MURDER ORDAINED

______________________ 

Hush, Hush Sweet Lorna

Gothic Groanings

Hollywood Hauntings

The Granada Theater Knows

Lorna Tells All

The Emporia Gazette

Midwestern Noir Muse

Deconstructing the Fly-Over State

Escaping Emporia

Returning Home

______________________

 

Hush, Hush Sweet Lorna

As Sandy Bird fell —

Downward off the Rocky Ford

Bridge into the murky waters

Of the dark Cottonwood River

Falling down in slow motion —

Down from the old cables and

Gothic girders silhouetted by

The cruel Kansas starlight

Leaving bloody handprints —

Clutching the stark railings

Staining the whole Granada

Grande Dame Guignol Movie

___________________

Gothic Groanings

There in the putrid pews —

In the shadowy sanctimonious

Aisles of the Lutheran Church

Where murder was ordained

Blessed by the congregation —

Preached by the gaunt gothic

Minister who turned Emporia

Into a TV murder mystery

Like “Dead Ringer” (1964) —

“Strait–Jacket” (1964) and

“Lady in a Cage” (1964)

The list going on & on

“Die! Die! My Darling!” —

“I Saw What You Did!” (1965 )

“Queen of Blood” (1966) and

“Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?”

_________________

Hollywood Hauntings

Not to mention others —

“Frightmare” (1974) and

“A Knife for the Ladies”

Plus “Blood and Lace”

“The Killing Kind” (1973) —

“Cry of the Banshee” and

“That Cold Day in the Park”

Plus “Night Warning”

As well as “In Cold Blood” —

“Queen of Blood” (1966)

“Berserk,” and yes

 “Hush, Hush Sweet Lorna!”

Gimme some Grande Dame —

Guignol Cinema and I’ll give

You an American goth flick

Worthy of wasted Emporia!

_________________

The Granada Theater Knows

“Come in, Madame Capote! —

Suave smooth Soothsayer and

Famed Kansas Clairvoyante of

“In Cold Blood” Psychic Powers!

The Granada Theater is packed —

All the way to the crowded Balcony

With Halloween Trick or Treat

Emporians eager for Cheap Thrills!

All the town’s staid churches —

Are boycotting the Cinema Séance

Delving into the Dirty Secrets

From whence Bird Bridge flowed

“Oh, Authoress of Cold Blood! —

Oh, Great Emporia Enchantress!

Give us the Holcomb Down-low

On louche Lorna’s Love Life!!!

_________________

Lorna Tells All

"Commune with us, tonight —

Sweet Sister of Sin and Sorrow

Confess your Skanky Secrets

Bring on the Dark Shadows!”

“Speak American Goth Spirit! —

Read our Red State Beads!

Tell us all the Wretched Secrets!

About the Rats in the Cellar!”

“Aghast and totally Disgusting —

Tell us about The Bad Seed!

From whence flows all our tacky

Fly Over State Fuck Up’s!!!

“Tell us a Goth Ghost Story —

Befitting our Midwestern Noir

Skeletons in the Dark Closet!

What goes Bump in the Night!!!”

__________________

The Emporia Gazette

Soon the Emporia Gazette —

Began gossiping like the tacky

Scandal-Rag National Enquirer

Telling the most horrible Tales

Small town idyllic Emporia —

Once used to sleepy streets

And elm-shaded neighborhoods

Safely hidden from prying eyes

Suddenly turning into a louche—

Lorna Anderson Murder Mystery

TV Show that would’ve simply

Shocked poor William Allen White!

“Hush! Hush! Sweet Lorna!” —

The Gazette Headlines Hissed

“What Ever Happened to poor

Sandy Bird?” Emporia asked

________________

Midwestern Noir Muse

I have this Midwest noir —

Muse whispering inside my

Midnight movies dreams

Haunting me late at night

I simply can’t help it —

I blame Raymond Chandler

And Mickey Spillane as well

Plus campy noir Miss Capote

But most of all I suppose —

That old Yoknapathawpa queen

Miss Faulkner deserves most

Of the shameless noir blame

Deep South Delta Dixie —

Decadence rotten to the core

Mildewing just like my tacky

Midwestern noir existence!!!

________________

Deconstructing the Fly-Over State

Funny how things work out —

In ways you’d never expect things

To work their way through the

Nefarious detours & divagations

I’m more open to it now it seems—

Once I got used to being down on

My knees in the gutter looking up

At the heavenly stars above

Pretending to be hoity-toity about—

Being way up there above it all

Looking down at the Fly Over State

From a lofty jet plane high above

Suddenly I was born again it seems—

Plopped down like a runny juicy tacky

Cow patty from the haughty sky above

All the way down to Midwestern noir

___________________

Escaping Emporia

Thomas Wolfe seems somewhat—

Misguided to me when he says in his

“Look Homeward Angel” that we can’t

Ever return back Homeward again?

It’s just the opposite for me—

I tend to think that we can

Never actually leave our dumpy

Homes ever at all, my dears!

We’re stuck with it forever—

It’s embedded deep in our

Dizzy devolving head like being

Helplessly born Middle Class slobs

What makes us run away?—

We run from ourselves madly

Helter skelter but unfortunately

There’s simply No Escape at all

____________________

Returning Home

Nostalgia for me ends up—

Being nothing more than a touchy

Migraine headache that simply

Doesn’t want to go away

I’ve got the Granada Theater—

The Strand and the 50-S Drive In

Playing movies for me all the time

Up there inside my balcony head

Old film palaces haunt me—

Decaying decrepit abandoned

Haunts like all those gone movie

Theaters in dying dead Detroit

My only consolation being—

The Bijou Matinees still playing

On summer Saturday afternoons

There inside my Valentino heart

Black Angel

The Black Angel

—for Desdemona

Well, dearest Melba literati—I finally got through trudging my way slowly but surely through that simply awful novel so lauded and praised by Desdemona so much lately.

I really can’t blame Barton for putting the novel down for awhile on the nightstand, because there’s really nothing quite as tiring and boring as a rambling black feminist Sheena of the Jungle S & M Melodramatic spiel as noted by The New York Times.

Yawn. It’s not that I’m a male sexist misogynist White Trash ignorant pig—some of my best friends over in the Sports Forums and Mr. X’s Political Alligator Pit are quite intelligent discreet dilettantes of the dinge queen genre of Black Literature.

I’ve long admired William Faulkner’s exquisite decadent Southern novels like “Absalom, Absalom” and “Going Down On Moses.”

One of my favorite Louisiana black writers is none other than the esteemed gay porno author Carl Corley—who wrote many pulp fiction classics similar to Faulkner’s two-bit broke-and-in-a-pinch slutty little paperback novel, “Sanctuary.”

Back in Baton Rouge in the Sixties when I was a rather irresponsible undergraduate at Huey P. Long’s lovely Louisiana State University—I was able to read this most stimulating gay pulp fiction classic by Carl Corley—and discuss it with my English writing professor Dr. John Hazard Wildman.

As Desdemona so lovingly noted, my academic career was rather disappointing—although Wildman encouraged me to keep on publishing no matter what.

So that there’s now in the LSU Middleton Library on campus—there in the stacks my first book of gay decadent poetry “Chicken” published by Gay Sunshine Press in 1979.

At the time there was no MFA Creative Writing Program as there is now—with the recently retiring chairperson Andrei Codrescu from New Orleans.

“The Black Angel” is a trashy Southern decadent novel that tells the racy story of the life of a handsome Bongo Boy who goes simply Hoodoo Voodoo over you know what.

It centers around a wild cargo cult of faux Zombie drinkers at a mixed View Carré bar that caters to tourists who debark from derelict cruise ships in the fetid Gulf of Mexico & the turbulent erotic Caribbean.

The Black Angel later relocates to London where he opens the first pretend gay Tiki bar in the UK . A certain young royal personage has been known to sip a Shirley Temple Mai Tai there now and then. I shan’t tattle-tale though—the Queen wouldn’t like it.

My fav drink by the way, my dears—is the Roy Rogers Mango Tango or the Mickey Mouse Mocktail. It puts a zing in your Trigger—and makes a girl wanna sing all night long…

______________________________

Anyway, things were pretty much in the closet in the English Dept at LSU back then in the 1960’s. The anti-Viet Nam War protests and Hippie Movement were just beginning—and the Stonewall Riots would soon happen in 1969 in NYC after the cops raided a drag bar on the night that Judy Garland died.

I remember it well—because that day I had to show up at the Draft Board to go through a physical, get inducted and be sent off to die in the jungles of some South Asian Hellhole.

I mention this incident because it fits rather nicely into the Melba Fiction discussion of Desdemona’s Sheena of the Jungle Dinge S/M feminist Novel which some of our esteemed Melba intelligentsia have commented  and opined briefly on—although as I said, the feminist rant gets a bit boring after awhile. The same with my rendition of white trash fiction as well I suppose, but please bear with me.

As most queer cognoscenti from back then know—one of the only ways out of the Draft Board’s inquisition of college students back then if you flunked out like I would do every other semester was to check the Box.

The nefariously evil unspeakable shameful Box without a Name—was of course the place to check your little X on the spot that declared your Homosexuality. Saying you were Homo and verifying it for the Authorities was two different things though.

“Prove it,” the gruff, butchy, mean-looking Army sergeant barked at me when I meekly showed him the forms they used to send young flunked-out undergraduates off to the Jungle Gulag Archipelagos of Southeast Asia to fight, rot and die for Nixon.

Luckily I’d brought along with me none other than the beautifully handsome young black stud Tyrone Xavier Jones—who just happened to be my fervent lover there at LSU. We lived south of campus in the notorious “Tiger Town”—a niggardly student ghetto for drop-outs, druggies, whores, nascent hippies and other down & out denizens of the times.

Tyrone’s mother was the head cook of the university infirmary cafeteria—where Tyrone in his white dinner jacket served the meals to medically vulnerable students like me. I’d worried so much about my gay lifestyle and getting drafted—that my stomach was simply too upset all the time for normal meals.

So the doctors put me on a bland diet—and I moved into an off-campus dumpy cheap apartment there in Tiger Town to try and keep things going as a struggling gay writer there in the Deep South.

I turned to Tyrone and told the shocked sergeant: “This is my black lover boy and he’s really tres hot in bed. I call him “Bon the Beautiful” after Miss Faulkner’s louche novel “Absalom, Absalom”—you know the one about Henry Sutpen who falls in love with his older dinge half-brother and goes to bed with him as his roommate at Ole Miss? Well…”

Needless to say, that got me booted outta the front door by the enraged Str8t sergeant—and banned from the military for life!!! I simply wouldn’t be good for the morale of the Troops—especially horsing around in the showers and foxholes!!!

Anyway, Tyrone and I were happily married as a mixed couple for a couple of lewd semesters—even his cute younger brother Dwayne Jerome moved in and lived with us as a three-some. He was a dealer and I got some of my most seminal inspiration back then for my outré creative writing—I can still taste the tingle so tangy and lovingly touché that made my Dixie Delta tongue curl. (See my blog “Gay Delta Review” for more flashback editions of those dayz)

______________________

I was like William Faulkner’s poor queer Quentin Compson back then—I must unabashedly, unashamedly admit the faggoty truth. Lovely Drama Queen Desdemona—has definitely read my beads.

What more can I say—about being a miserable English Major failure back then in Allen Hall. And to think, dearest Desi, it’s been almost 50 years since back then when I was a white trash Pretender to the Throne—other than Professor Wildman, the English faculty simply detested me. I really can’t blame them—after all they banned Miss Proust, Miss Genet and Miss Ginsberg, so I was in good Exile Company one could say.

Alien Invasion

THE ALIEN INVASION

When the Aliens—
Finally showed up
Nobody expected it to be
An Invasion of Beauty!!!

By some strange twist—

Human beings had expected

Interdimensional contact to

Be rather Exopolitically ugly!!!

But rather than the—

Usual grotesque creatures,

Repulsive blobs, robots

And all that sort of thing

The Aliens turned out—

To be rather artistically

Beautiful in a shockingly

Gay Oscar Wildeian way

Nothing could be worse—

Then a tres gay stunningly

Beautiful Otherworldly Being

Descending the UFO staircase

A swishy Michael Rennie—

Pretty as Dorian Gray

So very Stylish and Gay

To The NYTimes dismay!!!

Thus the Alien Invasion—

Despite being aesthetically

Chic and so cosmopolitan

Devolved the same old way

Panic circled the Globe—

What could be more Alien!!!

And horrible than such a

Gay Galactic Invasion!!!

TATTOO QUEEN

“I simply must have a rose

in the center of my chest—

to help me resist too many

tattoos, for the lust is in me

now”—Samuel Steward

A tattoo—

And a quick blowjob

The rite de passage—

Of a young hoodlum

DICK HICKOCK

Dick was my Diva—

Tattoos turned me on

When he said “Honey”—

I went down on him

PERRY SMITH

Miss Capote would say—

Perry was his little sister

Truman went out—

Thru the front door…

But Perry liked—

The backdoor, honey

IN COLD BLOOD

—Richard Avedon's contact sheets 
from 1960 photo session 
http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2005/12/millers_crossin.php 

1

There’s always been—
I suppose a certain hoodlum
Element to the American West

The Dick Hickock types—
Robbing, killing, hanging
Around the Western scene

Where else could young—
Prison con-artists go but
“Go West, youngman!”

Avedon’s portraits capture—
With amazing accuracy
These American West killers

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

2

Cocky Dick Hickock—
His name oozes with
American West violence

He possesses that—
Sullen young hoodlum
Insolent male beauty

A lop-sided face—
Victim of a car accident
His twisted goodlooks

One eye so gimpy—
It both breaks your
Heart and scares you

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

3

These other shots—
Most people don’t get to
See them very often

Or maybe they don’t—
Want to see the look in
Dick Hickock’s eyes

Dick takes along his—
Hired gun killer lover
Perry Smith the Gimp

All the way out to—
Holcomb KS to rob the
Wealthy Clutter family

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

4

Prison life turns—
A man’s sex life into
A twisted tattoo thing

Dick is str8t and—
Like the young stuff
While Perry likes Dick

They end up broke—
Down in Mexico on the
Run after the murders

They get nabbed in—
Las Vegas in a hot car
Truman is waiting

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

5

To Kill a Mockingbird—
Was a lot easier to write than 
Capote’s In Cold Blood


Harper Lee’s novel was a—
Great success story leaving
Truman green with jealousy

Taking the Super Chief west—
Spending long cold nights
In a Garden City motel

Gradually the form of his—
Nonfiction novel took shape
Twisted, gnarled love story

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

6

Perry Smith slowly became—
Truman’s kept man there
Behind those prison bars

Like two lost brothers—
Suddenly discovering each
Other for the very first time

Capote greased the palms—
To get into Perry’s dingy
Prison suite to make love

The nonfiction element in—
The novel In Cold Blood was
The killer’s pouty sweet lips

Richard Avedon, Portraits
Portfolio: Dick Hickock 

7

They say that when—
You drop you don’t
Feel a fucking thing

But it took 30 minutes—
For their hearts to stop
Beating, strangling them

They also say that when—
Your neck snaps hard in
The Hangman’s tight noose

That a guy shoots his—
Last extra-long spastic
Wad all the way Dead

Fag Noir

PHANTOM LADY (1944)

and then, of course—

there’s elisha cook’s

orgiastic drum solo

climaxing the wordless

sexual jazz climax in the

basement with ella raines

intercut and interweaved

with furious innuendos

of siodimak’s expressionistic

fusing of german noir décor

with the american idiom style

the look on cook’s face—

having a crazed orgasm

as the film’s mad drummer

all expressed by one of

cornell woolrich’s pulp novel

plots thick with campy fag

noir mise en scène nuances

hinted at during the nightclub

“chick-ee-chick” hysterical

act by aurora in her vera west

phantom lady rakish hat

like” born to kill” (1947)—

with claire trevor, ester howard,

elisha cook jr. & walter slezak

doing their business with offhanded

depictions of perturbed sexuality

and extreme brutality or is it

quickie quirky depictions of

perturbed brutality and elisha’s

extremely orgasmic sexuality?

Fag Noir

BORN TO KILL (1947)

and then there’s—

elisha cook’s slavish, faggy

cocksucker devotion to his

butchy, handsome killer

hoodlum loverboy which

defines perfectly the male

femme fatale aesthetic of

the fag noir gangster style

lawrence tierney is trouble—

from the word go even tho

fem miss cook tries to reason

with the psychopathic hunk

covering the killer’s tracks,

creating alibis & getting rid

of eye-witnesses, like nosy

old landlady esther howard

and skuzzy detectives like

sleazy walter slezak

but tierney single-mindedly—

zeros in on claire trevor, no

angel herself, resulting in elisha

cook getting killed on a lonely

beach by his crazy deadly lover

instead of the ratty wretched

landlady esther howard who

hired the sleazy slezak all of

which ends up with claire trevor

double-crossing tierney so she

can off her rich sister & inherit 

all the family fortune

this grim complicated version—

of the RKO quintessential fag noir

style of the 1940s uniquely

synthesizes the expressionistic

style of welles & the moody,

gothic atmosphere of lewton to

create an excellent example of

not only RKO style but also the

offhand depiction of a new genre

of perturbing gay sexuality and

troubling tough-guy S&M cinema

Fag Noir

DILLINGER (1945)

Even though dillinger (1945)—

isn’t listed in the astute alain

silver and elizabeth ward

film noir encyclopedia one

can’t help but look in the

mirror and ask oneself:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall—

who’s the faggiest of them all?

knowing full well the gay rumor

that dillinger the nefarious gangster

had s schlong a foot long and

notoriously the last photo of him

on a cold morgue slab shockingly

gave everybody a good look at

the erect hoodlum’s endowed rod

in all its fag noir glory

that hollywood choice of choosing—

the infamous american criminal

with moody, sullen, troublesome

lawrence tierney was certainly an

act of casting genius worthy of

catching all the matinee mobster

fags bent on getting turned on by

the dillinger big dick legend

one has to ask why the director—

chose faggy elisha cook jr. to be

a part of this mafia gangland orgy

of hollywood size-queens and surely

the only answer can be, guess…

I WAKE UP SCREAMING (1942)

If I were slimy, grease-ball—

victor mature, i’d wake up screaming too

especially if faggy laird cregar were

sitting there on the edge of my bed

playing with my big erect boner

as usual chicken-shit elisha cook—

the pimply-faced elevator operator

is just as usual the fall guy just as

faggy and perverse as laird cregar

with his apartment plastered with

photos of the movie’s dead woman

cregar is queer for victor mature—

and when rebuffed wants to get his

usual bitchy revenge. cregar’s

repressed homosexual passion and

desire for the later-on samson and

delilah muscular hunk implicates

mature’s seemingly apparent guilt

by his fag noir association with

miss cregar in his bedroom

disturbing noir shadows coming—

down thru slanting venetian blinds

contrast with the blonde healthy

freshness of bette grable in her

first dramatic role making darkly

gleaming mature seem to make

him seem guilty even tho innocent