Rob Stephenson has been published in a wide variety of anthologies, journals, and magazines, both online and off, including Velvet Mafia, Dangerous Families, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Blithe House Quarterly, Problem Child, and Please Records. He designs a continuing series of chapbooks that feature his texts and digital artwork.

Born – California - 1957 - Lives – New York Email – RAWBE@aol.com -Very short publishing history – I’ve been writing for over thirty years, but have only been publishing consistently for the last six. I’m in over fifty publications and about half of that writing is published under pseudonyms. I am more and more interested in making writing that has forms based in the abstractions of architecture, music, systems, and processes.

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THE SIGNALS

..if by mishap the signal made no sense, and if it no longer had this great look of simplicity so essential to everything we call signals, where would we then be?
D.A.F. Sade February 8, 1779

The great evil of this war has been that I slept beside it. My eyes closed. Like curtains. As if it unwound in shadows.
Every complex design is a compromise.
I could find no rest. Horrible images plundered my minutes. Grayish-blue squares. The opaque squares of windows too high to see through. The squares of rhythmic unraveling.
There were wax flowers in the death cell, behind every rock, every tree, under the carpets.
My mouth was full of birds.
Prisons are full of liars and the delicate sounds of the condemned man's chains.
I am almost the only one in this room. With me the memory of her tender perfume, a thin invisible thread stretched between her and me.
Her wonderful hands describe the gestures I make.
Everything seems to have wings.
They put her letter in my hand and went out without a word. This day flies.
Shut up in this cell without a mirror. I never knew the glamour and charm of the criminal world. So using my pen, I stuffed the priest's mouth with my full pages until my garbled notions came out his ass.
Twenty days in the hole.
Or was it twenty-one?
The errors in my calculations can be found in the seriousness of my measuring.
She counts the days of my life. An abstract exigency where a number equals the shape of my displeasure. The little darling sent me that beautiful boy.

There is no more need to invent stories in this moment of awkward, asymmetrical silence.
Against a backdrop of suffering I have made it my duty to write concealing nothing with the same sparkling and polished precision as before. A compass in my heart. Not wrapped up in fake illnesses, but full of mocking smiles.

The trunks in the grove remain like gaunt skeletons. I do not heal like the victim of a whipping. I feel only the softening of the surface, which is normally as hard as diamonds.
I relish your mind when you misunderstand my tales. The fresh blood of my thoughts. I use the ribs of the dead to pry the iron collar from around my neck.
She speaks of the cellars beneath me. And as her voice changes the sounds come off in her hands when she tries to clutch them. She explains the ingredients of a cake recipe with love. They brand her forehead with a red-hot iron. She learns to sprinkle words against a stone wall. She looks somewhere down. Her eyes closed like curtains.
There is no end to the counting. All of her letters are written in dust and urine on silk. It overflows into my daily life. Inserted between visible lines. They set traps for me. Something hangs in the air.
That lovely boy she sent me was the last blank page at hand. I covered him with a fetid prose in black ink and drowned him in a river of six hundred passions.
Her voice remains here in such sudden impressions. Over in a corner behind a tiny wire cage. The feathers choke me still. My throat bears the mark of the closure. A false opening inside me.
There is no end to the counting. It feels like so many knife thrusts lost in the dungeons under an old house.
Without friends I become an imaginary being. Why did you say nothing for so long?

six ancient mapseight pounds of candlesone puff of swansdownone sleeve of her taffeta gown just wornone Savoy biscuit iced all the way around its surface on top and underneathtwo hundred birch strokesone embroidered silk vest patterned on a green background without silver trimtwenty little grilled cabbagessixteen fartstwo packs of toothpicksone very young puppy either a water spaniel or a setterthirty letters in milkone architectural plan for the new Theatre des Italianseight streams of sperm on her backsideone prune colored redingoteone toe from each footone large box of marshmallows

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PARIS OVER PARIS (2002 + 1996 + 2002)

Neither boy is wearing a shirt. The one on the sofa has dark hair and the other one sits awkwardly beside him on the carpet. They stare at each other. The carpeting is a darker red than the sofa. Litter is strewn everywhere. A pair of black briefs is draped over the arm of the sofa. It looks like an advertisement to me, but there is no text that I can see from where I’m standing. Emerging from the soft metallic blue darkness, a large school of fish float midair as if underwater. One of them is close with its mouth open. I want to put my finger in it. "Soil me," he said so softly I could barely hear him, "please." His little black eyes burned. I wonder if he learned English from the British. Now some of the fish are above me. I see their white underbellies. They are skewered with metal rods that are attached to a black rectangular structure, but a few of them look like they are floating freely without anything holding them in place. Behind the sofa the leaves on the trees are burnt orange. It’s cheap wallpaper. The guy at the market gave me a perfect mango and some huge purple grapes and picked some coins off the palm of my hand. Why is it so frustrating for some people when they can’t see the whole thing, when it’s just a bunch of fragments? And when is it ever more than fragments really? I wonder who keeps the complete ones at home. Hard peaches and nectarines. The colors have darkened. They spend a lot to protect stolen objects. A piece of heavy paper is framed on an easel. A thin rectangle of gold runs through the middle of the wood frame. The easel is the color of fresh pecans, crushed. There is a label at the bottom of the easel, but I can’t tell if it’s the title of the drawing. The sketch is unfinished. Probably the bare bones conception for a larger work that was never made. Simply outlined in charcoal are a group of centaurs holding a nude Christ-like figure. Straight vertical lines reach upwards to the top of the paper. Trees. Without leaves. Just outside the restaurant. Full moon. Rude waiter. Cous cous. He ripped a row of small curving slits in the paper tablecloth with the tip of a serrated knife. An ice skater. Or a Chinese calligrapher making a brush stroke. Large nose. Small catalog. Origami ears. He brought yogurt and an apple. Euphoria in little disposable glass jars. Sugar syrup in mint tea afterwards. A delicate mix of intimacy and powerlessness. A man lies on his back on an aquamarine park bench. He is asleep. The bench is designed so that the curving slats comfortably hold four sitting people. Behind the bench is a gray metal fence. It protects a bed of pink flowers, the pink of a little girl’s pajamas. The man’s hair is long and dirty, pushed back from his forehead and hanging off the front of the bench. The skin of his face is sunburned and unwashed as if the dirt has been collecting in layers for days. His mouth is half-open, as if he’s waiting to be kissed. I can’t tell if he has any teeth. He clutches himself in a loose hug. I wonder what his mouth tastes like. There are men in nearby apartments looking out over the window grills and smoking cigarettes. My parents pushing me along the burlesque streets of New Orleans when I was ten. A praline sticky in my hand. Latin letters in gold on marble. A city full of theories. Side by side. The timid joy of thinking useless things. Stratified pastries about to be folded inside floral printed wax paper. I see a courtyard through six windowpanes. The upper left pane is slightly opaque with age, while the other five panes are warped and distort the view of the courtyard and the building across the courtyard. There is a clock that says three minutes after four. Mid-morning light bathes a triangular bed of tulips in full-Spring bloom. One of the windows of the building across from me has closed chalk-green draperies. The rest have flimsy white curtains. Behind me, between an Italian globe, brown with age, and an open book with very tiny hand-written letters, I hear whispering that sounds like a simmering stew. As I walk away along side the long silent tables, a section of the card catalog opens and a middle-aged woman walks out from a room I had no idea was even there. This time without sugar. I ordered a quick espresso with a spot of froth. I sat down on an oak chair between mirrors framed in baby blue and a grown-up shade of maroon. They were slanted in such a way that reflected the white-hot noonday. My own glances were returned on every side. I savored my own quiet attention, my casual inspections. My heart pounded. There were bags of rubbish so carefully arranged on the curb outside. The waiter brought me a plate of strawberry sorbet surrounded by a dense meringue set amidst a drizzle of lemon-raspberry syrup and mint leaves. "…delightful creature," a young man says in broken English to a scabby girl half his age as he walks by the open window, "but trapped in a menagerie of his own time." Above his gruff voice, the gentle river of French voices in the café flow just outside my daydreams. It’s as if their mouths are full of oily marbles. Mostly it is some kind of lettering that is unrecognizable to me, except for a distinct red dollar sign that has been spray-painted in thicker strokes than the rest of the graffiti. Halfway down the concrete steps is a short break in the stairway, a level area with two flat trapezoidal stones that sit on top of the concrete instead of being imbedded in it. Next to the stones is a patch of miniature round stones that are set in the concrete in an uneven grid pattern. I knew I wouldn’t come back to this place. I didn’t want to see him again. But I did like him better after he said he was not happy and it was impossible for him to buy anyone water. I even liked his girlfriend who told me, "Black and white is only in the movies." I fingered the foil-wrapped mint chocolate in my shirt pocket I’d bought earlier to eat on the Metro. As I walked off, he called after me, " I’m just dying to see the inside of a fancy Parisian apartment." I can see a desk against the far wall. Who would leave the door to a place like this open? There are a dozen orange roses fanning out in a white vase. They appear more yellowish where the light from the window hits them. The view out the window is of a balcony across the courtyard. It’s full of plants. A man in a gray sweatshirt is watering them with a hose. He is looking down at some red flowers, a variety that I don’t recognize. His head is shaved. He has no idea that I am taking his photograph. To the right of the window above the desk is a wall. Paint that was once white is curling downward in thin ribbons. An oval mirror with a mahogany frame reflects a few window panes, but nothing is reflected beyond the glass from outside the room except a milky whiteness. "It’s just too convenient for some people to be stupid," a voice said behind me. A woman’s voice. Spanish. The doors shut automatically, but it felt so different from the subway in New York. The boy standing next to me kept feeling his neck with long fingers and long nails. He touched his lips a lot. He was restless in his own body, reminding me of a fidgeting baby rat. His pants were riding so low on his hips that I wished his shoes were untied, but like mine, his sneakers had no laces. They were slip-ons. "Liebhaber," the tattoo said in a monstrous font across the small of his back. He had big feet. Beef. Uncooked with raw chopped onion and a dish of mysterious green leaves sautéed and fragrant. One custard fruit tart and after that, another. I hear accordion and violin struggling for a blend. It makes the music sad. I enjoy it more than the second tart. And I realize that the shadows forming and dissolving behind the shade across the air well last night, were made by two people holding candles as they moved around the room. When they blew them out, I saw the little red glow of their cigarettes. Almost touching. A black dog comes up to me as I sit down on a bench. He licks melted mint chocolate off my fingers. The swarthy man in the shadows whistles sweetly and the dog runs off mid-lick. Midnight. Not quite rain. Sumptuous yellow curry sauce on my tongue. Wonderful old cameras and kinescopes in an unlit shop window. A boy in a bubble-gum pink polo shirt on a street full of whores. I cried into the goose-down pillow the same way I had when I was watching the sunset paint the cathedral and the river. Oh shit, I really am a tourist. Trick mirrors. Magic boxes. The smell of his chest and the feel of the stiff hairs there tickling my ear. Hiding my wet face inside a jewel. Images of black men spread out on the tables and on the walls. Everyone sits quietly watching porno instead of each other. I am completely alone in a room full of men who are too private about their own desires while someone else’s flicker across their faces. Outside. In the dark by the river. I pay attention to how the rain on my head changes every few moments and how it doesn’t quite correspond to the patterns it makes on the street’s puddles. There was a man here earlier dipping his fingers in glasses of water and rubbing them on the rims. He made long droning tones that never quite repeated themselves. What if you had to pay admission to go outside? And no elevators. Two different kinds of cheese every day for weeks and never having the same kind twice. During the meal I watch her hands. They did things to make you look at them. Fingers rubbing together. Digital frottage. Poses and perfect motion. A balanced economy. Holding the fork just so. The plane’s wheels made curly clouds of blue-gray smoke that the body of the plane passed through and left behind. Another brush stroke of the calligrapher. There is a scene of brown bears framed in red with little white light bulbs that are not lit. Underneath, a child with long brown hair and a dark blue jacket sits on a giraffe. A girl? I can only see the back of the child’s head. A boy sits on an ostrich. He looks back at the other child. A lion stands between them and as the music starts they all spin out of sight. Next to the Ferris wheel everyone stops speaking. They turn to look at me and then continue eating, carefully, as if they might hurt the food if they hurried or had any aggression toward it whatsoever. Thick copper poles run vertically between the shoulder blades of many white horses. Their ears are flat and their mouths are gasping for breath. They could be in agony. They shine. I want to touch them. Their legs are bent as if they are galloping. But they remain still. They all have horseshoes on their upturned hooves. There are no children in sight. Tan saddles and bridles adorn the horses, but they are not identical on every horse. One has a pink blanket rolled up at the back of the saddle. Another has a yellow blanket unrolled and hanging down its side. Carnival-colored feathers and tassels ornament their bodies. Plastic or painted wood? His pale arms pick up the lime green light from overhead. Eighteen? And so drunk. He dropped his box of cigarettes on the floor between my legs and looked at me as he bent down. Twice in a half-hour. I’m so tired of this. Two crows pecking around on the big lawn. Contortionists with bicycles. Some guys doing martial arts routines. I moved away from them. I clutched my shopping bags and lay face down on the grass next to four people playing a card game for small change. I felt safe and dozed immediately to the sound of insects buzzing. Bird wings flapping. The shuffling of the deck. Dusk. Huge bursts of flame flared out of a young man’s mouth up into the air. I smelled the heat on my face. I heard bells in the distance and people talking in a language I couldn’t identify. I don’t want any more crepes on this trip. Back and forth in front of one of the closed stalls. An acrobat with sore nipples. A bit narcoleptic. The crowd watches. Sweat on their necks. A circus that comes out of its own womb. "I’ll never do this in public," he said as he spread a vivid red smear across paper. The same color as his lips. I pick at the ham pizza under my fingernails in the taxi back to the apartment. I don’t bother to interrupt the driver’s crazy rant. Hot baths without soap. Stained glass. A cemetery of terra cotta and old soil. Incomprehensible arches in cracked white stucco.

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