Tyler King
Playing Phantoms in the Vampire Castle
The summer of 2014, tattoo ink dripping blood to hardwood floor,
I step into the ghost of a boy racing chemicals all the way to sunset, and come out the other side screaming
like hell,
all black, car crash, funeral heart beating reverie, strung out valentines on parade, Satan
speeds up on the turnpike, God is a railway car bound full tilt to supernova,
any moment the scales can tip, delicate balance shift, dialectical relationships unwound over radio static elegies,
they started lacing the shit and by March the death became a riot, a language of communion and massacre, we’re out here unlearning existing, violence as a door swinging off its hinges, step over the threshold, into unending longing
moments of silence, calm repose and anticipation, breaking down by numbers,
playing phantoms in the vampire castle, communing with the dead, shamans of infinite space and void, through the sunroof my disintegrating acid eyes observe the fire of heaven, heavenly bodies falling, I remember saying something like, the trajectory has come, we might as well draw futures from the ashes,
I’m getting fucked up off memory, the fragility of experience, it has been one Armageddon after another since we split the atom in our stuttering tongues,
like the gleaming teeth of empires, like the dope sick fever state,
weaponize history, and learn to get higher with less
Tyler King is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Sonder Midwest. He is a student at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, where he lives.
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