This page is dedicated to James O'Barr and The Crow.
Fear
He screams and screams and pounds his head
against the wall until wailing phantom firetrucks
pace across his vision.
Pain, pain is all he wants.
And hate, yes hate.
We shall never forget and never forgive.
And never ever fear.
Fear is for the enemy.
Fear and bullets.
- By James O'Barr
Despair
Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles long
Coiled, one thousand miles deep
Eyes like candy, it has eyes like candy
Hard and blue, but soft as kittens feet
Out of sight or in the element of light
It could be a devil, it could be an angel
With spiders inside a vision from hell
Its spine is a vertical scream
Slow as concrete, blurred as a dream
It spins round and down on an axis of atrocity
Fueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity.
Its soul - a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain
Killing time killing time
And praying for rain
One thousand miles deep
- By James O'Barr
Concave Scream
In the city, where angels fear to hover and devils come to croon,
the sex of the night lets down her black narcotic hair under a
yellow opium moon. Here a shadow of a shadow, an earthbound ghost
shivers, not from October chill, but in erotic pain. He says to
his dead lover, "We should never have come here, with flesh so
soft and hearts so unwise, but like tigers in tall tall grass,
like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, we sucked in our fear
and we came here. Now all the atrocitites are replayed, like
a late late show. We came here but we never should have stayed.
Though we had inertia and radius and deapth, we took the last
train with velocity and passed our own deaths."
So, The Crow spirals down through a collapsed dream and the only sound he makes is...
Like a concave scream.
- By James O'Barr
Untitled
Still, so still, in the city tonight
Twelve o'clock tick-tock,
When all that is good slinks
Away like a beaten dog and the
Black black shadows are alive
With the dead, twisted poetry
In broken english, flesh and
Blood and staring faces...
So grey and despairing, strong
As steel but collapsed inside,
The Crow laughs under a
Street light, a voodoo smile of
One who lived and died and
Still yet lives...
He makes his way home where
He can be shapeless in the dark
And paint his face in the colours
Of joy...
Tonight, Hell sends an angel
Bearing gifts...
- By James O'Barr
Death
It's not death if you refuse it...
It is if you accept it.
- By James O'Barr
Pain
A year ago... A cold October night...
A broken down car on a dirt road...
A man... A girl... Madness... Pain... And the shadows...
My God, the shadows...
- By James O'Barr
Irony
The tides of sin draw tighter and brighter,
The hours become heavier and weighted,
And the shadows smile, dark and wild.
This is when hope and desire collapse.
The arc of the dream descends into despair,
When innocent lovers dance
Like angels on fire.
This is when the night comes down,
A hammer on an anvil,
And the only absolution accepted
Is a legacy of brutality.
A single note rings on and on and on.
- By James O'Barr
