It comes for me at night
when I’m alone

It comes at me
with the eyes of an Angel
soft lips
teeth with a penchant for nipping.

It comes at me
with the memory of a warm embrace
of peace.
A solace lost forever.

It comes at me
with hot breath on the nape of my neck
smiles no longer mine
vacant sunshine
taste of skin.

It comes.

We bleed
alone
in her void.
8/93

Bottle

Sitting on the shelf
a bottle of fine wine
seal unbroken
whispers of the past
beneath glass skin.

Hidden from the light,
I collect dust.
Filled with nothing,
wine long gone,
I sit in the dark
with the ghosts
a void
a vacuum
sucking.

My life is nothing.
A dull ache
waiting to implode.
Empty bottle.
In the shadows.
Empty.
8/93

God’s Last Laugh

The gun,
warm in my hand
savors the last vestiges of body heat.
something drips from the ceiling,
on my head.

I cannot speak.
The roof of my mouth is gone
a ragged hole to match
the exit wound that is the top of my skull.

I smell cooked meat,
my own,
the muzzle flash.

Why am I still here,
for the last hour?
No pain except for the flies
seeking my barbed wire heart.

The blood on the walls
is sticky,
stiff crust for a shirt collar
my laughter a thick gurgle
when the joke
no longer amuses.
9/93

My Good Friends…

Feel safe
draw near
listen to my jokes
laugh
see my face contort a smile
yes.

Everything is okay
stop worrying
complain about your shallow wounds
like before
look for comfort from stone.

You don’t see
salty tears descent.

An empty basement my confidant
wracking sobs
hurled at carpeted concrete
the floor
a lingering embrace
yellow cinder block ears
for my screams.

Lips so soft
gentle
touch filled with knowledge
sensuous power
gifts unopened.

My caring friend
come close
look at me.

My pale shade of grey.
9/93

Favor

Kill me.
I’ll supply the gun
Buy the bullets
The leather gloves.

We can go to an empty field
I’ll drive
get down on my knees.

I’ll avoid your gaze.
Leave me in the grass,
an afterthought.

Close your eyes
gently squeeze
it’s over.

A final favor for a shadow
a pretender
a shade.

No one needs to know
just us
just you.

Kill me.
9/93

...the poems bleed out of me in line after line after goddamn line…

…i cannot stop them…

…for a time, I am a man possessed… writing in corners, in the basement, trying to come up from the bottom but I was drowning in it…

I bled endlessly…

I found them in moments of clarity, written in chunks, a verse here, ten lines there... On the backs of invoices, napkins, notepads…

I didn’t know what to make of it. The crust of my façade crumbled, blown away by a soft wind that smelled like HER… I cannot hide my madness anymore… I can see it on their faces… I can never pull my mind out of it… no matter what I do, where I go, how hard I work, my demons drive me and drive me and throttle me at will.

Demons with such pretty smiles…

I can’t sleep.

I eat junk.

I’m drinking. I’m confused. I work until I can’t think straight, then I pick up a bottle and drink until I can’t stand straight. Conventions blur. I write. I’m painting. I hit the bars, I pace the sidewalks, the railroad tracks lead me out into the woods with a pocket full of thorns and eyes like glittering glass…

I have snakes, two roaring greasy black snakes wrestling between my ears... they whisper atrocities to me deep into the darkness, wet eyeless things… I drink to make it all be still, to not hear the roaring, the ripping tearing roaring in my head… the pain drives me to my knees…

I wake up in strange places.

The trial cannot come fast enough… I work and work… It’s all dark, everything I touch, all the new work… I can’t get away from myself fast enough…

I think of the trial.

I think about the trial holding onto my head like it was going to come off.

I think about the trial with a fist on either side, hitting, hitting, rattling my bones.

At the trial…

I think…

yes…

I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him in the center of the courtroom, with my bare goddamn hands. No one will stop me. The courtroom is small. HE’ll be too close. I think of it. I think of him. I hear he doesn’t like it in his cage… it’s supposed to make me feel better, them telling me that…

It doesn’t.

By Michelle McKee

It is the belief of the American people that Freedom of Speech is the cornerstone to a free society. The ability to freely express oneself is a so fundamentally important to the American people that we consider the ability to do so, unrestricted by government, an essential right as a human being and have illustrated that ideal by enumerating this Right in the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution.

We are guaranteed in the United States the right to be able to state that which is unpopular, to produce material which some may deem inappropriate and even objectionable, and to speak out against actions of our government without fear of reprisal. In America, it’s okay to voice your opinion against anything and everything, without fear of oppression.

The Founding Father’s had enough foresight to know that it was not going to be popular speech which would need protecting. It would be dissenting speech, vocalizations which no one agreed with that would be at risk of being silenced, as well as those who would dare to publish such speech. Freedom of the press is an essential element of a free society.

These freedoms that I speak of, America’s sons and daughters have fought and died for them, and they are freedoms in which their very existence is continually challenged in our country every day.

The true importance of fighting to ensure that the rights of our people under the 1st Amendment are upheld and will continue to remain intact appears to fall short on some of my countrymen and women. It is distressing. There are members of the American public who believe that arbitrarily shutting down these freedoms is an appropriate measure when one’s own personal sensibilities and independent ideas of morality are offended. I believe that such willful shredding of the United States Constitution and America’s values is about as unpatriotic and anti-American as one can get. My first thought is to shuttle these folks off to the Middle East where attempting to exercise freedom of speech might just result in being decapitated, hung, impaled, or set afire. I have no love for any of my countrymen who wish to urinate on our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and I have no problem tossing in for a plane ticket to a very large sand dune outside of our already burgeoning borders if they dislike the ideals that America stands for.

If I am offended by material that is produced - and believe me I have come across plenty of material that I have found to be disgusting and which has offended me on every level - I have the freedom to not view or listen to it. And I have the ability to do this without imposing my will onto others and calling for the removal of that person’s rights and freedoms. I am not being forced to listen, read, or view anything I do not want to. The TV still has an off switch and no one has stuck duct tape to my eyelids and forced me to watch A Clockwork Orange or Deep Throat.

For the last year I have kept an eye out for a 1st Amendment fighter that pulled no punches. I didn’t want some phony baloney pontificating buffoon. I didn’t want some blowhard in a new dress and a set of Lee Press-on-Nails. I wanted the real deal. I wanted someone who had actually fought for their rights, not a sweet little faux freedom fighter in a pair of granny glasses. I wanted the biggest, most controversial, most hardcore 1st Amendment badass I could find.

I’d like to introduce you to In Cold Blog’s newest contributor, Hart D. Fisher.

If you are a regular reader of In Cold Blog you may have noticed that over the last couple of weeks I have been leading up to Hart’s actual introduction. There is a reason for the slow steady pace. Wanting to gently lead you to the water, but taking care not shove your head under the surface until bubbles come out of your nose. I thought that perhaps when one is about to introduce a writer to regular readers and that writer’s professional portfolio contains credits for the production of pornography (yes, adult movies; naked people having sex) it may be prudent to break said writer out slowly. Just so as not to shock the more gentle readers right out of their granny panties and straight into a pair of Depends. Especially when the brand of porn produced resides within the horror genre. I know, horror porn, who knew?

Having authored Poems for the Dead, Fisher is an acclaimed poet, a savage spoken word performer and a sharp new voice in the world of death metal music videos; he’s directed cutting edge videos for international death metal legends Obituary and the kings of black metal, Dark Funeral. Fisher is also involved in projects with hardcore horror metal superstar Glenn Danzig.

Currently the subject of a new documentary, Hart D. Fisher and the Untold Story of Boneyard Press, directed by horror sensation Roger “Nobody Loves Alice” Scheck, Fisher has been writing, directing, and producing two European television shows, American Horrors (broadcast in over 17 different countries) and Flowers on the Razorwire, while running his post production house Crime Pays Inc. He has also been preparing his directorial debut for its international television premier on American Horrors and its DVD release here in the states this summer, a film about a serial killer called The Garbage Man. The Garbage Man has been an official selection of film festivals around the world and garnered rave reviews, including praise from the likes of Fangoria's Tony Timpone and Rue Morgue Magazine.

Fisher’s opinions on serial killers and serial killer culture have been sought by numerous television producers for programs such as ABC's DayOne, CNN's Murder By Numbers, Entertainment Tonight, Larry King Live, The Jerry Springer Show, CNN Headline News, A&E's Biography, and in magazines such as Time, Tattoo Savage, Hero Illustrated, People, The Comics Journal, and the non-fiction best seller The A-Z Guide to Serial Killers, to name only a few.

To say that Hart Fisher is hardcore to the extreme would probably be a gross understatement. He has been called the "scariest man in comics" and "the most dangerous man in America." Not just due to the horror factor involved in the material he produces, but because he will take his work to the extreme and push the envelope on the boundaries of freedom of expression beyond that which many are comfortable with. His work has been banned and pulled from the shelves. People have literally tried to blackball this guy, they like him so much.

In fact, Capital Distribution, who was the 2nd largest comic distributor, took censoring Hart’s material to an entirely different level and opted for a book burning, of sorts. Although Capital Distribution had received orders for over 1,500 copies of Hart’s comic books, which they paid him for, rather than fulfill the orders and ship the books to the various retailers Capital made the decision to destroy them.

Called one of the "100 Most Important People In The Comics Industry" by Hero Illustrated, Hart D. Fisher has probably been the most universally despised individual who has ever set foot in adult theme comics, let alone within in the crime genre itself. As the controversial publisher behind Boneyard Press, Fisher created Jeffrey Dahmer: An Unauthorized Biography of a Serial Killer, A comic book that started a firestorm which brought death threats, stalkers, lawsuits, protest marches, and a SWAT team to his door, along with a request by the local police to leave town. And when local media reported on Fisher’s whereabouts and announced that he would be out of town attending a Fangoria convention, a CBS news crew arrived at Hart’s home to interview him and found that those who opposed his work had taken advantage of Fisher's absence, kicked in the door to his home and robbed him.

A favorite target of talk shows at the time of the Dahmer comic controversy, Fisher was not only defending his right to publish material that the family members of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims found objectionable, he was also attending a murder trial. Hart Fisher absolutely knows what it’s like to be a victim and suffer through the horrific murder of a loved one. Michelle, his girlfriend and the love of his life at the time, had been raped and murdered. While he defended his rights in front of a national audience Hart Fisher was suffering in his own private Hell.

Family members of the victim’s of Jeffrey Dahmer sat in the audience of these shows berating Fisher for exercising his freedom of speech, actively attempting to take measures to silence him, and hurled insults that the material he produced was evidence that Fisher was deviant, evil and reflected that he simply was not a very good person. But they didn't stop there. During breaks in the taping of these shows, the same family members would regale Hart with remarks of how glad they were that his girlfriend had been murdered, that they hoped it hurt, and that she should have been raped twice. There is certainly something offensive here, but it has nothing to do with the material that Hart Fisher created!

As managing editor of Glenn Danzig’s publishing company Verotik, Fisher created a comic book murder story, Verotika #4, “A Taste of Cherry,” that was considered to be so offensive and obscene it shut down Planet Comics in Oklahoma City in the early 90’s and the work was banned. It is still banned in that state today.

Hart Fisher produces the type of material that members of the morality police generally object to. His work is considered by some to be vile and offensive, and it is exactly the type of unpopular speech that is at the forefront of assaults by the so called moral majority against our Constitutional liberties. It is the type of material that is typically blamed for various public ills and criminal activity. After all, we already know what the Uptight Ninny Brigade has to say about sex crimes, metal music and video games. Fisher has fought for his right as an American citizen to exercise his freedom of speech – and he has lost. I can’t think of anyone more equipped to talk about censorship, morality gone wrong, exploitation, and the removal of one’s Constitutional guarantee of freedom than Hart D. Fisher.

Welcome to the razor’s edge!

Hart’s first post at ICB will appear on Monday, February 9th.