Vargdrewhands

5. An open letter from Señor Matanza to the world. (The Ten Stanzas of Matanza)

To:
Homo Sapiens
Local Group: “Orion Arm”
2/3rd right of the Center
Galaxy: “Milky Way”
3rd interstellar body orbiting “Sol”
From:
“Matanza The Tigermother”
Address not registered
Wavemaker and Rainmaker
Laid to rest (in either the Eastern or Western Ocean)
5/14/1999

My dearest friends, sisters, brothers, and comrades:

Allow me to illuminate the stanzas I wish you all to help me tackle poetically.  I feel that the gift of finding meaning and beauty in the laconic and passionate craft of poetry is honestly beyond my scope of expression.  I once expressed to you all that poetry and lyricism is the hardest and most challenging form of writing.  One must crystallize the minutia of our experiences into small fragments and rhythmic phrases with great meaning.

I am asking, wholeheartedly, that the words you help “us” craft be of a meaning superior to any musical theme, counterpoint, or composition that I endeavor. I wish to accompany these X concepts with music.

I will attempt to elucidate these with brevity in mind.

Please advise and think deeply; intellectualize your emotions and become computers: Overthink so as not to fall into caring or the finite mistake of love. (Love is not boundless)

Sincerely,

Matanza The Tigermother.

 The Ten Stanzas of Matanza

 Poetry of the Awful Experience: yet to be written by “us” (the Collective) humans

 

  •  I wish to explore the concept of legacy. I would like to apologize to those I have harmed.  I would like to wish those who attempted to love me only the best they could since their endeavor ended falling onto bruised ears that are conversant in only the language of self-loathing and pure melancholic pity—in the sense of esteem—and a deviant and masochistic addiction to emotional pain.  I would like to ask forgiveness to whatever God or Gods there may be, if any exist, and express the fact, to him or her, or them, that I have gone unheard and look forward to meeting them soon to express in person—or through the ounces and evaporated droplets of anima that escape me when I dissolve into corruption—that I am within my rights to break their jaw or tear their limbs off.  I wish to communicate my deafness to those who offered compassion, and I wish to frame it in the sense of pure longing.  I would like to speak of one love that has mattered, the way we tore at each other, the way she tried endlessly to be kind to me, and how I buried my pain and unforgiving nature in the dark places on Earth. How I repented by suffering alongside people who were liminal in society; how I lived and still live on the finest of lines, eschewing human mores and proper laws, those of man and god; and have embraced the utter romance of chaotic danger and foul resentment.  I purged her from my memory through suffering, in some ways flagellating my haunches and heart all for a Christ hard of hearing and a troubled woman.
  • I would like to speak on the rights of the American worker. I would like to express the concepts of how the gold of the bourgeoisie is tainted and stained with the blood of those who work the land, mines, and fields, and those who live honestly, albeit misguided by charlatans.  How the working poor find joy in the small parts of their family.  How the working class has been buried in collapsing coal chutes, how the farmers’ grains are rotting in silos to price gouge, how honest work is looked down upon, and how those people who form the spine of America from the Rocky Mountains, down to the Ohio river, and to the forested hills of the Shenandoah, are misrepresented: Their bodies are being used to build the foundation of a declining empire.  How no man or woman should spit blood to put food on the table.  How their lives go forgotten after they leave us, and how the nameless men and women who built our country are treated as figures of pity and contempt, instead of being invested in communities built around them.
  • I want a piece about losing myself inside of alcohol and painkillers. I want to explore the numbness and the seeking of danger to live in those liminal edges where I find myself most at home in. I want to speak on the romance of longing, of distance and drugs, the use of extreme violence due to my perverse sense of justice, and how I can disregard the violence and antipathy I cause in those I fight, which have been many, and at much loss, since I have never won a proper fight fairly.  I want to express how I have turned into a mythos, how I became a caricature of my own design.  How I somehow coagulated into a mass of a broken man, one who loses himself in tragedy and adventure.  I am a solitary and insular man, as you are well aware, who bites at his rancor and cannot accept kindness without that nagging voice of bitterness or paranoia of ulterior motives. Express in some way who I am, for never being understood in my wholeness has left me shivered into pieces, like a whiskey-filled tumbler, in a dark smoke-filled room, thrown onto a hardwood floor.
  • I want a proper ode to a complicated woman. Someone whose incredible kindness was torn apart by exploitation. How I fell in love with her small hands and smile, and how she worked with dignity, until, drug-addled and bruised—raspberry-blotted purple and blue-pricked veins, numb gums and cold shots into her knuckles—she drowned in suffering, unable to forgive herself for the drive of needing to feel perverse and complex pain to atone. How she has survived by selling herself, and how she cries every night alone at a bar, always friendless, connecting only with the tigers that buy her blowjobs for cocaine.   How my thoughts drift back into her, how distance and danger are how I forget her. How I am much more complicated than she is, a worse person, a man who has caused more pain to others, and yet find myself in judgment of her; holding in my heart the unjust premise that I have always been a better person than she.
  • I would like a series of loose compositions that can dreamily explore the warm embrace of benzodiazepine, how depressed and labored the breathing becomes after mixing a multitude of green pills with a quart of whisky, how speech is slurred, how the mind shines a dull opaque and confusing hue, how sleep comes and goes through fantasies and colors, how stories and dreams and what is real becomes mixed into an ever-darkening pallet—smeared and smokey—with the occasional punctuation of colors through the haze, how drugs numb the fear of love and the need for it. Never forgetting that jarring and reviving sting of a Camel or Lucky Strike burning down into one’s finger during the orgasmic deadness of wheezy gasps for air during the silence and quiet one finds in somber and dull auto-asphyxiated sleep.
  • I would like a piece that celebrates the body of a woman or man. How that first moment of holding their hips has unforgettable magic, how mutual seduction opens people up to complexities that humanity still isn’t ready for, and may never be, since famously and throughout history men and women have cannibalized each other, philosophized, and weaponized sex, into affairs of power and influence for control and oppression and exploitation, rarely framing it for that wrenchingly beautifully tart, lemony and ocean-salt mineral taste a partner leaves in your mouth, and for the trust of bonds being solidified through physical pressure and the gravitas of openly imbibing the thoughts and vulnerabilities of the nude human form and the spirit and mind behind it.  How people have mystery and depth that they hold onto just long enough to feel the pain of disappointment in love.  Often clamming up after recurring wounds, failures that slowly eat away at that once-readily open heart, sometimes balling up and carbonizing into a diamond-like, shame-triggering sexual deviance that one hopes hides the pangs of compassion, that kink that one uses to atone for being silly enough even to have loved in the first place
  • I would like to explore the dead and dying deities, the absence of god and love, and the looming oblivion that we all pack away deep into our marrow. The idea that there is nothing more valuable than glory.  That the pursuit of glory is worth dying for, that the “love of your life” is what you erroneously go to war for, the idea that one should accept death as a reality that is not special or noteworthy.  That people forget you, that photographs fade, and that you will be lost in the multitude of millions of bones beneath our feet without making a difference.  That that special “one,” that woman or man who created a life with you, will move on, that your children’s voices will utter your name less and less.  The only worse thing than that is knowing that you left personal glory behind on the table for another to exploit.  Finally, that last tiny ember that you left on Earth, that one thing that will spontaneously burst into flames, indirectly leaving its mark in every future generation, manifesting centuries into the distant and immeasurable sine wave of time, will be how much you fucked up your kids.
  • The incommunicable experience of witnessing war deep in the swarming jungle, where the green of the equator’s bounty concealed gray and chartreuse bones, thick with bits of hanging, black-skinned flesh shrouded in rotting cotton olive drab fatigues, bodies that become leaky purple balloons, popping into a gelatinous mass that quickly dissolves into the red loamy soil. Dodging AK47 rounds while the occasional .50-caliber DShK rounds ripped chunks off banana tree trunks behind you. Those old willie jeeps running on tinpot lawnmower engines, motorcycle taxis, drinking Turbo King beers with lunatics, pirates, mercenaries, and racists. Getting a kiss from a confused and homesick Swiss nun, during that one precious moment of vulnerability where she allowed a gently placed hand on her neck and breast in a shared moment of unique passion. After which I found myself wholeheartedly enjoying her smile, tinged with a rosy-cheeked sadness, and the embrace of regret, as she realized that she had just broken her sacrosanct covenant with God—hoping she felt my thrill. A just God would never let human beings commit the cruelties I witnessed.
  • The exploitation of the poor, the hypocrisy of the helpers, the fiat politics of kindness and absolute truth in pure meanness, the bureaucracy that ties up the decent and misguided intentions of kind people, who are drowned out in the vocal and base madness of the mob. That unheralded greatness that humans rarely achieve and the invisibility that the poor live in, unable to even dream. The voices that go unheard, the talents that never become real or are ever nurtured.  The waste of lives spent on the trivial and small.  That American lie of upward mobility and the circle of poverty, misguided education, and the manufactured pursuit of excess, that is so intoxicating and inescapable.
  • Alcohol-fueled nights of Pall Mall filterless cigarettes, fingerpicking Andean melodies, Jorge Cafrune and Atahualpa Yupanqui concerts, worshipping the “Pacha Mama” and pretty women, dancing until the sun rises, ladies who pass in the night, however only after leaving incredible moments that last in memories forever, until one passes onto whichever other plane exists, if any. Living life to the brim, laughing, whiskey highballs, kissing a girl with a nice smile. The women who mean a lot for a little then leave.  The love of walking barefoot in the grass, stars shining brightly, and large blood moons.  Howling at expansive milky night skies, sleeping in the forest, and the beauty of finding grace in introspection and solitude.

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