ABOUT JAMES

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[ warned for drug use, violence, near-death experiences, destructive cults, homelessness and questionable relationships. ][break][break]

control, noun: the power to influence or direct.

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the room blinks open like the eyehole of a microscope, hazy blackness and a dim pocket of white light circling monsters that take the shape of common things. a scratched bedframe pressed against curling drywall, long ago painted ocean-foam cream. dry, airless smells tinged with a dusty taste and the acidic burn of household cleaners. a desk, three feet and its slanted top raised on a crippled leg, pristine with vials arranged in sterile rows. laid out, they march like army soldiers and come to rest beside a stolen syringe — carbon steel flickering below the empty stomach of its barrel – squirrelled in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag.
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two figures stare one another down, tension reaching hungrily towards the smoke-stained ceiling. jaundiced, sick-yellow explosions ringed with brown that writhe in the dark. they whisper in dangerous silence while the inside of room two-ninety collapses in and rots around them.
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and, like a doctor examining an unknown contained within a petri dish, it escalates into a virulent, ruthless disease in his mind. the room becomes the origin point, his patient zero, and razed his twenty-seven years on earth like an unstoppable force.

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family, noun: a group of objects united by personal significance.

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( circumstances, they keep stealing his voice, this wavering and stuttering timbre that slipped in and outside of him. james luther picked up and let a town die alone for school, a thing nobody around there much believed in the power of.
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his father, in a letter and one of the few times that he looked at him long enough to offer a word, called him incredibly, harrowingly selfish.
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"i left because i wanted to," but he, the man lying in a dirt hole with closed eyelids and milky skin, never listened to a soft, twittering sound like a melody or his own son. )

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preacher told him to believe in the tenants of god, the gates of heaven. daddy too, on a phone line, and he groaned it from the grave that was his hospital bed: "james, i'm dyin’. you can change, it's not too late to—"
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— to what then, and he looked at the receiver of a 1990s dorm room phone line with something in the same family as regret. "how could my own blood walk out on me," and his daddy, he laid bare his beliefs and his loyalties years ago.
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leave to help keep himself sane, leave to see the larger world, leave and naively expect his parents to respect his blasphemous decisions. james tangled himself in the safety net of his university as if born into critical thought and dialogue and the collective history of human ingenuity. science: an inverse to creationism. textbooks flooded the dorm room shag carpeting, the young man strewn out on the floor with the grace of a lanky, stretched thin kitten.
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the antithesis of the dogma that they entangled him in, like a dragonfly to a bug net.
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why come around asking him to take after him now, to stop being james timothy luther to save a soul he never sees. now, when the master's devoured by the mouth of the soil and there's no truth but a soulless, empty signature. when he never wanted him around before then, his wife's ghost inside this little and caring house dictated by verses hung above doorframes.
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and momma, she said while she strung lace and hair through her fingers that love's a thing like water. love flows, a swelling and a falling and a thirst that dries us up, and it keeps everyone alive. scared, powerless folks fill themselves on it. everyone's helpless against its current, and she smiled like how it feels when the clouds hide the sun, in the same way they feel hopeless to stop fate.
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( and daddy's dying, but there is no returning to that church. no one escapes ackles, texas and the blocky rectangle cathedral that looms on its lone hill like an inferno to hawkmoths.
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what he meant: “i left to prove ya’ wrong.”
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then elder gods, please lead him home if he has one. )
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union, noun: the action or fact of being joined.

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his love picked him up in a truck tracing a country road with his hands in his pockets, headlights glowing like wolf eyes and her severe, suspicious glare haloed in golden-rod curls. If american girls are a mythology, then she’s the sole reason that he suspects he might believe in gods.
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( james has a man too, another mythos when she exists often in strange, disjointed pieces five years later and something lonely consumes his sentimental heart. his back pressed taut against a wall with someone else’s fingers locked in his hair and a bite mark blossoming near his jawline, that’s the other side – the demons in him, maybe. )
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eying him, a curiosity and a contempt as she waved that he close the door, james commented idly that he never once met a lady trucker. a sliding of her shift, the engine rumbled and woke like a sleeping animal before she answered, “cute, but let me tell you, tiger, that’s because there are none except your’s truly. the name is marley.”
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like most anyone, she never resembled him – a stranger, nature's hurricane borne of beauty, reckless force and a calm that sat at the center of her. muddling, like spirits at the bottom of an aged barrel, and she tasted the same on late, dizzy nights.
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james held her hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, a softer boy in a concrete jungle when they saw each other in seattle.
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( and she murmured in a trembling moan, white locks spilling between the groves in her fingers: "demons followed me once too, but they’re not the same kind, jimmy." )
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system, noun: a set of principles or procedures.

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marley's rage orbited around peculiar voices, and his around these two Doctors of Philosophy that burned through his life like a flare, like the sun at the center of the solar system. in the prime of his academic career debt weighed down his feet until it sank him to the ocean floor in his mind, and rallies erupted on college campuses. students, activists and anarchists ripped apart emerald lawns with pamphlets left like bullets littering the modern war front.
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james dropped into his bed, massaging the exhaustion from his sore wrists and thought of how to save her, what time and the turnings of the universe should owe back.
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his love ( both of them ) said: "don't you think it's wrong. i know of a politician who thinks like a socialist, who wants what's best for the people."
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[ x ] said humans deserve humanity.
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[ x ] said they gutted america, gutted history, gutted dignity.
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[ x ] said revolutionaries rise up behind the closed front doors of ordinary men and women.
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in the aftermath of her genetic disruption, james found her screaming her throat wild and raw at an empty room. she shook, as though her body threatened to crack and peel away, before another doctor diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. the clinical man tapped the pen to his clipboard in a slow, hesitant rhythm with a pill bottle abandoned on the countertop. the glowing, sickly orange color crept into james's peripheral vision from his seat on the leather armchair tucked a corner away, "marley ashwood seems prone, based on her mother."
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( and for nearly five years, she repeated it. fueled her violent end, the gasoline to her fury when she wrapped his hand gingerly in her own, "i never talk about her. that's why i agree with some things you don't, jimmy. momma, she needed help, we needed her in an institution." )
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and his mentor, stretching filmy powder blue gloves over his fingertips, whispered fears and solutions and uncivilized words into his ear – forever the devil digging into james's shoulder. such an ear worm, the kind that eats him from the inside out, and he watched helplessly as marius arranged a thin surgical blanket over a corpse: "she's not well, james."

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death, noun: the permanent ending of vital processes.

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a small end, the way the pill slid into his stomach and bled into the rest of his system – his circuitry dulled to this wet and meaty sound rising like a crescendo in a backroom, the crunch of bone decompressed into a dust storm that choked the air. this scratching on the floorboards, how their voices ripped from their bodies like butchered rabbits or stayed silent like terrified prey beasts.
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it took a year in that dark, soulless circus mirror of himself before he thought that even corruption deserves forgiveness. james luther never killed anyone, writing fake prescriptions under names that belong to front-organizations and ponzi schemes.
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( but god, oh god, did he hear it as if he might as well have, and he only needed to listen to that pitiable noise once – )
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no, and he watched bloodshot eyes stare back in the face of an unfamiliar man's reflection ( his own ) that he caught in a glass window, not for god; for his own guilt.
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cult, noun: a social group with deviant norms.

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a psychedelic kaleidoscope, the trajectory of the Earth laid out in technicolor landmines – like heaven, but not dead, not alive, a hymn to transcendence or perhaps thin waftings of smoke. the raw inside of his nostrils scald and shrivel and spill over, blood staining his teeth in the dirt-smeared bathroom mirror.
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looked like dirt anyhow, rubbing the sting from his eyes while the light sparks and sparks and sparks; a miniature sun burning out above him, this pinprick-sized collapsing star.
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cheap place, damp toilet paper soaked with thick red bruise spots, where the concrete chipped and snaked and contorted, his mind whirring at twelve thousand revolutions per second.
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sighing, he whimpered into the sink bowl as soft as an apology, "oh god. did i black out."
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( what – who – controls him now. )
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purpose, fate: the reason for which something exists.

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he sees a numbered motel room, two-ninety, in his head and a premonition of how he ( expected ) to die. an enforcer, monsters that look too much like normal things scattering a dirty carpet and a syringe plunged into the bloodied, purpled arm of his arbiter.
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at the mercy of fate, in the hands of false gods and desperate to find somewhere ordinary, james timothy luther ran.
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like all revelations, the horrifying truth sets him free.

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call me
FANTASMA

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