Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman Has Left His Tribe
Said a woman at the checkpoint in her eyes
Her son was a suicide bomber and she wasn’t yet
She collected the well wishes and cashed the checks

I focused on her facial expression to get me thru the hills
Chinooks swept me into a caravan of diplomatic stills
Every rock that could have been thrown went under the wheel
I thought about the Shahikat valley as if from here it was real

The militia sat eating during the day’s prayers I took a poll
How many had seen a chest explode and who fired into the hole
The headless horseman carried a copy of the New Yorker
He laughed and kicked the tires and asked how much longer

We’re going to explode a yellow cake of debris
From McArthur’s grave to the homes of you and me
The headless horseman has left his tribe
And there’s no going back to the other side

- Chris Mansel

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My American flag doesn’t have any white or red
It’s all in blue and flies its rainy days over my head
It’s got a star for me and yes it’s got a star for you
They’re laid out in a graveyard design in gray
It didn’t have to be it just turned out that way

- Chris Mansel

Each Truth, Each Lie

(The title is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem, This Side Of The Truth)

This piece is dedicated with love to the Brother’s Grimm Jake Berry and Hank Lazer


The wilderness is like a shallow river, a skin straight from the bark of the tree that acquired its nutrients from the wilderness, the river closing itself off from what made the wilderness a jungle. From the wilderness we have encountered many beings and we have learned from all of them. Cast not out our brothers you could say and our enemies as foes be blessed with our constant attention. A slain enemy is a confidant in the ways in which you stay alive, a slain enemy like a body in an autopsy is a confidant in the ways you stay alive and while on the table the body which is open to the air resembles a ghost that has had skin stretched over it as to defer itself from the one examining it. A coagulated naturalist could find disgrace in silence, an embrace so immodest as to recall the elegance of a tradesman watching the tools of his trade wash away in the river as his limbs hang lifeless.
Joseph Wolf Shenk writes in his book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, “The perception of reality is called mentally healthy, ‘one textbook declares, “when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.” The wilderness becomes barren when the ship of discovery runs aground. The earth doesn’t swallow the ship whole but acts as a port of extradition when depression enters the sea like wilderness shore of reason and accountability.
An element of depression is fear of success or something like that; I think I read it somewhere. All I know is that while I have suffered intricately from this disease I have never sat back and wondered if I was successful I would have to blow my brains out. Fear is farther away than courage. Courage like the perspective of our enemies is at best alleged and gaunt, but it must also be kept in mind that a revengeful for can also become a revengeful ally with a shopping list of deal breakers, requirements and stacks of affidavits to the contrary and so it goes with depression.


- Chris Mansel

That Isn't God's Voice

“A scream that’s all dawn.”

- Ferruccio Brugharo


The tropics of my cancer have never known disease
My heaven’s head is severed in a replica of HIV
A death head’s spiral returning to the ground
Its tightens slowly and unravels without a sound

Sam Peckinpah in California prison facial tattoos
Sunsets and horses running into the ocean blue
Emigrated to death row from the scene of the crime
A sixth century weapon used now for the last time

A sister’s lover and wrenched and slow obscenities
Cold cooking oil and Robert Browning’s plea
Knuckles disappear and the face seems to tighten
The phone doesn’t ring and the night seems to brighten

Chorus:

It’s all short quick breaths downstage
Chemical inserted murder on a page
The quilt is a picture of the Buddha child
Unable to smile he sits under a tree awhile


- Chris Mansel

New Year's 2006

Just as the ferocity of a hummingbird’s wings could pull a fresh team of horses it is also true that in the beginning of a new year those meant for survival will indeed fall by the wayside as the horses make their way by towards the cliff where the hummingbird will simply fly away unharmed.
- Chris Mansel

Extradition

“Having dressed the sunlight in bloodied robes I embrace the night as the time to discover the source of the sun.”
- from an unpublished poem by Chris Mansel

It is in the psyche of anyone who creates to want someone to give you their opinion, to look at it or to read it whether they hate it or not. To do so can lead to obstructions that the creator of this media had yet to imagine otherwise he or she wouldn’t have shown it to anyone in the first place. I am one of those creators and I am speaking to others.
Whether consciously or unconsciously we will, as artists tend to rely on the fact that other artists are the same as we are, think the way we do and are the same kind of people and have the same customs or experiences we have. These events of thinking are so regional it seems that half the country could drop into the sea and the other half would have no idea.
I began a few years ago trying to get a larger audience for my work and I committed one of those crimes for which a lack of comprehension or slow deduced, while trusting in the better angels if they so exist I asked the question that is either answered or explained back. From there I begin to give my opinion on the work of others and being open minded and tired of the clichés I have read for years and also tired of seeing what others have gone through I decided to tell the truth on advice given to me by someone I hold dearly as a friend. This was good sound advice and much like the previous situation I found myself betraying someone, or the act perceived in this way, without any action on my part outside of honesty and good intentions. But now looking back I think my opinion and not that of the author was best.
Growing up in the south I have a definite perception of right and wrong and a customary manner in politeness and a sense of doing all I can for others and expecting that of others but alas this in the world of literary matters is sadly, naïve. I have done and will continue to do everything I can for someone whose work I admire and someone who deserves the act or effort who may or may not consider his or herself in this manner. It is not who you know and whose hand you can grease, it is not you blurb me and I’ll blurb you, it cannot be an outsider is prey and we do not feel like chasing the kill just opening another wound to make it easier for others to finish off the kill, no, it is following a certain civility of lack of a more offensive term.

- Chris Mansel

CODA: Where All The Dead End Roads Intersect

All I know about my writing is that I have tried my best, suffered the most and brought to life what no one wanted to see or cared to observe. I wrote a book that hardly anyone read and it pushed the limits of even the underground much less polite society. If it never gets any attention, if it never gets published then I know at least I wrote it. I may write the second book in the series, I already have some notes but why should I? To bring into focus what exists in all of us? People just don’t want to know.

Chris Mansel

Lao Tzu Aboard A Flight Bound For Everest

There is no political species other than personal being. Injustices become like sores on the skin and infection, like nonviolence, is the result therein. To see the world in a grain of sand is to close everything off all around you in order to focus and grief in the distance as well as sorrow in forefront give rise to that secular mirror image that cost you your soul.

- Chris Mansel

Be Pro-Life, No Capital Punishment

Open All The Time

The river holds a hotel of ghosts
The piano in the kitchen laughs loud
The stairs on old used cars is broke
The beds like a muddy bottom shroud

The bleakness of a funeral inside
The smell of a fisherman’s worm
Running alongside like a pair of eyes
His eyes like stars staring firm

The doorman spins his head and laughs
Catfish in their eveningwear tip their hat
Here comes the mayor stumbling up the path
The front door closes on a scene like that

Chorus:

Gothic southern mystery, undead chateau
Tennessee river hotel open all night
Under the waterline open all the time

- Chris Mansel

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CRush The Blade, Reap The Rust

The Fauna of 1999 (for Mark Eitzel)

I woke up in gasoline
Slightly apart at the seams
Summer flies dark and curious
Exoskeletons and subcutaneous

Cries and moans God is alone
Where the road ends but goes on
Hauling a Cadillac up on the cross
Crying at the labor laughing at the loss

Martin Luther King as a sparrow lands
He picks up the children by the hand
Disappearing into the cascading waterfall
His wings are as wide as they are tall


Chorus:

The fauna of 1999 keeps moving through my dreams
The cadavers of leaves crushing under my teeth
The lacy moths and butterflies keep me coming back


- Chris Mansel

Looking In

Window Series

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

The Passing of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown whose home was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, died not fromt he Hurricane but of a broken heart. A little bit of the soul of music passes with him.

The Charnal Origami and The Chemical Make-Up of Glass

(for Ivan Arguelles)


As part of the window
We are foreign to the glass
The wood, the nail and the latch
Are all an opposition to the view
Neither can see


- Chris Mansel

I Read a Book on SElf-DEmand Amputation

What do you say when all is said, when speaking brings you to tears, when writing brings you to the point of screaming in anguish, when there is no point? Why do you subject others to your pathetic suffering when you know they have their own?

There are no heavenly bodies just those that are there when you awake or so the dreams you have seem to suggest. Using the word symmetry when describing the contents of your mind is like throwing yourself off a bridge into a ravine knowing full well if you would have walked a few feet more down the bridge you would have hit the water easily.

The epilogue is always sown into the skin and doesn’t distinguish from the beginning to the end unless you take into account, which insects arrive first. The ash of a religious ceremony never shows the blood or whether or not the snake slithered away alive or dead. From the cradle of exposed skin to the hounding of the door nailed shut, the sounds and motions of life are going to get in one way or another.

If you ever hope to lighten your load you’ve got to learn to leave me by the side of the road.


- Chris Mansel

Clonazepam 0.5 MG Tablet, Round Yellow

Dead in the brine, golden-yellow
A country road is the godhead personified
Leading to a cave where horses give birth out of the reach
Of those sympathetic to the western pantheon
Deserted traveler meeting across the shadow of the steeple
The wandering Albion, cooked meat on the bone
The smell wafting into the cave where newborns
Meet the sacrifice head on


- Chris Mansel

When Hair Remains With The Body

The right moment illustrates the end. A man is never enough and his faults are what give the courage to fall into his own trap of equilibrium. A prisoner is a great source for protection since his life is dependent upon the controlled atmosphere he is within. A victim is to the attacker what the sun is to the rain, rarely, but sometimes they co-exist to cover what together they have joined together to create; they can give and they can take away.
Fear is never an adversary. A cornered animal in the deep snow owes as much to his mistakes as he does his advantage of his white fur. His wounds bleed into the snow and his scent is carried on each snowflake that drifts by. His death a mix of darkness and words, the attacker whose hunger betrayed by thirst at once discovered the internment of organs felt the need of a heartbeat in withered flesh.
The excess of the key generate the obesity of the door. Trepanning of the human skull reveals what every lover cannot caption, the freedom of the mind set loose under the door. The reflection of the light in a blinding sun like starvation to a pair of teeth forced into a curb of concrete in a traffic accident, belittles the contribution of the skull to its last gasp. The image seen through the blinds, the image that would be hidden by doors is the sensation of light on a open wound. The key, a purveyor of the opening shrouds the lock of the weakened eye blinking wordlessly.

- Chris Mansel


“I love she who hates me more.” - Poe