THE 7 DEADLY SINS

[in order from least severe to most severe]

#1 Lust - Women standing on the corner of Broadway, she's the feisty fishnet fetish. Sexual sin sucked in sweet as sugar - sly strangers with candy and pedophiles pace playgrounds lurk around without a sound. Secretive secretaries strut sleazy in slit stockings. The typical high school jock craving sexual interaction: the trashy tart: a whore providing satisfaction, one paying rate if you don't wish to masturbate. Arousal tickling, slaves licking, sucking, thrusting; Erotic tingling: a groping genital game. Everyone engaged in erotic ecstasy. The prostitute fucks depraved men as their source of income and salary. Disease is spread through orgasms - mankind's inflicted punishment. Astrology's Scorpio pushed to an extreme, a nymphomaniac's free-for-all, and sick of lover's lament. A fantasizing pre-teen's perverted wet dreams. A drunk in a bar, commits adultery in a hotel room, he licks the nipple of a woman he finds sultry. He finishes declaring an end to the night's tune and returns without guilt to his sleeping family. Ruled by Asmodai: the demon who created pornography: a guide to all the sides of lust, deceitful, you're just another fool. Watching as relations and love all soon begin to rust. All the time, boys keep a condom nearby; girls sit around and reapply makeup to their eyes. Plastic penises penetrate in private: Beating off to bisexual beauties, vibrators and porn hidden under the bed, as not to let the family bump into it, wouldn't want them to know about your obsession with nudity. Married, yet still unfaithful, risky rape and sickly sexual, genitalia luxuria and oral pleasure, bound and gagged, all dressed in leather.

#2 Gluttony - A manly mammoth, the woman whale; with greasy lips and oily fingertips, will you live to tell the tale? A daily buffet every night for dinner, your drinking wine from grapevines that withered. A personal chef: your passion: cuisine. You need not imprison yourself inside: your vacation within your recipe magazines. In Latin the word is Gula, managed by Beelzebub, the demon that acts as this layer of hell's ruler. Fine wine, fruits, meats, a grand platter to be gorged despite your current level of hunger. A human with a dependence on food, a reliance on calories to solve life's dilemma's, no matter how crude. Fried chicken, ice cream, salmon, and thick goopy cheese, they're fingernails filthy their teeth encased with plaque. Their arteries clogged and unhealthy, cooking is their knack. Fancy restaurants: their ideal date. Food from France: their ideal mate. French fry: their life's delight, stir-fry's what's cooking for dinner tonight. When feeding is finished: skin appears balmy and white, daydreaming of they're next given bite. Life lived and ruled by hunger and thirst: indulging in human instinct, they balloon until their stomachs burst. Intestines scattered no longer linked.

# 3. Avarice (greed) - Asinine avarice or avarita - excess love of monetary meter, concerned with financial wealth and gain, despite the hurt inflicted on others and despite their pain. They desire money, power, and fame. A man who conducts business: selfish and full of demands. No envy of love or sacrifice. Avarice required but envy and pride: an indulgent sinner and active in vice. Ignore god's signs and enjoy the pleasure ride. You must be quick, words can be disguised as a sermon and this level of hell is ruled by the demon, Mammon. Safety and security the avarice receives, protection of money is important for greed, whether in finance or with a druggie. Never fuck with a human's high, whether stoned, tripping, or burnt out of dilated eyes. There is no point without a profit; stocks call for a financial rocket. Green: the color of American money, their time spent mostly at the bank. The greedy don't go out of their way to make jokes or be funny; and don't appreciate riddles or childish pranks. I am greed. I smoke cigars. My suits are pressed. I ride in bulletproof cars, only the green leafed paper, I caress.

#4. Sloth - The sloth, the koala, the moth, and the panda. The turtle slow, but sure won't win the race. Though pronounced within the children's fable, apathy founds the sloth's bland base. Positive morals for the slow and idle you'll find that it has lost its label. Religious worship becomes too much an effort, a job, a career: too demanding of your character. Would have been better off had you been aborted. The white trash husband; eating only TV dinners. The remote control taped to his wrist, despite the common misconception, excess laziness does in fact, make you a sinner. Wastefulness defined in the encyclopedia, reveals the translation, acedias. The demon ruling laziness as well as excess idleness. Behind the door: to flaming hell leads to the demon Belphegor. The unemployed, the barely surviving, choice avoided, boredom inciting.

#5. Wrath (Anger) - A blind man's rage, ira: translated Latin anger. Eyes blood shot and heavily pillowed, dripping blood and salt water, in a constant fight against the bullying, pushy sleep. Rebelling with fury, it's been far too long since tapped into the mind's unconsciousness. Of other's movement I'm left leary of their motives, hatred floods without a measured gauge. Consumed by madness and lacking sanity, you can't bury your own emotion underneath Earth's soil, the single-shadowed grave. But emotion is annoyingly persistent.

#6. Envy - You're cool, Daddio. I want to be cool like you. I want to be good looking and rich and wear cool clothes and talk to cool people. I want to be a Starbucks double-double mocha breve; not a Folgers in a styrofoam cup. Envy is the desire to be cool, to don that facade so many people wrap themselves in. It isn't about money; it's about how I'm perceived. Look at me and think cool thoughts.

It's kind of funny that the cosmic punishment Hell will dish out to those consumed by Envy is total, eternal emersion in ice water.

Pretty cool.

#7. Pride - Ego consumes emotion raw, unable to ever fully love, they're beyond the law. In Latin its superbia, ruled by the fallen angel; Lucifer. A father who's exiled his own flesh and blood, revealing himself wrong, he could not clean off the tainted mud. A hard-headed hell raiser, pin-pricked and pissed off, A successful businessman or a dad in denial, if you dare to defend yourself, you'll wind up on trial. His wife will surely learn the proper time and place to speak, or surely she'll be punished and privately beat. The proud won't tolerate the slow or strained, and won't allow to be referred to as "weak". They are usually wealthy, or at least well off. Their homes are tasteful and certainly clean, expensively furnished: a boudoir, chamber, or bedroom loft. A royal bordered trim: their life's long dream. Pride requires the company of other sins, sins such as gluttony, envy, as well as greed. Money as well as an exceeding reputation is what the proud desperately seek. Competition, not patience or repetition, is the name of Pride's deadly game.

(note: Envy co-written by David and Megan who envy each other.)

*****

I was sitting in a cement playground for cars tonight over top a dirty lake tainted with mud and angry geese and I'm staring out across at the checkerboard hotel of lights in the deep of night, that separate the night owls and oddities from the norm.

Menacing joy & melancholy battles each other for my heart.

It freezes up and I just sometimes want to forget. I know I can't, but I try.

I don't know what the future holds, but I know that I'm happy within the present.

Things are as I want them to be, but the past still holds a cut or two.

Whether the marks fade or I open up the scab, I don't honestly know, only that i'm healing at this moment and its invigorating.

I just wish everyone would stop pressuring me to destroy myself, and let the conflict fight itself out in my own head within my own time, because its my life.

The blasphemy of your eyes captures the instability of words that writhe out of my stain-smudged napkins, hidden within the dim-smoked glaze of a lamp light decorated on the walls of the cold corner cafe.

I broke the deep, melancholy night sky tonight.

I tried to gather the stars as they poured out like glitter, but it was so difficult, trying to keep everything together.

I scooped the dusty leftover stars into a dust pan, in case of a rainy day.

A second ago I felt so oily and disgusting and dirty, and as I phased into an actually feeling of sleepiness - finally - now I feel comfortable and clean.

I feel like a portrait of myself on exhibit. With the essence of life, yet not physically retaining it. Not knowing the meaning behind everything, yet watching as all of those whom gaze upon me, define me, and critique each others renditions, and analytical papers. Really, they cant bear the thought, that behind my painted image, may lie no secret hidden or phallic meaning behind it. They can't bear the idea that maybe I'm just me and I hold no lock to my friendship, or to my conversation. And finally, they can't bear the idea that this painting carries a soul, a soul that carries feelings and naivety. I can be a nagging old bitch...but I can also be a vulnerable little girl stitched with brittle porcelain.

Fragile: Handle with Care.

*****

Baltimore Bum

Pixie sticks and bubble tape line my cigarette paper and my lighter is bubblegum pink to contrast the dirty slum streets of Baltimore. Taxicabs and boys in leather stroll by with a mission-accomplished aura within their bones.

The side-by-side houses are old and vintage surrounded by trees that vine and wither; moss covered and crazy-crooked. The buildings are stained and graffiti tainted with the aroma of heroin syringes and belt straps. Those antique street lantern lights line the back alley street named Broadway that contains slick small shops like "killer trash" where the paint is peeled and chipped and the brick is broken and out of place.

My first love and I are soon anticipating the exploration of these gutter-punk styled shops filled with rag doll clothes and fancy stained bows. Clothes made for girls who are tattered and torn, whose eyes once filled the silence, now replace gaps with violence. Girl's whose makeup and their stockings have runs; who are bruised and beaten, aching and abused. The shops only girls that smoke cigarettes with red lipstick and combat boots would linger by.

I am exactly that girl: the lady Lazarus of the ego, who spends her free time in rainstorms and back alley cafés that are dim-lit and smoke hazed. I'm perfectly at home here, a tweaker tarped tease among the sewer rats and alley cats, walking the oil-slick city streets with a painted face, like I own the place.

*****

I'm sitting in the café that's turned menacing mainstream with a bitter stereotype to go with it. The place has changed since we've last known it. So many types of people that lack significance but each different, maybe not to the extent that I am, but still pieced together in a puzzle of abstract faces.

Some smoke cigarettes, some smoke cigars. Some hang out at nightclubs, some in bars. Some are on laptops and some here for the social atmosphere. I'm sipping bland-tasting coffee, at the typical "gay coffee shop" where I don't fit. Not that I wouldn't fuck a girl, but most of the café's homosexual population in generically male.

The lampshade shadows brochures I'm not interested in, and local artist's paintings hang crooked on the walls that are a whirlwind of purples and pinks; plums and berry blush.

Lonely older men sit with coffee and a long-since ashed cigarette, looking pathetic and alone: without a wife and without a phone. The music's loud and the styles clash but that's where they vacate; their places of refuge, their place of escape.

I feel like us two are the only souls in this place that have been painted in a brilliance of unique and vivid individualism, shocking others and standing out like a sore thumb. One brief millisecond of eye contact would make any particular atypical zombie aware of our zenith insane mentality.

*****

I Am Numb, but I'm Not Dumb

Only a single star spies on me at a bird's eye view. My cigarette's firey cherry is the only light that's bright shine could possibly compare in the oil-stained sky of mud and rainwater. I picture God opening a god-sized lipstick cap and dragging a long red makeup smear across the dirty air as a contrast. I sip and slurp a milky mixture of ice cream, strawberry and banana. I'm a pillowhead pajama girl, and boy do I wish I had a cigarette right now, I want the scratch of nicotine against the surface of my lung.

The stars twitch and tremble like kids with terret syndrome enacting a seizure. The trees reach out to grab my face and I shrink low to the ground. I'm crawling up the pavement of the charcoal painted roadway like a lizard up a brick wall.

Denis Leary is hot in the way that he has the balls to smoke wherever the fuck he feels like.

And the lights that light up the red glowing hand sign over the pedestrian crosswalk closely resembles that child-game "Brite Lite" thing.

All the street lights wink yellow at me making me aware that the norm is still in hiding. The street lamplights reflect off the night sky revealing the promiscuous clouds that hang low, and I conclude that everyone was right about my head always being high up in the clouds.

*****

SID: THE PERFECT DRUG

I'm writing in watermelon lollipops and cigarette ash. I seemed to have inhabited Brooke's hellish habit of taking the unknown and imaginatively concocting all of the worst possible scenerios for a given situation, only the key difference is I don't invent unhappy outcomes as a defense mechanism, I invent them as a source of poison to lace my melancholy in. Misery loves company, they say. But when you are without a putty doll person to mold into a state of misery, you're left only with your own hated mentality that plays devil's advocate with your heart. I wore this really kick-ass knife in a sheath that velcros onto my arm today, it was all tomb-raider-esque. It was pretty fuckin' cool though, cause my hair was all messy and fucked up, my eyeliner smudged, and my lips were cracked & dry. I looked like a dangerous & violent heroin addict [Who says heroin chic isn't still in?] And the best part about it was - everyone left me the fuck alone, I didn't even care if someone had called the cops on me. Besides, I put my jacket on when i'd go out in the public. This weekend was spent in fractals of shades and brilliance moving up the walls, across the floor, in the sun, across the ocean...It was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy and I had bonding time this weekend and I love her.

*****

Copyright Megan Ireland - 2005

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