THE MASK INSIDE MY HEAD

Intervention on a mail art envelope. For the blackbird project of David Stone. A week later I wrote this text around the image:












To all victims of christianity, including myself.



I’m wearing a blackbird mask inside my head
for all the sins I’ve not committed
Fear was part of a self thought education
Came to me as natural as Tchernobyl’s radiation.

Shining through my eyes were those mutated plants
growing in mutilated bodies on the borderline
of wrong and purple midsummer migrations.
Why don’t you do right like some other men do?
shouted a milkshake in a mind-blowing desert.

Christ on the cross in your name
Jews were slaughtered as cattle already in the 4th century
Books were burned, women were stoned to death
Bishops raped little pagan boys & girls
Priests told me to believe in hell and damnation
to suffocate red resistance, to embrace suit surrender.

I’m wearing their masks inside my skin
They cauterized my soul with many irons
Yes, my whole life has been an estimation
of the damage cause by holy fires and learning
how to heal the third-degree burns in my brain.

Spontaneous combustion of the heart
makes me a bewildered displaced person.
It took me 56 years to renounce my catholic birth.
Free at last, free at last, I want to be buried
in untamed unhallowed earth. I want to be
married to any sulphur witch.



Guido Vermeulen
27 July 2010