About
My name is Peter Harrison Green. I am a multidisciplinary artist from Decatur, Georgia, specializing in compositions/recordings, writings, and visual art all coalescing into a body of work greater than the sum of its parts, in representation and in magnitude.
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Being the product of around 6 months of development, Prophet was initially intended to be the penultimate song for an album with the now defunct project Apocrypha, ending up as a solo piece built around expanding my repertoire in psychedelic, free-wheeling avant/freak folk deeper into the compositional idioms of avant-garde jazz, the more intricate soundscaping of electroacoustic and post-industrial works, and the intense intimacy of the most potent and unique singer-songwriter works out there, the latter requiring a vulnerability I’ve had to work for a long time to build up to.
Prophet
Moonsickness
The Crab Scene
Her blood is a shallow pool, surrounding her like a snow angel. I look to the sky, and feel the snow on my face. I look back to her, and there she is, enveloped in flakes of velvet stained ice. The roads are frozen over, and snow piles above the doors of every building. The wind lacerates my face and hands, pooling into my eyes until I can see the fractals glisten before me. Like a dissection, the frigid air slices me open, goring me until I can’t see, because my eyes have a hundred million little holes in them, each filled with a crystalline shape I fail to trace the contours of. My vision blurs from the sheer over-exertion, and I keel over into the sweet abandon of black nothing.
I dream of crystals divine and bright, folding inward on themselves in ways so subtle and infantesimal that even light, in its restrictively large wavelength, can’t trace the full intricacies.
I awake again in the snow. The warmth of Marcelle’s blood has now engulfed my side, rousing me from the ill fated sleep of the frozen wind. I push myself to the ground with a cascading wave of effort, using up most of the energy left in my body. The blood now soaked into my clothing will soon begin to cool, and, even worse, will run out after the 15-something holes in her chest exhaust themselves. I have no choice but to move, given that out here in the open air, there is only death in stasis.
I steady myself, now shivering as the pain returns to my body. I can feel my extremities aching and screaming from the flush of stagnated sension. My blood flows once again, only as a result of her river running dry. I wonder if she has anything more to give me, now that there’s nothing left to lose. With reckless abandon, as a dying heat surges in my chest. I sulk downward, wrap my hands around her legs, and heave. The strain and effort sends shocks of attrition throughout my body, pulsing with every throbbing nerve still warm enough to live. I tighten my grip, and, just as I realize what parts of me hadn’t yet returned to form, hear a crack. My hand feels numb, but the difference in balance and weight tells me I’ve lost my lower two fingers, potentially my entire ulnar nerve. My entire lower grip is useless, dumb muscle. My fingers are gone.
I proceed with the task at hand, pulling her along as the pain becomes a sort of fogged up haze, like I’m drugged on anesthesia. I crawl through attrition in the face of some inconceivable thing beyond death, beyond decay, where my viscera and bone fragments splay out across the cosmos, every nanometer of me searing with pain until the last stars burn out into shells of iron and dying protons.
For hours, I drag, and drag, and drag, and drag, and drag,anddrag,anddraganddraganddraganddrag until I can’t remember where I am, who I am, who the hollow shell of a woman I carry with me used to be. For days, I somehow pull myself through the needle-piercings of snowfall careening through the wind in an unceasing and undying litany, scraping with dissonance and discordance until the tonality of life fades away. I don’t feel anything, the frost takes everything from me. The frost becomes me. For years, I heave, and I drag, and I stumble, until my actions lose all meaning, and all there is left is the cold and what I used to be.
Then I find a cabin.
Burning with a sunburst glow, wood reinforced by a frigid glaze sealing away the only warmth left in this life. Distance matters not, and for the first time in so very long, I move faster, dragging and heaving to find an end to this futile display. I feel it all now, the sting, the exhaustion, the hunger, the fatigue, the dread of all these things bearing down on me one last time. As my body gives me one last ultimatum, I let go of her right arm, and pull open the door.
I collapse. I lay there for only a moment, a reprieve so insignificant yet so necessary, just to rouse within me some impossible demand to pull her through the doorstep, and finally seal myself away from the cold. With her sanded-down legs now lobbed over the threshold, I heave, and bring the door back in with a reserve of strength overdrawn beyond description. I shut the cold out. It is done. It is done. It is…
I fall, and for a thousand years, I sleep, and dream of nothing but white crabs.
The image of a black sand beach engulfs my mind completely. I am there fully, no longer frozen and cold and bleeding in a throbbing agony. I am warm and young, a child safe in isolation, only a few minutes away from the comfort of my mother if I were to run back in retreat, yet still completely at my own devices. I am between two rock faces, in a small valley surrounded by a circular wall of stone opening out between the two arches opening out like the top of a pot with rounded and extended edges on both sides of the opening. The image is so clear. The feelings are real too. I am soaked in the salt of the sea, bleached in it after a day of swimming under clouded skies, and yet I am warmed and comforted by the wind of the shore and the humid bliss of the air. I walk out through the opening in this small cradle of land hosting the two story, upper-middle class beach house, exotic and remote yet filled with commodities and accommodations from life in the city. I too am cradled by the world around me, free and yet protected, just as a child should be.
I wander out to the margins of the shore, entering into a vacant and now private landscape, watching the late evening downturn of the latter part of the sunset. The sky is dark, but just bright enough to see the details of how the waves curve and crash into each other, how the shells and sand scintillate and shift in the dying light of day. I stare at this view, breathe it in and compose it into a permanent, undying part of me.
I stare and I relent, if only for a moment, but the moment is one that becomes infinite in my mind.
Then, I shift my gaze. On my left hand side, down the west bend of the shore from the island’s point of view, I see them. Two white crabs, unknowable and carnal, crustacean-like and feral without direction. They make erratic patterns around each other, a taunt-dance of warning and threat, until once lunges at the other, gaining the upper hand. Its pincers devour shell and sinew, taking in white flesh with greed and reckless abandon. To the crab, it matters not what shape this meal takes, even if it is a reflection of the self. To consume the self is to state your claim as the apex of your being, to say that you define this shape.
Or maybe it just means you’re too hungry to care.
I stare, swallowed by dread and fascination. I can’t bring myself to look away. The crab on the receiving end finally stills after a couple minutes of thrashing, and the victor slows its pace, consuming almost with a sense of satisfaction.
I watch for hours. The sun fades away until only moonlight illuminates the shore.
Now there is nothing left.
…
Her body will still be there when I wake.
I can feel it.
I have no choice.
But to do as the crabs do.