Rev up your chain saw, Joan of Arc
Trebor Healey
He was the ultimate badboy
And he got me like Jesus
I worshipped his darkness
and I'm still testifyin today
He had black hair, black eyes
he never shaved
he was a junkie
and a thief
a runaway since 14
His wrists were all torn up
like razorblade runways
takin' flight over the bruised outposts of his forearms
mottled like molding bread
He never stayed anywhere very long
He got into trouble with his knifeblunt tongue
he always told the truth
when he revved up his chainsaw
truth-sower
He felt he was stupid and fucked-up
cuz he should be by now
but he was clearer than the dharma
and he psycho-stabbed the truth into people with a cake knife of
clarity
He had a tatoo on his neck
that looked like calligraphy
like a blue knife had slashed
away at his throat
Like he'd asked some tatoo artist
to slit him ear to ear
It made it hard to get a job cuz he hated hip cafes and clubs
He was an angry disrespectful bastard
most of the time
and he spoke the truth almost always
He was a furious spinning wrathful deity of a dragon
breathing harsh truth like fire
he blistered my soul
and I let myself burn
I didn't want any of who I culturally was anyway
He was a great tree surgeon of delusions
and his voice was a chainsaw
Chew me up baby
I wanted a blood-letting
knife-cock chainsaw lover
He called all my bluffs
chopped me up like beef in a tacqueria
trimmed me way back to the bone
Sometimes I wondered what I was doing in the bad neighborhood of his
psyche
And I'd think about all the nice boys I've met
light and airy, everythings OK and I believe in happiness
Nice bright sunny people
with savings accounts and health insurance
about as sharp as spoons
Usually black as coal inside
With big iron doors for ventricles
and no trespassing signs posted along their pulmonary arteries
relationships are their snake pits
The kidneys where they keep you
the infernal incinerator that keeps their happy light glowin
lots of people die each year in their own excrement
to keep them shining like chrome
I didn't want any of who I culturally was anyway
He wasn't like that
He looked like a blackhole
he drew me in with his gravity
He had no stop signs, no signals, no cops
He scared the shit out of me
but black holes are the lightest stars
cuz their light never leaves em
His heart was an inverted sun
and once inside there was no ozone between us
A flashing prism of pain igniting everything and everyone
around us
An internal combustion engine
there was no danger when we burned
we burned clean and blue
He's got a full tank of gas
And even if his 400 horses of power are crusted with anger and bile
Inside that nasty grimy plastic shell
there pumps the clean shiny well-oiled piston
of a chainsaw motor
Rev it up Joan of Arc
I love to feel that chain move across my skin
I love to feel your electricity arcing across
my loneliness
like a comet
He blinded me with the glare
from his black obsidian eyes
His heart was a lighthouse in the fogbound night of his body
Blackness isn't evil
Blackness is fear
And I know avoiding it isn't virtue, it's loss
So fuck that good and evil bullshit
Evil and cruelty are stupid graffitti tags
America writes all over him
like he's the stinkin 22 Fillmore
It's there way of claiming him
stakin moral territory
vandalizing him with their words and judgements
Saying we're right
and this reality is our territory
your life included
because we were here first
pissing dogs, Conquistadores and Christians
Half the pc blowjobs in this town
hate themselves so much
they turn into monkeygrinders for white trash opportunists from Hope,
Arkansas faster than you can say
Us and Them
Rev up your fuckin chainsaw Joan
Mow em down
truth-sower
Yea he was my little Joan of Arc
The kind of truth that just wont do
visions and crazy voices
that reek of upsetting everything and everybody
Lots of cold stares
from ladies in museums
who didn't like him loving what they loved
He reflected their glares back at them
til their glasses fell off their noses
and I knew it wasn't his evil they saw
but their own
He was a blessed canvas of truthpaint
too goodlooking though for them to ever believe he was a mirror
In a lot of ways he never had a chance
and what irked me was people felt obligated
to be consistent with his past
so they never gave him one
the blind, pessimistic bastards
He'd make a great museum piece someday
and they could appreciate him like Van Gogh and Christ and
everyone else who got treated like shit while they were alive
pumping out beauty like gasoline
and people spittin in their station john
His days were flames that licked
his bloody gash of wounded faggot child gasoline
He was a blessed menstruating vagina
and he got treated with the same undeserved disrespect
he was the boy raised by wolves
He ennobled heroin and suicide and badtempered tirades
not because it was hipcity romantic which it is
and lots of stupid people feed on that bullshit
No, not that way
He ennobled it because it was who he fucking was
and he was Mary Magdalene
No one had more integrity than his truth-fixed mind
He shot it up like junk
He dignified the greasy streets of the mission
like the Sisters of Charity
I called him my little sister of Disparity
He upset everything and everybody
like Christ in the temple and the moneychangers
sweet little saint of the street
People didn't want his love
they wanted other parts of him
and he could see that clearer than Elijah in the fog
and he'd tell them to fuck straight off
and I admired him for it
Not because I hated their need to lie
but because he was doin the same to me
throwin birdseed and life-giving firebrands
We're like those pinecones that only open in the flames
the fruit trees that need pruning
And he was doin it for free
Rev up your chainsaw Joan of Arc
Burn all the forests down
He's all the anger I got locked up inside
He's my sweet fire hydrant
I'm an underground river unknown
When we come together
there's sexmagic
It wasn't just the same old tired queer thing
of fucking like crazy 20x a week
We willed changes with our bodies
we were going somewhere together
orgasm was just a fastfood joint on the highway
and we weren't stoppin there
We were both dead serious and speeding
People pulled off the side of the road when they saw him coming
Everyone thought he was a demon
little kids said he looked like Satan
I know he's my blessed dark angel
and I hate the way this world hates him
and how he hates himself
He hates being a man
because his father's one
and his father is one fucking bastard
He used to make him strip as a little boy
and he would tickle him while berating how
sickly his body was
how he should have been a girl
Look at you! Look at you! echoes through the caverns of his
loss
His father beat him nearly to death when he was two
for falling onto the Christmas tree
and then locked him in a room for 4 hours
He's ashamed to be a part of this warped culture
that breaths through men like that
a fucking college professor
whose just a sperm donor
as far as he's concerned
With those sorry ass habits of resurrecting German myths
around a solstice they have know fucking consciousness of
The kid was winter man
what could be darker
He should've been deified in the dead of nightseason
A blessed tuber
a black ember
He was just the black death to them
He tried to push his father off the roof once
and hasn't seen him since
His grandfather sexually molested his sister
who was the butchest dyke ever period
and she had a chainsaw of her own
She tried to cut his dick off with a pair of scissors
when he was just a baby
He still has scars
His mother was a Sicilian-American Class-A screaming bitch
who used to just rip up their house
broken windows, plates, speaking in tongues
She was a middle-class tramp
who went out to singles bars in East Buffalo between husbands
She was disgusted with him being a flaming teen faggot
And he told her once
the reason she hated him being queer so much
was because he was gettin more dick than she was
It was the truest thing he ever said to her and one of the last
And he's got a 4-inch scar on his arm
he got when she attacked him with a spatula
to prove it
She threw him out like she threw out her four husbands
and she called the police whenever his fourteen years of pain came
around
Ungrateful kid
she always tells him she thought he was dead by now
when he calls
And I half-fear the same when a few months go by
without his wail and his cry
without that fine revving sound
He broke apart our thing together
like a hatchet in a melon
clean and uncomplicated
we're OK apart
and I knew it would come
but we had a form together
that grows
I miss him
and I wake up in the middle of the night
wondering about fire and Saint Joan