The Plugged Nickel

The Plugged Nickel

Have you ever been to The Plugged Nickel
right between Slugs and The Bitter End
and if you ever lose your way down the alley
just peel your eyes and ears for the muted trumpets, my friend
well, rainfall and thunder comp a backbeat

Drinks are stiffer than The Bad Penny
café espresso is stronger than The Thin Dime
lost, wayward girls wear their hats and coats
dashing in from the fog and rain all the time

No, it’s not like The Screaming Bean
with its plucked dulcimers, autoharps and banjos
and they pass the straw hat around
cracked peanuts and sawdust litter the tired floor
make a detour to the shack with the abstract sounds

Well, the PA system crackles
and the lights shoot off sparks
half the customers think its entertaining
and the rest of them think it’s art

And the notes fall like raindrops
on a cobblestoned street
the notes drippety drop like hail stones
on a cobblestoned road
the bass booms like thunder
the cymbals flash like lightning

On a good night you can catch Miles
even better if you see Monk
but it’s snake eyes if you fall in
and catch a poet strung out on junk

Andy Seven Ltd. · The Plugged Nickel

Deck of Muses

Previously published in Horror Sleaze Trash Quarterly Spring 2026

There's a whiny voice shrieking from the jukebox
some high pitched wail
"If you leave me I'll just die"
in that case
i've died a thousand deaths

They leave you for a jerk with drugs
they leave you for a jerk with money

But, but butt butt...
i have no drugs
i have no money
i have no friends

What do i have
i've got edgar allen poe's muse
i've got annette peacock’s muse
i've got rahsaan roland kirk's muse

All that inspiration
comes with an expiration…date
catch the spark, catch a fire
Baby, before it’s too late

I've got a deck of muses
i've got a full house
chips stacked sky high on the table
i'll never fold

Got hit with a fevered need
I’ll launch a voluminous screed
I’ve got leonor fini’s muse
I’ve got stephen crane’s muse…
I’ll never fold

Andy Seven Ltd. · Deck of Muses

Prose and music Copyright 2026, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved. Work is not royalty-free and not approved for AI usage.

A Few Words About Liminal Horror

I’ll never forget when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and I was on contract to The RAND Corporation. Many staff members were sent home, and I stayed behind to complete my contract. Costs had to be cut since operations in-house were suspended, so all the vending machines and coffee makers were shut down. Shortly thereafter the two top floors were closed down, and those departments were sent home.

Out of morbid curiosity I went up to those floors and walked around. The lights were turned off, and previously occupied desks and offices were now abandoned, relegated to complete darkness and silence. I was possessed by the apocalyptic eeriness of my environment. (I didn’t steal anything LOL, I have religious guilt).

For the past year I’ve enjoyed the surreal horror of liminal space videos and vaporwave music, so I couldn’t resist running to the cinema to catch Backrooms and wasn’t disappointed. Backrooms is an extraordinary film, but it’s been the topping of several years of liminal space horror videos making the rounds on You Tube.

Around the same time that liminal space videos were posted a new series of videos of abandoned and decaying malls went viral, as well. Shuttered shopping malls of elephantine proportions across Middle America were explored and filmed for Tik Tok and the ubiquitous You Tube. Their cheerful video arcades and food courts were now dead like a long-abandoned corpse. The creepiness was downright surreal, and I imagine if J.G. Ballard were still alive his eyes would be glistening.

Getting back to Backrooms, several of the Backrooms series videos date as far back as 2022, some even in 2021. These dates struck me as significant in that this was the era of COVID-19 enforced lockdown. Liminal space horror was created to show a desolate world evacuated by a biological pandemic. You can almost make a case that these horror videos pose political commentary on the destruction of commercialism by social neglect.

I’ll decline from discussing the film, I’ll just recommend that you see it, especially if you like brain twisting surrealism from artists like M.C. Escher or Rene Magritte. I'd also like to point out that liminal space as a horror device in the cinema has its precedents, especially in the films of Antonioni, ie. the park in Blow Up, the last ten minutes in L'Eclisse, and parts of Red Desert.

Leyland Kirby · 11 - Isolated lights

I also recommend that you check out the Poolrooms videos, which are similar to Backrooms, but you’re stuck in an indoor swimming pool world, complete with fifty-foot-tall rubber duckies, gigantic Greco-Roman statues and endless towers constructed of bleached white tile. Aquaphobes need not apply.

I’ll also drop recommendations for Vaporwave music, which provide the soundtrack for both Backrooms and Poolrooms videos. It can either emulate innocuous shopping mall muzak, or provide dark ambient sounds, like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports series with a more sinister edge.

My favorite Dark Ambient artist is Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker, and assorted labels Geometric Lullaby and Dreamcorp Records Inc. on Bandcamp are dedicated to this wild genre of music. Admittedly, everything listed here is an acquired taste, not for everyone, but if you like your surrealism on a horrorshow level, you’ve come to the right place.

Chemtrails

Chemtrails, chemtrails
snaking around the sky

Vapor trails, cloudy centipede
hanging in the atmosphere

Chemical trials, chemistry vials
fighting off cellular battle

Ghost writers in the sky
Skribbles to heaven

Laying out white lines in the blue
powdered sugar messages have bled into
my blue heaven

Feather wings feathers fall
birds of fire with leather claws

The sun may shine but don’t feel daunted
betraying the darkness
and the wind is haunted

Oh, say can you see
all the aerial aestheometry

Spider webs of clean white lines
get higher baby, get higher baby

Vapor exhaust, look up in the sky
what are you trying to say…and why

Words and music by Andy Seven Ltd. Copyright 2026, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved. This is not royalty-free, no matter what Meta/Facebook claims.

Andy Seven Ltd. · Chemtrails

Braintree

1.

Never eat from the Braintree
never listen to the hissing serpent
Dancing tongues, flickering tongues
poisoned fruit let it stay hung

2.

You’re not permitted to feed your head
grown-ups all thrown-up say
you should be burning books instead
tear a leaf from the book
Leaves from the Braintree

3.

Yonder down the meadow
rests The Crying Tree
where the lonely virgins dream in sad repose
right by the Scarlet Women
in their barely covered midnight clothes

4.

Persian vestal virgins lie by The Crying Tree
Babylonian whores lie by the other side
sap of murky burgundy blood trickles down
and the whores just laugh while the virgins cry

5.

Stay away from the strychnine orchard
stay away for heaven’s sake
Partake not the juice from the tattooed fruit
Despite the exhortations of the seething snake

6.

Jackals dance in the darkened forest
Ring around the Celtic Cross
never forget to drop 100 yards of sourdough breadcrumbs
perchance you realize that you’re lost

Andy Seven Ltd. · Braintree

Copyright 2026, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved.

Oldboy - New Poetry Album OUT NOW!

Spring is here, and a young man’s fancy turns to poetry, indie poetry, punk poetry slam, darkwave poetry, a dying rose by any other name and all that. Two years after my last audiobook I’m here with the new opus, Oldboy. And as Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) defiantly sneers, “What are you waiting for? A spectacle? You shall have it!!!” So polish up your spectacles, Andy Seven Ltd. has returned.

Oldboy is my fourth audiobook of poetry, fifteen prose poems that up the ante from previous efforts. While past audiobooks featured poems with more traditional soundscapes, the new work features dark ambient, industrial neofolk mixes and drum and bass rhythm tracks.

All music mixes aside, Oldboy is a wild mosaic of sonnets dedicated to horror films (Sadako, Succubus), Robert Williams-inspired sports sleaze (Demolition Derby, Bantamweight Vs. Flyweight), and a triptych of Southern California gothic (Bougainvillea, California Boyfriend, The LA River).

The title, aside from the movie, comes from my theory that some males are men from the day they were born and always remain men, while others will always be boys, even when they’re pushing their Seventies. Some boys always inhabit an adult form. The same goes for females. Some women will always be young girls no matter how old they age.

Making the transition from punk singing to poetry recital wasn’t a Herculean task. When I sang with my band Trash Can School the most common remark I heard was that my vocals were “monotonous”. Whether I was aware of it or not, the monotony of my vocals probably meant that I chose to recite my lyrics as poetry.

I could make a case for it by saying that singing was never the objective but just reciting my prose. So, in a very loose sense I’ve always performed poetry recitals back in the days of my band and I’ve continued to this day.

Islington High Street was about my all-nighter at Islington Screen on The Green spent fifty years ago watching The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and other future superstars like Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux. Slumgullion is a piss-take on Willy the Shake’s classic plays, some of my favorites. I love the surrealism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Saints and Sinners was about a real saloon in the heart of sleepy Culver City. Transfigured Night is my surreal take on a dream where I walked through a forest accompanied by mutilated lab test animals. The dream world continues with Succubus, nocturnal eroticism let loose upon the bedroom walls.

Those expecting sermons from the mount taking a political stand will be disappointed, as the only track that shows a political angle at all would be Carrot in The Donkey’s Eye, which criticizes the punishing exploitation of the average worker, the most offensive culprit being factory and warehouse environments. I suppose Smog lies somewhere in social commentary, too.

While I’m on the subject of poetry, what are your favorite movies about poets? We don’t get a lot of cinema space, I see movies about Bukowski, Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, but I’d like to see a film about Anne Sexton or Rod McKuen. Rod McKuen was an awful poet but his life story is utterly fascinating.

My favorite movie about a poet is Orpheus by Jean Cocteau about a popular poet despised by the hipster cognoscenti because his work is too successful. His best friend is a poet so jaded with writing that his next book will be a volume of nothing but empty pages. Doesn't get more existential than that!

But back to Oldboy, ahem: Some poems have been published in the past, i.e. Bantamweight Vs. Flyweight, Succubus, and California Boyfriend were featured in Horror Sleaze Trash. Other poems like Slumgullion, Transfigured Night, and Sadako were included in several Dawn of Darkness witch house compilations, available for listening at The Internet Archive.

Oldboy can be streamed on You Tube, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Deezer. Hard media CDs can be purchased at Bandcamp. I’ll merch a few on eBay, too. Friends, Hollywood Babylonians, and countrymen, lend me your ears.