SKULL KINGDOMS
-the Houngan-

There was a rusted girder protruding from the ample loins of the man with sunken eyes. He squelched the congested gulps of a mink in a trap, its neck at a mortally obtuse angle and being attacked by possums on Aderol. My mangled hands clutched the blood slipperied circuit board talisman tightly. The patron goddess of pain had come to the Skull Kingdoms and she licked her chops at the feast before her. Broken buildings with seaweed draped windows wrapped the skyline forming a cleaved crown. My bandages were grey, yellow and red with bodily fluids, flapping in the hot wind and glistening with foxfire.
Desperate grandmothers carried flowers, votive candles, incense and Basic cigarettes to the tomb of Alvaro Ojos, the notorious smuggler, reviled in life but transfigured through death into our patron saint of lost causes.
“Don Ojito!!!” they cried, “the sea must be angry! We dream of strange and awful things- oil soaked pelicans dropping from the sky, and flesh eating crabs that hide in the woodwork like roaches!”
I rose to my full stilt-enhanced height from behind the tomb, mantis arms reaching for the devotees. Either Ojos possessed me, or I put on enough of an act to fool even myself. The talisman began to hum, resonating with steel beams and strange tangled power lines embedded in the ancient concrete walls of his... of my grave.
“The water is a mirror for our own anger- we wish for revenge against life and forget the wish itself: the only way to get what you want is to forget what you want.”
The words issued from the static of the ham radio attached to my utility belt between tinny fragments of a long forgotten Los Hermanos Rosario tune and clips of Hugo Chavez’s post-plebiscite victory speech. Emissaries of the dream world choose strange media to reach us. The Insect god’s men had surrounded the shrine to steal my words but they were too late. Babosos.
I blew a kiss toward Kali’s thin lips and the counterfeit thugs were dragged into the ground by their disappointed ancestors. The pain in my hands eased and I saw no need to stick around and further placate the mob’s need to be hated by the world at large. I placed the talisman in my mouth and became invisible- just another ghost in the necropolis.


Alvaro Ojos had left his secret journals and grimoires buried in the foundation of one of the many ruinous Churches of Dunkin of the old city destroyed in the wake of the Dragon King’s wrath- I had found them while running from the angry fruit vendors of Burnside Park.
I often wonder if my act of thievery had forged a bond of sympathetic magic between the Don and I. If so, it made no difference to the daughter of his heart, Alvarita. I was nothing more to her than the drifting wreckage and oily flotsam clotted in the shape of a great sea snake on the barren beach where we first met.
She had sat stonily on that shore like a native cairn. Her eyes burned a hole into some arbitrary point on the horizon, and I found it hard to believe this fledgling curandera was the same girl that had friended me on Facebook not two weeks previous, who had listed her favorite song as Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Paid in Full (Cold Cut Remix)’, who had driven me into a frothing erotic frenzy with lurid text messages and now showed nothing but borderline repulsion at my physical proximity.
I let her stare at my rag picker version of her father’s fashions as I rolled a mixture of tobacco and dried apricot in a coca leaf and considered walking into the sea, leaving behind the never ending chain of unobtainable women that have haunted my life since some cursed and unknown womb spewed me into this world. Alvarita rolled her eyes with sheer telepathic contempt.
Ankle deep in the fetid tide, I felt a sharp pain on the back of my neck. She had thrown a fossilized starfish at me and it was then I knew I had fallen under the doom of love.
“Why are you still here?” Her voice carried over the length of the deserted beach unbroken, as if she were whispering in my ear. “Go to Despair Island and study the journals. Your will splatters and makes things worse here. Go now you despicable fucking swamp yankee!” She spit cleanly into the sand and walked way.
Left alone in cold sludge with a wilting erection, bleeding from my neck, I gave myself to the deeper currents- passing Hope, Mercy and Forgiveness- I washed up on Despair no more than a soiled prophylactic of a man. I built a fire from the innards of a Buick Le Sabre, black smoke rising with my ego from the pyre. I cracked the books.


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SKULL KINGDOMS
- the journals of Alvaro Ojos-

I’ve lived a million lives and I’ve died a million times. In each incarnation I degrade, become my own enemy- the ANTI – existent only by virtue of my absence, repelling what I want so those I love grow alien and distant. I am a hungry ghost and I wander the wasted moments of your life while you sleep.
I am told I speak too softly to hear- then why do I feel like I’m screaming until my vocal cords are acidic shreds?

Bruja and Malé’s snits get sickening; their constant psychic cannibalism fills the air with a strange vapor that leaves me weak with infection, adverse to affection. The spastic clamor of flocking birds, the fatalism and desperation of ants. And these are my oldest friends.

I saw you again today and swore I felt something where my soul once was. The smooth swivel of your hips walking away told me I could have you- I know I can- but our words were cold and hopeless, punctured by a pointless reserve. We show ourselves no mercy, you and I- tell ourselves of the ease of wanting and preposterously deny ourselves that desire for the sake of what? Some arduous agenda for the accomplishment of ephemeral monuments to our ritual escapes from an inherent lack of self worth? Is it as easy as finding the voice to tell you how my blood and semen runs hot in your mental and physical vicinity? The line between reality and fantasy grows vague, permeable. I must tell myself a story, write a script with a part worth playing, a death worth dying...

Malé wanted weed to kill the fear eating his guts- I had a run to make in South County for a few pounds anyway so it was no trouble, but I can’t stand the anxiety driven bipolarity of apathy and obsession, structure and chaos- this kick he’s on is a downer, word is bond. It’s either Bruja or her brother riding his ass to ruin. Where’s all the potential energy hiding? That kind of paralysis isn’t a numbness- it’s a perpetual state of panic and pain. I know Malé well even though his perception of the world is alien to me. Perhaps that’s how I’m able to know him at all?
The trip to Exeter was nice today- I’m in a rare mood when I relish blue skies and sun, Aaliyah singing sweet sad songs from beyond the grave. The yokel dogs of Babylon kept to themselves, napping in their air conditioned country cruisers. No one wants to work when it’s this hot- automatic siesta. Couldn’t believe Star had the shit packed and ready for me- she runs on a schedule of her own. The time I spent three days stripping her place for a fire inspection while waiting for a batch of weak Haze... Her paintings are going someplace strange, yet familiar. Déja vu. (note in margin: ask for $ of one like jungle temple)
Later...
Meditation results: shit. This vibrating techno-organic parasite in my pocket is killing me- endless vocalized loneliness, escape from the fear of death or boredom. How long and well can we keep moving until we don’t? As I sat praying to my unforgiving goddess, attempting to channel all this humid musk of WANT fogging up my aura into some kind- any kind- of release, I snapped from my fleeting trance to the buzz of my damned phone. For all my admitted self-inflicted derangement- if the electronic immediacy and simultaneous emotional distancing of modern communication is literally killing me, is it nothing less than a demon to be bound and cast out?
Almost had a good time despite myself. Malé bought my beers and conquered me at pool. Bruja showed up with a different reality and the dive became electric and dangerous. We reeled on the pure heroin of narrative and lost our legs. Every conversation is a hall of mirrors, an orgy, a Bosch depiction of the inferno gorgeous for its detail. For a moment I forgot the hole in me, even if that brief respite’s buzz lasted the five seconds of the brunette at the end of the bar adjusting her bra strap. Brujo swaggered in drunk as fuck, bellowing for his sister and swinging a half-killed bottle of Amaretto which the bartender foolishly told him to ditch. Brujo pissed on the dude’s shoes, brought the bottle down on his skull with a righteous crash. “There’s one for progress!”
Malé lost in pothead nostalgia... I’ve taken bullets for him as he has for me- and we’ve shot each other down as many times just the same. The difficulty of getting my keys in the door with blood lubed fingers. Regrets for every inconsequential move in the game of killing time- waiting for La Santa Muerte while pacing the small cells we’ve built for ourselves. And after these escapades have made the wait a little shorter, what do I have to show except the memory of emptiness? The alcohol’s an anesthetic for vivisecting our wounded erotic drives and frantic hypocrisies.
Call Brujo on Tuesday- something big. When in fuck is Tuesday? Tequila turns my veins to concrete.

SKULL KINGDOMS
-the whores of perception-

I can only read the words of Ojos so long before I sicken and vomit, leaving an unnourishing snack for the island’s seabirds and water rats. This isn’t a place of power, but of understanding and transformation. Daily I make the pilgrimage, delirious after extended periods of fast- upon my return I visit this man’s daughter (although she has never claimed herself as such...) and while gorging myself on rice and beans, drink and drug, I feel incestuous with my hands’ ache to squeeze her offered hips, to sink myself in the wet warmth that must be there if the unnumbered goddesses and gods of these isles know any justice. Would she bed a man downloading her supposed father’s consciousness to better play his part as shaman for Le Fraternité du Serpent et le Tambour? Perhaps I can appeal to her cruel perversity and contrary nature.
The Insects have gotten bad- the bright glass and steel hive that grew at the periphery of the old capitol’s destruction consumed every available resource for its sustenance and expansion, and those of us that dwelled in the forgotten ruins and shadows of urban decay for the sake of our souls’ sole ownership lived as outlaws. There is honor amongst thieves because our fellowship is all we truly have against the devouring hoard- and in the end I know I may only be running away from a dark reflection of my own hive-mind banality.
Tigersden is at the edge of the disjointed old textile district where mills and warehouses went to die but found their bones appropriated by assassins and the willfully mad. We fuck and puke and bang our drums in the dull glow of the neighborhood’s incessant red brick. Hashish choked bazaars, wailing alien wind instruments patched together from broken electronics, Muslims and Jews chewing the haunches of swine dripping black heart’s blood, the antiseptic hands of handsome, young competitive murderers looking for the night’s lay, children learn to pick pockets and masturbate by the bountiful examples in every tent, on every corner. I drag my toxic waste sullied frame through these streets of rotten fruit and glittering cellophane to the girl I worship (whether she wants me to or not) just to feast my fill on her cold, familiar cruelty. Her motives remain inscrutable.
Alvarita is the protector of Les Fleur Fanez, a restaurant run by aging and retired prostitutes. She had been raised by the geriatric whores redolent with the scent of yesteryear’s lovesweat, and so learning everything there was to know about love in its carnal and intangible forms she found herself immune to the disease that is destroying me slowly. I have seen her laugh spitefully at drunken would-be paramours before whipping out her ever-present shotgun and blowing their besotted brains onto the barroom floor for the restaurant’s many resident cats and birds to lick up. No matter how much I knock back I try to keep a tight hold on my virulent yet sentimental emotion, but she sees it in my foolish face. She knows. She knows and I writhe with pleasure under her constant verbal abuse because it is the only intercourse we have.
The visions have been increasing in both frequency and vibrancy. I no longer need to enter trance to see them- I only drug myself to keep it manageable, such as when I don the masks that allow me to pass through the territory of the norms unmolested, or when I feel my heart bursting with unbecoming romanticism during planning sessions with Alvarita- which is too often. I have become a constantly intoxicated spastic mess, and am often teased by Terri Siesta, Les Fleur’s grey stubbled trannie dishwasher, and my favorite marijuana hook up.
“You just need to squeeze some joy juice out of those loins, darling, and you’ll feel tip-top in two shakes, and you knoooow I’ll help you with that any time your little heart desires.”
Terri’s voice sometimes grates on me as it hops and lilts, throwing in extra syllables for lascivious emphasis, but she has the best Weybosset White Leaf around, and her stereotype-prone speaking habits give no hint of the beauty her singing calls forth as the leader of Le Fraternité’s choir. When he isn’t playing up the nonexistent originality of his tedious band, Terri’s dour pussed metal head scumbag of a boyfriend bristles at each casual flirtation and makes a fool of himself, spilling rum and cocaine every which way and pouting all the more, but in the end keeps his bitchy silence intact for the pleasures of Miss Siesta’s behind.
Tonight Alvarita is tense and slicing the room with her sharp eyes, shotgun at the ready. The restaurant is packed with braggart gamblers and rich punks slumming it. A Cambodian 5 Percenter had already turned some belligerent career drunk’s face into hamburger, a group of homosexual Red Thread monks immolated themselves while engaged in a daisy chain, one of the cats gave birth to a litter of slimy mewling kittens in the popcorn bowl- and the night has barely started. I’m high as hell, chain smoking blunt after black raspberry blunt with no end in sight while plucking up the courage to have a conversation with the gorgeous and deadly beauty behind the bar, but I’m trapped inside my masks and the labyrinth of self criticism. Doubt is soaking my robes just as much as the textile chemicals and sewage from the polluted waters I’ve crossed to come here once again.
I have a terrible hallucination: the painful life I am living is only an illusion I’ve created to hide an even more pathetic, degrading existence. This hidden state of being just outside the field of my drug narrowed vision is so empty and hungry that it has made a fictional world to live in, and following the downward spiral of addiction only takes me further from feeling anything at all.
So I order another margarita and roll up a fresh one as I give myself over to the only glimpse of paradise I have, the bountiful cleavage and rolling shoulders of Alvarita as she washes some glasses. What else can I do?

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SKULL KINGDOMS
-selections from the collected emails of Corporate Intelligence Agent, Random Fürst-

Sender: Random1@scarmail.wrd
To: HighCommercialOverlords@virus.sys

Sirs-
My researches into the mythos of the cultist/ terrorists’ fanatical belief system have hit pay dirt. Several names have reoccurred in the ritual storytelling sessions I’ve witnessed during my nightly excursions into the ruins. The spiritual ancestor/ saint/ god [their terminology is confused and/or confusing as to what exactly he is (or was)] Alvaro Ojos is thought to have once been an actual historical figure- but again the time period when the man is supposed to have lived seems almost purposefully obscured. These people can’t tell the difference between a day or a hundred years and, if you’ll forgive the melodramatic phrasing, it’s starting to drive me mad.
Digressions aside- Alvaro Ojos seemed to have had a circle of friends turned enemies with whom he shared a localized karmic relationship similar to the ancient Egyptian belief of the ka-tet, the chief difference being the obviously fabricated or exaggerated fallings out with the individual members of this circle. No one could be shot as many times as this man Ojos was and live- in fact, the tales of his many wounds are popular and bare a resemblance to the Vedic tale of the god Indra of the 1,000 Eyes, as many of the bullet holes Alvaro incurred are related to a woman (or women?). The sadist-Freudian interpretation of the wounds directly mirrors the thousand female genitalia Indra’s body was cursed with after his affair with Ahalyā, wife of the vengeful sage Gautama- later the vaginas were transformed to eyes (OJOS) after the god underwent harsh austerities. A further supposition may be that the name Alvaro Ojos was an appellation created for the narco-saint long after his death: the real man or men may have nothing in common with the scaffold of legend built around him.
BUT- if the plan to defame the cult’s object of worship is to succeed, I believe we must hijack the mythological narrative (i.e.: the detournment of the Situationists). The enemy ‘gods’ who warred with Ojos can be given a new spin in line with the company’s objectives to win the favor of the locals.
However, for this initiative to succeed there are a few local figures serving the functions of a traditional Santeria or Vaudou (colloquial voodoo) society who must be removed from the field of play. They will be counterproductive to the plan for they act as the primary conduits to Ojos and our other numinous ideological enemies. I have, as yet, been unable to trace the movements of these figures since I am lacking the necessary advanced skills of espionage- my training was centered on serving a statistical and analytical position for Intelligence, despite having minored in basic Ninjitsu. Upon arrival of more ‘active’ field agents I can provide all known data concerning the undesirables whereabouts, habits, movements etc.
My next report should contain details regarding Ojos’ contemporaries and antagonists, and who might best serve the role of supplanting the narco-saint’s favored position with the locals- at one of the seemingly endless number of black markets in this area I’ve come across rumor of a few promising pieces of obsolete media tech I may be able to access in order to gain a clearer picture of the life and times of Alvaro Ojos- but am awaiting approval for the charge to my expense account from the Finance Division. Your assistance in ‘greasing the wheels’ will assure my prompt continuance of intel.

Agent 170180 R. Fürst

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SKULL KINGDOMS
- the journals of Alvaro Ojos-

In the bowels of the Beast- a ‘something’s not right’ crawl of my skin- DNA imprinted with the bands of college neckties and sports cars- when it’s time to pay the devil his due, he only takes plastic. Unseen, unheard, I’m an organic battery in a concrete box for 8 hours a day- a self imposed term in a torture cell to hide me from the eyes of paper pushing bureaucrats, dealing weight from the back of my old red pickup in a dark corner of a downtown hotel parking garage- solitude’s erosion leaves me featureless. Distance summons the demon paranoia, thriving on that horror movie moment before the hammer drops on the surgically enhanced head of some ugly pile of cosmetics. The wait is hell- the interims of silence are only broken by mind numbing conversation with the other zombie prisoners, innards dissolving in an acrid sea of stimulants- the fevered scratch of pen on paper- or worse, a blank sheet taunting me to squeeze that last bit of liquid from my swollen red pulp. How many hours have I lived like the last man on earth, wanting you from across an impossible abyss? This is a program designed to make me a grateful and obedient masochist for an all too seductive schadenfreude. While you dream, or draw, or make love to unworthy men I remain locked in a coffin- its interior poisoned with blinding florescence- the walls reflect my dying countenance, and reveal through my death the end of all things. Pandora, call me! You can keep your leftover hope, just let me the fuck out! Or in.... into the only box worth being in.


As a child... walking from the corner store along the backstreet by the highway- a humid summer day- I look into the sky and the sun is the eye of a dragon carved from cloud staring down with the secrets of earth and heaven on its lips.

To this day, the serpent in my heart is my one true ally.

The sky is the playground of leviathans, sudden thunder... my grandfather saying “giants just bowled a strike”... meeting friends for drinks on the East Side- gold heat lightening flashes... a tornado is that dragon riding to heaven... storm lore- the Hurricane of ’38 washing away the last vestige of the cove- let the spirits of those brought in slavery to these salt bogged swamps find rest.
I remember Hurricane Gloria with crystal clarity- c’mon Van Morrison, Patti Smith, sing it. My parents deciding to rescue me from my demented grandmother’s house at the last minute while the oppressive sociopath shuffled from one taped and boarded window to another hidden behind heavy gloom-inducing drapes, obsessed with the delusions of her cross-pollinated ancestry of Portuguese folklore and Catholic self hatred.
“THE EYE!!! THE EYE!!!!” as if her ugly and wrath filled god were hovering in the sky to punish us on a whim for the supposed sins that were really only an excuse to crush us like insects for the fun of it, a monstrous child creator and destroyer- and there I was, pissing with fear, envisioning this giant malignant orb staring down at me, prepared to smash me with great waves of gravity into hell for no reason I will ever be able to understand.

And later I recognized that eye as my own, my power- and yours as well, my goddess.

Over a light infusion of yerba maté with Bruja, talking about old times- trying to remember when she and her brother and I first met- my uncle sold their stepfather cocaine- a children’s birthday party used as a cover for a heavy deal? A faint recollection of someone playing the drums, dirty backwoods blues, ice cream and fireworks. Bruja grubby with chocolate and mud, shrieking for attention- her twin lording it over the other kids while practicing the painful moves of his favorite luchadores- always the rudos and never the técnicos. Catching a beating after coming across the kilos stashed inside a rusty red toolbox in the garage. Not much has changed.
Brujo and Malé arrived late- Malé’s suspicious shit has to stop. I am a twisted and bitter man who will do whatever it takes to get what I want, but his woman utterly killed all attraction I could ever have for her long ago. I can’t tell them about the terrible desire I have for you, I know them far too well to trust them. Your existence is mine alone to orgasm and suffer over, if only I can manifest our coupling in the flesh.
I thought it was going to be another session plotting impossible robberies, but things look good. Brujo’s lucidity was shocking- speed? And the theatre of it all will be a good kick to the nuts of those high and mighty puto fucks with their rose scented shit. Call Tony, Kim- it’s more than a four person job (and won’t Bruja hate that, cutting the split even more? Good.)


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SKULL KINGDOMS
-Le Fraternité du Serpent et le Tambour invitez vous... –

Echoing voices from 2 dimensional space- are these dancing ink symbols really the vessel for the thoughts of the dead? Am I? Cutting through the distance of time and space like the broken oar of the ronin Musashi Miyamoto.

We met in the black skeletal frame of an old, fire-gutted strip club on Washington- best to keep the restaurant a safe haven. Alvarita had gotten word from one of our elderly friends of movements being made against us- and so our mutual precognition of a storm brewing was confirmed. Don Ojos and our other allies had our backs, and we had theirs.
Mojo Jaune, the Master Drummer of Le Fraternité, can never sit still. His fingers, toes- probably even his pecker- are always tapping out a rhythm. Mojo isn’t mute, but he finds difficulty with words and prefers to gesture and grunt. His time is divided between us and the 5 Percenters, whom he runs a diner for on Potter’s Ave when he’s not drumming in the tunnels and aqueducts of downtown during the times the chemicals in the river cause it to burst into flames. A man kept busy working to feed his 23 children and single, bow legged wife. Mojo was squatting with his back against an old dancer’s pole, a determined grimace on his massive East Indian jaw while he slapped his thighs faster than my eyes could see.
Terri was acting tedious, kvetching about not being able to bring her annoying boy toy. I suppose if she were 30 years younger she would seem more attractive- but her man hands are showing, and the day-glo wigs she wears to cover her balding head are tacky and old fashioned. To some degree we all play roles, take on personas (except for Alvarita...); Terri’s is tired and cracking, a constricting mask that’s strangled the life out of everything but her voice and sex drive. When she sings she finds freedom, calling the Lwa down with real emotion before resuming her familiar cunty pattern. Erzuli Jé Rouge is her tutelary goddess- a fitting match, and one I would be loathe to let ride me myself.
Alvarita Ojos was talking to a few of the semi-retired call girls from Les Fleur Fanez that sang in our choir, cleaning her shotgun in case anyone were to fuck with us during the meet. Alvarita was our La Place- the machete bearer- though she was deadly with any weapon when it came down to it. She was Kali in spirit and flesh. The older members of our group said that long ago, during her initiation on the night she was blessed with her first bleeding- the moon eclipsed, and the black goddess entered her completely, so they would always be one and the same. To speak with Alvarita was to speak with Kali, and she was to be treated with the respect a goddess deserved or suffer the consequences. It wasn’t hard to believe: seeing her dancing during the opening procession of our ceremonies was to experience true ecstasy and know the will of the void. She took a single drag on the pipe as it passed to her before calling the assembled Le Fraternité du Serpent et le Tambour to attention.
“Shut the fuck up you hideous rodents! Mojo, if you don’t quit that tapping I’ll break your frigging hands! Alright Brigitte, speak your piece.”
Young yet old Mademoiselle Brigitte, the retired mambo of our group, stood while depending only slightly on her cane of intricately carved jade. The woman had taught most of us at one time or another. Her ethnicity was indeterminable- the blood of too many nations ran through her and blended into the singular, venerable bluish grey of the ash paste she used to paint her skin, eroded smooth by the years- ashes of the ancestors and descendents she had outlived. Mojo Jaune was thought to be her sole surviving son but she’d had so many lovers and children she couldn’t be sure. Brigitte was one of the few still around that was born before the Kingdoms’ founding. Some say she knew Alvaro Ojos himself- but she is reluctant to speak of the past except in conversation with the dead who lived through it with her, for she ever has her eyes on the present- dancing like a mad woman, smoke billowing from her dripping lips, grabbing the jug of black rum from your hands before groping at the loins of a fortunate young buck soon to learn the esoterica of sexual magic.
“ Friends: when the mosquito drinks my blood, he drop down dead. Why should the norms not do the same, feeding on our land? Least the real bugs is honest, direct. No one owns shit- no one got a bank account gone move Legba to open the gate of heaven. My dead friends say- he laughs! Oh, he laughs children- leaves the business man standing there with his tie ‘round his neck like a big limp dick. Even Mammon and Khris à the Kross cover they eyes in face red shame at this hoity toity rigmarole of order and servitude and unnatural angles. Bureaucracy’s like an obese man with the runs. Yeah, you can use shit to fertilize your fields- but what you gonna do with your laptop when the pipe trees get chopped? Day by day make it new... they want to plant their bad seed in our homes: our heads. Vampire army coming- the names’ve changed but the game’s the same- ‘gentrification’ just a new word that conveniently ignore the ghetto we get shoved in when they’re done. They don’t need death camps on the physical plane no more- too messy, wouldn’t look good on teevee- they’re trying to turn our brains into a nice cozy Auschwitz built for one. And me and the Guédé? We say fuck that at the drop of a hat.”
The assembly stomped their feet and hollered like all hell. Alvarita took the mic and introduced Frieda, a prostitute in her late middle ages, still active and always on the prowl. She tended to political and economic clientele- most in our world would rather screw rabid Dobermans, but the info she came across was often vital to the survival of our community. She had our respect as well as our sympathy.
Frieda had been washing the balls of a very drunk Irish- Italian senator at the Biltmore Hotel and overheard a disturbing conversation. The dumb son of a bitch had been stupid enough to put the conference call on speaker phone- he felt safe talking around the prostitute, who always pretended to speak nothing but Cantonese, though the material concerns and repressed instincts of the senator and others speaking clouded their words meaning and made the needlessly complex wheeling and dealing difficult for the clever call girl to follow. Long story short- someone with a southern drawl on the other end was hot for the property rights surrounding the ruins at the head of the bay where the tomb of Don Ojos was located, the sacred and viciously guarded territory of Le Fraternité.
Our people have a legend- if the tomb should ever be disturbed, or the earthly remains of Alvaro Ojos used as the subject of a National Geographic television special, then the Skull Kingdoms will collapse into the abyss, and while there are many who wish to become one with the void, we believe that is each individual’s journey to make on their own, and by their own choice.
We will fight.

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SKULL KINGDOMS
-the continuing research of Random Fürst-

Upon acquiring the needed funds I purchased several laptops and memory sticks of a bygone era from one Howard Phillips, a man lost to the advantages and conveniences of the modern world.
Phillips: a recluse surrounded by moldering print media and arcane technology in a dilapidated flat on Nephilim Hill which he shares with 3 mad crones who treat him like he were a little girl. I was given his location by a disturbing man of Arabic descent in a Tigersden black market (note- most of my expenses were used on getting this information from the Arab; Howard himself seemed happy enough to part with the tech for the price of my conversation and company- it seems the man has few friends outside the world of email and texting). Mr. Phillips is useless to us as far as actual field intel- he is a virtual shut in, and his wealth of knowledge extends to the enshrouded past alone. Despite his vehement insistence on his dedication to rationalism, science and technology, he takes an almost perverse pleasure from his researches into dark fantasy and the occult- yet he is also the most fear driven person I have ever met in my entire life, and would surely be driven mad were he to encounter the supernatural entities whose nature he inquires into.

With patience- and not a little luck- I was able to extract partially degraded data from one of the memory sticks and it has been a shattering breakthrough in my study of the Alvaro Ojos mythos. The following facts and suppositions were drawn from the thesis of a graduate student majoring in American literature- a detailed study of the popular author Alain Farrell's literary output and real world influences. Farrell's works were so diverse in style, theme and structure that during his life (and increasingly so after his death) he was accused of having hired several ghostwriters throughout his career, if not having outright stolen the manuscripts of unknown authors. Farrell also spent much time in court fighting libel suits for his thinly guised portrayals of many people whom he befriended and subsequently used for character material. Further, and most importantly, his death at age 73 was attributed to a man bearing the description of Alvaro Ojos- a theory which seems to be supported by the tales of Ojos' modern day followers, but does not hold up when considering Alain Farrell, a man of roughly the same age as Alvaro Ojos, lived much longer than the drugrunner- whom most sources agree died in his early 30s. One thing is certain: at least one novel, two short stories and an allegedly non-fiction account of urban drug traffickers from Farrell's body of work are based on the same collective story elements which the Ojos cult's griots (or oral storytellers) retell as a part of the primitive rituals that occur in the ruins.
The popularity of the Alvaro Ojos (hereafter abbreviated to AO) cycle of myths is derived from his reputation as an 'honorable' outlaw, his disdain for material possessions, and that he resorted to violence only out of self defense or revenge for wrongs done on him and others. This is the classic Robin Hood motif embraced by poverty stricken cultures the world over- often the human failings of the man behind the legend are overlooked if not forgotten, or the blame for the hero figure's faults is projected on his antagonists. The Farrell documents blow AO's noble reputation to pieces, casting a highly unfavorable light on the cultists' object of worship- they also show the two figures reviled as AO's enemies, Bruja Aguilar and Malé Hazard, are not quite the villains they are currently regarded as.
I have given much thought to which of the two enemies of Ojos is suitable for the Company's agenda in supplanting AO's position among the locals. I've discounted Alain Farrell off the bat- his origin of wealth and privilege would be too blunt an affront to the lower class pride that makes AO popular in the first place; and although he is an important figure in his own works, he is just a minor player in the cultists' myths. In the case of Bruja- sometimes spelt Brujo- there is a confusion of gender. It may be similar to the phenomenon of the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin's gradual feminization as an effort to placate and convert women followers. For our purposes Bruja's indeterminate sexual identity, while marketable to a broader (no pun intended) demographic, might create too soft an image to gain momentum.
And so my conclusion is that Malé is by far the best choice as a replacement for his overall similarity to Ojos- the same struggle up from the urban ghetto, the same fantastic exploits and supernatural powers. He is also the only enemy of AO who has a following of his own, if much smaller and secretive. It is a common superstition in this area that when misfortune befalls someone due to 'sorcery', the root cause is believed to be a devotee of Malé. I have yet to confirm the existence of the Malé cult firsthand, but I've had hints from sources such as the previously mentioned Arab, Ali Ahz Addam, through whom I obtained much of the content of this report.
The working principles in this situation that we can manipulate towards elevating Malé Hazard's status are ironically those which we intend on eliminating in the first place: anarchy and rebellion. Alvaro Ojos is a pervasive presence here- we must make that ideological dominance oppressive, onerous; let's make the man a hypocrite, only out for himself. We basically have to run the classic disinformation scenario: create alternate or skewed artifacts which take the same stories that are common currency and give the characters entirely different motives. From there we can start to re-write the history itself, shortly thereafter release the Alain Farrell findings free to the public- and soon Alvaro Ojos will be nothing more than a bogeyman to scare children with, quickly forgotten like the boybands of our youth.
I mentioned in my previous communiqué: the people we are dealing with have no real sense of time or space. They share the same spatial and temporal vocabulary- but a man saying 'two weeks ago' might be referring to a period of months and years, if not a matter of hours previous. Anthropologists often had similar findings with secluded hunter-gatherer tribes when such people still existed before Worldwide Incorporation- agriculture begat the clock, and industrialization made it holy. The outlaws live in an aboriginal dreamtime which we can use to our advantage; what might otherwise have been a process taking decades will take only months given the necessary manpower and resources. I must admit the strange temporal sense of the natives may be more than just sociological- I have had several instances where my personal perceptions of time and distance have shown distortions- perhaps it's a geographical anomaly produced by chemicals in the air or water? No matter- my loyalty and continued dedication to the further progress of the project is assured.

Agent 170180 Random Fürst



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SKULL KINGDOMS
-the journals of Alvaro Ojos-

The longer I live the more people that I know and love I'll see die before my eyes- is it any wonder the image of the eye is the most frightening instrument for shocking consciousness? Is it any wonder death becomes an obsession and I forget how to live except wrecked and recklessly, impulsive, unforgiving? My mantra has been:

Sometimes I want to fucking die,
but most of the time I want to die fucking.

Living in this mausoleum, I have to be firm with the way I want to live because it might only be moments before I join the rest of the dead- this is all I’ve got, why waste it on doing what someone else wants me to do unless they are my friend, my lover.... or to at least make sure I do those few good people no harm, a modest fucking goal if ever there was one.
The past has to be tangibly present, or we must recreate and live new iterations of our pulsing, colliding flesh.... how can we afford not to live in and for that one moment of happiness and ecstasy? Heaven is the red thread that runs through us. My vision is narrowed and I only see you- it becomes impossible to disentangle the rest of the world from your hair- I suck the juice of a grapefruit and taste your skin on my tongue, my lips and beard stained with pussy.
SEX DEATH.... get it? Shiva Kali Goddess Snake Thunder. We become each other- I want to smell your thoughts, run my cock through the teeth of your dreams, freckled skin in the sunshine and your fingers start the dance lightly stroking my hip behind you.
These things break and grow cold for no good fucking reason- and then it’s just me with the snake nailed to the wall of my heart...

Reconstruction: I need my story straight- what reality do I choose right now? What the fuck happened in the first place?

Fat rat sigil tattooed fist smacking against the glass of my Accord – if the way I woke from my exchange of souls with the snake god Damballah Wèdo was an omen then why the fuck didn’t I pay attention, or does it only seem like that in retrospect? Brujo came back from his watch. Veteran’s Day- all the geezers and right wing fuckheads that let themselves get brainwashed or wanted the release of death and aggression and wasted their lives fighting at the behest of those who throw their souls away for the wealth and luxury of those safe from harm- all waving ugly little flags. Raid the VA drug dispensary- take a little back for the shit they did to our fathers, and for what our fathers did to us in return.
Kim had on a nurse outfit she’d specifically tailored to look completely real, still sexy, but not sleazy or stripperish- she knew how to use a man’s interest to her advantage and castrate them when they let their guard down. We’ve always been cool as long as I didn’t lay hands- hard core lesbian, but damn. She lopsidedly carried what looked like a power pack for an electrocardial stimulator- pretending it was heavy when it was filled with large canvas bags soon to be stuffed with plentiful and profitable drugs from the stock pharmacy, which was kept under lock and key 20 feet away from an armed guard. She had 10 minutes to get him to the broom closet in between the emergency stairs and the reception area before Brujo and I arrived in our stained field jackets, bandanas and Harley Davison sunglasses- as Brujo split off to find his sister like a faithful pet-I found Kim wiping her hands- she got the job done clean.
Tony Leroque had gone in earlier- Brujo’s constant slurs against Tony’s bisexuality and persistent use of his hated high school nickname ‘Crack Roque’ had nearly blown the whole scheme for us when they got into a brawl at a nearby bar while researching the VA’s layout and narrowly escaped the blue and reds. Tony was the only actual vet among us- dishonorable discharge for killing a chaplain that had raped him in the baby food aisle of a Baghdad delicatessen- which he hadn’t gotten caught for, or was ever even suspected of (he’d bleached any DNA evidence into unreadable nucleotides and the Iraqi owner of the corner store had been beaten to death by over zealous and/or bored MPs), he just made the mistake of going AWOL to Brazil for a year with his guilt over the innocent owner’s death. Of course, constant fucking and amyl nitrate is a hell of a way to repent your sins.
Malé, Bruja and Brujo were covering the security booth. They were each wearing Diablo Negro Luchador masks Brujo and I had bought years ago on a road trip to Tucson in hopes of scoring enough peyote to get us through a rough winter. I didn’t learn until I saw the channel 10 report at five am this morning that Bruja had convinced her brother it would be better to leave no video equipment or witnesses at all and the two guards on duty were shot dead, although I had guessed that that was the fate they had met when the side of the building blew out from the homemade fertilizer bomb ala that punk bitch Timothy McVeigh- spraying shattered glass and metal across the windshield of my gold ‘85 Honda Accord as it careened from the entrance of the underground garage and jumped the curb onto the steep grass covered hill I remembered playing in the snow on with my mother as a boy while waiting for my father to come out from his appointment drugged to the gills and mean as fuck – realizing I have to put my favorite fucking car in storage or do some major spray and body work if the vehicle was ever going to take me anywhere again without drawing Babylon on me like flies on shit- faithful little sports car carrying my steadily bleeding gut-shot ass out with Kim’s salvaged corpse to the old textile mill where I owned a convincingly abandoned looking garage on a small piece of land that had no name on the deed not a mile away from the burning VA- I weaved through the dark backstreets swearing and spitting- the violet white streetlights left trails in my spotting vision- the expression on Crack Roque’s face as he fell dead looked like a junior high schooler taunting another kid with Downe’s Syndrome- my hands kept slipping on the steering wheel and the scratched up copy of Ice Cube’s ‘Lethal Injection’ lodged in my CD player kept skipping on the line ‘treat ‘em like a prostitute’- considering if Cube had ever wondered about the implications of that line... if he had friends who whored like mine... Malé fucking Hazard you insufferable cocksucker, you couldn’t even look me in the eye, you couldn’t even look me in the eye- you bitch, you fake fuck friend- cheap sluts sucking the devil’s come for stupid, worthless money... Brujo I could understand, he always had murder glinting off the blood diamond capped shark’s teeth grinning out from his pubic beard and glaring from his cock bald head- murder and the bottom line: how much in his fucking pocket - and when I tagged him in the crotch with both barrels of my sawed off I let my anger rest with him- deactivated, dead- a fucking videogame enemy that will disappear in 5 seconds from my consciousness- Bruja and Malé still owe me blood… Kim didn’t want her once beautiful, now hole ridden, body poked and prodded by piece of shit cops who’ve watched too much CSI and felt the tickle of necrophilia- I will carry her in my old Toyota to a still place where her lovely cells can rot and rejoin the earth- I’ve staunched the bleeding- cauterizing the wound with gun powder as if in a Chow Yun Fat film- adrenaline keeps me alert through the morning and I pass out while remembering your eyelashes against my chest as you licked my nipple and slid down to blow me, that was yesterday and I am almost more shocked about our first time in bed as I am the fucked results of this dark morning- I will have to be careful about seeing you so you don’t get caught up in this- another reason to bring the pain to these soulless dogs...

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(the Houngan)

From my vantage point of Despair, the Skull Kingdoms lay naked before my mind's eye. Vagueness and confusion only clarify my vision- I am the flow of chaos itself through the local collective unconscious' tributaries. I have ceased to question whether or not I am just a fiction in the journals of Don Ojos- a character born to walk the labyrinth of his dense and unending fantasies. 'Reality' doesn't concern me.
I feel I have met the woman Alvaro writes to- perhaps she is the goddess herself, opulent and unknowable.
In my daily ritual, solitude breaks apart the static of brain chatter that periodically forms around me- my mind fragments and diffuses. The raw elements of persona can be traced back to their sources: Alvarita, Brigitte, Mojo, Terri- they created me as I continually re-create them, and they possess my I /my EYE, just as surely as the serpent dwelt in Ojos' breast and in this land where we now live.
We are creatures of living, liquid narrative.
Tell me a story...

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SKULL KINGDOMS
Where Drums Sleep

As he finished sharpening his tools, Mojo Jaune paused to watch his newest grandson send a small but enthusiastic stream of piss into the grass at the base of the cherry tree in their garden, joyfully fascinated with the still new sensations of urination. Mojo approved of the gesture- a man can't be a man unless he can piss when and where he pleases.
Children and grandchildren were everywhere- the house looked like an elementary school. One wonders how the giant master drummer found the chance to close his eyes for even five minutes. The secret lay within Mojo's mind: he lived in a perpetual state of dreaming where normal circadian rhythms ceased to matter. His constant state of physical movement in no way reflected his inner calm.
[insert CHI HAN KI]
He wrapped his axe and other implements in sheepskin, placing them with reverence in an old brown golf bag he slung over his shoulder. He went to his wife, who was pounding wet laundry against a rock. Grabbing her by the wide hips that had brought so many into the world, he pulled her still firm ass into him and clamped his teeth on her neck to taste the sweat of her efforts and emitted a low vibrating hum from the back of his throat while she gave tired protests at the interruption in her work. Mojo ran his tongue across his teeth and headed to the garden gate and the wastes beyond.

Long before the events that made the world the way its is, there were a people who lived with the land and not off it. Doesn't the phrase 'living off the land' imply some sort of alien nature? Conquerors came and raped their way through this people- those they did not kill they converted to the worship of Mammon. All that remained of the land's original inhabitants were the stone cairns whose purpose was forgotten, the place names whose meanings were lost, and the native trails entombed beneath the shattered tarmac, crumbling check cashing services and haunted hair salons that lay between the old city and the modern megalopolis of Samuel. Following the Greenwich mainline west through the heart of this no man's land we come to a dense forest which few dare enter- a sacred grove known only as the Rogue's Will from the marred inscription on the entrance of its ancient gates. Mojo knew the truth behind the whispers that the beasts of legend roamed free within- he had seen the lions, wolves, buffalo, bears and crocodiles with his own eyes and yet knew no fear. Long ago he had made a pact with the guardians of the Rogue's Will: on the appointed day and time when his spirit returned to the essence, his remains would feed the forest and its inhabitants- and until then he was free to make his pilgrimage to the valley where drums sleep.
The way through the wood was nearly impossible for the uninitiated. The main gates gave way to a wall of thorns, and if one were to cut themselves the scent of blood would draw the large predators that made the forest and its lagoons their home. Jaune closed his eyes followed an invisible path, hearing the same sound he had heard ever since the morning after his first child was born. He'd entered the Rogue's Will that day on Brigitte's advice, looking for an answer to the terror and hopelessness that filled him when confronting the prospect of guiding his new daughter through life. The thorns and roses had been enshrouded by a fine mist-like rain, just as they were now as he found himself standing on the same terrace of old brick where he had first heard the angelic choir that emanated from within and without- a swelling ocean of sound which resonated with his soul. It had not left him since that day- drumming was his way of adding voice to the chorus outside time and space, and he would not stop.
It was Mojo's character to disturb as little of his surroundings as possible. When coming upon an impassible tangle of foliage or a sickened swan hissing with pain he found a way around. Finding the path was dependent on the attitude in which it was approached. If he sensed a pack of hungry timber wolves he would take castanets from his pocket and use his constantly moving fingers to his advantage as a basic aural ward- when he waded through the algae clouded lagoons that shifted with every rainfall, a small table speaking irregular rhythms sufficed to keep the prehistoric reptiles at bay.
Mademoiselle Brigitte had taught him the ways of his unknown ancestors just as the 5 Percenters had shown him knowledge of self . His people had been stolen from their homeland and brought half a world away to serve as replaceable moving parts in the machine. Drums were one of the few things his forbearers had retained from their origins- for all drums have a soul which no arrogant slave owner or missionary can ever destroy. When a ritual is over there is the coucher tambour- putting the drums to bed- and their spirits return to the homeland to rest and gather strength for the next performance. Even when the body of the drum dies, its soul lives on sleeping until a new vessel is made. Mojo Jaune acknowledged no home except this ruined city where he had been born. When he came of age and was initiated into the mysteries of the drum he found a fitting place for the spirits to rest while he crafted new bodies for them to speak though once again.
The silent valley where drums slept lay in a natural tree filled amphitheatre surrounded by rolling hills at the edge of the largest waters in the forest. In its midst were the remains of a stone temple once dedicated to music by the frivolous people of another age- its granite columns collapsing under the weight of years. Mojo lay his prayer rug at the center of the ruined temple and let his mind diffuse completely. The God of Bright Rain came down, drizzling between the spreading thoughts and filling the gaps of NO. Everything is light, and light is a downpour of something that is not quite a particle, not quite a wave crashing gently against the eye. The god reached into the golf bag and pulled out the axe and a skin filled with black rum. He took a swig, sprayed it across the axe's blade and it burst into bright yellow white flame. Standing, he raised the axe high over his head, musculature elongating as his body formed a crescent. With one arcing flash it whipped singing into the trees and landed with a resounding plunge in the trunk of a formidable and ancient oak. Thunder split the sky and the God of Bright Rain proceeded about his business- the drum of war had heard its wake up call.

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SKULL KINGDOMS
- Hatecraft (a Haunter in the Dork) -

"Howard. HOWARD. HHOOOOWWWWURRRRD..."
Auntie Hera- or was it Dian this time?- sat paying tribute to the goddess Oprah, needed another sacred cognac to anoint her throat for the blessing of Xanex and Ghiaradelli chocolates. Howard turned up the volume on his antique CD player and climbed the trap door attic stairs as if the furies were on his ass, pulling up the ladder behind him and sealing his last refuge against the naked horror of imposed reality, his simultaneous cure for and perpetuation of the inferno's torment, the diseased childhood that never ends.
In Japan he would be the otaku king, subterranean punk rock cyborg death orgy god arenas of the mind, the foundations of the alien city's grids are in every low budget horror film you've ever waited through for a shower scene- the collected comic and design works of Kirby, Ditko, Steranko, Starlin, Mayoh- the cover of "Lark's Tongue in Aspic", veins and arteries leeching through the thought sphere feeding on the milk of Crowley, Mathers, Spare- Kurt Cobain's shotgun shell casings used to grow flowers- a blow up doll of Marjorie Cameron- the memetic golem stacked to the ceiling of his Edwardian turret fortress of decrepitude.
Howard Phillips practices egregore class psychic martial arts- his nightmares had been the doorway of initiation, a reflection of his life seen from the Aleph of Fear. He is inheritor of the chthonic knowledge buried in lost cities sleeping beneath the sand, onyx obelisks encased in Precambrian ice and strange coral on the silent ocean floor of causation. He stepped through the invisible door and on the other side he was someone, something else- lived an existence he could not comprehend with normal eyes. He perceives a crystalline geometric shape, but it only pretends to obey the physics of the world we just left for the convenience of communication. Analyze, imagine- space bends, time stops, pause and re-loop- a dynamo of shame and savagery pulses sexually with arcane energies... we tell ourselves, 'this is how the world was made'

Ali Ahz Addam opened his eyes with a gasp as his throat closed from chronic hash sleep apnea, felt the hair on his knee touching the down on the ass cheek of the hazelnut skinned girl next to him. She moaned low in the back of her throat and shifted, mahogany red hair falling from the slight droop of her heavy sweat sheened breast. Her juices still glistened on his foreskin- he painted his finger tips with them and rubbed it into his moustache and beard so as to smell pussy all day. He lit his water pipe and regarded the dim violet and orange glow that came through the beads to the beautiful snoring spice merchant's back room. The sun had not yet broken the horizon and by the time it had he would be too busy to notice.
He wrapped his long thin body in smoky black rags, concealed his weapons, painted his face in blue, white and black and drank a mug of espresso before licking the cleft of the girl where she lay and leaving the spice shop. Shafts of oppressive red light beamed through the shattered skylight of the mall's scuttled cavern. Ali's keen eyes watched a family of twelve burning the contents of a Baby Gap to stew the head and genitals of a black goat stolen from Kali's alter- headless infant mannequins blistering in the heat. Cannibal feast in the rectum of consumer culture. Ali hunted the easiest prey of all: information. The sour smell of sweet desire, jealousy and paranoia were weak or only common here- he moved on to more promising territory.
Ali Ahz Addam hid behind the desire for wealth like a shooter's blind. It was about the Way, being a god of his own destiny like that part in 'A Better Tomorrow'. Among his few intimates he was free with cash, chemicals, whatever he had but his thoughts and soul, which were his alone, and he was utterly alone for that ownership.
And he was not human- just one of many possible constructs built to access this world. His true nature was capable of destroying thought systems on contact, and being one of the few aware of this gave him power over the trade routes of viral sensory perception eating away at the axis mundi- his were the psychic pseudo pods of the time beast extending from an arbitrary judgment of juxtaposition- tentacle porn featuring the talents of Sofia Wisdom: Ali Ahz Addam, living book of the Hashishim, the Esoteric Order or Assassins.
The old man had been pleased with his preparations thus far, but shewed impatience as the Tricentenniel approached. It was an important ritual for the parasite Corporation's ravenous cells: the latent synchrognostic energy of the local collective unconscious would be at its peak, and they would tap it to shift the paradigm incontrovertibly in their favor. If the Foundation Stone of the Skull Kingdoms, the tomb of Ojos, were disturbed the end of all things would manifest. The Hashishim knew all things would end no matter what- but they would lead the world to suicide before letting the landlording infidels have it their way, right away- desecrating the grave of the man many of the Assassins believed to be the 22nd Imam.
The hunt lead Ali to one of the old city's seven hills. He made the evil eye at a phallic symbol of the Bacchanalia that hung from an archway- a bloated testicular fruit ready to drop on the heads of the curious out of sheer spite, a living ode to the arrogance of architecture posited by St. Laser. Taking the maze of cramped intestinal back roads, suffering the bright neon glare of rotting vinyl siding, the assassin came to a burnt out church: within, the shooting gallery with the highest mortality rate in town. This was where the old and sick went to OD- the elephant graveyard of junkies. Their corpses were dragged to the bell tower above, attracting clouds of crows who in their own turn had become addicts from regularly feasting on the pale scarred scabby sacks of bone.
He walked through the shadows unnoticed by the nodding clientele curled in fetal positions on the pews- not exactly a challenge to his skills. A guard leaned against the wall by the vestry office in back. The man reached up to his neck thinking an insect had bit him and had only seconds to feel shocked at his shiny red hand before collapsing like a pile of dirty laundry from instant massive blood loss and still Ali remained unseen- any reasonably competent necromancer could divine the identity of a murderer's eyes from their victims.
It would be inaccurate to say Ali Ahz Addam next became flat, or even intangible- but there is no way of accurately describing in human spatial terms how he entered the room without opening the door, gliding silently into the blind spots of the furious telepathic battle raging between the establishment's proprietor and its financial backer, an alpha male pheromone contest, beasts hungry for the rank piss stench of fear in their opponent- bare your hindquarters for fucking. Frank Statement, the man from the Corporation, had the upper hand- money and a colossal power structure for which he was only the instrument. Giallo Perro, the aforementioned proprietor, was still holding his own- the rarity of his greed in these parts and his rabid sociopathy allowed him to hold his own. Perro would let the anchor grafted to his massive and grotesque hair infested arm land with an ominous CLANG! even while picking bits of scab off the track marks oozing pus from behind the greasy copper fur of his bitches' teats. Frank knew this hideous misshapen creature could never break the conditioned fear for his life and livelihood which the Company instilled in all those that served its interests, yet the agent's surgically limited imagination was still capable of envisioning blood and shit and torn intestine hanging from the barnacle encrusted hunk of metal and he kept his tendency toward snark in check.
Figures. Territory. Aggression. Concession. Limp-dicked Conventionality. Ali Ahz Addam tired of these buzzing, beeping children's toys. Pulling his short handled Japanese zanbato spear from the folds of his cloak he gutted the Spanish-Italian heroin merchant like a garbage bag, severing the clumsy anchor weighted armwith a second stroke just to see the lower being waste his last moment fascinated by the fluid squirting from his wounds. Within three seconds Ali had turned his full attention to Frank Statement, whose brain seemed to be suffering a processing error. The assassin regarded him like a butcher considers a rack of ribs. He brought the zanbato's long wide blade against the side of Frank's head, sending him flying across the room, instantly unconscious.
After crucifixion to the confessional in the uncomfortable frozen posture of an Olympic figure skater going for the gold, Statement was most forthcoming with the information Ali required. The Tricentenniel parade would be the final moment for the Hashishim to strike before the war machines of the urban redevelopment contractors rumbled in. Things were more desperate than realized: the Corporation had a turncoat in Le Fraternité du Serpent et le Tambour, guardians of the tomb of Ojos. While the Assassins rarely saw eye to eye with Le Fraternité they never underestimated the importance of their role in safeguarding that holy place, and a spy in their midst could mean the imminence of doom- but now the Skull Kingdoms had a spy of their own. Frank groveled and whined like an obedient puppy. Despite Ali's cold detachment from his emotions, he looked forward to the day he could release this wretched abortion from its parasitic existence. For now he sent him crawling back to Samuel, crying like a cunt but ready to tell his owners that he was attacked by Giallo's men and managed to escape after the church had caught fire, killing everyone within. Ali was busy for an hour or so suffocating the druggies and thugs within the church before thoroughly torching the place- all the while exploring the sense of déjà vu the experience gave him After making his report to the old man he would clean his weapons and find a tight holed virgin with olive skin.

Howard came to gurgling foamy phlegm clotted saliva onto the unvarnished wood of the attic floor. At some point he had soiled his trousers with semen and his first thought was to the predicted actions of his aunts were they to see that white signature at the end of his sexual sentence.



SKULL KINGDOMS
- a glimpse into the violent narcotic paranoia of the steadily fragmenting Random Fürst-

Death fantasy: banking on a heart attack or upper induced coma- the possibility of ending up as a spray pattern across some bleached blonde broad’s BMW grill while she applies her lipstick, sends a mundane erotic text message and checks her hole for monthly blood is as likely as anything else-I’ll have been checking the ass on that red haired high school girl that smiles at me every time I’m coming back from the library when suddenly I’m so much meat and coagulating fluids. What a shit life.
There are tobacco coarsened voices and broken bits of Batman dialogue mingled with the vague memory of getting fucked up and making out with a bar troll talking about her son’s military career- puffy high blood pressure red face wrapped around my half soft knob- I feel like an insect tossed by angry waves against a large stone surface, hardly conscious- the throb of my temples is a drumbeat whose rhythm is a fist against a slab of rotting pork, giant screws in my eyes- my sinuses are the roads on the map of pain- a molar broken on an almond in my breakfast cereal sings its sweet song and I chase my morning coffee and cigarette with a shot of rum and a nugget of weed tucked inside my single hitter. I want to play Russian roulette.
When I returned to my office in Tigersden, it was a shambles: filthy polaroids, neckties, ballpoint pens, unpaid bills and a soiled brassiere from my college days blown against the paper thin walls by the broken glass and buckshot blast of a garage cobbled sawed off shotgun.
“Jésus Malverde, what the fuck happened?” I shouted to the empty room, immediately thinking of the money I had stashed. If they’d found it... a vision flashed across my eyes of my scrotum nailed to the vintage wooden signboard of the bodega downstairs- Soco would not be well pleased.
The cash was still there. This wasn’t about money- it was about fucking shit up, or else the brain trusts that busted up my place hadn’t thought to thoroughly check the notebooks in my old plaid briefcase- a Ben Franklin taped to every page of opium scrawl from my wannabe junky-intellectual days. The vague smell of bargain basement tequila piss and prayer incense, the girls I wanted to lay and never could for all my wealth of self-hatred. How come the people that tell you, “No one can love you until you love yourself,” invariably despise themselves?
I changed clothes, and cleaned the shithole as best I could, making preparations for the meet with Soco- if I could just get my hands on the shit- caught a cab to the white trash infested suburbs- I had to split this scene, I felt The Fear. I paid the driver his ridiculous fee, leaving him with a middling tip- I didn’t want him to remember me. I was average, ordinary, unimportant... and very, very fucking high and paranoid.
I was at Jack’s crib- his brat son ran around screaming about video games and I tried to keep my cool- but I was having a bitch of a day.
“Listen you,” I said, coldly addressing the arrogant little prick, “do you know what happens to little brats who act up? To little shit heads like you?”
He shrugged and rolled his eyes. His strung out, half deaf step-mom barely noticed as he bawled at the boot in the ass I gave him- she was too invested in chopping up her Oxies and screaming “CUNT!” at an American Idol contestant badly mangling her all time favorite theme from a Disney film. I wiped the child germs off the tip of my penny loafer on the edge of the K-mart couch cover and caught a glimpse of her heaving, vein-latticed tits as she took a line.
I kicked in Jack’s bathroom door. He lay in a fetal position on the floor puking behind the toilet. Who are these people?
“Hey, get up man.”
I kicked him in his worthless guts and took the pound he had taped to the underside of the toilet lid and I hit the streets running. I ran as hard and as fast as I ever have, trying to outrun The Fear... or myself. I was sprinting until my heart seized in my chest like a dead animal hooked to a car battery with jumper cables of hate. White hate, black hate, mustache hate- I HATED THE WORLD, everyone- the two dumb metal head stoners talking loudly, pretending not to follow me as I made my way back uptown- them I hated most of all, neo-shamanic tantric thug potheads working for the Beast, the Insect King, whoever- the same fucking closed hierarchy I used to take it up the ass for. I reveled in my hypocritical languor.
I crossed the road to a bar with sidewalk seating and ordered an ice cold beer- and damn it for being piss warm anyway. The two tailing me sat in a nearby bus shelter and I read their lips .





DUDE 1: Shit...
[DUDE 1 hisses as he drops some loose bits from his dwindling stash on the litter strewn ground at his feet- his blistered and burnt fingertips fumbling with the cheap rolling machine while DUDE 2 uses the end of one cigarette to light his next]
DUDE 2: Well?
DUDE 1: I’m not fucking around.
DUDE 2: What do you mean you’re not fucking around?
DUDE 1: Historically, when I’m fucking with someone, I laugh maniacally and move on to the next thing. I’m a busy man, I’ve got things to do.
[DUDE 1 taps his wrist as if he were wearing a watch. A watch might drive him mad.]
DUDE 2: Listen, I didn’t sit next to a crack head that smelled like old shoes on the bus for a half an hour so I could play fucking games.
DUDE 1: How’d you know he was a crack head? Or are you just speaking figuratively?
DUDE 2: I may not speak Spanish, but I know what the fuck yayo means.
DUDE 1: Well- then he was a coke head, not a crack head.
DUDE 2: Oh shut the hell up and roll that fucking thing.

A bus stopped and a fat Chinese woman got off carrying bags of live lobsters. It was apparent she was the replacement for the two losers tailing me as they got on the bus and were soon gone. ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ sampled over a speaker-blowing dirty south drumbeat played from a passing vehicle and I chewed thoughtfully on my second to last peyote button. I became Nosferatu on the walls of all my would-be pursuers degraded brains. The L train roared past, or was it a dragon off the Ming Garden takeout menu? I wrestled with my cell, called a number I thought I’d had long memorized. I bellowed horribly as I strangled my phone like an unwanted infant. The fever pitch of modern telecommunications has turned us into receptacles for digital and chemical signals- we are conduits between junk food and shit- tubes, wires, moving parts in an unholy machine.
Every day (week? month? year? maybe only moments...) I’m unlucky enough to wake up once again, I tell myself the story of who I am and who I want to be. My memories are tales grown corpulent with fictions malformed through their constant retelling.
When I was 9 I killed another kid. The two of us were alone near the train tracks and I smashed his fucking head in with a rock. We used to burn furniture with lighter fluid we stole from his father’s garage. He’d said I fucked his dog of a sister and before I knew it I was wondering how to get the brains out of my farmer jeans. In a way I blame New Kids On The Block. I wanted to choke Donnie with his fucking peace sign necklace.
What’s real? Me least of all.
I am Malé, Malé- bad to the fucking bone. Where can I get a piece and give that fuck Ojos what’s coming to him?
First I have to settle with the extant matter drugs and the cash, drugs and cash. It’s funny how money doesn’t matter to me anymore... and drugs are as easy as pretending you’re someone’s friend and listening to them bitching ‘bout shit you couldn’t give a rat’s ass for. I wish a pale tattooed woman would suck me off. I wish to all the demon gods of this hell I’m in that I could sleep for more than an hour without some dumb fuck pushing a lawnmower or tracing pentagrams with a shovel in deconsecrated churchyard gravel destroying my dreams and throwing them in a shiny black bag, sweating like a fucking pig while choking down my constant urge to infanticide every time some mongoloid’s unwanted brat shrieks because they’re copying the shitty brainless behavior of their shitty brainless parents. Eat, shit, fuck, die. Monotony. Robots and Insects.
I finally got a hold of Soco and told him to meet me at my place. I retreated into my mind and asked my personal god, evil and brilliant Malé, to take over- grant me eyes to watch my enemies from afar. I lay shivering in the sweltering dumpster across the street from my building while I cut my hand over and over with a broken Heineken bottle for the necessary blood sacrifice but it wouldn’t hurt no matter how deep I jammed the fucking thing in. Heh- that’s what she said. My parasitic world faded, and my astral body, united with my god, walked unencumbered by the ineffectual, numb meat machine I’m usually trapped in. Malé- thank fuck for this blessing!
I saw Soco pull up in an ice encrusted, platinum rimmed, hydraulic monstrosity that must’ve put a severe strain on the dwindling fossil fuel reserves that haven’t already been dumped into the fucking ocean. He licked his phosphorescent neon vampire fangs and ordered his boys to have their glocks ready as he roughly pushed away the scrawny teenage bitch giving his gargantuan limp member a greasy mangling with her braces and Mickey Mouse tongue ring. He pulled up his hypnotic codpiece and adjusted the pigeon bones driven through his nipples before getting an automatic rifle from the back that was big enough to give Tony Montana penis envy.
I saw he and his flunkies stand for several minutes like the lazy, dumb pricks they were at the old broken elevator in the lobby of my building that the slumlord Pawtagee I rented from steadfastly refused to have repaired. They gave themselves over to the inevitable and climbed the innumerable stairs to my office. Soco vowed to kill the bastard negligent owner as he hit the 9th floor and I wondered why I hadn’t thought to invite him over sooner. Too little, too late.
Outside my office he paused, scratching his testicles for a moment and checking his text messages- and I almost thought my earlier forecast of his predictable loud mouth alpha male bravado would be wrong- but fortunately he aimed his gun at my nameplate and blew a hole in the door I’d sealed from the inside with duct tape, trapping the gas from the disconnected stovepipe within so that Soco and his boys were blown to Skull Kingdom come in a great big ball of beautiful orange flame.
I kicked my way out of the dumpster and danced like an epileptic while watching scraps of my former life and burning bits of drug runner rain down into the street, thanking Malé for the assistance granted to his mind-fucked, unworthy servant. I strolled over to Soco’s SUV with a swelling hard on and hopped in, asking the burnout waif in the back sucking on her pipe- oblivious to the chaos around us- if she’d like to come up front and wrap her lips around her new boyfriend. Tough love, Random style.

.....................................................................................
__

SKULL KINGDOMS
At the Gaslight

Two friends banter over cheap beer. A Nancy Sinatra favorite skips in the jukebox, but no one bothers to fix it. Built into the wall behind the friends is an eight-foot long terrarium with a yellow anaconda inside. She cannot stretch to her full length and no longer bothers trying.

Friend 1: So, on the south coast you have the central city, which is where we landed. And there, I mean, there's the skyscrapers built on coke money, with shantytowns in their shadows, like any equatorial metropolis, I guess...you know, such visceral contrasts. The cholos hustle you on every corner, and you fell bad for them out there selling broken trinkets in the sun all day. But what the fuck can you do? I mean, the guy's got like seven kids and they're probably splitting a package of Ramen noodles for dinner but, what, do I buy two dozen sets of New Kids On the Block keychains for charity's sake?
Anyways, at one point, after like two days of wandering all sweaty...


SKULL KINGDOMS
A City on the Move

Standing here with you all amisdst the grandeur of Caldhart Plaza, I have to rub my eyes to convince myself that this is not a dream. Because this is the realization of my dream, and yours surely, of seeing the sorry streets of Samuel raised to the heavens on beams of steel and panes of light-deflecting glass. I remember when this very spot that we stand on now, together, this magnificent piece of real estate, was a no-name cross-street of crumbling triple-deckers and...why right there, was a used car lot, and next to it, if you can believe this, was a house of prostitution run by diseased aliens from the South Coast. In those days, Samuel was a washed-up town in the shadow of a rustbelt city, and few among us ever dared to imagine it any other way. But folks, let me tell you, I was one of those daring few, and even as a boy, I remember walking those hardscrabble streets with my eyes closed, and visualising flowerbeds all around me. The flowerbeds of the future, which were actually high-rise office buildings, as we can see now...

Alvarita leaned against a sculpture that belonged on the cover of an Ayn Rand novel, a twelve-foot tall titanium steel man with a barrel chest and no face gazing coldly past the crowds. Gazing, as it happened, into the window of the Happy Man Deli some hundred feet away, famous among the local food snobs for its wild turkey cold cuts. Maybe the faceless man is hungry, she thought, or maybe he is hot for the life-sized porcelain Happy Man mascot with his fat cheeks and bushy mustache, in his shiny white chef's uniform holding a butcher's knife. Knife or not, she thought, he'd be the one on the bottom.

The plaque by her feet read:

The Walgreen's Independent Man
by Italo Lozada
Dedicated to the City of Samuel
Walgreens: Helping People.

Slum kid agitators seized upon the Walgreen's Independent Man as an embodiment of everything they despised about Samuel; its consumerism, its compulsive self-branding, its blind optimism, its shininess, the infantilism of its people, and etc. blah blah. On the covers of their crappy zines and homemade t-shirts, they parodied the statue in all kinds of yawn-inducing, faux-subversive ways: the Independent Man with a billy club in place of a dick, the Independent Man atop a hill of skulls, the cartographic outline of the South Coast, anthropomorphised with cartoonish hands and feet, taking it in the ass for the Independent Man. Oh, the banality of it all, she thought. She knew the pamphleteers of Tigersden too well, a bunch of graphic design school dropouts resorting to agit-prop in a desperate attempt to get laid, and how they would all be at home drinking Gansetts when their betters went head to head with the Insects. At least the mayor of Samuel had his so-called vision, however childish.

The city council meeting was scheduled for Monday, but she had come to Samuel a day early to get away from the diner clientele. The city's tricentennial celebration was happening tonight, with fireworks and doughboys, and Alvarita was there, because she liked people-gazing, and because she liked the mayor in spite of herself, and because the risk involved in illegally crossing borders turned her on. And if anyone should bother to ask, tonight she was Elaine Spardello from Kingston, Systems Analyst and single mom, planning a move to Samuel and having a look around.

Samuel's children lined up for the urban warfare simulation booth, while their parents licked organic ice cream cones obscenely. A twenty-something couple was fucking in the shoestore alleyway, and Alvarita stared dumbly at the girl's tanned lower leg bobbing limply to the rhythm of her man's actorly thrusts. A current of heat surged through her body, but she had only to visualize their ever after in a local condo to turn cold again...

As the festival wound down, Alvarita made her way towards the old mines, where she would spend the night. They lay alongside an expressway off-ramp at the edge of town, where forlorn ranch houses and strip malls belied Samuel's spit-shined cosmopolitan image. The mines were at least a century old, and not even the local teenagers seemed to know of their existence. They served as Alvarita's living quarters when she first arrived from the south, and she still kept a little chamber down there with a makeshift bed, a kerosene lamp and some other essentials, if only because it's always good to have a place to hide, of which no one knows. Now as then, slipping into the patch of woods that buffered the neighborhood from the expressway was a dangerous prospect. She was within view of a solitary house on a dead-end street and at risk of being seen by the old folks inside, if ever they should happen to sit on the porch instead of watching television in bed, which was about as likely as the moon exploding. But still, moons do explode, and she breathed a little shorter whenever crossing that threshold.

The entrance to the mines was a foot-wide hole in the ground covered by a garbage pail lid, the old metal kind, which itslelf was covered over by dried pine needles and such. Underneath was a ladder that led to an antechamber with three tunnels forking out from it. Her old room was a space carved out of from a tertiary tunnel that branched out from a secondary tunnel that branched out fom the main tunnel farthest to the left in the antechamber. It was the least stifling of rooms because the only one whose air shaft had not been sealed over by the expressway asphalt fifty feet above. That room, as it happened, lay right between the northbound and southbound lanes, right beneath an island of crabgrass and dandelions where no human being had set foot in decades.

Pilgrims flocked to her father's tomb and suffocated it with plucked flowers, and Alvarita honored his legacy as much as they did, in her way, but when her own body was laid to rot, as she had decided long ago, it would be in a perfectly secret place where no prayers could reach and bind her to this desperate, clinging, ultimately selfish people. She would come to die in the mines.

SKULL KINGDOMS
The Mines

I cannot fall apart for my father's sake though his old sack of bones no longer clatters. Even here beyond the streets where the drunks claim to see his ghost his spectral eyes keep cinching to see me and I cannot fall apart here because he sees me. I have passed through so many empty cities where trees grow from spent temples of commerce I have coursed rivers of cracked asphalt that never seem to end and my legs have want to give way and my shoulders want to bend forward beneath the weight but I am him also Ojos and if I close...

Alvarita sat in an old pine wood just below the expressway. It was night time, and the sound of passing cars reverberating in the trees and out to the whatever beyond also reverberated between her ribs. She imagined herself expanding to hold that noise until she was too expansive to have a name.

She had not eaten in many days and did not care to. She had not slept in just as long, and the highway noise became a kind of mantra to be chanted as she crossed the threshold and into death. Not chanted but hummed. Alvarita hummed along when they passed, a high hum for motorbikes and a low doleful one for sixteen wheelers. However much time passed soon she rose and saw her body there circled by hungry ghosts who were sitting still for once. They looked like naked, emaciated old white men with open mouths but no eyes and very very long fingers. Time passed. She sprouted new lungs there above the pines and hummed from them until she was both the call and the response, the traffic, cicadas, crickets and wind all contained by those lungs.

Time passed, but the hungry ghosts just sat there around the body. More time passed, until suddenly all the ghosts started moaning in an awful way, rocking back and forth and grasping dumbly. From above the pines, the dissipating essence of Alvarita, in spite of itself, suddenly and violently funneled back into that body.

She sprang back to life, in pain, and there in front of her was a jumpy white fox nudging its snout against her limp arm. She flailed about angry to be alive again, and the fox jumped backward playfully.

Alvarita was back in her body, which now registered hunger and pain in every fiber. She lunged pathetically for the fox and the fox ran coyishly into the woods, looking back now and then to see whether his playmate was behind. Alvarita was not playing though. She wanted to grab the fox by the tail and slam it against the nearest tree for interrupting her appointment with death. The fox kept his game going for quite a while, though, running but never so fast that Alvarita might lose sight of him. Until finally he stopped, looked defiantly towards her, and dove into a hole...


SKULL KINGDOMS
The Legend of Chi Han Ki as told by Twice Born Allah:
A Story for the Children [DRAFT]

Twice Born: We live in a junkyard of symbols, seen? We walk the waste of a finished civilization, and trip over broken sidgils, which for the gods are only good if they serve a purpose, seen? We are not curators, and nothing of ours is encased in glass or stuffed or priced.

But those who have ears let them hear: Look at at the god Arcana Build. Son came here from the South Coat in his own damn way, in a damn seaworthy contraption built from three oil barrels, the husk of a Ford Explorer and an old combustible engine salvaged from a...

Arcana Build: Shuttle bus!

Twice Born: From a shuttle bus. Heh, that's peace. So, Build got all the way across that great big body of water in his own damn way when not a one would dare it, and after all that, the Insect minions aimed without stopping to marvel and wrecked his craft! Blew the shit up! Now, a civilized people, a civilized people would have given the god a medal, or a meal, or sent him to engineering school, and it's only thanks to the disembodied gods that Build did swim to an empty port in the old city, right under their noses. But what?

Understand. For Samuel, some old busted Ford rigged up to a shuttle bus motor, well, that's about as bad as the governor's tits falling out on TV, seen? Why? Because they fear the closing circle. They endeavor to straighten time and escape the wheel of causation, as we do when sleeping, seen? And when a one revives the scattered junk of their past, as we do when awake, as Build did, they panic, because in that they see time's line forming an arc, no longer vertical, back to the earth, seen? The closing circle!

Because when you don't pay dues to the dead you get, what? Zombies! Zig zag zig. And if you don't know where you're coming from, how can you know where you're going? And then who is the zombie? You!

Seen? We gods put a lot of emphasis on 'building.' As in, conversation leading to mutual self-realization. And that's peace. But there are many ways to build, as many ways as the god has names. And we build when we put these scraps of a profligate people to good use, to the gods' use. Because the ancestors weep within those scraps, as the rocks and oaks weep. As this leaky building weeps, seen?

Now, the eighty-five think of themselves as builders, and every week they're cutting ribbons, but who is the Supreme Architect? Whose city stands through rain, hail, snow and earthquakes, and floods?

The kingdom is in me, the lights flicker dimly...




We are the poor righteous teachers, who do not believe in the teachings of the ten percent. We do not chase the burning man, the so-called independent man, who runs this way and that in search of water to extinguish his ass, which is on fire. The eighty-five see that man and think he burns with the knowledge of the true and living god. They chase that man to the ends of the earth, which also then burn, and they welcome him into their houses, which also then burn. They mistake him for the god, and his flames for the knowledge of self.