Daily Roach: Feb. 11th

In autumn he played with fire, and under a harvest moon burned.

Daily Roach: Feb. 10th

Some electric spark sent it, a moment after the flare of the cherry bulbs: a high and ambitious siren climbing the sky and cascading over the grass like the wail of a great soprano, full and sure and pure from lungs fat and slack and wet.

Daily Roach: Feb. 9th

He had dish-pan hands, creased by the waters of time, wrinkled in seas of rippling seconds.

Daily Roach

Let me tell you of it; but no, my lips freeze, my saliva is a thickening concrete.

Daily Roach

A dark road curls off into the night, a brunette strand of danger.

Daily Roach

He held his hand up to the glory; opaque orange leaf, shadow-vein, capped with five smooth stones.

A Hibernation of Sense (The Harbor of Pearls)

“Dey sings me a song, and I sing along.”
And so here we begin the tale of Melchizedek the fisherman, with his bleeding gums and rocky skin; his peppery stubble sharp enough to shred the delicate hands of them touchy folk; his black, black eyes and his parasitic, lichen-tossed hair. God bless his nasty soul.
The tides were running with the moon that night, full as it was, staring down at Melchizedek while he baited his traps beside the upturned belly of the Shifty Lady. The broken shells around his callused feet were the white teeth of raped organisms he’d gutted from Oceana’s fair womb, and while he spun his knots and spat his spittle, the Song of the Destroyer crackled like brush-fire beneath the soft, virulent folds of his butcher-shot mind.
“Dey can comes, dey can scuttle down here on ‘dah backs a’ demons, but I ain’t movin’ my Shifty Lady.”
Given the size of the moon, the creatures would be crawling and the sand-runner’s running. And Melchizedek – the vicious, the malicious – would never miss an opportunity for such slaughter. The singing salt spray eddied around the sensitized wound of his sea-heart, and when the water was calling, nothing could stop him from joining in on the lusty swoon.
“Dey can comes, dey can flutter down here on ‘dah wings o’ gulls, but I ain’t movin’ my Shifty Lady.”
They’d first cluttered around the splintered doors of his home the same day that he’d decided never again to answer to strangers. That family with the little dog had convinced him of the stupidity of mankind, yippin’ and yappin’ like they were making the sun rise every morning. He wore the pup’s paw now, round his neck on a string of parched seaweed.
“We need this harbour, Mr. Brady, and we are willing to offer you a sizable amount of money. You can have a villa anywhere you want on the entire eastern coast! Come now, let’s not be unreasonable. This is a very big island. Can we at least talk?”
There were three of them, and the one with the hat had been cut before they’d decided to leave Melchizedek alone. Comin’ down here to ‘dah Lady lookin’ like ebony devil-urchins in d’ose army suits, shaved and smellin’ like purdy parfume! Not one scratch on their prissy-hands, either, with hair slick like an oil spill and skin as pale and clean as dried tuna bone.
“May ‘dah sun burn ‘em pink!”
Across the negative, star-pricked canvas of the sky-night winking, the sound of flush-red lobster and white-bellied crab shuffled in time to the terrible tune lapping against the inner flesh of his head.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

He shimmied the rancorous pellet-bait into his wooden cages, and humming aloud the dark shibboleth that simmered within, shoved his algae-frosted rowboat onto the porpoising surface of his sea. Paddles slapped the water, and self-echoing bubbles skimmed the liquid earth with the rainbow-refracted light of moonray. But being beyond the poeticism of coerced nature, or beneath it, Melchizedek sucked the blood out of his gums and refused to acknowledge the aesthetic beauty of Gaia’s great Pond.
The flickering, torch-lit eye-windows of the Shifty Lady teased him like a lover as he distanced himself from her. She wanted to smell the rank fish-odor of dying life as much as he did, and though he was sane enough not to draw such abstract lines of personality in her, he couldn’t resist the way she glared at him – all fire and light and violence. He ached to kiss her. The army men would not touch her while he breathed, and he swore with a spray of spittle that if the tender curves of her prow were ever harmed, he would release his Hell and destroy their world.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

Sensing the abundance of the depths beneath him, and feeling in his gut the soft movements that betrayed imminent prey, he let his traps sink beneath the black water – his dark angels, his hungry spirits. Then he settled back against the hard planks of his boat and pretended to eat the stars; pincer fingers extracting them from the sky one by one. As he feasted on diamonds and waited for time to reap a field of victims, the sneaking, slithering snake of sleep slid over his eyes and turned him to the Other side.

The tracings of bright that highlighted all things of his world revealed to him that he dreamed. The tiny, reverberating rivulets in the water were covered with sparks, and the clouds too, defined and sharp with sparks. Melchizedek cursed. He rued dreams, especially daytime dreams, for they reminded him of his mother – that white witch of blessed spirit and spider-soft hair. She loved the day. Melchizedek hated it. The bright and the sparks and the twisting anxiety in his ravenous gut proved all the more that she had some part in this dream.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

The Song still crackled, and from that he drew hope. Yanking his frayed trap-lines from the water, hand over hand, he whispered in time and nearly dropped the traps back down into oblivion. They were covered in clumps of mussels – barnacle-specked protrusions that gleamed with sparks.
The Song slithered under his stomach.
A low rumble breathed out from his pores, shook the boat, and letting go the lines Mechilzadek turned to the south. The Song had changed, and with that change he understood that it played not from within him, but from a far away vast place where he and creation could not go. The bright intensified, the sparks fused into lines that traced each rivulet and sharpened each water-point.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

“No, me’s not!” Mechilzadek stood in his boat. The rumble grew. “No me’s not! You are!” he accused, stabbing a scarred finger at the horizon. The ground of his boat wobbled, and as he fell back into its bosom he saw the stars fizzle as the rumble now roared.
He caught glimpse of their bloodied faces, teethed and wet, but squeezed his eyelids shut. Dragonspawn after dragon screamed over him; rumble-screams, like the kind he imagined death would make. Fiends! Primordial and real, the fiends!
The world-devil roars at you. Oh, his mother’s words would come like that, scraped up out of closed memory, revelated at the moment of their truth. He opened his eyes, and again saw the metal dragons – awful and all and spitting fire, the repetitious sound of hate.
The lecherous, disconcerting wail of lesser demons sounded from the shore. Pain and horror compounded on pain and horror. Mechilzadek shook and spat out the stars he had tried to swallow; they had caught in his teeth, and he’d been reveling in the small scratches they made across his inner cheeks.
And the dragon sung

I am the destroyer,
indestructible me.

All around him were boats now, thousands of them, bobbing and burning and crackling. Men were in the water, some of them dead and seeping, others alive and also seeping. So numerous they became that they clogged the water. One rolled over and thumped against the boat, and at the recognition of the face upon that burnt dead his fear capsized into terror.
His face. His very own – his rocky skin, his peppery stubble, and even there as the face grimaced in frozen cessation were the same bleeding gums. No, worse. All of them had his face, all of the dead or dying; those ending corpses, a conglomeration of fleshy buoys upturned or overturned and turning red as the crimson sheen of blood and firelight washed over them like a visual wind.
Across this roiling labyrinth he saw the flickering eye-windows of the Shifty Lady.
How it could be that he saw the truth of his love rise up out of her like flames, he did not know. But there it rose, pluming from her blown out prow, billowing like an open flower, red and raw and screaming at the pain of release. Oh, Melchizedek did not love – that was not love, that wasn’t life surging from her rotted insides.
“Me hates you,” he croaked, a twisted sob catching and squeezing his throat. “Me’s not in love, me’s in hate...!”
With the horrible abomination of a fiend spitting flame into his chest, the dream split apart and dissipated like a drained cloud.


He dove like a spear between the calamities of two invisible corpses, breaking open a legion of invisible watery sparks. He kicked as the sea entered his lungs, welcoming the pain like a last draught of liquor. He curled in upon himself. His rotted clothes burst open, and across the rents his skin crackled and hardened into black shell. Barnacles replaced his eyes, and then the entirety of his stubbled chin. It was the look on her face that had made him do it – the betrayed look of an avenging seductress – and although he felt the fear of her at the nape of his neck, it was more the cataclysmic horror of betrayal that had caused his splintering. There was no repair for Melchizedek, no restitution and no respite.
A sundering so utter demands transformation. Requires Resurrection.
“Aye, mother...aye.”