GARGOYLE
by Scott Darnell

Forty feet above ground is no place to lose ones concentration, unless of course you're looking to crackle-splatter in a messy final exit best dealt with by a janitorial crew. Nobody ever said that being a painter was an easy task. It's a life or death struggle to slap that color between and betwixt all those rafters.

Man against gravity, the least and the greatest of mother nature's weapons. How awesome! It pulls at every molecule in your being so subtly, all you need do is forget for just a moment, just a millisecond and...

Hell, even the gargoyles know better than to get distracted. Stone upon stone, still as night, they at least stay conscious of the tall. But then. Pin no gargoyle. I'm just a lowly bug. At least that's what The Powers That Be around this place call my kind. We aren't real bugs of course, just a bunch of mental patients scurrying about the institution with paint brushes in our hands and prolixin coursing through our veins.

Hey, don't knock it, it's a job. Maybe not the best in the world, but then again, I'm not in the world. I'm in an asylum. It's either this, or end up like some of the real bugs down there on the ward. Sitting half comatose in front of a television all day is no way to spend a life, believe me. We definitely got it better.

Still, we are bugs, and sometimes as I paint the walls and ceiling with those bland eggshell-whites and slate grays that belie the hundred year old cracks and crumbles hidden underneath, I find myself wondering about the lot of us. I mean, do any of us truly realize the cracks and crumbles so prevalent in our own skewed little minds?

There's Ghomer for an instance. Pushing his broom across the red tiled floor below me, he seems oblivious to anything but the need to answer those pestering personalities relentlessly pushing and pulling at him with their brand of reality.

Sitting way up here, alone and untouchable, Ghomer merely appears to be mumbling at the dust to me. But underneath it all, I know his conspiracy rages on. Memories acquired, memories forged, memories yanked from the shadowy sub-basement of his disturbed little childhood cry out to him. They endlessly mutter about a dead aunt killed by an uncle who lives a secret life as a Nazi who builds Volkswagons with slave laborers versed in the Cabala.

Now that Nazi uncle and his slaves fester deep inside, worming their way to the core of a confused mind that can only mumble the esoteric chants of unwelcome borders who cry out for justice, for emancipation, and most especially, a Volkswagon of their very own.

Then there's Folks, a black bull of a man, braided up like a Bo Derek reject. He holds a paintbrush chest-high, confusedly seeking an area to paint on a wall he's covered several times already. Poor Folks is always confused. It's little wonder with an I.Q. barely surpassing that of an eight-year old, though no eight-year old I ever met took a pair of scissors to anyone.

To hear him tell it, the school nurse was dead when he found her. The blood on his jeans wasn't blood at all but red paint from the janitorial project he'd been assigned. He'd been drinking the night before and the paint fumes, red noxious little gremlins seeping through the air and into his poor brain, knocked him cold and painted him guilty. He remembers nothing, thanks to those fumes. Whether he did it, or will ever do it again, he cannot tell. And yet, in their infinite wisdom, The Powers That Be allow him a place on our paint crew. God protect us from the gremlins!

Destined for early release is our very own resident kiddie molester. Sixty and loving it he patiently trims the window frames, dreaming of the day he can get back to his leather shop and earn enough money to take that special trip across the ocean-blue, the Philippines no less. But hell, enough said about him.

Even in the best of situations monsters sometimes slip through the cracks.

Then there's me, the gargoyle sitting astride a plank stretched precariously atop the metal skeleton I depend on to keep me afloat, Without it, how could I paint the ceiling? How could I hit the corners deemed so important to the cosmetic survival of this asylum I call home? I'd come crashing down, tumble after tumble until suddenly, no tumble, no more.

I wonder, if gravity won out, would I scream? Or would I fall all quiet like, simply grateful that my own cracks and crumbles were about to shatter into oblivion? No, I think I would scream, and then giggle insanely when I came so close to hitting but never actually did. I'd float above the insanity so prevalent on terra firma. And then, having more fun than my doctor allows without a shot of prolixin and a few choice restraints, I'd wing my way back on top of my scaffold and keep on painting.

T'N'T (FOR TIMMY TAYLOR)
by Robert Roden

Chicago's Lounge Axe, Tim Taylor took stage,
10,000 volts made his body convulse.
His voice wreaked havoc on the audience.
Tim sold Brainiac shirts after the show.
And I popped dexatrim for two weeks straight,
Looking for that fix after Timmy died.

It's been 74 weeks since Tim died.
My teeth still clacking, bones shaking the stage--
Sense that something truly great has gone straight
To Hell. I smell his burning and convulse
From the stench of his death on my clothes. Show
The fire hydrant to the audience.

LA's Roxy, Tim sprung the audience--
Vesuvius on the microphone, dyed
Boots twisted, punched keys on the Moog for show.
I stood transfixed, staring at the lit stage,
Like some hot flame was about to convulse
In my blood. His pulse on meltdown mode--straight

Atomic disaster. We all got straight
Interference: feedback. An audience
On television snow sat convulsed.
On the 23rd of May, Timmy died
On some dark Dayton, Ohio street stage.
Alone in the car with nothing to show

For the explosion. The brilliant sideshow--
Few people mourned; the world kept its face straight,
Oblivious outside its own filled stage.
Melody Maker told the audience,
Captured it: "The Day the Sexmusic Died."
Repulsive modes in different convulsions.

I got good feelings seeing him convulse,
Like God himself had decided to show,
Nietzschean notions had finally died.
I can't shake him, can't shake him, can't get straight.
Pity the cutthroat cash cow audience
That settles for less passion on a stage.

The erratic convulsive pulse of straight
Joy & screams for freak show audiences
Died that night Timmy drove his car offstage.