Poetry in the Age of New Media: Lewis LaCook

excerpted from Wormwood, a novel-in-progress

People are afraid of this city. You know. This is where thugs live, they say. Nothing but crime and ignorance here, crack heads and junkies. Online, in the commentary below articles about the burgeoning violence, people are writing in the local newspaper about bombing this city and plowing it under.

True dat. It’s becoming a ghost town—we’ve lost a significant portion of the population. Buildings are moldering, crumbling to the earth.

I’ve heard the theory that the government wants it empty; that they’re doing something here, and they want it kept on the down-low.

That’s paranoid, conspiracy-theory talk. Only nuts believe that.

Yeah, well, there might be some truth to it. What about that card you found on the tracks?

Well, there is that. I found it on the railroad tracks one afternoon, taking a walk, taking a break from work.

I know.

It was just laying there. I looked it up online when I got home—it was a card that allows NASA personnel to carry firearms. Why would someone working for NASA need a gun?

Homeland security?

Whose homeland?

I’ve noticed, though, that you don’t seem particularly frightened.

I am. I’m scared all the time. I’m just not afraid of the city.

The amazing thing is, jail’s closed, reduced police force, but somehow everything just grinds on as normal.

Do you think it will become a ghost-town? A real ghost-town?

Don’t you feel like it’s haunted?

Ha ha.

What is a ghost?

A memory, maybe. A memory without body, unhinged.

What happened to you when you stopped in front of the abandoned warehouse that night?

I was walking home from the video store—I was doing retail at the time, the work-at-home gig had fallen flat for a while, and I needed cash. The only thing I liked about that job was the long walk home after midnight. I love this city at night, especially now, half-abandoned, littered with decaying buildings, burned and gutted corpses of houses. Over the course of the year I worked there I developed several different routes back home, and would vary which one I followed night by night. One of these routes took me along just about the entire length of Broadway—from the corner at North Ridge Road all the way to the Charles Berry Bridge.

The warehouse squats atop the Nardini underpass, blind, gaping, a dark and obsolete idol forgotten in a useless cul-de-sac, surrendering to time and weather. She’s all rust and red brick, busted windows and shadows locked into misused and half-digested rooms. Bums and kids leaves offerings at her scabbed feet, burst bottles splayed out like cutting flowers. Over the underpass the train tracks creak into the banks of the Black River, leaping in the form of a rickety trestle over the river proper.

You were afraid the first time you crossed the river on that trestle.

So were you. You definitely didn’t like the fact that you could see the water through the grill of the platform.

It’s reference, you’ll notice, that creates vertigo.

I’d never really gotten close to the warehouse before, but of course, it being derelict, it pushed its way into my thoughts every time I passed. Almost as if it were so hollow itself, it had to hammer its way into passing people to hold on to its own sense of objecthood. It had blared at me when I passed it before, until I started rubbernecking every time I walked that way, scanning its windows, even pausing the song on my media player, trying to catch some sort of movement, some kind of sound. There were times I thought I caught glimpses of lights on somewhere in its rotted bowels; a few of these times I tarried, pacing until I could determine that the light was just the streetlights from Broadway, catching on something within. A few of these times I couldn’t make up my mind about it, and wondered, if there was a lit room somewhere within that disastrous hulk, what legitimate purpose could it have. Was there a slum lord in Lorain debauched enough to rent out rooms in that hell of a warehouse? Or was it just squatting junkies?

Finally, one night I determined I would do it. Smoked a fat joint as I left the video store, hotboxing it in the empty parking lot behind Sheffield Centre. I didn’t turn my media player on all the way there. The cannabis embossed everything I saw with a translucent sheen of significance.

So it was the good stuff?

Oh, it was the bomb. Great shit.

Approaching

Blight follows the tracks all through the city, burning the blocks surrounding them until the houses are blackened, creaking, empty. At this end of Broadway storefronts, ripped open by the slow blast of decay, try to board themselves up against the fear, but the fear splinters wood, the fear seeps into beams and splits them from the inside, the fear hollows out everything left behind after the money’s gone, dirtying it. Wild dogs nest in the emptiness.

The warehouse, sitting above the tracks, right where the tracks meet the river, seems to oversee all of this degeneration. Scales of ragged glass still cling to windows here and there, like broken teeth framing a silent inky scream. Boards have been nailed to the windows nearest the pavement, and a sheet of plywood interrupts the front door. It’s one of the higher structures in Lorain; I have to lean backward to see the peeling sign painted on its southern side, a diamond shape proclaiming it the site of wholesalers, said wholesalers long gone. Red bricks climbing into a pink and black sky.

Pink, black, purple, some gold, probably some green.

The colors the steel mill dribbles across the sky. We see them every night. Even when we’re away, when we’re hundreds of miles away, the mill colors our dreams: pink, black, purple, some gold, probably some green.

I stood in front of the boarded-up front door, flicking my media player to record mode. I wanted the sounds, some shred of the atmosphere, some evidence, just in case something extraordinary took place.

So you went there with an expectation of something extraordinary?

We’d been talking about it for weeks, Mary and the kids and I. It’s inescapable. It’s a fathomless smudge even in the day.

But don’t you know how that fucks up any veracity? One, you were high. That’s bad enough, but then you’re already expecting something. Whatever happened could have been made up.

Yeah.

There was no traffic.

Sigh

I stand in front of the boarded-up door. Sigh. A row of windows, these not boarded, stretch across the length of the lot, coming up only to my knee. A basement, I guess. It’s very dark in there. My mind populates the unseen basement with motion, I think; I can see round pillars, chipped islands raised by the yellow moan of the streetlights. I press record. My blood stops. I can’t move anymore. I want to look in the basement. I know I shouldn’t look in the basement. Red brick punctuated by black metal. Sigh. Basement darkness aches. Full of brushing. I can hear pink clouds rubbing over the sky, sighing. I’m bending. I stare into the basement, straining to pick out movement, but the dark stays smooth. I want to run my hand over it. I want to slip through the metal bars and glide in. I no longer have shape or skin. I am only want. The blackness reaches out and grazes my eyes. I know this isn’t happening. I know this is just the drugs, just the brain, coaxing fear out of a dreaded place. This is just cement, brick, metal, broken glass. I need to break it.

I throw the bottled water I’ve been sipping off of the whole walk here into the basement. It thwacks fatly on the pavement, completely submerged from sight. Then there’s the terrible pause, silence sharp as talons, relentless like an owl atop a mouse. Sigh. Suddenly my mouth is very dry.

Broadway, the railroad tracks, hush. If I don’t come home tonight, will they notice?

Somewhere above me, the windows in the warehouse begin to whisper. On the threshold of what I can hear, soft, aspirated voices sigh their way through blasted glass and metal bars.

We are what you see in the edges of your sight when you’re out walking at night. We’re the flash of movement just beyond comprehension, the voice just below listening. We’re the sweetness you sense when you’re high but not high enough, the plateau in poison you know you couldn’t live through . On bridges we’re the fleeting compulsion to hurl yourself. With knives and glass we’re the vivisecting temptation. Come live with us. We can fill your brain to the brim with a sugar beyond thought. We can glaze your nights with a mist spun from orgasm. We’re under everything you do. We can fill your head with a snow so silent and gorgeous you’ll forget your skin. Come lie with us beyond your flesh. Come fly with us beyond your body; leave the mornings behind, the ache, the parch of aging badly in a dead city. Come to us and know us. We live in the secret beyond what it means to be awake. We live in the deliberate liberation. You fear us but you want us. You want to blot yourself out in tides so dissonant and contagious you’ll mingle with the dirt, the mold, the long slow shudder to nothingness that suffuses these blind and hollow carcasses of buildings you admire from the safety of your living. We are what you strain to bury yourself in, the beyond in your dreams. Come here, little boy, and taste the long cold fuck of the grave.

I stand for a moment, listening, swaying. Cannabis bubbles through my skin, lighting up my nerves until I glow from inside like a Christmas tree underwater. I want to step closer to the warehouse. I want to reach between the dark metal bars of the basement and grasp the slender arm beckoning me from that secret within the bricks and glass.

But I know. The beautiful whisper, the white emaciated arm reaching out for me from that deserted basement; it’s all evil. Evil. To follow it is to die.

So I turn, slowly, dazed with fear and longing. And I walk back home in a darkness newly glittering with recognition.

The Evidence

How carefully did you review the recording?

What do you want to hear? There’s nothing in that wav file that matches up with what I experienced. The sound of footsteps, my breath, flick of a lighter initiating a cigarette.

The water bottle?

You can hear it. It falls, echoing, flat. No trace of the voices. Just the wind, my breathing, a few cars sighing through the underpass.

So there’s no evidence any of this happened in the way you just told it?

None whatsoever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Pure Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.