Editors note: A few weeks back we received a concise and very appealing message in our journal mailbox:

“I know very well you have never read anything like this. Please let me know if you need any information from me. My best,”

– Louis Bourgeois, Executive Director of VOX Press and Program Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.

The five texts are his own works of fiction, not the work of his students, and the level of violence in them is quite extraordinary, as if reading from inside the mind of a perverse narrator. Over the next few weeks we will publish them one at a time, releasing them slowly to dose readers with the extreme and unflinching material he has granted us. Here is the first part of the second text, ‘Amputation.’

Stars explode in my mouth, for a week I haven’t eaten, and I have never known such Joy; an endless misery is ending in absolute Euphoria—I always knew it would end this way, right at the edge of death my conversion into happiness would inscribe itself on the very foundation of the universe, at the lowest and highest strata of the Abyss—I’ve seen the whole of the universe on fire and I’m here to tell you that the final destiny of human consciousness involves only explosions—purest, sweetest melancholy that’s really a most intense ecstasy—after the historical dialectic rots in us, we’ll know only profundity, a profundity as logical as blue air.

There is a spear in my side, a hook in my mouth,  an axe to my head; I was born this way—born chopped up inside and out—it’s not easy to be born this way—but this apparent curse is really a gift—a lone man in a most desolate place is a paradise of extremity—releasing the supernatural that lies in us all coiled for years then unfolds itself like a famished serpent—it is only in isolation that I become human, social—it was only in the cloister that life came back to me all at once—it was only when the prongs were stuck high up in the rectum that I began to understand anything at all—the pure peace of Blue, the pure torments of chiseled pain. If only I’d discovered this truth sooner, I would have been on the right path of most fantastic oblivion—but there were still many obstacles in my way; career, wife, child, dog, house, car, friends and enemies—literary pretensions of grandeur.  I’m well beyond all of that now. Now, I have only this empty room, and all the pleasures that go along with a room this wide and vast.  

Explosions everywhere; somewhere across town a butterfly is dying slowly—he is wounded and happy, a premium feeling grows in his mouth. You see, I woke up in this room one day, the room was of the deepest purple, and, for the first time, I realized what destiny was, and destiny is the total coming into being inside the bowels of one’s nothingness in an empty room—what is outside the window is another matter altogether that has absolutely nothing to do with reality—outside the window, are only cops and soldiers who want to kill you, that is all—inside the room is where the real torture begins, the real mutation. 

With this knife, I have strangled blue. I have not spoken to anyone in over a year, now I know what real language is.  Language is color, at other times, language is fire.  There are waves of fire washing over the room that feeds me the secrets of eerything.  I do not know why I was chosen to receive the truth—a purple dove has just flayed open a rainbow and raped it—I know of an eagle who cried tears when his wings were clipped.  I am much like this eagle.  Somewhere along the way, they clipped my wings and left me alone abandoned forever in this room. When it first happened, I didn’t realize they did it out of love—to be truly happy, one must be abandoned and mutilated, amputated, and then they broke my mouth open just to see what would happen—just like the medical doctors at Auschwitz did—complete and absolute curiosity, but much pain to the inmates from whom these experimental conclusions are drawn—this they have very much done to me—I am well-loved and well raped—fucked in the asshole so many times now against my will that I’ve now come to love the anal rape that occurs randomly and that may occur anytime day or night…I dreamed recently of walking through the green green grass of home and I stumbled across a cemetery of dead feet.  There are embryonic feet everywhere, stuck at the tops of trees even—floating over ponds—growing forth out of the ground, breaking out of the sides of mushrooms—everywhere I look there are amputated limbs dangling in the woods—the wind blows blood and flesh flubbing against a tin pole—I see sharks grazing in fields of wheat along with goats and lambs—it is a normal dream—a fantasy of melting—ne’er a second goes by that I don’t feel as if I’m in some process of liquefaction—you’ll never meet another as happy as I.  I should win the Nobel for happiness—here—cormorants eat baby flesh in the tall grass and jet planes crash everywhere killing everyone but me—a dead armadillo decays under my bed and the smell is pleasant.  I don’t know anything but tricks;  I leave traps behind wherever I go—I have caused the death of many a lover—amputated the hooves off a white stallion today, just to see what it would look like—then I gutted the stallion and twelve foot green porpoises fell into the horizon—It fell into the horse’s gut sack. I took the porpoise, washed it, then fucked it good a proper like it was a virgin, then threw her off a sixty story building and watch it drop down and splatter nicely on Fifth and Main—a dozen or two dozen people died instantly—this pleased me immensely, then I pulled down my pants and shot off huge globs of cum all over the city—the police didn’t catch me because they couldn’t see me, no one has ever seen me, although I’m right in your face and I’m not even invisible.

I’m being crushed by Blue—there are too many fantasies, false dreams, inside of me—they destroy me with their beauty—I fear nothing more—I’ve killed so much in my long 37 years of life—I’ve killed my father twice and my brother at least 36 ½ times—turning gold into silver you might say—I’ve recreated the monetary unit of exchange to where 100 plain quid equals exactly 76 quid and 100 quid equals 271 billion gold wrapped dollars—it’s saving the economy.  I have become endless, every day I butcher a sheep for Allah and burn grass for Yahweh—I got a hand caught in a propeller when I was a child and that’s not good. People look at me funny when I walk by—Look, they say, that boy now a man only has one arm and only half a nose—they are pleasant, these passersby, they believe in the Tooth Fairy and in Jesus of Nazareth—they are quiet and awesome—why did nature produce so many liars?  If I were king, I’d crucify them all—all the liars, for they shall inherit the earth—do you realize reader that I’m going further than anyone ever has before? Do you realize there is no difference between propaganda and literature? There is not even nihilism here—far beyond even that frontier of thought and action—I’ve lost all belief, save that of filling up blank pages with blue and green ink—I am a human, honest—I am here to tell you there is no such thing as anything at all, especially death (we couldn’t get so lucky).

I used to believe death existed in the same manner that I believed God existed.  The only thing real now is amputation—amputation clarifies, and once you are amputated, you finally realize how truly real you are, how silly with nothingness you are, no, not even nothingness—no, there is not even that:  there is no such thing as Death, God, or Nothingness.

I’ve killed even the horizon—how many times must I hack to pieces the horizon?  You’d not believe how many fish fly through the air at that altitude—you’ve never seen such flying carp before—they were all trying to resemble themselves in blue air—I knew a long time ago a man whose son died and somehow or another he obtained the son’s skull.  The old man was appalled by his son’s bleached white skull but nonetheless he took it with him wherever he went. He’d go to the café with it and put the skull on the edge of the table opposite himself and he’d stare at the skull, as he ate his lettuce in thick mucus sauce made from the blood of herons. The man was walking home one day holding his son’s skull and as he walked some cop arrested the man for skylarking and the cop threw the skull into a dumpster as he led the man in shackles into the paddy wagon.  That night in jail, the man bludgeoned himself to death with a ball-peen hammer.  They shouldn’t have taken his son’s skull away from him, that’s all the man had in the world, his son’s skull. And they took it from him, why would they take from the man the only thing he carried about?   

The hell with it. Who cares what I write?  I’m going to fill the universe with poison and grin from ear to ear like some malevolent idiot child as everyone I ever known and love dies all around me.