BEASTHOOD
a poem by Dylan Fornoff

About a month ago Dylan asked if he could take over an additional room in the hotel. He already has created a creepy paint gallery for his large wall murals in Room # 22. So in this other room, Room # 21, he set up a computer and had been occasionally dissappearing into it for further secret projects. Today he announced he is actually (slow brewing) creating a large poem, entitled Beasthood.

Why Beasthood?

Dylan responds, "It is a take off of the term manhood and what coming-of-age means, but here coming-of-age means something completely different."

We'll keep you posted...

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Renee Angle writes:

Dylan was kind enough the other day to share a snippet of Beasthood with me as we sat in the bar each doing our respective writing. He read me about the first page or so. I thought the writing style and setup were exquisite! Dark, intriguing, full of rich symbolism. I don't want to give anything away about the content, but he's definitely off to a great start. He's written a bunch since too, I'm told.

I'm loving the creative vibe here these days!!!

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Blair writes:

Wed Jan 30, 2008
scribe alive reading in the rain

Yesterday was green as if in a season of Spring. Dylan stood on my porch and told me he'd left school. And I said, "And you're not coming to San Francisco either, are you." He confirmed he was considering not joining us after all. "Then why buy the ticket?" I asked. Maybe I spit it out as words can sound biting. It was winter, actually. "And what about Beasthood?" I asked. Again, he was on a downslide and almost mumbled that it would also probably never get finished. I wanted him to 'come-of-age', like his story sets up, and grow into the character that it would take to finish. To write it true he would have to embody that growth. Why not use the poem to attain that? I don't know what I said next, but he left, agreeing.

Apparently he spent his night and dawn through some epiphany. He returned tonight, proudly, triumphantly, and humbled by the pages in his own hands, his own work. "It's finished," he showed me in the kitchen. "Nine pages."

A few months back, some time in October, Dylan and I took a long car ride down to Somerset through the October leaves. They coated the countryside. And he read to me the opening pages of Beasthood. There is a certain part a few paragraphs in where he states, "Alone... listen... alone... listen..." where I felt he'd really found his own voice for the work, the narrator's voice, and his own voice. Golden driplets from the sap of some true source. I loved it. And Dylan reading it, as we sped through the change of season decorated with endless colored leaves, made it all the more wonderful an experience. I looked at him like he was Dostoevsky reading to me the first pages of his work Notes from the Underground, and asking me what I thought. I was very proud of my friend Dylan and liked very much what he was doing. I imagined people reading about this initial reading in a hundred years, and them imagining how excellent a ride this must have been to hear the poem they can only study, enveloped in a wet October countryside that mirrors the story, read from the author's mouth and soul itself.

"O good," he said, delighted, reassured, hoping to deliver on some genuine level of spirit and heartfelt soul, some soul definition, some genuine offering of his experience as caught and wrapped in this work he was summoning. "I'm putting everything I can into it." He assured me, "My every bit of everything I can."

Something like that were his words. He sounded like Kalil Gibran stretching to produce his work, The Prophet. Gibran said "Every word of it was the very best I had to offer."

So naturally when he came to me and said he'd dropped it, I wasn't just disappointed, I wanted to be brutal. I don't know what I said to him exactly, but I'm sure it was unkind and merciless.

So it is great that he came bouncing back tonight with shaking hands holding out his masterpiece! And at midnight Renee and Todd Holsopple and I sat back on the same damn porch and created an audience, while Dylan, scribe alive, read to us his entire new work entitled Beasthood. What a treat. And to hear it in his voice, what a haunting.

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Skot Jones writes:

Beasthood (the Audience)

Dylan,

Post it.

Sincerely,

-Us

BEASTHOOD 

-by Dylan Fornoff 



I am a liar. 

When I was very young I inspected the legged worms 

that devoured the plumed trees. 

They fascinated me with meekness 

that destroyed beauty, created it, and 

learned to fly. I would sit alone in stillness, 

as the worm, enshrouded, as 

the worm, and wait, concentrate, 

on darkness, on flight. 

I have never flown. 

My child-self grew 

Into a new persuasion. 

A fascination with the depths. 



I watch miniature galaxies launch apart, 

Shooting stars, slime dark hundreds growing into 

Separation, into monsters, 

behemoths beside their tiny former selves, 

tangling out trees, branching into fat 

fruit I happily devoured, having learned to 

create beauty through its destruction. I did 

not display my changing in a boastful way, 

as the worm, but humbled myself before 

creation as the toad. 



I lie on strangled leaves, raven cracks. 

Worm writhes forward, hungering. Fly dies. 

Night, goat, brays my name. 

There are no clouds. 

Black titans puncture sky. 

The world's words born 

of great goat night. Beasthood born in 

dark. The way the fly goes, I go too. The way 

the buzzing drives you, I drive too. Irreverent, 

incessant, iridescent. Quick and black in great goat 

night. Multitudes blink. 



The light around the pond is always smaller than the 

time before. Soon there will be no cosmos. 

Over thousands of visits I witness 

light shrink back from dark boughs. 

Trembling, hoary, slobbering needles 

losing cones in the pond. Cones are 

resilient and float for many days in thickness, 

stuck ships in glacial stagnant algae drifts. 

Bloated to capacity at last they struggle 

to the corpse garden at the bottom of the 

pond, pulled down by over-ripeness, 

they sink like wraiths to the invisible depths. 

The sky in the dying season is a fire. 

The evening wind will bring the countenance 

of flame from the maples 

to the pond, where the hot pages drift, sparks 

from center to thick, slowly dying. 



There is an in-between stage. Between birth 

and beast. Between cosmos and toad˜a 

stage where you find out. About fish. 

About hiding in the muck. 

It is branching out, the tangling. 

Arms and legs appear. And 

the wet plumpness. Sometimes for two years 

(I have witnessed it. I watch first and then 

devour and always remember and always 

remember). This stage is dangerous. 

It is when you learn to eat. Fish look attractive to you, 

like brothers. They will deceive you. They will 

try to devour you. 



But there are worse. 



I have heard of the ocean. 

A place that is a being, a being that is a home. 

Infinitely conscious, many minded. 

Immaculate betrayals. Deep shimmering. 

Phosphorescent ghosts. Leviathan 

Conquers every heart. Luminescent 

Skeleton‚s eyes loom, full of spite and 

Hunger. A beast of unfathomable depths 

and sizes. Full of unfathomable terrors. 

Complete envelopment, Transfixing, 

glimmering teeth. Cold-blooded night 

of soundless beasts within a beast too deaf 

with immenseness to comprehend 

its crashing, or Silence, or holiness, or devouring. 



But there are worse. 



I have heard of hell. 

There man may suffer eternally without 

shock or habituation. There is the warm 

cloak of darkness and the aroma of 

burning flesh, fat, and bone. Screams 

of joyous agony fill the air and every 

eardrum is a volcanic eruption, and every 

smile is a razor-ripped full grin, and every 

tear is salted honey over wounds, a refreshing 

lava flow, enough. 



The monsters are strong. 

At night a voice comes to me before sleep 

break away, don't speak, of dying 

leaves, suited now in somber 

brown as the season fades from red 

and winter, with its white glass wrap, 

comes to form your new tongue. 

The voice manifests angelic. 

The seductive being tries to 

smother me with its caress, 

every time I strangle it back to silence. 

The struggle is a difficult one. 



The wind is petrified. Stone bears moss quietly. 

Bird sleeps. Goat does not mate. River coiled tight 

around its bends, rushing under the force 

that binds it 

I salute you. Your task is eternal 

cycles. Lacerating earth with your fine amorphous 

tongue. Searing lather corrodes the bank. There 

is no time to thank you for your beauty, 

for your un-belief, for you are instantly 

reborn into forgetting. Hold no grudge. 



The caves are a place I go. They are gouged deep in 

maple valley (an inferno serpent in the dying 

season). They are deep as the 

pond and fade into impenetrable blackness. 

It is a warm silence, a pregnant silence 

dry with ashy leaves. When I found the 

caves it was the thick of the thaw. It was 

much different then. Green. I had strayed 

far into the valley after a toad. Deep in the 

running green rock. I first noticed 

shadows. Inhabitants. A mother 

and her young. The mother could not 

sense me, I was too much the dead toad. 

The two cubs crushed flowers playfully. 

Sometimes they would travel to the river 

and I behind them in the rocks. 

The mother taught the cubs to fish. 

I watched them for three days before they 

discovered me. The sound of miserable 

croaking ( which escapes me as my lies do). 

I left there bodies by that river, surrounded 

By a scattering of petals. 



The caves have been mine ever since. 

The silence of the stones attest to it 

with an oppressiveness that would 

crush you. They will not speak under 

their new master. They are no longer 

so tightly kept. The water works its way 

through them in a trickle. I have not tended 

the stones for two years. I hear them 

moving. What do I care if they kill me? 

Nothing will happen. I will join the stones 

in silence, that is all. 



Alone. In the pitch night of dark-rank. 

Alone in only pine, in endlessness. 

Sound is nothing, heavy drops on soft 

dank earth, hot air permeated with girth 

of trees, bed of oily needles, gnarled 

mushrooms breathe, silent insects creep 

and writhe the sap is thick and bitter 

never tapped. The dark is 

thick and bitter, never seen. Thick 

black boughs. Even in day there is only dark. 

I swim in it. I am, forever, never ending spires. 

I rip and shred the flaky bark and puncture 

soft moist rings, wood-flesh walls and 

flesh-thick stink, the hardest to wear off 

the longest black day, the longest 

resistance against river rushing. Against 

earth and wild, against wind immortal. 



I peel moss back from stone. Stone 

is silent. I eat the moss. Stone is silent. 

The moss is what you eat. 

The moss is what you will become. 

Stone is silent. 



Die well and sleep, flower of the grove. Spring 

will weep for you again. Fire is a fading 

melody. This day will end. Night will fall. 

A new day is to begin. A day of endless winter, 

where the white wraith‚s deathly pallor rules. 

The snow covers all flaws without 

question. I lie then, in the fields, and let the 

specter gently cover me, wet, white, and thick, 

the same as any flaw. I watch and wait. 

The Falling takes forever. 



The pond is black beneath the ice. I have cleared away 

some snow. One eye in the center clear 

of snow. I cannot fall in. The fish are 

trapped, flashing silver. They are 

murmuring about the kill. The tadpoles are 

hiding in the muck. The sky is lifeless and the earth 

is glowing, stark white.. At first nothing is wrong. 

Then the ice is broken. I have witnessed it before. 

I step lightly, speak nothing, breathe toad-like, 

in cold silence. 



No bird flies. No insects creep. 

No tracks pierce the snow. 

The white wraith. In the bleached bone of 

winter. The distant heatless sun. To the deer frozen in 

the river. To the honey bee, frozen with the 

flower. Clean and cruel in nature. 

The sky is barren lifeless matter. The trees 

churn out slow symphonies. 

Branches break into cacophony. 

Plumes are gone. The snow is the only one. 



It is falling thick and fast, heavy and bright. 

Night, frozen black. Stars ice the sky. 

The moon is a skeleton orb. The wind jags 

into crisp whiplash. The white wraith 

winds upward with the wind. 

phantasms scream in the violent wind. 

Trees from the wood, 

iced through, crash apart. Snow Lurches 

from the cold hide of dark-rank. The air is 

thick and heavy and fast. My mouth is 

watering with description. 



I can hear the sugar running through the tree. 

Soft and sweet and slow the sugar running 

with my head against the trunk. I can hear it. 

It is a pure flow, hidden even from the cold 

that tarnished and felled its thousand plumes. 

I understand the sound of the sugar, it is a 

language whispered between, 

I understand you. I hear. I hear the crystal‚s humming ebb. 



Men say there is a soul. A soul that 

cycles like the seasons. Do not believe it, 

only one autumn comes for man, 

and one winter, and one spring 

to be born into, and for summer 

you may only weep, but I do not 

weep, oh I do not weep.