THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED is available through Small Press Distribution, as well as part of The Lucky Bastards Club Subscription.

90 pages
full color exterior by Pablo Vision
$15

epic rites press proudly announces the release of THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED – the first feature book by American poet Jason Hardung. Jason’s book is a harrowing journey through the dangerous underbelly of the American underground - where drug abuse, violence, death and jail are part of the everyday landscape. Written in an unflinching style that weds the modern idiom to the more reflexive voice of poetry, this book does not avoid the realities of life, but confronts them head-on in a way that does not forget what makes a poem a poem.

AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION!

Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the chest
with a twelve inch butcher knife.
Between the ribs
a sharp tongue poking through hot teeth.
A tiger mauling a tourist
through the bars of the cage.
 
He caught his final reflection in the blade.
The kitchen was a mess that day.
The dishes were piled the drain dripped
like the hands of the clock ticked
the last minutes of love.
The space shuttle Columbia taking off.
Three two one.
 
He died of a broken heart.
I wish I could have told him
the monsters are in the head.
 
Kurt Cobain knew
but a shot gun doesn't leave any room
for self-improvement.
I always tried a big shot
of dope
a warm train that always ran on schedule.
My heart Promitory point
the needle the golden spike
in my transcontinental railroad.
 
At least that way
I would have a few seconds
so I could feel
what it is like
to never have
left the womb.

Hiroshima is a city in my chest
and your car is just outside my window
as I drive by just to make sure
you are alive.
I can see the light in there
and I have raged against the dying
of it night after night, and raged
against cops dealers teachers and priests.
I burn brick buildings with my insecurities
and dig up skeletons in the front yard
piece them together
dance 'til they fall apart –
and I move on.
 
The couple holding hands smiling
walking down the sidewalk
leaving me no room to pass,
sharing ice cream and secrets and the wind.
I want to burn them too.
 
Burn the flag
burn the text books
burn the greed
burn the sky
burn my veins, my heart, my eyes
burn the neutered children clueless
that money has everything to do with happiness
and you can't always be what you want to be
even if you try real hard.
 
The truth is they will end up in a job they hate
they will spend more time with co-workers
that they fantasize about killing
than with the people that make them feel human.
 
and one day, yes, they will fall in love
and hundreds of thousands of innocent
bystanders will die in the blast
faces skinned of emotion
knees skinned from so many prayers
and no matter what
they will be buried
with nothing
but bones.

These fingers flexed for mother's milk
for the distorted faces behind the bars of my cage
for shiny things and the sharp light above.
These fingers slammed in car doors
learned not to touch a red stove
father's razor and dog shit in the yard.
These fingers dirtied from long days of digging holes
and playing football ‘til the streetlights blinked on.
These fingers felt wet love for the first time
between her legs in the back seat on a Saturday night.
These fingers strummed six strings
the songs of men that burnt out not faded away.
These fingers wrapped around whiskey bottles
‘til they wrapped around the piss stained edges
of a toilet in a basement in south Cheyenne.
These fingers crafted maple, cherry and oak into centerpieces
in homes hanging on the edge of mountains in Colorado
while the homeowners had their fingers wrapped around wine glasses
credit cards and the steering wheel of all terrain Cadillacs.
These fingers stretched around the neck of sinners.
These fingers balled up in rage
broke noses and eye sockets of people just like me.
These fingers burnt black blistered
from glass pipes burnt spoons and tin foil.
These fingers flipped through dumpsters for food
and through the wallets and medicine cabinets of family and friends.
These fingers almost squeezed the trigger a few times.
These fingers form words lines stanzas now
they flex for the sun
and pick white-haired daisies with yellow faces in the park.
These fingers come together and pray every night
while I'm still out of breath
from wrapping them around myself.

I jerk off more when
my pockets are empty.
Like the free game that comes with a home
video game console,
it's not the most complicated
or the best graphics
but it came packaged with the game
so I take the ride.
Over and over.
Once before I get out of bed
and once when I get in.
There are three precise moments in life
when euphoria happens –
the two seconds during orgasm
the moment heroin hits the blood stream
and death.
 
Some day my body will be buried
in dirt, flowers will bloom from my chest
like an old toilet, a tractor tire,
a rusted wheel barrow,
or a claw-footed bath tub.
 
I will be an accessory perched in a double wide
trailer's tiny yard as Confederate flags
and windsocks wave above my remains.
And when my eye sockets become
ant hills that resemble scale models of
Mt. Vesuvius young punks will
still gather under the neon drone
of Shell Station lights burning into nothing.
Old men will talk of war weather and lawns
in barber shop chairs VFW bars and yellow
plastic fast food restaurant booths.
Murderers will still stare through razor
wire skies and wonder what it would have been
like to sail across the Tropic of Cancer or just
sail through life without taking one.
Babies will be born and some will
die before they can walk
and some will grow up and get married
and some will have everything they ever wanted
while an amateur gardener pulls weeds
from between my ribs.

Walking through the window of night
I carry a small silver cross in my drug
pocket given to me by a homeless
ex-boxer I was seventeen and impressionable
and he appeared from the box car shadows of the
Union
Pacific train yards in Cheyenne like the spirit
of Tom Horn but with a limp black eye and Mick accent
I carry this cross not because
I believe in Jesus but because
I believe in shiny things.
 
The human heart sets into motion
the plastic bag levitating in a corner
the addiction the paper planes the nickel barrel
between rotting teeth she was my heroin
I was her bitch she the hot devil
coursing through my veins the blood river 
and the canoes of native American warriors
rushing ashore have become more than
the white man's folklore
it's a movement in my gut
a battle cry an inevitable genocide
It's been four months and you are still
eating my bones with your disease 
I don't give a fuck about the sun anymore
Whether it's up or down
if it shines on my face in the morning
if the roses never grow again.
 
I blow smoke in winter's face 
pick up a stick from the sidewalk
peel the skin back with my thumbnail 
and keep walking until I'm somewhere else
drop the stick so when it comes to
it has to start over like the rest of 
the broken and the damned.

Jason "Juice" Hardung's work has been published widely through the American underground.  Appearing in The New York Quarterly, Zygote In My Coffee, Underground Voices, decomP, Thrasher, Lummox Journal just to name a few.  He has a chapbook, Breaking The Hearts Of Robots out on Covert Press.  He is co-editor of the Front Range Review and Matter Journal.  Writing, for him, is something that soothes the savage beast, or whatever it's called.  He is on probation for the next two years and hopes to have a novel done by then.  He lives in Ft. Collins Colorado and loves it there, but doesn't like all the Subarus with kayaks strapped to the roofs, the earth tone sweaters, Teva sandals, or white kids in Reggae bands. 

"The Broken and The Damned by Jason Hardung is a love poem for the schools of lost children. The story of a boy waiting at the corner of lost and found for the light of his mother's eyes to change to gold, a long drive into that dark episode we call father that always finds us where we live. These hungry poems will inhabit you like a junkie's old leather coat, the fix is verse. They need to be held and read out loud to your delinquent heart. Hardung's history packs a .38, does time, rides shotgun with a Cadillac moon singing liberation lyrics that will provide a solid rush, that healing you get when you first feel the poem enter the bloodstream." - S.A. Griffin

"The Broken and the Damned by Jason Hardung is very powerful. Vivid imagery combined with abundant candor make this collection sing. Travels on the vulnerable landscape of the psyche, memorable, beautiful, painful, human." --- Ellyn Maybe

"It's hard for me to be objective because I adopt literary geniuses as brothers. In a nutshell, Jason Hardung is cruelly talented & his poems are murder in a book. His tender but also brutally visceral poems are so adeptly rendered, they make razor blades slide down... the throat like Bailey's. In my opinion, Breece Pan...cake, Charles Bukowski, & Phil Ochs are privileged to share the same canon. Buy this ASAP!"-- Jeni Olin author of Blue Collar Holiday, Hanging Loose Press

• reviewed by Todd Moore here.
• reading by Jason Hardung on the epic rites radio network here.
• press release here.
• purchase through Small Press Distribution here.

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