Effervescent Coffins – Damien Ark

November 14, 2019

I.

should i be the one to carry out your punishment
the ring fits you like a coffin
pellucid cathedral
snow drifts silently below the horizon
tracing the shadow of the sphere
two moons aligned between the peak of the mountain
lingering in gnarled mouths
gauze wounds that comforted you
withered and forlorn planet
sobbing into bruised and reluctant hands
i have a thousand eyes but i’m going blind
staring through the blizzard on a train at midnight
flowers of filth and tombstones draped with black snow
deformed retina and static vision

II.

there’s blood in your mouth
you’ve forgotten what it tastes like
the resin, a clot
heaven you sought on charcoal shore
a cankered sore you bit and tore
anchor tattoo on the thumb
when you return to your kingdom
bathing in chrome
pounded into marbled walls
like a desert dome
with the underground cave exhibit
they will smell the putrid shit
leaking from your orifices
and albino bats will gnaw into it

III.

Saw you at another concert, this time a psychedelic rock band from Japan, and anytime you started headbanging I felt that I had the freedom to stare because you couldn’t notice me. I know you’re probably straight, like most metalheads, but I still think you could dig having me going down on your dick. There’s something about seeing a long-haired blonde in a vintage Sleep sweater with nerdy glasses, puffy cheeks, a hint of his body fat present, and seeing him puff on his watermelon flavored Juul as if he knows he’s the edgiest millennial in this crowd.
How does this happen? Every time I go to a concert, I fall in love with someone that I’ll never meet again. There’s you. Then the chubby skater with pink hair at the Ty Segall show (I honestly don’t even care for Ty anymore). Some worthless twink at a bunch of noise shows that never noticed me a single fucking time we crossed paths. Fuck him. Fuck all of the stupid harsh noise twinks, honestly.
You have good taste in music, so let’s fuck. Good enough? Hey, you want to check out my Acid Mothers Temple record collection? Some of them are signed, too. Okay, let’s fuck. How do you get your hair to look like that? Do you think anyone else has specifically pointed you out in public and admired you like I have? I went home after the show and tried to find you on Facebook by searching through who went on the event page. Of course, I couldn’t find you. Tried to search for videos on Pornhub that might resemble you. Searched, ‘Blonde metalhead gay,’ ‘Gay metalhead,’ ‘Stoner gay metal,’ ‘Metal stoner cock,’ ‘Horny metalhead,’ etc…, but nothing resembled you. So all I have is the clinging, and disintegrating image of you fetishized to oblivion until you’re just an idea in my head.
But I know you’ll be at the Sludge Metal festival in October. I know you’ll be at the front of the stage like last time. This time I’ll have a Juul too. As I take a hit on my blueberry slushie flavored vape, I will stare into your eyes for at least ten seconds and signal that I want to have sex with you. You’ll notice, vape, exhale, head-bang, and invite me into the mosh-pit. After the first band, you’ll follow me into the restroom, and I’ll suck your dick. I hope that you’ll be wearing black leather boots, black briefs with cartoon pentagrams on them, and an obscure brutal death slam metal T-Shirt or some shit. And I hope you don’t shave your pubic hair, that it’s this curly bush of bright blonde pubes that have a cheap beer stench to it, and that you’ll bite your tongue bloody when you ejaculate inside of me. But if it’s skinny jeans, converse shoes, and you’re wearing eyeliner, then you can bet I’ll be pulling them down and fucking you against the toilet paper holder. Whisper into my ear right before you ejaculate about how much you hate the new film, Lords of Chaos, which you believe makes black metal look like an edgy, immature joke, and how you’re a true kvlt gay Satan worshipper that loves my fucking cock slamming in and out of you.

IV.

i always knew that one day
you would crash into me
regardless of direction or speed
you’re tired and blind
nobody taught you to look both ways
checking dick pics on DMs
eating ice cream
putting on eyeliner for a tindr selfie
through a red light darkly
my body crushed to pulp dead as fuck
don’t blame yourself
it was predestined baby

V.

i’ve never believed in an angel
that wasn’t swept off shore
and drowned with plucked wings
your brain is like a limestone cave
you are marbled stone that
has been chipped away
valley of eagles follow you home
these cosmic effervescent coffins
that they built for you
can only be seen with your eyes
we are as blind as you’ve wanted us to be
our temples are crumbling
piled up under crimson sky
leave us a halo before you go
annular and rotating in retrograde
like the rings of saturn
shot by cassini in black and white

VI.

(my rapist speaking to my parents in the afterlife)
thought i knew everything
realized i know nothing
will i ever understand anything
you don’t see what i am thank you fuck you

(my rapist speaking to his parents)
you think i’m divine
you thought i was getting better
you thought i was a being that wasn’t
a serial rapist and manipulative liar
fuck you thank you

(me empathizing with my rapist)
hit myself in the face and i feel nothing
i have nothing
in this molded shut basement of snow
drive a nail through each of my eyes
as they shine ever so ludicrously

you’re out plucking flowers
sobbing in the silent october weather
i’ll walk up to you
in the garden of eden and
i’ll fucking kill you where you stand
i’ll fucking cut your throat

here he is again
screaming in the garden of eden
fucking himself in babylon
lighthouse comes crashing down
don’t hold my fucking hand
i’ll spill blood over the moon

ahhh ahh
that’s what you moan
when i slip my claws through the crypts
and to your five foot three long coffin shaped body
otherwise, the lime green basketball shorts
frail hairless sunburned skin
and little pee stained batman briefs
show me where i left off on you
and where he left off on you
that is the vault in you i hope to eviscerate
i hate picking you up from your friend
knowing what you do with him
ahhh ahh
skin so soft, so easy to abuse
i pretend to hate myself
to better manipulate you
and when you fall for it i moan
ahhh ahh
and so do you, don’t ever forget it

VII.

great-grandmother
you survived the mile high ocean waves
held onto by only your foot
you out of so many turned away and sent back
to concentration camps and pits of executed bodies
you flourished through years of torment and abuse
smiled like a sanctified sunrise
as you kissed your daughters goodnight
you fed and bathed and buried them all
and yet

there’s so many horrible people in the world
like me, not like you

VIII.

You do realize how much work it took for me to get in contact with you, right? So I appreciate this time. Can you tell us a little bit about what effervescent coffins are?
Yeah, of course. It used to be known as dyingofaids, then dyingofaids1, dyingofaids2, dyingofaids666, dyingofaids667, and then effervescentcoffins. The onions would keep getting shut down, and I’d troll by just adding a number to it. Eventually, it just got old, and I wanted to keep my dignity while hiding in the shadows. I’ve backed things up pretty well now. When they came for us during the first wave, most of us were permabanned. Half were imprisoned. Some were even killed, whether by assassination or forced suicide from gang stalking. It was rough, and I somehow survived it. Not everyone I was close to did.
Are they still after you?
Always. They’re gang stalking me and I’m under code white because they don’t have enough to really go after me like the others yet. I’ve built up my servers, my army, my weapons, and it’s too much for them to take on, so they just hope that the brain monitoring and constant surveillance will drive me out of myself. What they don’t get is that I’m not really human anymore, more so of an entity that’s become one with my traceless servers. You could say we’re both at a stalemate, and I kind of like that, in a way.
What’s your next plan?
We’re still trying to get a hold of some videos from Afghanistan and Syria that will put us at the top of the market, things that people consider only myth right now. But if they went there like some of us did, they’d know that the reality is that this stuff is happening every day, including in people’s own white-collar neighborhoods. You can find that stuff too, even on our site, but when it’s from a broken country, people eat that up more. And people love a story behind a video. It makes the myth and the haunting all that more appealing.

IX.

because we were both in love with someone else
we felt at the walls to our prison cells
trying to make it feel more like home
tree sap and nectar glued to our sweating bodies
oceanic breaths that submerged my x’s into o’s
silence can be so detrimental and restraining
pink dots sweltering/bubbling/popping in your vision
I want to be left breathless yet also relentlessly submissive
wearing each-others flesh, tattered to the sun/sand/tar
cleaning ourselves with spit and cum
pulled together into the earths wet grimy soil
time is a frigid cryogenic cave of infinitely worthless depth
i’m starving on a full stomach of rotten apples with a serpent’s tongue

X.

smells like fresh rain and mildew creeks and ponds
when I drag my head over your chest
i am fastened to you
even though the veins in my
arms are like roots pulled
from out of the earth
we will live together
we will die in bed on the same day at the same time
loaded rifle to our merging heads
release
this is forever because
you said please

XI.

If you’re going to be a harsh noise musician, then you should look like a terrorist. You need to be able to fit all of your equipment into a worn-down leather briefcase that you stole from a thrift store. When you’re setting up before your show, it should look like you’re assembling a bomb. The first sound that you make during your performance should sound like an explosion going off. All of your pedals should be cheap, used, and beaten up to the point that they randomly malfunction whether you want them to or not. When you’re done playing, all you need to do is slam the briefcase shut, throw it against the wall, and storm away from the crowd as if it’s the last show you’ll ever play.
Every show should be shrouded in uncertainty. Don’t ever let yourself get too comfortable. If you accidentally hit the wrong effects pedal and everything goes silent for ten seconds, then fuck it, that’s the end of the show, or start over. Don’t get caught in this “I fucked up my set” mindset. It’s a noise show. Who cares. Make noise, good or bad, and then scrap it for a two-dollar archival cassette release that you’ll put out on some Russian Bandcamp Label.
A briefcase isn’t necessary. You’ll look just as menacing if you throw everything on the ground and perform underneath the standing crowd, instead of in front or above them. Don’t be afraid to show your set-up to others. Let them take pictures and try to copy what you do, because any amateur copycat that tries to do it will fail. And if they succeed, who fucking cares? Ego shouldn’t exist in the noise scene. You don’t do this shit to make money – you do it to degrade yourself to the essence of sound.
The more philosophy you put into your noise, the shittier it is. The time for glamorizing serial killers, child rapist, having a slideshow behind you of antisemitic imagery, or dead women being tied up, it’s all tasteless and boring now. Nobody is going to take you seriously, and you’re just going to expose yourself as more of a childish, boring asshole. Just play the noise or fuck off.
I used to put my gear on a table, but then people would spill too much beer on it, which would destroy most of it, or I’d get frustrated and knock it all over myself, but mainly, I stopped doing that because I grew tired of the imbalance between me, the table, and the crowd. So I don’t use noise tables anymore. I’m a noise floor kind of person. If I could somehow play on grass, dirt, or any part of the natural Earth, that would be better. Recall the recorded performance of The Incapacitants performing in the mountains of Tajima, Fukushima in 1991. Everything that I use fits neatly in my briefcase, but I throw it all out onto the ground when I’m ready to set up, and I figure the rest out as I go. It shouldn’t take any longer than five minutes set up. Whether I’m ready or not, I start anyway. Nothing frustrates me more than watching these try-hard leather studded death industrial hours take thirty minutes to set-up just so they can do a fifteen-minute mediocre show. Nobody is going to care about your performance in a week, so fuck it, just do something already.

XII.

death metal daydreaming of being
skyscraped into vivisect oblivion
vampiric honey-eyes navigating your solar systems
rotting in the wheat fields
flowers that will bloom from your corpse
teeth that belong plucking blisters
petals swaying over the grave
a brief loving once more
the last minute suicide pacts
bathbombs and skinny little wrists slit open
like throbbing and abused pussy lips
throttling rabidly in the tub like a leopard
choking you out with your ebony dress
your latex boots your panties to chew on
the glass dick to your lips to make it easier
and to see you dead and naked in my bed
and evaporating from my touch
know that you don’t deserve any better

XIII.

So it is true that when you were thirteen you sold dirty pictures of yourself online to strangers and used the money on drugs
And the selling your medication to get more of it
And what about looking at pictures of dead people and torture porn at that same age
Do you ever wonder if people still have that shit and jack off to it
That’s where all of this shit began. What lead to this, right? Well, no excuses, you’re going to get the death penalty for it either way.
You’re a pretty sick fuck. Hard to believe you’re any different than you were before even if you made a few changes. Think you deserve to get raped a million more times.
Yeah. I guess that’s what was on my mind when I did that shit. Go ahead and spread this shit. Make money off it. Sell me. Find me. Rape me traffic me kill me I don’t give a shit. I’m just a soulless body anyway.
You really feel that way, after everything
That kid, it’s better to sometimes pretend that he’s dead. But he’s not. He’s obviously not. Still, inside me, I guess.
And that frustrates you? Do you want him dead?
Partially. But I’m more than just that kid now. Maybe he’s the one that deserves to live and get a second chance, and not me.
Do you think you could help that child now? If he were sitting right in my seat, what would you say to him? What would you do?
Well… That’s very Gestalt of you. So you want me to have a conversation with my child self. I’d rather not, though. There’s nothing that could have been done to stop everything that had happened. There are too many cracks in this world for people to fall into. There isn’t anything nice I could say to make it better for him.
Do you think he’s proud of you? After all the suffering you’ve caused in this world?
Do you believe… in nature or nurture? Which do you think is stronger? Can you relate it to my case? I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.
You’re by nature, definitely. You were a bad seed from the start, but what happened to you, that’s what made you what you are now. The only nurture that’s left for you is the comfort of the noose around your neck, and maybe your pillow in prison cell while you beat off to your own death.
All that I wish… Is that it, my death, could have been on my site before it all went down.

XIV.

thousand pillars
begins and the next one ends
micro-structures and nano-particles
the sound of your DNA’s vibration
mist rather than heavy rainfall
paradise and a crippled mansion
fuck all suppressing transposition
separate every last thread
fuck your paranormal investigator
dream where everyone is dead
surface through grey hotel rooms
you become what you delete
a nervous lust
remaining unintimidated

vibrant feathers
rowboat through rose blossoms
mechanical, sluggish, concrete
leather gloves over bronze hands
in the dungeons i’ve constructed
throwing lanterns into the furnace
everything being unrequited
have happened in the first place

nebula fetish
you cannot escape escapism
freckled epidendrum radicans
skeptical of even solipsism
at the center of the supercell
self-annihilation impulses
still has that fresh casket smell

fun being suddenly mass murdered
every loop disintegrates

chaotic purple vortex cape
my system is corrupted
piano and tape
oscillating fuck drive
dope horse prince
casually offensive
inside of the capitals monument
time to evacuate

XV.

sulfur rain over our heads
i burrow into your shoulder
half of your body explodes
and regenerates again and again
before we are transferred
through the stargate, through the ether
her torso is squirming with centipedes
her eye sockets see cosmic vortexes
will she make it through to us
my innards spread out over your innards
we’re holding our flesh together
if unable to make it through
i know you’ll resurrect me from the machine world

XVI.

In Vancouver, Hatesex performs a meditative piece in front of a massive Cy Twombly to a small collective of fifty observers. One amp, two cymbals, a contact mic, reverb pedal, and a small mixer. Performers and voyeurs sit and rest on the floor for the entirety of the performance. Anyone can do this, but they haven’t, and can’t to the ability that Hatesex does. She knows when it’s time to string the bow against the cymbal, allowing a single high-pitched note to reverb for minutes until it dissipates until the next one, followed by the crunch of the contact mic stuffed in her mouth. When it’s over, I feel a faint disappointment, like how I feel when I’m stoned and I suddenly end up sober out of nowhere.
J does what he does. Manipulates the recordings he made of the rain on the drive here and turns it into a fifteen-minute crackling wall. Every static click and pop radiates within us as we listen to his piece with closed eyes, reminding us of how these cells in our body will someday stop regenerating and succumb to death.
It’s rare that I ever play last, but pressure isn’t something musicians like us really think about. If anything, the trashier the show, the shorter it is, the more the audience is mystified by it. Goat is known for his harsh noise monolith, “Holy Mountain”, which spans fifty-three minutes, but if you see any of his shows, they last from two minutes to thirty seconds before he throws his gear at the crowd and is drowned by applause for his short burst of catharsis. Time is what stresses me out. I want to get lost in what I do, but I don’t want to get overly absorbed into it to the point where people think I’m being obnoxious. That’s why I wish we could all be like Francisco Lopez and be blindfolded into every musical performance we see, surrendering to the sound, and no focus on the artist(s).
The contact mics that I use are more expensive and pick up microscopic sounds better than Hatesex. I tape four of them to the wooden tiles of the art gallery near where I’m sitting, and then I roll handfuls of dice, seashells, pebbles, and marbles around them. My idea is simple – I grab a handful of the objects every now and then, toss them, let the distortion and reverb do their work, think about the texture for a moment, and repeat the act all over again.
Manipulating instruments and so-called non-instruments with the use of distortion reveals a new body to the constructs that we put on the sound of something that we find familiar to ourselves. When you hold your ear up to a seashell, you typically hear an echo that mystifies you into nostalgia, but when the contact mic is under the aperture, the sound is now a corrosive storm. The philosophy of learning, exploring new sounds, along with tearing apart old ones, leads to an unexplained higher way of understanding our world and our own sonic bodies, these undeserving voids of invisible light that hold our undying soul’s vibrating frequencies.