What follows is a "lyric essay," a kind of poetic meditation, on the film TREMORS 5: BLOODLINE. I wrote this shortly after completing my NOTES FOR THE WOUNDED ROOMS collection, and found a rather interesting color study of this film hosted on an academic site. When I reached out to the creator of the study, he agreed to publish the essay, but apparently some sort of legal battle happened in regards to his site and the essay has never seen the light of day. I haven't touched the essay since 2016. I present it to you as an artifact, as a slice of bloody lyric essay poetry that might induce a sense of the inexplicable, a tremor, if you will. A tremor of horror and joy. - JG
We’ll bury ourselves in a coffin of green licks, and learn how to breathe dust, swallow dirt-piles to choke on the fleshy black worms of our final haunt. There will be no more than a smudge of blood to rip at our guts, ground hearts to meat and gnawed skin. And stroke death in a wavering line of heat. We are waiting for night, waiting for beige to bleed out this dark clump of jitters. I’ve stood under desert skies so long my sores have burst to thorns: monsoon nightmare, broken glass in the tangle, sand storms for the tongue boils. To the blue licks that are not water, but night drops, wind-chimes from afar. A slice of being sucked into earth. These are not worms made of light, but straggling wisps of deepest hunger. And our blood is flecked with starry skies of fire like the scales of a behemoth too large to leap into, too full of twilit howls and the ancestry of weeping mountaintops. But the onslaught is at an end. All we can do is keep our feet suspended off the ground long enough for the jaws of the earth to snap shut and claw back a growl into the bow of the earth. I’ve never been a man made of grey slopes. I saw my teeth into a paste, scratch patterns in the sand, and this will never cease. How an open mouth looms like a lake full of venom. Or how we hunt with women on the back of a fiery arrow. You are not my son. I will rub the whites of alien eggs over your gums and call you “Queen.” And a cave is also a mouth, a gape, a testament to the virtues of becoming utter darkness, becoming a swath of vibrant tones. Ascetic, hear me vibrate. I’ll hum the dirt to swarm, awaken you from sleep, and flee. These teeth are stairs to the truth. The scales of our enemy exist to be kissed in our absent heaven. Stick out your tongue and and hum the desert. Feel the trembling shift of what it means to forsake a family. Destroy the mother. Destroy the gushing terror of memory, and learn to dissolve into a black goodbye that is closure. This must end in a familial rain. When will this end? How do we return to the lush blue? We will never return. There will be no one left alive to bury the bodies. So, dig, son, dig until your fingers crack and spill and let the beige blood drizzle in a rectangular line. You are not a monster. The blood will seep into the earth and become others who must die like how we will ultimately die in the unreality of this vast pulsing tremor of mutilation.
