the summer I got noided

“When you write, your words must go like this: bim bim bim, bim bim bim; each line must be full of a delicious little juice, flavour, they must be full of power. They must make you want to turn a page, bim bim bim, bim bim bim.”

Charles Bukowski

…not even the strangest resonance in my life, but in 2017, I was finishing my reading of the Law, as stupid and confused as when I first entered university. Only ambition and lust had gotten me that far, but by May, before my final academic exams, I was becoming a person in public while privately disintegrating. More than two years had passed since I threw away the poetry notebooks I had kept since 14.

Whatever poet I had been was long dead. The World was pushing me towards becoming a lawyer, and I was pushing myself towards it too, for no reason other than that I could not stop. A year earlier, I had decided Literature was the only destiny in which I could survive beyond 33. I had to write a novel. It had to be good. It had to get published. It had to be adapted into a movie. Then I would be saved from rotting in the belly of the Neon God, as I had called the World in a poem I wrote at 15, a poem now lost.

Music was my only respite. I drowned myself in trap, in the powerful platitudes of 2 Chainz’s Pretty Girls Like Trap Music. Sustenance, not evolution. Not transcendence.

That came at random. Death Grips, gifted by the Algorithm after I fed it Sunn O))), Viet Cong, and other weird acts. First came I’ve Seen Footage. I blasted it through my headphones at night, walking through sweltering Piccadilly Gardens, drowning out the sound system of an old Rastafarian on a bike, entertaining dealers and junkies gathered there to buy spice.

Gray walls. Another noodle place. War children. Their preacher with his kilted bag. Godless punks selling strange poison they did not understand to people who did not care whether they lived through the week. Too young to be evil, but crack and the hydraulic clenched their hearts. Behind the stupid gaze, algae in the soul. The Machine recruiting early. The Neon God eating with anal fangs.

Already, I had a language for it. Soul language. Tongue unspoken and untied. The Wrongness of the world and the Wrongness within me speaking of each other, at each other, like a handheld dream shot in hell. I had not made the crazy shit yet. I was only gazing, drifting, drunk at the wheel.

…aiming at the clean cage.

Job. Title. Salary. Name on paper. Face in the office light—the man of Law, man of promise, young body in the gut of the Neon God, right on schedule. Theory said respectability. Appetite said wrong door.

I had the Dangerous Woman then. Strange rules for fornication, chatting all night with her sharp teeth. Rotting books, burning power. Desire. Future. Mouths working. Bodies opening. Minds dancing. Root unreached.

Oh, to be understood and eaten. Oh, to be saved and keep your damage.

Name the Thing without killing It. Respectability stood before me like a lit corridor. The lights hummed like syphilitic angels, and I walked towards chaos.

Of course, I mean Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix), bootleg scripture smuggled out of the End of History. That summer I got memed. I got noided. Possessed by an egregore. Then Ride. Just Ride, for all you posers. Government name: Stefan Burnett. Stefan. Names are accidents, tags tied to meat, but whenever I meet another Stefan, I feel the wire tremble. With him, the wire snapped me awake. The Stefan reading Law heard the Stefan howling from the other side of the wall. One learning the grammar of institutions. One spitting from the machine’s mouth. One trying to become respectable. One proving what respectability can never bury. Ride is no idol, model, or mask. He is Stefan B’s scream. My scream. The secret twin. The throat beneath the throat. The mirror showed me who I was when Law, family, ambition, politeness, and fear failed to close their fists around me.

Where were you on 22.05.2017? What door was knocking? Tell me below.

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The same day Steroids dropped, the Manchester Arena attack happened. 22 dead. The number bathed in blood. After that, the city filled with horses and cops. Mounted police under the gray sky. Sirens. Flowers. Screens. My family asked me how I was, what I needed, and whether I was safe. Normalcy shattered by violence. I answered as best I could, knowing the shape of that Wrongness, knowing the door, and knowing the sound of the knocks, knock, knocks.

Ride also knocked at 3 in the morning to give me my weapon, but I found it in the steel gaze of an armored cop holding a rifle. I saw the watchman my soul had set out to protect what I was, what I had to carry forward, what I had to protect: my Scream. I knew the armor was not as important as the gun. That was when I decided to write. I decided to write every day, and I never stopped. I never stopped screaming. Of course, I drifted from time to time. I surrendered. But the Scream kept growing louder, and I am sure that when I am old, if I ever get to be old, all I will be is a Scream.

Now, I would like to tell you that after that summer, after I broke up with the Dangerous Woman, after I moved back home to a greener city, everything changed. That I found some form of peace, some form of normalcy. But there is one thing I always have to remember: for a guy like me, peace and normalcy are nothing more than the grave. Evenness and stability are the qualities of the tomb.

It’s been a pleasure, I bet. If you would like to hear more of my screams, subscribe and read more pieces like this one, and the one below.

i write my heart out in the dust of these streets

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Feb 5

I didn’t know what this was while I was writing it. I only knew it hurt. What began as a challenge ended as a trial. Memoir, poem, essay...none of them fit, so I let it remain unfinished. You’re reading it as it came.

"pay me, bitch"