I) postdiluvian twilit drive, serpentine sinew wind-down on ten east, highway slaked with rainwater rivulets. careening car rearing offramp, skittering periphery. wheel turns, chassis concertina. dirtbaked treads scrape concrete, last mile to make. skyline interregnum snagged by weathervane halberd, dogtrack under dogsreign. dogseye drenched. lead-pipes cinched. breach-beached firmanent in rebar tangles, threshold scathed, all doors opened.

II) the initiatory process of editing NTTN began in the lowest desert, dead middle of sweltering summer, the hottest in a month of Sundays. dogdays under the dogstar. monsoon storms swelled unnaturally early in the season, leaving behind a choking, humid july, venusian corrosion permeating every skin pore. dogseye view in hyperaustral america. i had reached out to David about printing Organ Bank’s first novel, our first foray into long-form printing, and what was returned was a lengthy manuscript, described only as a “mutilated detective story.” to prepare a psychic mise-en-scene, i planned on listening through Coil’s “Time Machines” during my first readthrough. i relayed this plan to David; his riposte, a soundtrack of Nurse With Wound’s “Soliloquy for Lilith” in its stead.

“Soliloquy for Lilith” is the inadvertent moonchild of Steven Stapleton and his wife Diana Rogerson. the only sound source utilized was a string of effects units fed back into itself, snaked together as an ouroboric feedback generator. the cavernous final product materialized when the two began shifting their physical positions in relation to the units themselves; by passing hands, fingers, arms, elbows over the units like a theremin, the shrieking squall would shapeshift, timbres and tones manifesting as slow-moving downbursts, gust fronts, hook echoes, scud clouds, all under the wretched aegis of chthonic cycle-humming. the album was an unexpected success, allowing Stapleton to move his new family to rural Ireland, and is fittingly dedicated to his real child who also serves as the title’s namesake. in future reissues, a secondary dedication was added to pay obeisance to the unlikely conditions of its gestation- “Our thanks to electricity for making this record possible”.

III) as my calloused hands till the first layers of soil, i discover detritus best laid in a shallow grave; patches of dead skin, frayed strips of electrical tape, shattered incandescent bulbs, spent nicotine pouches. NTTN is indeed a detective story, spangled with mystery, but with little to ultimately solve. a local television station airs footage of disused industrial interiors for hours at a time. two detectives spend their time idly watching and wandering, sleepless dreamers occasionally awoken by aleatoric caesurae of violent crimes, inscrutable and grotesque. the work is saturated in a dull, humming ferity, woven into its ozone, mirroring my own. i live in a postage-stamp in southern arizona, a single square mile in size. it has been reduced to a tarantula molt in the wake of recent lockdowns, city-stripped of copper wire. razorwire parapets encircle shuttered buildings on every corner, a climate of diabolical diffidence. on my block sits a husk of a church, burned-over for decades, limply guarded with chainlinks, allowing safe passage in a single jump. i too spend my time watching and wandering in these furtive sanctuaries, empty and palliative, respite from aching torpor burbling under chunked asphalt and tire shreds. the week prior, i sleepwalk to an abandoned motel down the street, surreptitious photos snapped; sign-skeletons, empty pools, carved-up crossbeams. i run my daydreamt hands across dismantled car engines and rusted daisyblades, langorous scenes of steven stapleton in the studio running his hands over effects pedals daisy-chained together with no input, microvibrations in space producing microvariations in time, mouthless aria for an absent audience.

IV) i begin to notice a cainite eye for devil details in david’s prose, a text pockmarked with implication and insinuation. several once-human forms smeared and jellied, slain hours apart, seemingly willingly. black iron bars dissolved to oil slicks. black graffiti eyes slit by a single straight line. black grains slipped under the tongue or down the throat with the name of Vail, mirroring the name of the sleepy town just miles away from my own. a boy arrives after a long journey nightwards through nightwoods to arrive at a cabin in the clearing. i slouch alone in my fortress home, grey iron bars on the windows and doors, digesting it all with little appetite. two empty capsules on the desk, once filled with white grains, a tonic for summer somnolence. my dreaming days are less sweet, more side-winding. i wake from one into another, nesting dolls tumbling neither above nor below.

i remote-view steven stapleton alone in the fortress studio, choked by a london fog of brutality, paranoia moth-eating through rising metallic thrums. unsettled and excitable, i criss-cross train tracks a stones throw away to the dark coliseum next to my neighborhood. years prior, live greyhounds ran this track until it was discovered they were being injected with cocaine. dogs blood rising. months prior, it was torched in an assumed insurance arson. dogsbody charred. slipping under, i bolt awake into another dream, less lucid. i criss-cross a rubicon of shattered windowglass, entering the arena. signs of recent life and habitation halt me, i notice my footfalls silent. i dissolve in a blur, my mind goes to a clearing of my own. deeper desert, strewn with spinal columns, cattleskin still attached, no sign of predation. genii loci of chalcedony swirls and sloughed millipede skins. sparse silence, enough to hear blood lurching through my veins, quenching in my organs, vibrating in my skull.

V) i wake the following morning to a perfume of fried electrical wiring and spoiled milk. dawnslight dappled with taupe haze, ozone smoke-soaked. i drive down the frontage road and see the motel as a primordial inferno. fulgent flamelicks dance in impish tyranny, devouring every stitch and surface. wiremother charred. smog roiling, pulverized permutation of asbestos, valley fever spores, tar, benzene, creosote, plaster, mold. i stagger fungible. at the gas station a woman wraith-warps and begins slamming scabrous fists onto the roof of my car, i offer her a cigarette to ward off evil spirits. soot-stained fingers, chafing against sweat, dust becoming granules. blackpitched Vail. arriving home, the electricity is suddenly out on my entire street, during the shank of the evening.

— Is the electricity out in Vail?

febrile fugue road-roam, teeth-ground under the weight of occlusion. all is occluded, nothing is clear. where it once stood, still it stands, but changed. a sign that indicates to me that things have changed. my mindseye no longer lingers lazily on any one image, everything in flowmotion, no channel to cross. the interiors have been eviscerated, their insides immolated. wireswake at dusk, the buzzing is quieter than before but with a higher pitch, a tone for shepherds caintending the wayward. it bleeds out in the background, as i have attained a higher focus. nothing above, nor below. no mute wires over, no magnetic pulse under. the electricity which once was is now within me, but changed. neither force, nor form. every organ in my body is charged with black light, pleura pleroma, falciform. liber pharynx. my pericardium is garnet gristle, flaking black powder. i wake finally from dreamlessness. 

VI)  i realize how little i understood NTTN when i first started. there is no mystery that cannot be solved, indeed there is a pattern, but the pattern itself is more intricate and complicated than i could ever fathom. there is no point in solving a single mystery, no point in solving several, no matter how tantalizing. rhyme is anodyne and anemic. i am interested in Reason. Reason has come into my world. i am hearing subtleties in the plangent pulsar rays of the soliloquy. stray squeals of feedback, coyote-chokes under an antihelion analemma. rhythmic stutters replicate, sequence opens then comes to a close; listening again, i hear an additional knock where there was none before. a sign that indicates to me that things have changed. i hear, deep in the mix, the sound of a child laughing, maybe crying, maybe screaming. threnody coiled. 

reedy middle yellowbeam, gelding gildheur. i try to record-keep as i saunter through the neighborhood. the dogtrack still remains intact, it was reduced to cinders, but it can still be accessed, penetrated, ascertained. fellow travelers pass through, some take sojourn. it is a known known, a fixture unscrewed. the motel has held a similar status, but its recent incineration shifts it to an unknown known. It’s unclear if the photos taken days prior still reflect reality; plaster fountain, slipshod staircase installed as a makeshift fire escape, stack of cinderblocks on the verge of toppling towered. the church is the only unknown, and it is an unknown known. nobody in the neighborhood knows when it appeared or why and a deep search online offers up nothing; congregation, choir, crux, all missing, the only means  of identification is a logbook scrawled by some unrung record-keeper. there are no unknown unknowns. no bells unsung. my steps trace toward the unknown known, but are halted violently. where it once stood, now it is gone. no trace of structure or substance, plotless dirt and fences. placed square in front of the invisible vestibule is a desiccated dog corpse, head raggedly removed with curdled blade, matted furburnt. sothic sequence closed, behenian requiem. dogshead missing.

there cannot be unknown unknowns. chain-snapped and short-circuited, i collapse in black bile.

VII- i’ve taken to inviting a scapegrace ride-along, cradled in my lap or in my pocket, moonsickle quicksilver glimmer between thighs. swung-low charioteer, engine rattling venomdrip. hotwire highlife. eye contact made with a man outside the gas station, he flickers bright at his waistline. hollow point to make as i flash my own. we envision the insides of the other eaten alive by black tines and flash canicular grins. propitiations to procyon. dogs blood cooling. nostrils soot-soaked, blackgrain stung cilia. vailrent thin. i stagger frangible.

rounds could be filled with

—washers, thumbtacks, glass shards, sawdust, nail clippings, gravel, black powder.

[a woman standing between the sidewalk and street slowly slinks her sore-covered arms through air like broken swan necks, pausing to scratch violently at her own loon’s throat, rictus grin broken by peals of laughter. Knockneed and cygnus-giggled, procuress of Gabriel’s hounds. Gabble ratchet.]

[a man dances a talon-toed tarantella then smashes his hand against a streetlight repeatedly, metacarpals splintered and shattered, no blood flows, but instead frothing, blistered skin.]

[a group of figures draped only in piecemeal quilts shuffle listlessly across the intersection in a straight line like a covey of clockwork quails. one by one, they gingerly lay upon the curb, automata entwined, lock-limbed and keyless.]

[i stumble blindly into the retaining wall of the racetrack, paintchipped mural smearing. i run into the empty concessions bellowing, voice swallowed whole by shattered windowmaw. 

deeper 

deeper 

descending a flight of stairs into a basement boilerroom stacked with dogteeth, dogtails, dogjaws, dogears, fruitbats, botflies, fruitflies, fleabites, brickbats, bloodroots, scapegoats, hammerbones, capstones, paydirt, dustdevils, dirtnaps, doornails, rattletraps, skinflakes, splitlips, lickspittle, gridlocks, lynchpins, bootrot, bonemeal, bonechar, dovetails, coxcombs, waxwings, wholehog, harddrives, crankshafts, skintags, tripwires, bloodclots, fiberglass, broomheads, rawhide, rotgut, maresmilk, birdshot, buckwheat, buckshot, bluebottles, tailbones, bloodlines, anvilbones, catgut, wingtips, whetstones, carjacks, gamelegs, greenhorns, jackpots, latchpans, dogshot, cowlicks, licecombs, banewort, bridesheads, henbane, blackjacks, saltburns, tablescraps, cropdust, waspnests, pigtails, oxbows, bowlegs, jawbones.]

VIII- lanced spiderveins in my heel drool inky spidersilk, stagnant stained sock pools of pitch. footfalls at midnight, haptic extrasensation of my achilles tendon wrenching out. cuspid cupidity overtakes me, seized with the urge to rip out ligaments, tendons, joints, chewing them like engorged pinworms. with intimate precision, i could anklescrape to pinch the sciatic, peeling pomegranate pith. eyetooth vision for constant ennervation. slurped spine. gnawed hanasheh. I I I IA i in-in sinew ate. iaia. hahehohi. Hu. huUUUuh. what crushes the heel, bites the head. jewledtoned rainbow film coats my eyes like flayed fish fascia, pavonine paint drip-dried, lenticular teratomas metastasize. i’ll need to scrape away the layers to see more clearly. needled pupil deflating iris caldera. nowl flying backward. need to make a clear ring away. pathtrod on and on and on. gimel stalks the desertwain. clear clover honey, oozed cloven hooves. hopscotch to daath. slipping septward

down 

all doors closed

Semyaza shrieks 

—Scorched owl. 

some joke.

do you know what’s behind the sun? i can hear the howls of sulfur can smell the breath of copper can taste the sneer of iron. i know what’s behind the sun. smeared bursts of gunhail colorcrashing baptized in holocaustal flame in monsoon rain in spires of clouds cloistered in the split-lip adytum. beating scarlet wings golden wings emerald winds murder winds sapphire murder wings predator wind. baptized in monsoon winds hind-quarterfirst into vertiginous gyres of austral and boreal twin spirals in vortex rhythmin circling further downward into ravenous downpour, deluge, drowning the deep earth forever-fall. germfire perfect mind, but how many do you think drowned in the air? on ararat as it is in meru, saint of the ark. saint of the arc. luminous arcsplay against the gloam. ark of history. do you know what’s behind the sun? all is wrought and all is rot. ritrottrot trot rot trot trot. rockunder rath rang-warmed. rungwormed, declovered? in the pearl lies the calyx. Caliclackclickclock lock clicklack clocklocked. lockclipped going nowords. shibbolemma sad, sad, sadyousee. tierfall wailwall wirewilled dogflare heelnipped. slash lashtongue kawww 

KA

LIK

KU

kulilitu exuvial. water-bride waterlogged, greenskin mottleblue riverrun. but it’s parched. drydry as a bone, aureate radix threaded in heartwell. heartwater gold in well rundry. in the garden is a carob tree. sinjin bred and locustbit. coagulate unsalved. tonguecut at the root syllable. no law higher than tooth. slitear from ear from ear to ear to ear from ear to ear from ear to ear from ear to ear from ear to ear to ear from ear. malleo scissa. incus dissolvi. 

Is there no balm in Golgotha?

IX)  

fait accompli.