The last stimulus is withheld from me. It slips through these poverty-frayed hands, the skin peeling from between my fingers, the nails soft and soaked, saturated in viscous waste of putrid lights; tears and spittle and vomit and mud, this sludge that seeps through the surface of me skin as I beg for food, salivating near the end of pleasure, pain the only leech at me side.

Me name, now nearly forgotten under the attack of diving, man-eating mosquitoes -- their colors so brilliant like a mid-morning crimson sun sinking behind cobalt-blue-gray clouds behind the horizon of my gossamer-lidded eyes, beyond the maroon and turquoise radiance of an Aegean-like sea, swirling down the toilet as if an effigy to me acquired sins; these last painful days alone, bereft of pleasure, raped by pain, pain that bleeds from me eyes as the gargoyles flutter around me head, and I then recall me name -- as if in Morpheus' Dream-land of eternal, excruciating pain!

Caffey.

Jonathan Reginald "Reg" Caffey.

A ghost of a man now; skeletal threads hang from my jaundiced bones, the taste of food soured and thick in my mouth as I drink from the well of forgetfulness at the oracle of porcelain regurgitation, under the auspices of self-flagellation. Heart races though me chest; a glint of hard shadow pours through the leaden window, a portal circular and misted-over in a cloud of impenetrable steam, razor slipping 'tween me Parkinson-diseased hands, shaking, trembling insane, fingers dead, gasping breaths to breathe the acidic air that fills my bronchial lungs with scorching flares of fire and pain, or pleasure biting at me jutting spine as I raise me chin, me eyes glaring into the nova beaming through the portcullis, to dispel the shadows of the valley of death that I had stumbled into, whistling frivolously, foolishly, strolling gaily whilst singing sweet melancholic tunes: a whistling challenge to the old gods demonized behind Irenaeus' closed cathedral doors, but still merrily I sing as that razored blade topples from me spastic digits, knife floating calmly on the water's spotted surface, a reflection of Jon's gaunt face -- me own face, features gaunt and grim, his rictus lips no longer mine as I turn, bolt from that place aboard a barge sailing o'er Charon's fiery lake, a trail of conflagration, a wet field of crimson tears in the night of my once-dreaming -- now lunatic(?) -- mind.

I am no longer there.

No longer a soul aboard the barge adrift on a sea of shadows.

Blade cutting deeply, so deep still to caress me sinews, down to the grinding bone, a nerve churning sparks in my near-dead, rising mind.

A laugh, a mocking wobble -- that is me own voice I hear, not Jon's sad gruff, not a man's voice at all.

But just that of a dead angel's dreaming in a crypt dripping cold and damp, a child's tear streaming along a roadway path climbing towards oblivion.

A folk song for the dead, the living dead that was I, but still a child, a boy lost 'pon a ship sailing towards salvation denied; so weary, so hungry am I. This malnourished imp singing sailing songs as the Death burns on distant shores, as me mother sinks below the dancing waves, Consumption blackening her once-pink lungs. I stand to stare, coughing quietly into me frail hands, blood and black muck awash in me sweaty palms. I jump o'erboard into Mother's arms.

Into a warm black sea to float beneath a blind man's dirge.

Darkness blankets me: a shroud.

Butterflies are free... as me eyes open 'pon misery-laden eyes, a soft contemptuous grin molded from chapped lips; a salt and pepper goatee framing those lips that silently mouth words of occultic wisdom (that which assails me ears).

Unheard of, these phrases, these words only certain animals may hear, their ears alert, their bestial orbs no longer feral slits of hunger, but burning with a shard of misery. Misery as this man walks the fields of Elusia, as he crosses the water, a bridge invisible beneath his bare-footed soles, his hands flat, perpendicular with the water's calm surface as speckled doves fly to soar o'erhead. The arcing sun blisters his skin, so dry even o'er the fresh waters of his rebirth; so curled his blood-dried lips, so bright now his eyes as the land approaches from no-where.

So naked his blemished beauty, so red enflamed the stars in his eyes, so does trickle the blood from the wounds inflicted millennia ago -- he then but a child, now but a man lost at the periphery of a childhood's end.

He halts, steps away from this land now deemed infernal. His screams are mine, reverberating through the land that once called his name, but now... Now it shudders to a grinding halt, sinks again below the waves of a blood-red sea, solar flares licking our flesh, decimating skin and bone and brains and spit, reducing us to arid dust, but still he sees through me eyes again full of pus, of misery as our remains are washed away beneath the cold red sea...

But butterflies are free... Momma told me that they be free... so free. A joke? A misery.

A celestial joke!

My mind oozes sludge. A truth configured behind a curtain, once again, behind the shroud of winding eyes.

I see what I feel, I feel that which I can see, and I lift me cup up in a toast, throw back me head and drink deeply of me stewed, fermented soul.

A soul once new, then strained by religious thinking gone wrong, askew, amok; malicious, forgotten meanings in rote ritual slayings. O'er time, thoughts or thinking is lost, sacrificed but never quite resurrected before the public's yellow-flecked eyes: that would be blasphemy. "Let us think for you -- we'll tell you what to do, how to think and act and breathe and dress and socialize and entertain under pretexts of Divine will" -- under the tutelage of masters with tongue-lashing condemnations, of whips and swords of allegory. We the slaves who follow blindly: "WE BELIEVE!"

(Have faith in yerself, be responsible for yerself, and the pain and suffering and misery shall subside; the endless wars shall fade if we admit ignorance, admit our mistakes so idiotic at times, our lies but 20th century art forms taught in colleges, on TV, and at the finest seminaries money can buy.)

These Gnostic whispers from misery-laden eyes walking 'cross blood-red seas.

Admit to yerself that no devil or ghost of an angel told you to do this heinous deed you've done. I have seen you do it! Quite alone with your eager friends who're just like you; another face dressed in blue among the singing choir.

I've seen you do these crimes.

I've seen no demon or angel straddling your shoulders. I saw only weakness and non-thought -- saw only spur-of-the-moment, hasty decisions and premeditated hatred; thoughts all jumbled and jangled at the bottom of yer purse or pocket or glovebox; thoughts intermixed with cocaine and weed and speed and prescribed Prozac mislabeled but eagerly handed out as long as you pay. Thoughts misplaced in the cistern of your soul, lost among the tomes of text best left to our ancestors used to technological deprivation! I only saw you, like unto a mirror reflected, as if in a court room drama on TV. As if in a Dream among the ruins of honesty, and the drained remains of ensanguinated responsibility.

"Blame him!" we shout in unison deception. "He forced me to do it. Told me to suffer the innocent. I have a condition. I'm on medication (that which I lace with a flood of alcohol and candies). I'm in a rush, I didn't see. My insurance company will drop me!"

Don't blame me. Satan made me do it, I swear.

An excuse, the anthem of me life. Amen.

We are all petulant children.

I've seen it. I am God! I am... you. Am I blind? Demons poisoned me brain. But I did pull the trigger, shot Momma in the head. Under duress and extreme emotional distress, your Honor.

Acquitted.

Butterflies are free, fleeing past the barreling headlights down a summer's lane...

A butterfly of azure blue and pumpkin-traced lines swoops to land upon another man's brow. Insect melting into tears streaking down his face, a tortured face, me face I feel again, the muscles and weight, the burden of suffering as I stagger awake.

As: he.

He sits in his own waste, reading the Bible. The sunrise burns the corneas of his eyes, as the words of Epistles sink like obsidian shrouds o'er his chaotic mind.

A twisted grin of both pleasure and winding pain, sin or salvation, redemption in squalor as the flies buzz through the humid air about him; flies burrow into dark brownish-orange waxy ears, laying mounds of eggs, crests and pinnacles, monuments to Ole Be'l'zebub. Christ Jesus is in his heart, bleeding in stigmatic fashion, blood ethereal, psychological euphoria or madness plain and clear drools into his sunken chest cavity to the beat and rhythm of the azure mucous running from his nose. Lips moist and snotty and chapped, grinning in wicked glee his madness -- that of his savior within him as is now as it is forever.

Weeks alone and starving for food and junk and nicotine monkeys; hands, legs, muscles no longer shaking in spasm, our brain no longer sparking electrical languages but clouded in vapors of souls dearly lost to him (us). A bottle of furniture polish, a bottle of bleach that pales the dark stains, scolds our skin as we bathe in baptism, this day at sunrise.

The firm calls. The partners shriek, but no one comes a'calling, even after the phones were disconnected between Reggie's bellowing screams.

And so he reads in faithful detoxification, reads the words that sink in so deep; he glances ceiling-ward where the flies rest in discordant silence, waiting, weeping, sleeping in fitful rage. He gargles bleach, spews it out, tongue scolded by chemicals that fuel a lantern in his mind, a light blazing from his rheumy eyes.

Rustling sounds from within his ears, under his skull as the children rise to birth, crawling, squirming under his skin. Reg hears his heart thundering panic, his gaze panning towards the setting sun, shadows creeping, clawing, howling in a dervish of angelic glee, angels stepping free, free from the shadows of his pain, misery.

Reg fears this angel, his wife thought dead; so cold was her flesh when he'd returned from the firms hallowed halls of justice denied. But she had arisen an angel, a wicked smile left on her otherwise shattered beauty.

Reggie gasps, frozen in molten shit, his muscles stringy, his arms restrained in monstrous white snake-like children coiling taut around his wrists as their brooding parents shout and cry and buzz-screech in his roaring ears. She lumbers near.

And the new day sun, now rising in the western decay of his mind, casts a fiery glow round her face, image, about her hands which are harpy-talons, claws of metallic razor-wire, as the flies dive to descend pouring down his screaming throat, as the partners dressed in blue assault the door. But Grace shall not be denied the pleasure to take he-who-loathed-her-and-cloistered-her-in-his-maniac-love-ridden-heart.

For Grace was, as well as be his wife, his daughter, now thirteen and pregnant -- his disgrace won't be denied!

As Grace slashed his throat, his head falling back to thud, blood raining tears, wriggling carrion-children now soaring high... Butterflies are free to soar and form anew me misery... as a She.

She laughs now, no longer in a private hell. Her long hair midnight black, her ruddy lips so full and whispering curses; her words vicious and pointed towards the sons of man, the man himself a mockery. HE is. A parody.

But still she laughs, this irony come to pass. As tiny monsters breed inside urban-celled debris; as a new wave of ghastly demons crawl forth, unafraid and untouched by the sunlight, once anathema to all of her progeny, save for the enslaved betrothed: man betrothed and shackled (in spirit and heart) to His Celestial Father, a joke these days of techo-babbling adolescents.

She licks the blood clean off the streets, savoring the last ounce of fetid humor left under the acidic blankets of toxic sulfuric-pink speckled roiling skies.

She laughs, and then she prays. She kneels before the judge of man, blows him softly, a kiss to his cheeks, to his bloated member like oozing hydra, scratching his eons-old itchy, red-raw worm.

She smiled, resolute in debauchery.

Her wings of black leather regained. As her sired son arrives to proclaim: The world doesn't belong to Him. It belongs to us. Eternal.

She frowns as the three depart. As the men below kill each other, rape their planet, slaughter their babies in the filthy streets. The sun explodes simultaneously, showering the heavens with the world's rotting teeth. And darkness knows no name.

There is only a roaring silence, a rush of warmth created by a spark lost in time, spreading like a fungus over space, luminescent moss and lichen moist with new life past death, as the darkness congeals, reforms, as butterflies flutter free within this dreaming landscape. A name is spoken aloud, hushed voices call, beckon, images cascaded o'er his mind -- our mind. It is SHE. Another, not me.

A vision appears to him. A ghostly, primordial woman of intrinsic beauty, one which radiates a magically golden glamour that entices him to reach out towards her, touch her, pulls her free from the butterfly's embrace. Her breasts so round and soft, firm close to his glee-filled face.

He rises from threadbare sofa, walks round this three dimensional wonder of glorious woman, who lusts for him like some electroplasmic tendon reaching to score his flaccid brain, her tongue teasing him, forcing him to shudder, to strip away his wrinkled pinstripe Oxford shirt, his office a dim shadow, a nightmare shrouded by the concrete world outside; a prosaic world obscured by her beauty, so ageless, inviting her touch, her hand upon his bare chest, fingering his erected nipples, her eyes devouring him, his pants and briefs disseminated by pale moths trapped in time, time lost to the lovers, his face buried in a cavern 'tween her breasts.

He drowns in her scent, so rich and lilac-sweet, her tongue lapping at his soul, lashing his lips, ears, his wanting mouth. He moves, touches her hair -- she hisses, throws him to the mauve carpeting, severing his passion, his hips shattering, his pain escalating. But she mounts him, mocks him with a barbed tongue that digs into his flesh, toys with his innards, lobotomizing his brain with flowing honey. HE screams, flails about, but she tames his beast, gouges his heart, sours his soul until he lies drained, lifeless, dick-limp brain awash in cold showering stars.

He cries out like a child: Mother of God -- help me!

"I have already helped myself to thee."

She: a heavenly creature streaking towards moth-balled hell, her son's sins dying within toxic bloodstreams, her blood no longer singing, her lust not denied, her thoughts clear long after a mortal death. A vision of Matron duty.

And still the man cries. His lust spent, his concern crucified as translucent moths hang about his head.

A vision of a man he did see the following dawn. His smile regained in jest, his erection tossed in the corner like dirty socks. A vision of a man he did see, touch and feel as St. Michael's sword proffered a tilt towards redemption, a searing light cauterizing the wound: A tear goodbye.

A liquid butterfly soaring across the blood-red sea towards another domain, dominion, towards another crazed loon who thinks me but a caustic dream, twisting, turning their mind into mush, sour mash stinging lips parched, cracked, open-wound in a skull slightly ajar.

For there is great evil inside me now.

There is more quicksand darkness than there is light of day -- there is anger brewing within storm clouds, demons within ready view to piss daisies across my shoe-trodden path, clay-muddied child-fingers poking into my serrated skull, stone, knife, scissors but a dull sharp thud as it hits me brain -- and then I realize: I'm quite insane!

Hoppin' mad, a lunatic without remorse or conscience, all choices removed to bow before animalistic passions/obsessions that crowd me soul in the mosh-pit of me crumbling heart, me mind's eye weeping inside, deep-throated chuckles escaping, inside-out, as I run the jagged-blade of knife down the scope of me brain.

But first, I must confess to feeling a little bit silly, for me brain is between me thighs, a happy rocket in ripped blue jeans, so tight, under the veil of cotton/Spandex sheen, a sportscar red that mocks me still, so inebriated, high on meth, dust and weed, speeding, gallons of whiskey burning me tongue, me throat, bile caught in me gullet, the man's lashing blade warm and slick with taco-sweat and cheese. I am no longer pained as I excise this oozing, stiff brain from its stalk, watch in numbed ambivalence as me brain, now a jiggling globe of green mint gelatin, shrivels and shrinks, eyes of mine blinking into a wet, cold egg, ovoid, fetal pumping non-life.

I am insane, locked away in a reality I knew in adult sans boyhood youth, disco bars and drag queens to snort this insanity at me side -- I'm but a gay man, lost and cold, alone at the outer edges of pop-up book societies, shadowy underbellies lit by torch-song grit. These, the last years of the 1990's... are lost to me, dying in another man's arms: cold, lifeless, passionless embrace.

Momma! Where are you? You lied to me. Butterflies are pinned and dried under Grandfather's nova-yellow desk lamp, caged under plastic, glass, his bulging eyes blinking, his tears shrinking. Momma -- dragging under that icy blue sea near Charon's rotting hull. A light, a beatific wonder blazing under gossamer flesh, a balloon of bloated fireflies, burning creeping vine wicker men drawing near -- bursting free -- to see: No! Not again!

It stares at me with harsh malevolent eyes.

Reality.

How can I turn away from this beast that threatens me at every juxtaposed turn? It lurks in me vacant checking account, it prowls the table-chess game fought by animated food scraps that dart in brown-fat shapes up the walls, into crevices down the drain, food which must last me for another three weeks. The addictive nectar of bubbling wakefulness is draining away; the dragon-sticks cannot sustain me another week, another fretful day. Heart thudding, a flat tire along the highway of despair, ravens flocking towards my carrion feast.

Me hand cramps, barely able to hold the damn pen. As I dare to scribble and scratch in the beast's face -- as I lance another bit of mind rot, as it howls and hisses at me: Pay attention -- Don't dream. Only think and dwell in the land of your prosaic, embittered father: this reality.

This misery.

The snarling animal of savage tangibility sits there in the corner, those plastic baskets o'erflowing with fermenting mildewed laundry, flowers of DIS rising to engulf me every sniff. It glares at me from outside: the lightpoles a Cyclops staring eye-blazing in the Night that is as close to eternal dusk as can be. It fills me mind in a cacophony of jungle-dreams and droning but booming pseudo-poetic voices. This beast is crueler still in the heat of summer, the parasitic leeches that bite at me, the spiders that spin their webs in me mind, dragging me into their mandibles, gnashing fangs of rose-blossoming vines, injecting the poison of ink into my heart as mosquitoes blitzkrieg through the screened windows of me shorts to suck me dry, a husk of frayed, tangled rosewood vine, shaped a ruined man, eyes vacant, hollow.

As does this Kraken called Reality.

Me bane, me burden, this dragon-beast I must slay or at least subdue -- to again step into the land of me dreams -- that netherworld of fantasy, both darkly tainted in romantic glass shards and those better suited to the corridors of me fanciful mind, rotting.

To traverse this rambling prose, to grind it under me stiletto heels, spewing out pleasant, melodic verse, both rhymed and non-linear progressions, that shall trumpet me glorious return to a world I created long ago whilst resting under a peach-pitted tree. Just to blight the eyes of materialistic, prosaic fags -- fallen Chaos King toppling pillars consumed by tantrums of granite-hearted fathers and unimaginative siblings that would rather rub me raw then to raise the hackles of me heart, to tongue me with their ill-conceived-of views I cannot and will not subscribe to. For me heart is me own, and no man nor god shall chain me to this tangible hell: reality.

I must be free!

I must be wise.

I must not fail myself... not this last time.

I would rather be a royal king than a true, golden-ass fool. Not that one who knoweth No-thing: the universal truth.

It is time to exercise me mind, to do literary somersaults, phantasmagoric tumbles into the core of me wheat-field brain. To rush blindly out of this blood-red sea and out into a cruel, cruel world of fools and pillars and albino junkies.

This reality: Tis a sick, video snuff film joke!

Fountain pen plunged into me jugular, a straw in the orange of me brain, blood pumping furiously as I walk along the corridors of me lifeless mind, a castle's keep awash in strewn linens of me mother's wafting azure wings. Cold hands embrace me -- Me: shrouded in some winding sheet embossed in sigils of golden thread, held o'er an abyss, water crashing far below.

Then I open me eyes to see, not that blood-red sea, nor Charon's blinded, hooded peace, but eyes larger than mine, smiles forced under the scrutiny of one who barks a litany in strange, other-worldly tongues of ancients.

Water rushes down o'er me, me mother I finally see in the blink of infant eyes. She hears me wail, cry. She holds me to her breasts; I feel the cancer, black smoke caught in lungs, water spraying mist to harken her unto death, the vicar asking questions -- asking me? -- "Do you renounce Satan?" Yes, I cry -- I renounce it all, the gargoyles standing guard above me, the matron swathed in robes around me, the T of a man bleeding in effigy, the crumbling walls of ornate cathedrals dripping in a savior's blood --the whole spewed mess of dogmatic verbiage that utters me reply: "Yes."

I squirm like a maggot in his placid hands, a sacred token passed to another as Mother offers me up to her god to die before I am born to sin, to fly, to find me own way back into the darkness of me astral brain, back to the pain, away from this shroud.

Mute: Butterflies are free. Drowning: Wrapped in divine plastic, left in the burning sun of freezer burned reality. Flesh cracking as the butterflies nibble at me parched, flaking skin.

And I stare up at the vicar upon me baptism. I gaze with an infant's misery-laden eyes. Mute and tied, mute and tied, mute and tied, my life bound to pain.

Tis a sick joke: me soul.