BY JUSTIN PHILLIP REED
for Judd on his 40th birthday
Why are you so fine? I mean kind. I mean coarser than human hair is the
crown I found on my head. Put the beds to kids; you have to see this.
It’s 1981 & two young men from a nation in the adolescence of its own
decadence backpack alone into English highlands where no one is their kind &
the climate not in their favor & thus of course they encounter / succumb to /
are found by / hounded by a rabid appetite for flesh that is neither truly
mannish nor absolutely animal. This film about what can’t be shown but
maybe should poses as a film about maybe believing what can’t be seen. Poster
for an orgy porno in the empty subway. No nipple in sight in the shower sex
scene. How David hides his bush in bushes or descends into the belly of a blue
movie to congress with the undead. The indecent is always in descent. I’m
going to look into your eyes so keep them covered. The golden age of porn is
living its silver years & in December ’81 a frequent visitor to the States will
die the first known AIDS-related death in the UK. “The bloodline must be
severed.” “This must be stopped.” Blood a taboo fluid in a blue movie theatre.
“The police are satisfied.” David’s ailment arrests him for the final time while
an actor moans an absent or otherwise occupied audience toward climax.
Should the world know our business? It’s murder, then. & now the country’s secret
business is leaving bodies in the streets.
It’s no secret I’m not hot for politesse. I go less than nuts for nice guys. For
me it’s gotta be a daddy who’s seen many battles, worn as many faces as shapes
the music of “Blue Moon” takes in this film alone. Soothing, moody, doo-wop,
adaptable. I think gore must be the score of 40 years. Spare me the dimness of
a middling loafer. If he hasn’t ventured off-road under lunacy’s tumescence
into some shit he shouldn’t & had his stinking organs spilled across the public
facing hills & awoken to wonder what he’s become besides in love, how can I
trust that his joy is genuine? Roll the heads of cops who said there’s nothing to
see. Fuck all that hush hush & howl about it, how it often hurts, living long
enough in the hope to know one thing from another, simple differences falling
out of focus, the moon many nights being merely a belief in the moon. To
retrospectively reckon with the cinema of your existence & witness its
implicit intuitions. Why are you so fine? Why is it, despite the laminate falsity
of other men of this era, we look into your eyes & are not lied to?
Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist whose preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), both published by Coffee House Press. He studies traditional martial arts and participates in alternative rock music cultures. He was born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and enjoys smelling like outside.