Tuesday, July 24, 2007

WAR STORIES WITH OLIVER NORTH

I.

There is a big war going on in a field.

It is the American Civil War.

The place is Oklahoma City.

A man notices an attractive Indian boy, who is 20.

There is a small stone cottage in the middle of the field.

They run up into the house and look for a room.

In the house there are many people having sex, it even smells like sex.

Some officers see the two run into the house and chase after them.

The man finds a bedroom with a small window and tries to lock himself and the boy in. The officers pound on the door and then leave.

II.

One army has defeated the other and has proceeded to hogtie the enemy.

The man and the boy in the room notice this through the window.

They become frightened.

The officers break into the room and drag the Indian away.

The man breaks through the window at the top of the house and looks down.

It appears to be about 80 feet. He jumps. He does not die.

He is tied up with the others though.

He sees the Indian boy, who is almost dead.

He has been tortured and dismembered and tied up.

The man is very upset. The house begins to burn in the background.

III.

The man is asking a group of officers if they are still in Oklahoma. The officers laugh at the man and keep drinking. The man is tied up, so he tried to escape.

He starts running, jumps a few times, each time higher and higher, and then begins to fly. He knows that because he is tied up he won’t be able to fly for long.

He looks at the trees and thinks “Yep, Oklahoma.” He watches the trees get thicker and thicker. Then he notices that many of the trees have been cut down. There is a river,

and next to the river there is a road, and on the road a small car. As he is flying he feels himself sinking lower and lower towards a dry gulch.

IV.

In the car, a soldier is driving.

Two women are in the passenger seat, one on the other’s lap.

The man is driving fast away from the war. He is scraped and beaten up on his face.

He asks the women to get in the backseat and he goes with them.

The car is still driving while they do this.

One of the girls is now in his lap and the other is sitting alone.

He begins to tickle the one on his lap.

He says he is gay but he wouldn’t mind some company.

The other one is still laughing but looks worried.

He begins to play a strange game with the first girl. He has long white curled fingernails and he tickles first her side, then her kneecaps, with strange strokes of his fingers.

The girl on his lap laughs.

The other girl looks more worried.

He keeps doing this to the girl on his lap, and the other girl becomes upset.

He tells the other girl to relax, and she begins to do the same thing to the girl on her lap. Pretty soon, she is laughing to, and they are all laughing.

Then the man reaches into the front seat and gets a bowl of chili and pours it on the girl’s head who is on his lap. Her face is covered in hot brown lumps. She screams in agony.

The other girl gets very mad at the man and yells at the man. The first girl crawls into the drivers seat and starts to open the window. The man follows her, but too late, she is out the window spinning backwards along the road.

The other two are now in the front seat, and the man tries to crawl out after the girl. The other girl holds onto him, and as he is half out of the car, she decapitates him with the window, then lets his body fall out of the car and roll into the river.

IV.
The man who has fallen into the gulch watches the car tailspin into the forest and explode.

Up against his leg a woman’s head has come rolling and it rests face down.

He lifts it up like an Indian inspecting the scalp.

Two more bodies have come floating down the river towards him and are floating face down as well.

V.

Two generals eat turkey legs together. “Mmm Mmm” they say, while holding hands.

8 comments:

Ian Davisson said...

i wasn't exactly going for normal, if thats what you mean.

i am probably going to work on this poem more to get it to do more of what i want. the weird sex stuff though kind of runs along with my whole war situation. the erotics of war.

ummm.

i really like the way you think its gross though. i mean, barely anything in the poem is actually gross, but it has quite a disgusting undercurrent.

i am coming back to athens in 2 weeks. woohoo.

Ian Davisson said...

when i say barely anything is gross, i mean, the words themselves aren't actually gross, I am just putting together a scene that is very disgusting. more disgusting even than if more were said.

like, absence of description in this case brings disgust.

and i am sure that if meredith's blog were still up she would have a fucking field day with this poem.

maybe my poem is like a war story because it is the shell of a disgusting situation, only told in a way to make you feel as if the speaker has really become perverted.

hmmm.

what do you think ashley or ryan or daniel or anyone?

Anonymous said...

ashley, at least you don't have to come to terms with the fact that your boyfriend writes really fucked up poetry. I mean....yeah...

Ian Davisson said...

thank you jessica for your limitless encouragement.

and i've seen some pretty scary stuff pour forth from the pen of phillip.

Ryan Downey said...

ian, i am ok with the gortesque sections. in fact, i was pretty bored with the poem until i reached those sections. i don't think they excited me because they were sensational (our point of views all differ here). i think i was excited because i also believe that the "the weird sex stuff though kind of runs along with my whole war situation. the erotics of war". i would magnify that statement by ten times in several different directions though. "the erotics of war" is just one example of the underlying presence of the grotesque or the "over-sexual" that we think we hide for the decency of ourselves as humans and for others. this current of underlying thought has a lot to do with the way we approach many daily actions though. can't articulate exactly what i mean here. i understand what ashley is saying. she is essentially saying what the person on that blog said in response to your dmp poem. my response there might be better than this i think. I think i forgot to add something to that comment though. the grotesque can make us feel uncomfortable and can be quite unnerving. if it used to address issues that we are "comfortable" with but should not be i.e. gender roles, war, dictatorial government, unadulterated waste, etc. then isn't it doing its job. subtlety is nice but sometimes we have our minds so muted that we need a little slap to bring our thinking to a nice steady buzz. we should feel uncomfortable unless we think we have reached the pinnacle of human achievement. jessica, you don't have to come to terms with it. the poetry is not fucked up. it is honest. deception is fucked up. I think my writing is probably similarly "fucked up". allison seems to be ok with this. a fucked up world creates the poems. we just put them to paper. we are not always the things we write. if ian ever decapitates you with a window then i will apologize to your family and delete this comment. that was meant to be a joke but i always sound serious. don't take me too seriously.

daniel spinks said...

i was only offended by the use of the word 'indian.'

i think 'redskin' or 'brave' would be a cuter word choice. it works for the nfl and mlb.

it would be funny if the girl tried to decapitate the man with the window and failed because it's just too hard and he sat back in the car and she just shrugged her shoulders like 'what?' and they sat there in awkward silence trying to find a decent radio station.

charles bronson can kill 48 people on spike tv but if there were a movie where he shopped at kroger pantsless with an erect penis viewers would write angry letters. and then if he shopped at kroger pantsless with an erect penis while killing employees people would freak out. i think.

i am more disturbed by all the pictures of babies on toilet paper packaging than this poem.

i am not trying to contradict anyone or say their opinion doesn't make sense or isn't valid. i'm just saying.

i am probably too desensitized to things. too many fucked up movies.

but seriously. why the fuck can't i buy toilet paper without the picture of some infant human on the packaging. it's creepy. and i don't want 1-ply.

Ryan Downey said...

fmv toilet paper doesn't have babies. it is 1-ply though. it is shitty. eroitic things disturb people more than violence. we are reaching the point where mainstream america feels ok with both things though. unfortunately they only feel ok with those things in visual mass media i.e. movies, television. poetry can and should embrace eroticism and grotesque subject matter but it should do so in a more valuable way than hollywood. what the fuck is the deal with movies anyways? i watched final destination 3 on television yesterday. ians descriptions of violence pale in comparison to the shit in that movie. what about saw. or fuck that what about a normal police chase in a movie where the cops cause a hundred fucking civilian cars to crash in the attempt to save on persons life or some nonsense like that. and eroticism is present in everything from adult shows/movies on down to disney movies. we are all too desensitized. we have been polarized and split into two camps. 1. violence and sex doesn't do anything to/for us anymore.
2. violence and sex even in the appropriate context bothers us because we are sick of oversaturation.
either way we are all at least a little fucked.

Ryan Downey said...

rarrr!