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From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 5 and 6 -- By Laurie Fallon, A Virtual Person Dead 9/11/01

by seanfarragher 

Posted: 18 March 2005
Word Count: 1235
Summary: Fear cripples for life. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again!" Sections #5 and #6 By Laurie Fallon ("Dirty Little Girl") A Virtual Person
Related Works: From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 1 and 2 • From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 3 and 4 • 

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From the Book of Byzantium --
Dirty Little Girl (Part V)


“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather
scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean –
neither more nor less.”

“The Question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words
mean so many different things.”

“The Question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be
master – that’s all.” -- Through the Looking Glass by Lewis
Caroll



The nature of Abuse in a Nation
is a Marker, as in biostratigraphy

... biostratigraphy, biostratigraphic project management, paleontology, service, stratigraphy, sequence stratigraphy, depositional system, paleontology, forum, pollen...



"My mother molested my life for ten years."
(written twenty years after the abuse)
By Laurie Catherine Fallon -- victim of 9/11/01

That's me. I'm the dirty little girl. I walk around with no underpants and I stink of pee. I'm always touching or Mom's touching where I sit. You know those little touches, brief, where my flat chest no nipples dance. Mom don’t realize that when she touch my tits I get so jumpy I want to pinch harder and harder and finally I explode. It is terrible internal distraction. She knows she does this. She pecks at the flat circles and gets them going. She know she does. She laughs at my shrug away I am not interested and then climbs into my bed and finds me fingering where I shouldn't or she says I should.

Mom always had this sheer laugh. She gave me to men who became her and carried their dreams as rivers found their own gravel basement.

When I had my first period, I must have been eleven, Mom stained her nose with my blood. Stretched in the mirror I reached under my nightgown and painted my nipples and my cheeks with more blood. I looked at the mirror and made a horrible face to mimic what I thought might be some native violence as retribution. Later that night I fucked myself with a thick candle and when I had pierced my limbs I bled until morning and taken to the hospital, no one knew I had lost my virginity when I was seven. Lies take on so many facets.


From the Book of Byzantium Part VI
GOING UPSTATE

It seemed as if we were riding in the car for days. We were not in the car, but had fallen asleep on the floor of one of the bedrooms in the country house near Warwick, New York.

It was bone chilled January cold and my breasts when I woke ached. I could not move and felt as if I were trapped in these thin wool blankets. The fires must have had gone out.

My skin tight in PJ’s that I picked to wear was sensitive sexual baby skin. I could not move. I wanted to seduce him as he does when he taps me on his knee or as he did when I was his woman, or now as the speck of stars, he cannot see. I knew the man driving the car about three weeks. He was mother’s new favorite, and he seemed kind, and certainly no different or angrier than my father did.

Joe reached down. I reached up by my fingers. He pulled me out of my own throat or so, it seemed, and then we swam in skin.

He was sweat. He was hard. I could feel his cock against my ass as he cuddled, and admonished me for not telling him the heat doesn’t work in this room, and that I should sleep in the bed with him, which is what I wanted in the first place, but I didn’t want to feel the trapped animal if he pushed me away as he does when he felt guilt. Mother could not get him to do what she always expected.

I was scared when he put his fingers in my brains. I did not want it. He put them in hard, and at first, they hurt. I could not catch my breath. I pushed into him letting the twin cheeks of my ass drive into his pad of fat belly and when his cock pushed at one clever angle, I felt him slip inside where he could not really penetrate.

I was so small. Last week these old boys at school gave me head, rubbing my ass and carefully I fabricated an actual orgasm for them. I was hot, and they drew it out of me that longing. I told Harold about it, and he said Sure, that is lovely Lass, and pushed into my shallow cunt harder. I had no hair, I said. I said it that way, ungrammatical, to make it stick out more, and then he pulled the hair that had grown around my lips, and as it was soft and a feather wisp I groaned as he ran his nails along my lips scratching the soft pink wondering how pain felt in that dark twilight when he was the monster on top as the usual master of a dance he pushed into my bowels and emptied cock like a deep sea beast. The boys last week wee teens left so much soup in my cunny I was lost with the slosh. The three boys fucked without any precision. It was jerk jerk and poof. Today, once the cold left, he fucked gracefully and taught me moves, how does this feel he said, do this until you feel this, or do you feel it, and if you don’t let me know. He was a gentleman. I may have been his child like teenager, but I was kept with the cold, and my hands warming on his balls slipped their knot into my mouth and he was a great dancer forever more. My tits streaked with semen were slippery and sick colder and I did not like it, but tolerated the image, as it was what most expected. The yucky semen rubbed against my tail bone as it dripped was a welcome sensation to the first barn door of pregnant woman I am told now several weeks later that I have taken into my sexual schemes and so I wonder if sex is that weapon we need to avoid war, true war and then if not war, perhaps the petty silly break down of civility that human beings require for the luster of gods as adorned hats and decorations we apply when we are falsely proud of being prudes when in truth what we want is the perfection of orgasm. Shall we shout now for the truth, or can we hide from the boundary of false bottoms, as you lean into me with your cunny and my two fingers drive as you climb my hip and have that pure orgasm you deserve and we desire. Does it matter that you are my mother and I am your father in this clandestine pageant.

All I ever want is to murder the circus clown, "to kill Bill," Joe, Peter or to end the torment as cycles of cold make the skin chaffed inside my legs swollen with an undistinguished history that. Every tongue lick to dick, pussy, and nipple becomes the next folio of horrific infamy in the Library of Congress. Every victim has a corner reserved for books about how they became serial murderer #3, 4 or simply part II.



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Comments by other Members



Mac AM at 08:28 on 19 March 2005  Report this post
Hello Sean,

I find this difficult to comment on from a poetry perspective because it feels more like lyrical prose than a prose poem.

Have you tried this section in a fiction group - though I know from previous posts that your poetry is grounded in your childhood and September 11th?

From a subject perspective, your work is extremely powerful, it is very in-my-face, and I wonder if you might not tone it down a little - there is a danger that your reader might feel lectured to, rather than being given an insight into your life though your writing.

I hope this helps. I don't mean to deflate you, I just wanted to suggest something to think about.

Mac


<Added>

Forgot to say, if you balence the high tension with periods of gentler writing, it might help the reader cope with the horrific images that keep on coming.

tinyclanger at 18:22 on 19 March 2005  Report this post
Hi Sean,

I've been trying to follow your work, and I have to say, I think I'm failing to see the central metaphor...I too have written extensively about childhood abuse, but to parallel it with 9/11 seems rather odd to me.
Well, I mean I can see links, devastation, abuse of power etc, but the link doesn't resonate with me much. One seems such an individual crime, the other such a 'wide' one...I cannot see how drawing the two together illuminates either very much...unless of course, one thinks of the individual tragedies of 9/11, that as well as being a disaster for a nation, a world, it was also very much of individual numbers, who each had their own tragedies..?

hmmm

tc

seanfarragher at 19:19 on 19 March 2005  Report this post
Thank You for your review of my work The Book of Byzantium. It is greatly appreciated and will help me in editing the poem (very much in progress). Some background AND assumptions. That "Byzantium" seems "odd" to you intrigues. Your open question at the end encourages me to provide some background that may or may not appear in the book length poem in a more literary form.

I assume you were personally not near the WTC when the event happened. I assume you are not an American who bears some of the responsibility for the devastation of Iraq on the basis of lies and the arrogance of power.

Every individual act of evil (murder or attempt) is an act against society. As Donne suggested (some of which is applicable in a broad sense) "never send to know for whom the bell tolls...."

Every individual child who survives abuse bears the scar for life. Most of the abused become abusers or victims. I DID NOT BECOME an abuser. I raise three children (two female) as an appropriate parent.

The terrorists in aiming the planes into the WTC, the Pentagon or that field in Pennsylvania where the third plane crashed demonstrated their enormous temporary power. The event itself as experience set in motion horrible consequences.

I was a taxi driver in New York City at the time of that act of war. The Friday before I stood outside the WTC and marveled at it. The Friday after the event I drove across the Manhattan Bridge down Canal Street and looked down at what appeared to me to be a scar from hell. Blue smoke. The smell of death and dust were a backdrop to the fires still burning at the WTC site that day. Crawling along Canal Street I felt myself become one witness. Over the next months I spoke to many people who lived in Battery Park City (cross from the WTC) and what one described of the event itself reminded me of Viet Nam.

Abuse is not only child abuse. It exists when any powerful person or group of persons violates the human rights of the less powerful.

Sadam was and is an evil man. He will never know freedom again, but our policy in Iraq is not about democracy, but oil and greed. Democracy, history has shown, cannot be exported just by the will of the US or any government.

The Book of Byzantium is about evil. What happened at the WTC (nearly 3000 persons murdered) is evil. Now, consider the tens of thousands survivors who were trapped by the events of 9/11.

Point Two --
Child sexual abuse is evil. Statistic..... Arguably 50 percent of all children are sexually abused in the United States.

As the twenty section is presented every week or two in Poetry Seminar I will consider individual tragedies (all fictional to spare the real victims)--

When I viewed the devastation of 9/11 I felt as I did when my mother took me to bed, or my father beat me for not cleaning the kitchen floor properly. Or perhaps he sent me to the basement to clean while he had sex, and when I said there was nothing to clean, he would beat me again. Let us consider the time when I was 12 when he put a knife to my throat, then pounded the point into the door inches from my throat. My mother and I managed to push him away, and fortunately he was so drunk he was disarmed. The scar where the knife hit my bedroom door existed for years afterwards. He wanted to murder me. Drink is not an excuse. He died in 1992 and I did not know of his death for five years.

When I was 52 in 1995 I began to remember (after therapy for depression) some of the details. When my mother died from a stroke in 2002 I could not visit her in hospital. I did not want to attend her funeral. I did attend but I stood off to the side.

My writing is not only about child abuse or any abuse of the powerless by the powerful.

Another long work of mine "Taxi Murders” is about redemption. A survivor of abuse and kidnapping finds a new life.

All my best,

Sean


seanfarragher at 19:34 on 19 March 2005  Report this post
Dear Mac,
You didnt deflate me. I appreciated your comments. Please read my answer to another Seminar Poet. It is background for the long poem. I truly appreciate your read of my work. Toning the poem down, allowing for a rest between intensity are excellent suggestions. As I edit I will examine the need for rest and that balance you suggested. I will test your idea, and see if the work still resonnates. Thank You again.

<Added>

I responded to Tinyclanger's review to help all readers of the poem (seen in parts) now.

Nell at 07:06 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Sean, I found this deeply disturbing. Writing about child abuse in such graphic detail raises many questions that I don't want to go into here, but for me the most troubling aspect of this section of Byzantium is the overwhelming feeling that your narrator's voice is male rather than female. I simply don't think a woman would write like this. As ever your writing is poetic/creative.

Nell.


seanfarragher at 08:52 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Nell, it is meant to be disturbing. There are so many sterotypes about child abuse. I was abused by my mother, but I didnt grow up to hate women or abuse them. What happened to me is disturbing and not meant to be easy. Literature tells the truth. Pop fiction lies. I am telling the truth. I appreciate your comments, but I don't care if what I write is not politically correct. I am tired of politically correct and fake literature.

<Added>

How can you specualte on what a generic (NOT PARTICULAR) woman would write. How can you sterotype it? And wait until you have a chance to read the whole piece before you stigmitize my female persona as male (as if that really matters)....

<Added>

I consider your crtitque political and not literary. I do find it useful, for it suggests that I am on the right track with this long poem. People love the writing and hate the idea of what I have to say. Why should they like it? Yes, I want to stir the pot. I want people to not forget either 9/11 or the fact that childhood sexual abuse is fearsome, horrible and a scar that never goes away.

Furthermore, how can you speculate on what a generic (NOT PARTICULAR) woman would write. How can you sterotype it? Pperhaps, you might wait until you have a chance to read the whole piece before you stigmitize my female persona as male (as if that really matters)....

Please do not take my comments as angry or not respectful of your work in reading the poem and speaking honestly what you feel. I appreciate the courtsey you show me by that work, and I in turn respect and do listen to your critque political or literary.

Nell at 12:40 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Sean, I know what generic means without having two definitions in capital letters after the word, and my intention was not to stigmatize your female personna but to point out how it came across to me personally. You write: '(as if that really matters)...' Believe me, it does matter. With work of this kind you're walking a fine and dangerous line and if the tone is wrong the only people who will read past the first few lines are the abusers themselves.

Later you state: 'People love the writing and hate the idea of what I have to say. Why should they like it?' That's fine if you're writing for yourself, but if people don't like it they won't read it, and having posted your work here I'm assuming that you'd like it to be read.

Sean, you ask me not to take your comments as angry or disrespectful, and I won't, but I've said more than I intended here, so this is my last post on this piece. Forgive me if I don't read on - it's not because I've taken your comments in that way.

Nell.

Mac AM at 13:03 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Hello Sean, I have to agree with Nell here I’m afraid. When you wrote that people love the writing but not the content, it is an indication that this depth and subject matter is too in-your-face. You’ve obviously had a life tortured by the events of your childhood, but quite often your posts, your introductions and on occasion, your writing tells us what to think rather than learning what you think.

For example, look through your recent posts and work introductions and see how many times you issue a directive to your audience along the lines, child abuse is terrorism, terrorism is child abuse. Indeed you repeat yourself word-for word in a response to Nell’s comments. You also maintain that what the U.S. is doing is right, but that opinion is not necessarily shared by everyone. This concerns me greatly because your work is in danger of becoming overlooked as a mantra rather than an expression of what you want to say.

I find your work very difficult to read and so I do tend to limit my content to the style, the mechanics of the writing. I was graced with a happy childhood, but I know friends whose experiences have been otherwise. They have chosen silence whereas your path is to expose and I would just like you to be mindful that you can alienate your intended audience very easily by being too big. A softer voice often gets the message across more successfully.

Mac


lieslj at 16:35 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Sean,

You're repeating the pattern you set up at Zoetrope. You overwhelm people with the sheer volume of your repetitive rant and your political kant and then get angry when you don't get the response you want. You disregard the valid and measured opinions of other writers.

I think there are matters of workshop etiquette that you repeatedly breech. I hope you are still in therapy so that you can process why you've alienated the people you claim to need yet again.

I was really hoping on reading "Parnassus" that you had found a fresh voice, a new song. I too find the excessive and tittilating rehashing of your childhood trauma extremely disturbing. I would go so far as to suggest you slide right into the kind of kiddie porn you claim to abhor.

Your aggression towards those who come to a public place in a spirit of good natured cameradie is in very poor taste.

It is tiresome.

L

Becca at 18:18 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
It does seem like porn to me.
Becca.

seanfarragher at 19:37 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Nell, I apologize for the section on generic being repeated. It was done by accident in posting.

Silverelli at 19:41 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Nell said, "With work of this kind you're walking a fine and dangerous line and if the tone is wrong the only people who will read past the first few lines are the abusers themselves."

That is a pretty bold statement. I read past the first few lines and probably would not read a whole book like this, because it just gets old after awhile(the explicitness), I actually had to laugh at times: "I pushed into him letting the twin cheeks of my ass drive into his pad of fat belly and when his cock pushed at one clever angle", because it does sound like an intellectual trying to describe a pornographic situation. But by no means would I go as far to state, only abusers will get off on this type of stuff. Just because I read Hustler, does that make me an abuser?

What I like in the writing is that you don't care what people are going to think, you tell it like it is, no matter how ugly. But then, reading the comments, you definitely do care, very much so. So I'm confused.

I really don't get the whole 9/11 connection. Well, I get it, but don't agree with it's relevancy to drawing a story about child abuse. But it's original and never-been-done, and I hope you do connect the message exactly how you want it and it works.

I did get through it, it was not difficult for me to read at all. But that's because I'm a serial killer in real life. It was a bit too eccentric for me, but I'm a simple kinda guy, that's all.

Good luck with this,
Adam

<Added>

You're obviously going to face some adversity with getting this out there. You've lived a batshit crazy life and seen a lot of crazy batshit things. Certainly not sheltered in the slightest. Tone down the effort of trying to make this super-intellectual. Shit happens, shrug it off, and let the people that know evil is everywhere, accept this writing for what it is. A freedom of some sort.

<Added>

Sorry if I sound like I'm being a douchebag, Sean. I'm trying to be honest and supportive at the same time. I'm drawn to controversy, also.

Elsie at 21:40 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Sean, I don't think you can claim Liesl has coloured people's perceptions of you and your writing as all comments apart from Becca and Silverelli's were posted before Liesl's comments. I think also that although you say porn has been approached by literay figures, it's not usually child porn.

<Added>

oops, spelling. literary.

seanfarragher at 22:22 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Elsie, I dont mind the criticism of the people who speak about the work. I would prefer literary criticism, but of course politics does enter into it. No matter what the sequence what Liesl said about me is out of context and does spin an attitude that misrepresnts me. She has no right to attack my character. That is not supportive criticism.

<Added>

I believe there is no boundary to good writing. I will use anything anytime anyplace to make my point as an artist. I will not censor myself to be loved especially when I had a significant following for my Taxi Murders work (about a female heroine) and this work will be read as well. I don't create controversal work to increase my readership although despite what some say, controversy does increase readership. I write as I do because it is the truth as I understand it at that time and place. I am listening to all of you (EXCEPT LIESL) and your comments and point of view will be considered as I revise the work.

Becca at 22:33 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
I personally think this stuff should stop.
Becca.

Elsie at 22:38 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Sean, I don't think Liesl was attacking your character. I think she was pointing out how you are alienating people with your attitude. My point was that she cannot have influenced the other comments - so the sequence does matter.

seanfarragher at 22:44 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Elsie, tell you what. Let's stop this circle of criticism. It doesn nothing for anyone. It is over. I will not comment further.

If you want to read a good poem, go to Poetry IV. I just posted one there. That poem is rated R.

Silverelli at 23:32 on 21 March 2005  Report this post
Reading back, I may have jumped down Nell's throat a bit, and not until I read Elsie's comments did I understand you guys were labeling this as kiddie porn. I, by no means, promote kiddie porn. In fact, I find it repulsive.

Maybe I'm just too desensitized to decipher between what is art and what is porn. Kiddie porn for me, would be the actual act being caught on videotape or photography. This is a work of fiction and I took it as a story that didn't really happen. Make-believe.

Apologies to Nell.

One thing is for certain, , as demonstrated here, I don't think your target audience is going to be women, Sean.

Silverelli at 00:29 on 22 March 2005  Report this post
I went back and re-read it. Yup, I'm definitely desensitized. This didn't shock me, and I should be sickened by the acts and attitude that takes place in the text. But I'm not. I grew up in a world where the Catholic Church was a front for pedophilia, a world where murders took place on a daily basis down the street. Maybe the writing is too real for some, and in turn makes it uncomfortable. Okay, I'm done, overanalyzing this, I'm out of my element here.

seanfarragher at 01:07 on 22 March 2005  Report this post
Adam, this section is not typical of the whole poem. It is one corner, an important corner, but it is not typical of the whole work. I have taken under advisement the reactions of people to one part of this poem. Do I tone it down? It is a difficult question.

I find it fascinating that the other poems I have posted here in Poetry 4 have been well received. Take a look at the one I posted today, Adam.

I will doing some reviewing over the next few days. I have always offered constructive reviews.


Sean

Becca at 07:03 on 22 March 2005  Report this post
Sean,
it shouldn't surprise you that your other work hasn't had the same reaction, if as you say, it's not like the above. It's the work we're criting on WW, not the person who wrote it. If you want to attract more comments on your work, and that's surely the reason we put work up, my advice would be to post up other sections of your work that doesn't involve child sex, or ignore that advice completely and have strong reactions and fewer crits. It's a choice isn't it?
I think lots of people are desensitised to the horrors we encounter because of over-exposure, you don't have to come from somewhere 'hard' to get that way either. Following on from what Silverelli said, (when my post above was the suggestion that this should stop, Lol!), shock is not the experience for some people, rather the opposite in fact,- boredom. Maybe there's a mistaken expectation that good writers also have good fiction ideas. Although I think having good ideas in fiction is the toughest thing there is, I certainly struggle with it. I also get the feeling that most of us on WW are really busy in our other lives and so the kind of approach that gets a good comeback here is to split work into sizeable chunks, - that can be really painful, leave pieces on site for a good time, (remember the demand each of us puts on other WWs when we post a piece up), and think about the nature of the material you do put up. Just on a more personal note here, I'm always attracted to work that has depth to it, that speaks about other things beyond itself. As a consequence I leave genres like 'chit-lit' alone, and without meaning in any sense to be cruel to you, I don't spent energy on material that's explicitly sexual either, and for the same reason, that I find it mundane.
If you think there's an issue to be examined here you can always use the forum slots, that's what they are for. For myself I have nothing else to add, and would only be repeating myself if I did say more, and then bore myself and everybody else senseless.
Becca.


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