still the room hummed, then cricket-burned tinnitus chased the silence. Nothing is here. Nothing will ever be here. Crickets rubbed elbows with the insect armies, and the Great White Room began to drift.

Forget it, said the Bad Magician. The secretaries already had. They were gone. The room was where anyone who could be entangled in neurons and synapses might invent a dance. But it was empty. It always was empty. Rush Limbaugh was an empty room where dancers smoked cigars and microscopic babies crawled liked tiny Jesus into hell. Forget it, said the Bad Magician.

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An extension cord, a battery, three short fuses and soon a hole was blown in the western bewailing wall. The Bad Magician whistled softly, and walked out of the project. Limbaugh was not the question. Limbaugh was an empty room. An empty room cannot be cured. We are occupied by the absence.

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Image from here.

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