Mansel: Poetry Corner

Limed In Restraints


from the beginning it was a prayer through
clenched hands
a beaten mouth so foreign to the words
as to wild the myrrh
for so blinds a man thus comes the vision
of a sense once used for locating the light

blood and rage, only standing still, eroding
only what was a part of the greater good

that a downturned eye could last in a room
of allegiance is to set fire to a ravine where
the many have gathered to follow the few

I put my hands to the window and began to
tremble, the passage of Purgatory to the
burden of the families of a criminal,

government becoming the intercourse upon
which we joust on the way down to the
rocks below



- Chris Mansel

Mansel: Poetry Corner

On An Island (for Jake Berry)


Robinson Jeffers on a loading dock,
blinded in pain takes questions from
reporters but answers in verse

"my predisposition is not to elect
but to persuade, to rise and like
the editor's note befall a certain
uncertainty, the common ailment
of life against the cliff, politics..."

his shoulders shrink and haggard
he returns to the steps from whence
he came and in a moment of clarity
the press is genuinely moved..

if not a community.


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Could it be?

**

"What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement."

- Kierkegaard

Could it be that the choice of Joe Biden for VP, could turn out to be as bad a choice as Eagleton in 1972 for McGovern? Could it be that the polls running neck and neck could have been demolished for good by a different choice, and not Hillary Clinton? Could the Democratic party finally move to the left? Do the footsteps of gravediggers really fill convention halls after the chairs have been put up?

- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Insubordination

**

leaving the way, returning to the burning
found in nature, cited here as turning
what you gonna do when your dialectic
has gone the death of animals, a waste
of strength

when you envisage a region scattered
of revolt, the only obstinacy crumpled pages
mercy on the projection of terrifying innocence
my wounds run deeper, they animate an
antisocial expenditure not separated by loss

degradation is the common convulsion shredding
in three colors: red, white, and blue.


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Right Down To Hell

(for Jack Random)


they were carving up the meat the other day
trying to get the bread to look the other way
they divested the spreads to fit the knives
but appetites could never keep up with their eyes
and just now before you go and condemn the tray
the salads and forks will get involved or so they say

dancing men grow impaled
split right down to hell
on the eye of the needle
right down to hell

I can't find humanity though I looked in the mirror today
It was a brick wall against where I used to pray
there was gnashing of teeth as they led me by flashlight
stepping over the bodies that had washed up overnight
laughing dying eyes always implies I'm going insane
I'm looking for the obscuriity of Zarathustra in
a presidential campaign

dancing men grow impaled
split right down to hell
on the eye of the needle
right down to hell


- Chris Mansel

Mansel: The Deadliest Convention

McCain makes his way through the bowels of the Straight Talk Express and dodges silk stockings dripping on his suit and buckets of ammo from assault rifles being kicked around on the floor by staffers. It's a new day on the campaign trail with target practice at protesters and an interview with Rush Limbaugh all by 7:00 am.

CNN has forgotten all about the death and destruction of the hurricane and focused solely on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's teenage daughter. If she was from the south there could be the comparisons to Britney Spears but in Alaska it's a different story.

As global warming takes center stage alongside teen pregnancy each bitter slice of ice that falls down into the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska it's like John McCain has fallen into the Deadliest Convention of his life.


- Chris Mansel

Mansel: McCain in Utah

Circling the Democratic Convention center in Denver, Colorado in an unmarked Chevy van is John McCain. With no other people with him, his short little arms making wide turns at intersections, spitting out the window and listening to an audiobook of Mein Kampf read by Tom Selleck, he thinks of ways to combat the enthusiasm that Obama has brought to his campaign. Suddenly the van blows a tire and McCain is on foot. A young man picks him up but the young man does not recognize the older man in the BYOB baseball hat.

McCain ends up at a dormitory in Utah reading the Koran with a mixed up youth who has been hoarding AAA batteries for a bomb to blow all the hair off his snoring roommate. Whenever McCain tries to get up to leave, the young man waves a G.I. Joe at McCain and quotes from the Koran in a low voice.

A quick call to Lieberman could end it all but who will his running mate be?


- Chris Mansel

Mansel: McCain's Secret Obit

From the unreleased obituary,

Here lies John McCain, former babysitter to Joe Lieberman, who became senile after losing the vice-presidency in 2008. Lieberman who in a death pact blackmailed McCain into dressing as Richard Nixon and waltzing into the room and announcing like William F. Buckley that each day had begun at least a dozen times. McCain also has to read Mein Kampf to Lieberman while crouched over a portrait of Prescott Bush.

- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: McCain Top Ten

The John McCain Top 10

1. It is said that McCain has begun refusing meat in order to sharpen his teeth.
2. John McCain never sodomized a rubber chicken dinner he didn't like.
3. When it comes to medication on the campaign trail John McCain sets his sights on pharmaceutical cocaine and human growth hormone.
4. John McCain is banned from Howard Johnson for urinating polling results onto linen napkins.
5. In Chicago recently John McCain appeared in a publicity photo dressed as a cheerleader with a gland condition.
6. John McCain believes a bungled execution is a good execution.
7. McCain thought a guillotine was a new hybrid.
8. Once during a game of billiards John McCain was heard to shout, "Chalk it, like they do in Saigon!"
9. When asked if he would pardon any African-Americans when in office McCain replied why has Obama committed a crime?
10. Lynne Cheney's new book is called, Laura: The Prostrate Years.


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Overhead

french lanterns swinging, whaling songs
echoing down whiskey bottles too long
betrayal blowed from waves to the skies
the ship disappeared from one's own eyes
set your oars overhead this labyrinth's closed
hell is is coming as the great beast blows


ecstasy came as a hovering cloud of dust
spraying out like a filth over most of us
duck and cover or you'll parch and rust
you must keep up with our bloody lust
hold your hands overhead this wars cold
hell is just the tip of the horned beast coat


the Bastille was covered in ice so they said
the veteran wrote in blood from his head
crawled like a worm to the mailing bin
was arrested for mailing his thoughts in
hold your hands overhead this plea is out
where it ends is left in some grave doubt

Chorus:

Overhead, overhead
faith will linger but its not dead


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: McCain's Long Campaign

The Next Best Thing To Being Him

A new documentary is set to hit store shelves in a few days which features a haggard John McCain alongside a thousand mourners in India weeping then popping out a cell phone and saying into the camera, "Bipartisan or not, it's been a long campaign. That's why I depend on Verizon Wireless." The camera cuts to a surging skyline of pouring rain in the distance and off camera you can hear McCain shout, "Mud in my damn shoes, get me out of here!"

- Chris Mansel

Ode to Jesse Helms

"...between the legs hung the entrails; the vitals appeared, with the foul sack that makes excrement of what is swallowed."

Dante: Inferno, Canto XXVIII


Ah, but those words come to mind when reading of the death of Jesse Helms. Bring them forth, the limousines covered in the filth of the day. Riding on the rims, on the side of the highway, escorted by the Hell's Angels, the far right. The Minute Men down from the valley of good shooting, the natural lifers, the recent win for the NRA, let 'em gather and celebrate the death of one of their own.

- Chris Mansel

Fear and Loathing on McCain's Pierrepoint Express

This campaign is one for the books if that book was soaked in the blood of a child whose first word was gut and last was duck. John McCain is playing catch and release with the truth so bad that the fish are just swimming by the boat, a trail of excrement clogging up the Straight Talk Express exhaust. Every redneck in the country, and some in San Juan it seems are sending in letters to McCain and including racial slurs which McCain greedily answers and some he even includes in press releases.

McCain is searching, through Google and Ancestry.com to find the descendants of Pierrepoint, the famed British hangman because he plans to open an Abu Ghraib in Puerto Rico after he gets elected. He's consulted with Donald Rumsfeld who still holds court in a Denny's in Pennsylvania off the main interstate. The cells will have four foot deep holes at the center to coil the chains which will be iced. Uniforms of the day will be blood mesh and there will be no windows.

McCain is not trying to quell any of the rumors and even trying to add to them as the wire reports come in. It is said he has begun calling reporters at home not unlike Lyndon Johnson used to call editors to try and get everyone to back his message. Just recently he called in Rev. Dobson to commit some of his underage followers to hold signs outside a rally supporting McCain but not in Denver. It's too soon for that.

- Chris Mansel

Mansel: Fundraising A Centimeter At A Time

Coveted by the undead a John McCain fundraising letter it is said can cure the most unruly sores in the after-life. Just rubbing it onto lesions garnered after a life of cruel acts against animals and mutual fund embezzlement will get you a lesion down from 6 cm to 5 cm almost immediately as reported recently in the Washington Times.

The Reverend Sun Yung Moon has begun a direct mailing program to all of his known aliases to receive as many as he can, stockpiling if you will for the afterlife, so he can anticipate those centimeters now. Worry will get you every time.

- Chris Mansel

Mansel: Divine Comedy on an Iowa Night

"Keep in thy memory what thou hast heard against thyself," the Sage bade me "but now give heed to what is here."

- Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno


Iowa

The skies darkened over Iowa as Air Force One departed. Residents turned to the ghostly mounds of garbage that used to be family heirlooms that were now artifacts of a time gone by. Wading through water the television news crews returned to the safety of Motels in the dry areas surrounding the damaged region and to their respective markets and remarked about the drop in the polls of Senator McCain. A man who has finally been allowed to return to the street where he has lived his whole life puts a gun to his head but stops as a large plane flies overhead. It's nightfall in Iowa again.

- Chris Mansel

Mansel: McCain and Fox Security

A close look in a shaving kit of John McCain's these days just might surprise you. Someone on his staff was trying to sell some grainy snapshots of a bag that could be described as a shaving kit in a press club dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas recently but I wasn't buying.

I asked this individual loudly, "What the hell man, hemlock! We all know he drank the blood and not the kool aid, what does he need hemlock for? To chew on like cocoa leaves after a meal?" He shuffled around and turned his back to me and approached the ghost of Sam Donaldson. A Fox news analyst who overheard my statement started kicking me in the shins but I slapped him on the cheek and he collapsed crying, wailing into his cell phone to Fox security. Which after a half hour turned out to be someone who looked alot like William Bennett in a local University sweatshirt who actually, no lie, asked me where the culprit was.

- Chris Mansel

(christophermansel@hotmail.com)

Mansel: Stoned in Colorado

Stoned in Colorado part 1

Today while rummaging through a few press releases from the FBI I ran into Jann Wenner cooing next to an FBI agent about a trip to the White House should Obama win. Now why he would choose a story like this to do such a thing is anybody's guess. He did come out several years ago and the agents do work out but this is not a story about that, hell, there was enough incest in the camp.

Stoned in Colorado part 2

Sentenced in Utah, Warren Jeffs: that must have sent shockwaves through the straight press. You must get a good hotel room there if you know the Demi's or the Bruce's like Jann Wenner. Yes I guess starting US Weekly was a good idea. You can imagine that Rolling Stone might even do a cover and get over their pop image and get back to the days of the serious journalism if they want an invite to the White House. Lord knows Jann has been crawling up the pants leg of several…

I made a visit to Kinko's yesterday to have some random photos enlarged to see if Jann's lips were in fact infected and found an exchange of money taking place. The local magistrate was ordering a spy camera to place in the lapel of his tie so maybe there will be a sting operation or a sex tape. Imagine that, sex tape rocks Utah!

Chris Mansel

(Editor Note: Jann S. Wenner (born January 7, 1946, in New York City) is the co-founder and publisher of the pop music biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.)

Colorado: Midnight Message from the Mind of Mansel

Colorado

Jack this is the one. We have got to get out to Colorado. Planned mutilations are the words circulating through the press core. Clitoridectomies and the tattooing of infants and that's just the F.B.I. I heard from that stringer from the Milwaukee Journal, you remember the guy who is always pulling on his fingers? The guy who flipped out on a Delta flight and started screaming about Santorum eating chili beans on Air Force One while being strawed to a pulpit in Wisconsin by a Iowa super delegate? Yea, him. He said he personally witnessed three F.B.I. crime scene photographers personally trample one another while trying to get to the scene then exposing themselves while urinating and under cutting the press core to Larry Flynt of all people. It stinks Jack.

As you well know the only reason the F.B.I. doesn't take curtain calls is because you don't want to see what they are doing behind the curtain. But anyway, the Washington Post of all trade rags is willing to pay us all expenses to get down there and get the story -- not for their archives but for the front page. They've lost in the campaign but haven't we all. There's a rumor floating around here in Alabama that the whole thing was planned as a Jim Jones like retreat for the Washington Times like fun crowd but I rather doubt it. I mean after all Bangkok hasn't lost its appeal to the Congressional junket to these sick bastards yet.

- Chris Mansel

Colorado Under The Knife's Head

They know nothing of Hoodoo in Colorado and this is their downfall. Just like in Idaho but that's another lysergic tale of of fistfulls of valium and phone calls to Missouri on stolen cards, Verizon fraud and a recreation vehicle that may still be burning outside a McDonalds just out off the interstate rest area.

Imagine Jack, a sacred egg and compressed hand and sexually predatory priests joining forces with the FBI brewing plastic oils and selling them at Cracker Barrels across america next to the VHS tapes of Hee Haw and the blue glass pitchers. A conjuring crossroads has venerated into the Blackhawk helicopter region of the U.S. From now on its enonymus americanus (burning bush) and that corpse from Wisconsin and heads for burials below the fold. Not since the Crescent City was galvinised and the ehads hung from street lamps, the informants carved in the work camps have the police chewed the left arm of libation in such a manner. I tell you Jack incest in the name of religion takes on a whole new name in begot's begot.

Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: American Prosthesis

American Prosthesis
By Chris Mansel

Part 1

Hospital tile and a sense of responsibility, that's what hit me when I first walked into a Veteran's hospital. I had been in triage situations in combat and hospital ships, Army hospitals in Germany, but this was different. This is the place where politicians come to be photographed and soldiers to be ignored. Any time day or night you can walk down the hallways and see blood trickling onto the floor or hear a voice crying out for help. After a while you start to wonder if all of the missing limbs aren't gathered somewhere in a room in the hospital, perhaps on another floor waiting to be reissued to another body.

It's not like the recruiting letters say, it's not like the news footage will show you. There are some who do want to return to battle but only to return to their buddies who they have fought beside for what seemed like an eternity, and there are some who want to go back and kill something, anyone. Their minds are twisted from fatigue and now their bodies deformed by gunfire or an explosion sit and drool staring at the television screen. They are never photographed with a visiting dignitary, that traffic is led away from the more troublesome rooms.

On my first visit there I saw a young Army private fall out of his room into the hallway screaming as his prosthetic limb gave way. He hit the floor hard and he swung his crutch at anyone who tried to help him up. He was crying uncontrollably. He started to shake and couldn’t stop his anger until another patient, a young black man with the lower half of his arm missing got down on the floor and took hold of him and held him as best he could until he calmed down. For a few minutes they were both cussing and yelling. The sounds they made went through the walls and out into the open, through the pressure built in the interstate by the hospital and into the neighborhoods they grew up in that would never except them back in the shape their mangled bodies were in now.

Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Go Sir, and don't forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time." Strange words from a ruthless dictator but most of the patients in Veteran's Hospitals are here suffering from the words of ruthless dictators in one way or another. One day while touring the hospital and interviewing soldiers I came upon a young man who had lost his right arm and both legs. His demeanor was about what you'd expect. He greeted me with, "What in the hell are you and what in the hell do you want?"

I told him how sorry I was that he was in the condition he was in and I only wanted to ask him some questions. He snapped back, "Any goddamn answers you could want got blown off with my legs, man!" I backed out of the room quietly and started back down the hallway and heard him shouting back at me, "Hey, you giving up that easy, you just ain’t got it man, just ain't got it!" I stuck my head back in his doorway and he threw a glass of water at me just missing my head.

"Incoming!" He laughed loudly.

I said, "So I guess you want to talk, huh?"

His eyes cut through me as I entered the room; the rage in his voice was troubling. But it could be understood. He looked at my clothes and back up to my eyes and said, “Ever been there?”

I answered back, “Yea, four weeks ago as a matter of fact.”

“Four weeks ago…” He let the words fill the room before he spoke again. Embedded?

“No, we were doing freelance work.”

He lowered his brow, “We? You had someone else with you? Couldn’t handle it on you own?”

“Not exactly, my partner was there with me. He’s in town right now just not with me right now.”

“What he didn’t want to come in here and look at us?”

“What do you think?” I asked him this with a look to let him know the answer. We seemed to have wandered off the subject but I figured I would just let him talk. He was quiet for a few minutes and when he finally spoke again it wasn’t about my partner.

“You get hit, or Blackwater tuck you in at night like a good little mama’s bitch?”

I told him the story of Jack Random and myself and the family we helped to escape the private security forces, about the major and the redneck Army guy. He didn’t seem surprised.

He smiled and smiled a sad smile, “You think that was anything special?”

He reached down and lifted his blanket and scratched at his hip so nonchalantly that I don’t think he even realized he was doing it. The scar he revealed was hideous. I could tell he hadn’t been too long in recovery. I had seen wounds in his state before and I could tell that he had still to see several stages of draining of the wound which meant a few more times in surgery which meant more mental strain on his already fragile ego.

“Questions, like what questions? How I got my legs blown off, my arm, what? Tell me?” He asked impatiently.

I replied that I was curious about his experiences with his fellow soldiers and Iraqi civilians. I explained that I didn’t write for any major publication and I didn’t have an agenda.

He faced away from me and all the color went away from his face and said, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you man, I’m dead, just dead.” Tears began streaming down his face in a continuous flow to a point where they would not stop. He took a gun that I didn’t see and put it in his mouth and looked around the room and I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I jumped up from my chair and he fell out of the bed and I screamed: I just couldn’t help it. His face twisted with rage. I jumped back against the wall as several orderlies came to the door quickly and he took the gun out of his mouth and yelled for them to shut the fucking door.

His eyes were directly at me now and he put the gun back in his mouth and I must have gone pale because the orderlies at the small glass window in the door disappeared for a moment and came back with an older man who I guessed was a doctor I hadn’t seen before. He held up a piece of paper that had written on it a short message, “Do you have any medical conditions?”

For a moment I forgot about my safety and concerned myself with that short note. Here across from me sat a young man who had lost both his legs and one of his arms in the service of his country who now had a gun in his mouth and all they were worried about were getting sued by a journalist.

Saliva began to pour out of his mouth and the tears stopped. I felt so sorry for him but I was afraid to say anything. I had been in situations similar to this before and I had learned from experience to allow the individual to calm themselves down in their own time.

Outside the door I could hear the rustling and panic in the hallway. I could sense the sirens, the news vans, and every cliché you’ve ever seen. This was after all a Veteran’s Hospital in Washington D. C., the nation’s capital. The home of whoredom and the constant leaking ship of news that forever set sail on the putrid waters of suffering that wouldn’t for a second pass an opportunity to cover a story like this. I wondered to myself if the young man had thought past putting the gun in his mouth, if he had organized in his mind what he wanted to say or if he was so traumatized he could even see past the door of the room in his mind or with his eyes.

For a moment I looked over at him and he took the gun out of his mouth. He started to say something and raised the gun back up to his lips and squeezed the trigger a little, my eyes were so focused on his finger I could hardly breathe. But then he took the gun away from his mouth and rested it against the side of his head and said one word, “Gunship.”

There was a loud banging on the door and a voice from the other side said, “Marine you have a hostage in there, you’re a hostile force! Relinquish that weapon!” The Marine screamed out, “Perkins get the fuck away from here before I shoot you instead, asshole.”

As I watched this terrified young man, and he was young, barely over the age of twenty, I thought that grace be beguiled then it is a dishonor to the living and to the dead. The room quieted down again, almost instantly. There was an eerie silence and in the hallway as well. I wondered what kind of circus was going on outside this small room but mainly I was focused on the young man across from me, I wasn’t as much worried about my life as I was this young man getting the help he needed, surely a healthy young man wouldn’t be holding a gun to his head or in his mouth.

He spoke sooner than I thought he would, and as he began to speak there were knocks at the door which he ignored. I honestly don’t know if he heard them or not.

“If you line up three marine snipers and tell them to aim at the kneecaps of three Iraqi’s standing in the middle of twelve other Iraqi’s by the fourth shot you can be sure that only one weapon if that will be aimed at the spot where shots are coming from. There’s more danger there defending these fuckers from themselves than there is checking out for your buddy beside you.”

He looked at the floor and followed an imaginary spot across the wall up to the door to the small glass window and put the gun back in his mouth. He did this slowly and I knew then he wasn’t serious about shooting himself, I had seen this kind of hysteria before in a standoff with a police officer in Georgia. Maybe he would feel more comfortable having someone to speak through, especially in this situation. After all this was Washington and they didn’t take to having their Military Industrial Establishment being bad mouthed in print. I could vouch for that personally.

One thing that started to occur to me was the fact that this had to be exploding across the screen of CNN by now taking the attention away from the Presidential campaign and Jack had to be somewhere outside trying to get in. I had no idea if my name had been released or if he knew I was involved but he did know I was coming here today. It wasn’t too long ago we had escaped a shootout in Iraq but this was different, Jack would be running towards the weapon in question.

Mind of Mansel: Backstage at the Book of Revelation

Spill blood on the Old Testament and it will come to life and illustrate the room. Throw it off the roof of any building in Washington D. C. and the separation of church and state will scream all the way down, the ghost of Jerry Falwell, his bloated corpse screeching and setting off car alarms all the way to Maryland parking lots.

Moses came to life in a classic ink drawing in the Supreme Court decision room the last time they tried to overturn Roe V Wade. Moses kept spitting out about his love for animals two at a time at such a high decibel that they gave up and set the right to lifers loose in the offices of junior congressman with the scent of blood wavering out of locked grins.

Airport runways are to modern politics what bathroom floors were to the ancient Romans. Exiting an airplane in the arms of staffers but knowing that that young boy or girl or lady of the evening is waiting in the limo or hotel room makes it easy to smile for the cameras when you are dangerously close in the polls. The angelic touch of the latest Cause, the latest bumper sticker colored ribbon or button, lapel pin celeb backed luncheon will press any flesh for any non-contribution giving voting or non-voting public if the little known Political rider is honored. They first came to the mind of the public through demands of rock stars or greedy performers but it’s not known that politicians have been demanding their sordid desires for years.

The most legendary rider of any politician was that of Mayor Daley of Chicago. He demanded that every time he traveled for an appearance after the violence of the convention that there be in his room four shabbily dressed young people stripped naked and chained in the shower of his hotel room and two angry Black Panthers to beat them senseless while dressed as F.B.I. informants. Also he wanted the entire room to be perfumed with the sickening smell of Mace. Daley who had built up a love for the smell could only execute his darker sexual desires while witnessing violence.

- Chris Mansel