Reader discretion advised. The following Feature is for adults only and depicts images and poetry that may be disturbing to some readers. Readers are fore-warned, proceed at your own risk.
“I’m still just another scream walking like a man.” H.D.Fisher
Hart D. Fisher is an assault to the senses & by all accounts the most controversial figure in the poetry community. Early in his career he established his own publishing company Boneyard Press and is author of Poems for the Dead & Still Dead. Fisher has clawed through every bloody facet of the entertainment industry in both main stream & underground arenas. Besides running Glenn Danzig's comic line Verotik, he designed concept illustrations for Marilyn Manson, mentored Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance & was a key lynchpin in his comic career. Hart Fisher first published Stephen Elliott's poetry in Flowers on the Razorwire & fittingly James Franco is slated to star in an upcoming Elliott-based film. Hart has directed & developed countless films & music videos; recently editing Danzig’s "On A Wicked Night". Regarding Hart Fisher's career experience...the list goes on.
Currently, Fisher has alchemized a riveting new project American Horrors, a media juggernaut hungry to devour the world of horror & stomp it the way Disney dominates the family genre. It is a powerhouse venture set to light the horror genre ablaze by monetizing distribution, production, publishing & the television horror networks; not to mention hell-bent on testing the limits of entertainment, giving horror fans the content they truly deserve.
Life has a way of severing dreams, leaving them hanging off a butcher’s hook & that is what Hart Fisher is able to do with a pen. His poetry comes from personal struggle, be it raw or taboo Hart lives his poetry. It is honesty at its most horrific or beautiful, always “stripped to the bone, directly naked”. It is his sordid legacy to art & the pulse of his creativity. He concludes that poetry, of all his creative endeavors best describes him as an artist & has opened the most doors for him; that being a huge kiss on the brow of the poetry community.
Hart Fisher is a multi-faceted talent but insists, it’s not a result of strict focus. A self-proclaimed “crazy Gemini” he excels having multiple projects going on at a time. With all his creative outlets he hadn’t thought of himself as a poet until the shooting of his first film The Garbage Man, during which his girlfriend was violently raped & murdered. This led to a mental breakdown, but would also shape-shift Hart’s writing career, resurrecting him a beast of extraordinary emotion & intensity. His work has been the target of censorship and damnation throughout his career, but he describes his work as a spontaneous “fit or seizure” an uncontrollable possession within him, a purge or bleed-out caused by the inhumanity of humanity, a manic urgency that “burns the methane” of grief and rage.
Moving to Los Angeles, Hart continues to shovel bones, haunting stages like a macabre character ascending from the ashes of an Anne Rice novel. Those who have seen him read live might assume he sleeps upside-down. His work is impossible to define in a traditional sense because he has the bewitching ability to blur the lines of poetry & horror. Critics always want to shove art into a box & what’s rare about Hart Fisher’s work is that it’s confessional & uncompromising, it will burn through any box it’s placed in. He is a literary necromancer whose words are seething, visceral & the hemorrhage of raw impulse. Hart Fisher’s poetry is like the taste of metal or biting a live wire, it has electricity to it...high voltage.
So, for such an insanely functional icon what could possibly be left to conquer? For Hart Fisher, a heavy-hitter in horror genre & impossible to hog-tie, American Horrors is running with full steam, his YouTube channel CrimePaysHart is in full force & you can read the inside scoop from the recent South By Southwest event in Waco Texas at American Horrors, he has new poetry on Facebook & plans to publish more titles soon, including works from otherwise out-of-print editions.
The following poems are previously unpublished works and are subject to restriction and copyright. Reader & viewer discretion advised. All Rights Reserved. Images are subject to restriction & protected and property of Hart D. Fisher
UNTITLED
I remember how I found you
Like a sleeping girl
Waiting for christmas
Waiting for morning
Tiny pink dress
Just a little worn
Stray threads like so many faded days.
I remember how I found you
Lying so still
Cheeks still rosey
Lips still pert.
Your hair was bound back with a ribbon
Crusty and dirty
A piece of some kind of dream
Some kind of hope
Threaded through straw.
I remember how I found you
Crumpled in the grass
The sun was shinning
You had one shoe
One sock
Old polish on your toes
Out of place under a blue sky
Clouds like soft fur.
I remember how I found you
Your mouth was half open
Fingers curled up tight
There was an insect
Trapped away under your eyelid
It pushed and twisted in the sun
Little legs scrabbling
And the rope…
The rope…
I began to scream.
Hart D. Fisher © 2011
white hot heat surging from the years behind
up my skin
through my nerves
crawling down the street
a thundering pulse beat that makes my vision swim.
A fire without hope
Ticks in the face
I’m watching you
I’m feeling you breathe
Shuddering
From a shadow
A black cat eager to cross your path
Carrion feeder
A mangled priest with one hand down his pants and the other on the holy mother cross
Transgressing
I howl with the wolves
A hungry beggar at the dumpster
We jump in place
Super sized and found wanting
One pimp to another
Two jungle cats eyeing meat.
In the shadow
It’s not even my smile.
It’s his
A grin with no pity
Trembling in my car I dream of all that blood on my naked skin
Out on the street
Watching your window
Waiting for the lights to go out.
Hart D. Fisher © 2011
UNTITLED
Lying at the bottom of the tub
Looking up at the sky
The rain burns like old memories
Smothering my face
Tattooing my lips
Slowly
Patiently
Without passion
Burning
Like a corpse on fire
Like a flag falling to the ground
I burn
Moving down the street
Watching the squatters shuffle and die before our eyes
So many petals before the savior
I burn
The end of the wick
The sputtering candle in her corner
Never enough to keep the night at bay
Her fears at the end of a knife
The twist of it’s edge
I burn
Slowly
Patiently
Without pity
Without you.
Hart D. Fisher © 2011
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Review by Apryl Skies
