Jim Jones Jesus and the Oxblood Lipstick of Illusory Salvation

No matter what we do, how clean we live our lives, we're not going to survive this

-Kurt Cobain

Everywhere there are voices. Creamy hot California days filled with the sounds of PEOPLE tucked into every available space.

It's daylight now. The fertile alchemy of sunlight still diluting the boisterous landscape with its unbearable glares and gleams until the night creeps to its precipice and all hell breaks loose. Sex. Drugs. Fame. A knot in your gut with the guilt of not being good looking enough to stand still under a fifty foot Dolce and Gabana Fasionista billboard, and the unbearable sidewalk landscapes so thoroughly embodying the hopeless westward nowhere that there's no place left to go. Listen.

Voices.

Hear them?

My neighbor beyond the hill. Singing songs into his mirror while I play with my shaving kit and glimpse at the promise of my maskulinity. Soon I will be a homeless thought, though I do not know this now. Soon I will be floating to the hospital at 10pm, sirens exploring the already neon skyline and blood throbbing like my thirst for purpose, down the side of my arm.

I get ahead of myself. Hear that voice? That's me saying "I get ahead of myself" inside my head. And inside my head my ears are filled with the tumbling echoes of this city. This worst of a continent, contrivance of a stopping point, earthquake epicenter, home of Chinese winds, sleeping bags dotting the happy sunset beaches, while ornery gang children roam like animal hordes speaking in frightened Spanish. "Oírme? ¿Oírnos?" Palm trees sway, their voices saying I don't know why it is I'm still here.

"You're fucking crazy," says a longhaired emo boy to his stoned-out-of-her-goddamned mind girlfriend. "Let's go home," she insists and I agree.

Let's all go home.

Perhaps you would think this place idyllic. The pigeons cooing palpable lessons of Eden while shiny sportscar Mercedes roar past and scatter them in confused disbelief. A radio blares the ripened bassline of progress and just out of reach a woman cries out with the voice of a cornered dog, angry shriek and brief.

Inspiration blooms perennial. All around me there are voices rising up and falling away. Anger is as productive as creativity. As productive as anything else.

I saw the best minds of my generation go to MIT, don white acronym-bearing ball caps and masturbate away the lonely screencapped nights to Alba and Dushku whilst we the artists dallianced away our terminal infinities with vainglorious love for ourselves.

I can only love infinity, for she alone can satisfy my ambition.

But hear them strive for unity? Those voices of the twilight time, stealing away my train of thought and the meadows of my focus quaver and burst into new horizons of possibility. Voices, characters, everywhere! Write your third person narration in a short story in the midst of a first person diatribe. Add a character sucking in smokescreen. Add the masked man in the mirror, studying the edge of the blade while he edits. What to shave next?

Voices rise in midair. Voices bloom. The voices interweave.
A boisterous choir, fermenting thickets of sound clustering in sharp cacti bundles of static noise under the sun. Plasticene bubbles coming up to pop right at the cadenza. "Life after Life" reads an innocent child positing, "what's that mean?"

"It means you'd better not screw this up or God will make you do it all over again." says mother. Blowing bubbles. Winding away.

The voice in the convenience store. Talking to the Punjabi registrar about his bracelet. "It's a ring man. Like he rings of Saturn. That's some cult or something you know. The sons of Saturn. Sons of Jupiter. Sons of Mithras."

"Paper – or-- plastic?" asked the agitated voice ringed into this brief connection of ideas. "Did you know that the rings of Saturn themselves are made up of millions of tiny rocks. Rings within rings man! And they never collide, there's like polarization or something. They spin around close but they never actually get close enough to touch each other."

"Solvine Teddy Bear" and "Scrapbook devoted to Hitler." Voices laughing from the rooftops, dead dog laughing in the clouds, hollow Russian cows howling from the basements. Everything in focus, the world is really small. All the details form a divine picture of… shit, I lost it.

Lift me up with the meandering hurl of asphalt. The voices of the river 80, our nation's highway hissing humming moaning and wheezing. Like water and wind. We gurgle down rumble strips and brawl around rickety construction rackets. Everywhere I go there are voices speaking to me. Seeking me out. This world is shattered and I am the rain gutter of dead voices clogging up with soggy sentimental sediment.

But one voice is notably absent.

I am sick and tired off waking up each morning, clutching the blanket, as if it is your shoulder.

Time transpires… What's the difference?

Flip the blade around in my hands. The mirror makes its subtle suggestions. Apply more white to the right. Red hints of blush. Velour on my shoulders. Lips red with the oxblood of thwarted passion. I paint and apply my colourable face. Not unlike the masquerades of certainty that you painted over the last of our conversations.

Now the Sacramento groans incomprehensible outside my window. So many voices you can just ignore them all. When I was sure there were no question marks left in my eyes I stopped noticing the ones in yours. Too busy being possessed by my urges to keep hold and so I left. Upriver, into the valley. I met Libra. A valley girl. Started a new profile of who I wanted to be and hid behind it telling everyone I was the voices intersecting. Desperate and desolate, I forged ahead to the gas station, the café, the green light in the night hoping the old hunger would never return. The rage of the sea. The burning of a million suns.

It wasn't hard to fool her. "I am a homeless thought," I said.

The somber limitations of the human form.

Her horrified eyes meet mine.

"Are you really the messiah?" she asks. "Yes I am. Believe it."

Dressed in our finest, her tortoiseshell hair clip, my broad shouldered tweed. Tonight we end it. There can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.

"Truth is just a fallacy of man," she recited. Flawlessly. Just like we practiced it a hundred hundred times. That's my girl. Bow down now. It's nearly 10. I'll get out the blade.

Voices saying keep facing the future. Voices urging solace in the gravity of your neck and my hundred little hickie kisses.

Too late for any of that now.

I hear nothing. Voices seen not heard. Like Libra's gullible smile. The breadth of her hips like the big fat lie that I've become. Her pedantic questions.

"What do you want me to do with your notebooks."

"Burn it all," I say. "That way it will be safe."

Though we have no reason to live and move and breath we do. We are temporary, and some burn as bright as they can, and maybe those who follow will remember the memory of that light long into darkness of night. Others go out in a blaze. Leaving behind only our voices.

See? I pierce the skin. The razorblade isn't strong enough so I have her hand me a steak knife from the kitchen. I test it on my left hand and in a swerve of steel my middle finger is gone. The California State Bird, flown away.

A hole in my hand oozes red ink, worm-like and foreign. I think, maybe if I hold my breath it will all go back into my body. Libra screams and runs for the phone.

The ambulance is quick to arrive. Calm placebic voices saying it's going to be okay sir. It's going to be ok sir. God you're pale. They wheel me away. Unneccesary gauze, the world outside our apartment.

"I am a king," I whisper meekly, and the shadows of the night before I am wheeled into the ultrabright hospital whisper back, "next time."