Author: The Ticket Taker

A Word to the Wise…

When the privilege of vision is stripped away, the dazzling circular warning of the windchime becomes as deafening as:

1. The bewildering eruption of the veiled volcano looming over the outskirts of your fierce and allegorical hometown, as you once knew it;

2. The speed-blurred and howling meteoric 4 a.m. ambulance deviously spiraling off the thin, crooked city streets and coarse, curved back avenues, screeching toward nothing but ragged relics, rotten edifices, and tattered manors of concrete and wood, steel and brick;

3. The crashing glass catastrophe from both within and without your jilted forest-walking nectarine dream—the twelfth time this week and eleven times forgotten, swiftly setting the stage, preparing the prerequisites for its once-more jarring arrival—instinctively aware of the specific instant your cascading, ever-growing snowball-shock wilts from your mind just enough to mislead your memory into myth, lurking eternally inside the inner lip of the threshold titled distortion, where it sneaks peeks at you patiently, eager for its inalienable opportunity to pull you through the passageway, recurring in an incomprehensible endlessness unbeknownst to you, effortless in its immortal tethering of what-can-only-be-called your soul to the corporeal (shared yet separate, unified though subjective, singular in solidarity, communally still individualistic, predestined plus autonomous, emancipated while enslaved, self-possessed however public property), subservient in its divinity, role-playing amidst the sacred constructs and perfectly-manufactured parameters of The Immaculate, conditioning you to the methods of operation of The Flawless, to the general habits of The Consummate, delivering your presence—your very consciousness—to The Everlasting, an infinite loop of which its existence you are unaware, save for that infinitesimal fraction of a second when you wake to the eardrum-obliterating cacophony of that all-too-familiar-yet-foreign-as-can-be metaphysical glass-shattering responsible for disturbing your wanderlust slumber, the ultimate infallible sensation of The ALLLLmighty living ten trillion lifetimes through your body in the blink of an eye—Universe come, Universe go, Universe come again—as you yawn and glance about, predisposed to clean up the shards of that which broke, although utterly oblivious as to what, how, and why.

Heightened awareness can lead one to dwell on sinuous sides of ordinary doors, hiding in plain sight for those who no longer see shapes, but hear colors and smell contours, tragic tracings filled instantaneously with unblemished premonitions of precise occurrences not even God hath yet fathomed.

To see, or not to see, that is the question… and the answer lies somewhere betwixt the well-worn cloud of ominous improbable epiphany, and the inverse three-tiered podium lying quasi-naked at the elastic underside—the accordion floor, as it were—of the deep blue and bare beige sea.

Wait until you see exactly what is in store for you. One simple request: Don’t tell Benjamin.

you’ve got it in you, kid

hate to say it,
           it’s unfortunate but true—

you could have been anyone else
           you could have had anything

but! no such luck!—

you’re a rotting leper,
           a terminally ill mental case
           with a new disease

you’re a boy genius
           teetering on the edge
           of holding the cure

now if you’d just get sick enough
to want it bad enough
           to pull it out of you already

he’s buried somewhere, thank Blah (or, if not, even better):

america sucks to fuck??

na!; earth only sp-
                                  ins
to win—

for itself & no one!!
     else (except you)

you’ve got it wrong;
you’ve got it backwards:

what goes around doesn’t always
come around, and what stays around
doesn’t always stick—

IT’S OVAL, YOU IDIOT

(it’s calm as a peach;
                         orange as an apple)

and for Blah’s sake:
just be a tangerine.

Worth a Shot?

It’s not about who
predicted it (because
no one did), it’s
about who was
prepared for it (not
who wasn’t),
and that is:

the doom ’n gloomers,
           the poets,
the singers ’n seers,
the downtrodden ’n
           forgotten,
the manic ’n the depressive,
           the anti-socialites ’n
contra-non-believers—

who never forgot
that things were already
fucked—we’ve been
fleeced from the jump,
the genesis founded
upon unbounded
generational swindling;
the cornerstone since
time immemorial (in
rough shape, battered ’n
bruised beyond
recognition—like there
ever was a point of
reference anyhow)—
and that they had to get
worse, before they
had the slim,
shimmery silver shot
           of getting better.

Pages from the Netherrealm that Nevermiss (III.)

A series of poems conjured from the minds of J. Evan Rogers + Bailey Gaus

To seek Truth—if She still breathes—follow
the Vermilion Kittens, their eyes aflame
with candor, through Sincerity Alley
to the Wall that Reasons Back—lest the Pendulum
of Morality defers to its own direction: back-to-
forth rather than side-to-side.

The Contrarian arrives barefoot, aghast
with vagrancy, pockets full of static, claiming
resurrection by tessellation, offering a celadon serum
that hums like a neon Eucharist, insisting it will
transmute your spiritual dampening
into an onslaught of joy.

The Forgettable Saint has warned against
this for centuries, wounded with immortality—
unheard beneath the Symphony of Creation,
unnoticed amidst the Divine Cosmic Waltz.

Emerging from the Oracle’s Closet, the Underaged Alchemist
promises the Promiscuous Prodigy—with maps drawn
on their wrists—that to reach the Dungeons of Abundance,
one must resist the gleam of the Gold-Plated Gallows,
decipher the Infirmary of Mysteries, and avoid at all costs
the Parlor of Perpetual First Impressions—unless one wishes to
unknowingly begin again back at the beginning,
never to speak to Him, trailed for all eternity by
the infinite ellipsis in an everlasting glow of gloom.

Enough with riddle and scripture—the illusion and reality of it all.

Step through.

It’s time to experience the Netherrealm from the inside out.

(Back to Pt II.)

Pages from the Netherrealm that Nevermiss (II.)

A series of poems conjured from the minds of J. Evan Rogers + Bailey Gaus

Further in, a flicker stirs
like an inverted firework—
not of Hope, but Remembrance—
a brittle pulse in the Belly of Dusk
where remorse coils like smoke in lungs.

The Whistling Spectacle frolics
hand-in-hand with the Anticlimactic Angel—
on the tip of thought atop the Tower of Certainty—
mocking Time and Truth with their
slow, decaying tongues.

A ceaseless fever dream, the so-swollen
crimson soil weeps with every footfall, soaking-in
silhouettes of the Parade of Regret, as if
Penance was a place, not a plea.

Still, the Tease awaits—languid, laughing;
seething, searching—beneath the haunted
hush of what was heretofore.

The darkest part is a fact of art:
the Heart of the Artifact is hard to find.

(Forth to Pt III.)

(Back to Pt I.)

“God’s Got Nothin on Gasman”

            An effluvium of tortoise-tone smoke rose all around him. He stood in the dustydark boarded-up building with no regrets.

            The space was abandoned, but far from empty. It held: a dilapidated counter as the only level ’n elevated surface that once served as a service desk now used for a multitude of other erroneous inactivities; pallets jutting out at all angles, left stacked or standing every which way like a failed attempt at a giant game of Jenga, rusted antique automobile ’n oil signs barely clinging to the walls like lizards ’n silverfish or something else unidentified ’n strange that slipped its cocoon and flung itself free into the frenzy… among other things.
            Think of something, Dear Reader. The rundown gas station he stood in held everything except that thing you just thought of. (Now what are the odds of that?)

            His mind was made mostly of kerosene—and he was still for the moment, smoking slow and convincingly, while the noxious wave patterns leveled out in his skull.

           It’s not hard to pump gas, he thought, you just always have to be sure to get your fill.
           That, and: God’s got nothin on Gasman.

            [*cutscene omitted*]

           His thoughts didn’t come out as clean as they once did. Still, they were invaluable when translated (which, as of yet, there was not a single known translator of such “language” on this planet, or any other). And, now, they emanated audibly.
           Glibglibglibbbb, came one. Urshaurshaaa, went another. And so on and so forth. Et cetera, et cetera.

           The world zoomed on outside the decaying walls. Time ticked endlessly toward nowhere in particular. He was an anachronistic artifact, a sullied statue in his greasy jumpsuit and beat-up boots.
           It mattered not how dark it got, how cold or bleak. He remained, mostly unmoving, in a tuckered-out tomb of concrete blocks and ethanol.

           He heard there were places where gas stations still exploded. The knowledge of these kinds of occurrences was useless to him—it simply did not compute. A moth faltered in its flight, swirled and twirled, crashing down belly-up under the faint glow of a pulsating “EXIT” sign.

           There was only one rule in the rundown abandoned gas station: No Smoking.

           He lit another smoke in his mind, which gurgled graciously for the chance to do so. It was a volatile yet conscious decision. Although the one rule did not specify, he knew why it existed, and although extrapolating with assumptions in gray areas and murky waters was one of his pet peeves (in the top ten on his list of lifelong no-nos, in fact), he felt it more than fair to take those two words literally, not figuratively. If we were to take every rule to pertain to the imagination as well, he thought (which came out flifffliffflifffliffffff), we’re in deeper shit than I imagined. (Shunnashunnnnshun)
            Plus, the therapeutic encapsulation a mental tobacco toke granted him was one of the main exercises keeping him alive.

Pages from the Netherrealm that Nevermiss (I.)

A series of poems conjured from the minds of J. Evan Rogers + Bailey Gaus

The Burmese Tease hides beneath
swollen shadows of featherweights,
hymns turn to Him to relinquish
what is left of their unbound souls.

Wind sits still, laden with mercurial secrets
long since foretold and forgotten,
relearned once more, entrapped in fleeting moments
where the horror of the Minotaur
steps forth in pitch black, unmasked.

Silence is not quite as quiet as it seems—
it echoes on in endlessness, etched in the ancient
onyx walls of a mirrored, cyclical Elysium.

Sinister whispers purr in the Garden of Amnesia
where Salvation is dancing unseen
on the outer edge of the palisade,
stuck in the esoteric recesses
a mere apple’s toss away.

The only way out, is to go further in:
this is always how it begins.

(Forth to Pt II.)

(it’s) rather vampiric

the way you slip ’n slide through the night
keeping clear of crosses,
cross your toes and hope to die

you’re rather tarnished
the way you reflect stains
(cuts and tears, smears and blemishes)
and how green you gleam
where you once shone copper

you’re the buoy that sank
and washed up on another shore
unsure of the consequences
yet firm on the stakes

you’re the glass bottle still floating
the message already scribed inside you

yet you’ll never know this
until you smash to pieces
on the hull of a ship
carrying the one true recipient
for whom it was written

six centuries ago.