Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: ghost

  • THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    Series: Filter Failure: Beneath the Noise

    (the crest) (dad at sea)

    Short Announcment: You never really leave the house you grew up in. It leaves pieces of itself in you.

    In the house I grew up in I found the McCarthy crest yesterday — buried in a box by the stairs, right where the house keeps its secrets.

    Same one I’ve got inked over my heart — Jackiemac4ever.

    A promise that never healed right.

    Funny thing about symbols: they start as pride and end as proof.

    Proof that somebody once stood here and mattered.

    Proof that love still bleeds through the cracks of time.

    Next to it was my father, trapped in a photograph — late thirties, early forties, somewhere between wisdom and warning.

    He’s standing on a sailboat, face tilted toward the wind, a man still convinced there’s more horizon left than storm.

    I was twenty-three when I lost him.

    Jack was nineteen when I lost him, too.

    Two men — the bookends of my life — both gone before I figured out what any of it meant.

    Mom sat in her chair, smaller now, soft around the edges, like the world’s been quietly erasing her outline.

    We talked about moving her out of the old house.

    Said it like logistics, but it felt like betrayal.

    Every wall in that place still hums with our laughter, our fights, our noise.

    Every step sounds like an echo of who we were trying to be.

    The air was thick with dust and ghosts.

    Not the kind that scare you — the kind that wait for you to understand.

    Every photo frame, a silent sermon.

    Every object, an altar.

    When I left, I didn’t cry. Or maybe I have selective retention.

    I Didn’t say goodbye.

    Just stood in the driveway, hollowed out and human — the last McCarthy man in a story written in vanishing ink.

    But I don’t call it grief anymore.

    Grief sits still.

    This — this is participation.

    A ritual of remembering.

    A man standing in the ashes of what built him,

    saying softly to the wind,

    I’m still here.

  • Council of the Damned

    How the fuck do you crawl out of rage?

    How the fuck do you scrub sadness off your teeth?

    Answer: you don’t.

    I call in the heavyweights,

    the intellectual cavalry,

    and it’s a goddamn carnival.

    Nietzsche storms the room screaming will to power,

    eyes rolling like a rabid horse.

    Aurelius is polishing his stoic turds

    while the empire burns behind him.

    Wilde wants better wallpaper.

    Twain heckles from the cheap seats.

    Thompson kicks the door in with a shotgun,

    mescaline dripping from his pores.

    Bukowski is shirtless, pissing in the corner.

    Burroughs has turned into an insect,

    clattering needles like antennae.

    Joyce is babbling in tongues that even hell won’t translate.

    Byron is dry-humping the apocalypse itself.

    Kerouac is pacing the ceiling,

    muttering go, go, go like a scratched record.

    And Hitchens—dear Christ—

    Hitchens is on fire,

    lighting one cigarette off the next,

    snarling through smoke,

    grief is a goddamn scam, don’t tithe to it.

    The walls buckle.

    The sky splits.

    Ink, blood, static, numbers—

    the whole matrix vomiting itself onto the floor.

    And me?

    I’m strapped to the chair,

    still asking the same useless question:

    how in the fuck do I get free?

    The answer is written on the walls in piss and whiskey:

    You don’t.

    You ride the rage like a dying horse,

    you suck up the sadness like sacrament,

    and you learn to make the end of the world

    sound like a song worth singing.

  • UNKILLABLE

    Fuck The Matrix and This Simulation.

    Almost Arriving

    Every time I inch toward something called normal,

    when the day almost tricks me into believing I’ve arrived,

    doom slips its hand back on my shoulder.

    I will never accept it.

    Not in this life, not in any.

    Jack is gone, they tell me,

    but I spit back the only truth I know:

    He may be gone,

    but he will never, ever, ever be forgotten.

    You will know his name.

    You will know his story.

    If I remain in this strange matrix of survival,

    it is only to keep him alive in every syllable,

    every note, every silence that dares to fill the room.

    My grief is my rebellion.

    My love, unkillable.

  • Father of Madness

    “They say time heals all wounds.”

    Who in the fuck are they?

    Some bureaucrats of grief, clocking in, clocking out, wielding the second hand like a scalpel, deciding when the wound has been stitched,

    when the blood should dry,

    when the rage should settle into something softer.

    Time—the prison, the con artist, the liar.

    It doesn’t heal. It magnifies.

    It twists the knife while whispering lullabies.

    It counts the days like a debt collector, reminding me of every second Jack no longer breathes, and every hour the bastard who gave him poison does.

    And still, they tell me time is the answer.

    That I should let it pass, let it work.

    I want to take that very hand of time,

    the well-intended, patronizing hand,

    and smash it for 19 straight minutes

    with a dead blow hammer,

    until the gears stop turning,

    until the numbers scatter like broken teeth,

    until time itself finally understands

    what it means to be overwhelmingly crushed. 

    Miranda, devil in a hoodie, dealer for pocket change was never a scapegoat.

    He was a man who knew exactly what he handed over.

    I wonder if he ever wakes up sweating,

    if he ever feels the shadow behind him,

    if he ever senses the weight of me

    staring at the back of his skull.

    Sixty ways in a minute,

    three hundred sixty in an hour,

    eight thousand six hundred forty in a day—

    I could carve my grief into his flesh.

    I could become time,

    the father of madness,

    breaking him down into seconds,

    watching him beg for a mercy

    that he never gave to Jack.

    But there is no justice.

    Only the slow, excruciating unraveling of the world going around the sun, 

    where killers breathe and sons are buried.

    There is no closure, no grand moment of reckoning.

    There is only the hell of waking up each day,

    wishing for ghosts,

    praying for gruesome vengeance,

    and knowing—the only end is mine.

  • FATHER SICARIO

    The streets pulse like open veins, black tar slick, the night a slow bleeding thing. Neon hums. Buzzing flies. A dealer on the corner licking his lips, pulling at his collar like he knows. Like he smells it. The reek of old grief turned to something else. Something with teeth.

    I move through the alleyways, pockets heavy with ghosts, fingers tapping the weight of the thing inside my coat. Not a gun. No. Something older. Something sharper. A father’s rage honed to the edge.

    And then there’s the voice in my head, Del Toro-cool, a slow drawl:
    Jack is gone.
    Jack is gone.
    Jack is gone.

    And someone has to pay.

    I remember the last time I saw his hands—calloused, taped up, always ready for a fight. But he never saw this one coming. Didn’t know the rules. Didn’t know the game was rigged before he even stepped in the ring.

    He was a fighter.
    This dead city made him a corpse.

    I light a cigarette, let the smoke coil in my lungs. The dealer sees me now. A flicker of something in his eyes. Recognition? No, not yet. But he will.

    He shifts his weight, sniffs. He thinks I’m just another buyer. Another lost man looking to fill the hole in his chest with powder and promises.

    But I’m not here to buy.

    I’m here to collect.

    I step forward, slow, deliberate, the way a lion moves before the pounce. He starts to speak—some rehearsed pitch, some poison-laced gospel—but I cut him off.

    “Shut your mouth. You’ve already said enough.”

    And then I show him.

    The steel. The weight. The cold certainty of a father who has nothing left to lose.

    His hands go up. Shaking. Sweat pools in the hollow of his throat. A scared animal now. His mouth moves faster than his brain, words tumbling out, desperate, sloppy.

    “I—I didn’t know, man, I didn’t know, I swear! I just—It wasn’t personal.”

    And then there’s the voice in my head, Del Toro-cool, a slow drawl:
    “For me, it is personal.”

    I press the blade against his ribs, just enough for him to feel the promise behind it. I lean in close, my voice low, steady.

    Miranda, pleading like an 8-year-old, who’s lost his blanket and thinks crying will bring it back.

    “I didn’t know!”

    I’m somewhere between uncontrollable rage and elation, but 100% locked in the moment.

    “Well, now you do.”

    His breath stutters. A whimper caught in his throat.

    I exhale smoke in his face, watch the fear seep into his bones.

    No prayers.
    No deals.
    No mercy.

    Only the reckoning.

    FATHER SICARIO (Del Torro Cool)

  • Junkyard Ghosts Looking for a Fight

    it started one night

    when the moon sulked behind the clouds,

    and the air buzzed with the sound of something unnatural.

    not birds, not planes.

    just cold, unfeeling machines

    drifting against the wind’s will,

    junkyard ghosts looking for a fight.

    no one knew where they came from,

    but the bastards were ours.

    man’s great pride and inevitable mistake:

    to build what he doesn’t understand,

    to send it soaring into the sky

    and call it progress. 

    then came the orbs.

    smooth as polished emeralds 

    gleaming like they’d been forged

    in some black star’s furnace.

    no rivets, no seams, no blinking lights—

    just quiet, humming judgment

    from an enormous void we thought was empty.

    our junkyard ghosts looked fragile, 

    wings bent, rotors spinning like drunk spiders.

    they moved in straight lines, predictable,

    while the orbs curved through the sky

    moving like whispers of a language

    older than time itself.

    and when they clashed,

    it wasn’t a war,

    it was a slaughter.

    men in suits argued on screens,

    pointing fingers at each other

    while their creations were crushed like ants.

    “defense budgets,” they said.

    “countermeasures.”

    as if the sky gave a damn

    about our bureaucratic bullshit.

    and all the while,

    down below,

    we drank ourselves blind

    under the flickering glow of bar signs.

    some prayed to gods

    they didn’t believe in.

    others wrote poetry no one would read.

    but most just stared at the sky,

    watching our junkyard ghosts looking for a fight

    and losing.

    they fell one by one,

    burning bright as they tumbled.

    our man-made birds and blades,

    our drones and flying dreams—

    reduced to ash

    against the cold, calculated cruelty

    of their orbiting gods.

    but here’s the rub:

    the orbs didn’t care about us.

    we weren’t the target,

    just collateral damage.

    they were here for our toys,

    our arrogance,

    our need to scrape at the stars

    like desperate whores.

    one by one, the orbs descended.

    more silent than death,

    merciless, cosmic executioners—

    the kind who don’t bother with last words,

    just the unrelenting swing

    of the reapers scythe. 

    and when the last of our machines fell,

    the sky went dark.

    we should’ve learned then,

    but we didn’t.

    we kept building,

    sending new junkyard ghosts

    into a sky that didn’t want them,

    still looking for a fight we couldn’t win.

    and somewhere,

    in the cold reaches of hell and beyond,

    the orbs are still watching,

    waiting,

    ready to remind us

    that we’re nothing more

    than ants on the edge of the abyss.

    so pour another drink.

    raise your glass to the ghosts,

    to the machines we built

    and the arrogance that made us think

    we could conquer the stars.

  • Ghosts in a cheap room

    Ghosts in a cheap room


    my old man was tough but I wouldn’t call him a bastard,
    rough hands, stentorian voice,
    but it was those eyes, they were odd in a beautiful yet chilling way , the way he’d stare right
    through me, like he already knew the end.
    he checked out early, left me holding the bag—
    a kid too young to know the game was rigged.
    I got older, meaner, learned to drink it down,
    fill the empty spaces with smoke and bad decisions,
    but nothing ever took root, just ashes in a cheap ashtray.
    then my boy, Jack
    all bright-eyed, all promise and fire, went cold at nineteen.
    like he was never even here.
    one day laughing, the next day gone,
    As if the most beautiful ghost ever decided to punch my gut and keep walking.
    so now it’s just me, an old man stuck between
    some past that’s long dead and a future that’s already given up.
    they talk about the Father, the Son, and some Holy Ghost—
    but what do they know about ghosts?
    all I got are dead men’s whispers
    and shadows that follow me from room to room.
    maybe I’m the ghost now,
    some sober, leftover thing, wandering between bad memories and worse nights,
    waiting for that final bell to ring me out.
    but until then, I’ll keep dreaming of drinking
    the cheap whiskey that almost drown me,
    chewing the lousy cigarettes I cannot light
    and telling those ghosts to fuck off—
    because it’s all just a bad joke , a hit—
    and I am the punchline.