Lucille and Maud (7th)

Plight of everyone: dying in the middle of the just started project of living. Thus puked zerotrustable. She has a bunch of “parroties” like this one – and (here’s the question) is she even capable of thinking outside of parroty-land...? (Parroties: parrot parodies.) Emperor Prepucius wrote long ago: “–Sicut erat in prepucius...” And created his world. Emperor Prepucius, a parlous parrot indeed, scantly if ever platitudinous. I harbored one of those stereotypical little crushes at his encounter. That night where his first hazing thunderstorm brought him flying higgledy-piggledy to my baffled, daunted arms as my lids were closing in bed. How to harmonize the presence of a bird that insist afresh and afresh on self-effacing itself inside my chaste crotch...? Alluring mimic, shrinks into a plumed dildolet. I heard a tiny snap of a little noise. A broken walking stick prefiguring impending death... I’ve got in a box my dead father’s hidden moneys, his dead son’s more momentous drawings... A pervasive sadness, not to be shirked. Death – conform to its possession. More to the heart of what’s ailing. Emperor Prepucius was at last a man liberated, freed from the slavery of aimless non-seeing – the unseeing accident-prone roving eye that crashed by itself (I only in reluctant tow) at all the wrong turns...

No, we were done. I broke the windowpane with my robed elbow, the weenis unscathed. Through the jagged hole down went the emperor and his broken tiny filament of a neck. Done with the wing of bad luck, finished the base dreams of broken windows and dark tatty clothes – now I could brace along with the firmest, breeze with the showiest, compose my pieces barefaced, not in the smutty half-life of hardly lit death­watches where I thought maggots were fucking, but in the clean open air, valiant, dandified, to the nines, not even afraid to crack in public those snaky affairs, a brace of too-obvious suspenders...

The storm made him do it.

For a few days I felt like the sheriff, but... But I couldn’t forget either the awful, driven hours of skinned-alive moonstruck victimhood, pitifully disguised as a predator, nose-wings aflutter, a lather of rabid spit at the corners of my car­nivorous mouth, eye uncorked and through it the lymph of my tumultuous soul gushing – the whole night crackpottedly in search of a burning-red recently-mangled unsuspecting twat of a bird, its soul, its umbra, its shadow, its intuited presence, the owner already yawning, putting off the meager taper, acrid smoke, while teary I retreat, if my mojo responds, to a new battlefield...

No, those fixings of the seen, those freezings of what was eyed for a split second before the bulb burst or the curtain fell, those burnings-up of the fleeting impressions in the available cells of my discombobulated brain, they serve me well now, all were only preparations for the real mccoy: The wounding for the healing, the thimble for the cupola, the copulation for the ascension, the humblepie for the spiraling pride, the fake dueling scar for the world-weary wisdom of the retired samurai – from the deadly experience to its rightful application, from the starry forehead to full steam ahead for the stars, from the momentous to the steady, from terminal turbulence to fair leveling..., and home free, Maudy girl, no longer moldy, maudlin, mousy, mangy, enjoy the warrior’s horizontal gleamings, hack-hack, yes! Hale, healed, say hail: shout your progery of prodigies, hail to the one who con­quered herself, she quit shooting at her foot, and loving the hurt – unlike the dumb beast that eats at its wounded leg and want to tear it apart in order to hurt and spite the pain – loving the hurt, start, instead, shooting for the mountainous range, a mounty, and some day over the rain­bowish afterlife being loved for it, a heart-throb of the summits of the arts, contributor to the splendorous future, mail chain to deliverance and back, one of the carriers of the key that spread to the forty-odd winds the signal penetralia, the explanation’s at hand, quasi-visible when you strain like this... Jaw-drawn, no qualms, having an edge on misfortune, the whole fold of insights in hand, ad nauseam, even in her deathbed, in agony’s rattle, the desperate fading hope to ripping clarity of purpose, ah precious pernicious Prepucius, blast it, mix the fulsome soup of elliptical pigments: gamboge, umber, potash..., all like a horde of stampeding Lilliputians: frenzied. Painting an anachronistic tableau, erst painted by a fogey roué and now forged by her rancorous daughter, to whom it rankles still the bah, humbug of so many elaborate explanations.

I’m sure the rotting kea is parodying somebody when she says: “–Sometimes I want to play the child and make love like one: childishly, tenderly, playfully, openly, matter-of-factly, without shame, nor heat, nor trepidation... Sometimes, I want to climb up to the last rung and plainly be seen on the glasses of the massive door. Fanciful, snappy, magnificently cut out, summoned to great accomplishments, aren’t we...? So we are. Hitched unstitchedly together, same ideographs projected on the shingle, same shadow burined on the jambs, a ponderous chimera trying to hatch an eggstar of a picture unimpaired and without simile, wheels and oxen, bowery lads, goatherds, and mahouts and all..., over bridges, over arches, over the gloaming horizon, and twilight-of-the-godsly gone.

Sidestep the damned bloody keening crowds, though, thereabouts as often as not congregating for the preliminaries of another fucking burial – shameful ceremony officiated by and intended for addled full-of-crappers – as an exercise in ludicrous futility beats the whole deck. And nimble here, never touch any of them creepy mourners, jinxes alive, a-whirl in the spiraling trap of the their scared next-in-line feeling, but be smart in dodging those phantom malodourous bodies, outlaw their seriously compromised existence, disregard any type of enticement, don’t be sucked into their underworld of dismayed and crumbly wraiths furiously trying to graze your heart with the hate-bullets of their discom­bobulated gazing.

No to worry, though. I’m imper­vious to their shriveling babble; never listen to the drivel the masses spew, I don’t hear shit of what they quack, or rather: that’s the ony sound I softly perceive issuing from their unsychronized septic-tank openings: shit, shit, shit, shit..., the soothing lovely sound terribly at odds with their spastic, wildly knotted lips..., but ignore the klutzy dubbing, the point’s that hearing detracts from seeing, and you gotta better see the moronic faces to guess right their bothering intentions and criminal stances; they’ll ransack your brain, needle your lungs, split your drums – braggart to hell, they’ll kill you all of a sudden and for less than no in­ducement. And that’s a known fact.

So, as chaste Fifth Claudia, the gray ashen liver-tearing pet of uncle Nerotxo, victorious after the ordeal, safely at the other bank of the river of the walking unburied, through thin and the piled-up thick, breathes up: We find oursel­ves again, huh...? Tightly taut, not a bit drowsy, firm like the unshaken rock. Collected, artistic, alive; frank and unscathed from the hormonal demons – wrong memories of dead yesteryears, wringing their horns in. Done. Easily bringing in the Catalonian (Anatolian? Babylonian?) Great Mom: Cybele – only a ribbon to pull the vessel out of the mud, the creation clay – her chastity a big help, her virtue all the strength; no hickeys in her fanny, her slit not red and overused. Blue Stone, enigmatic. Sometimes I want to play the child, and talk English: Traa...! Ta, love...! Fiddlesticks, me lolling about after me gloves has brought such a giggly deterioration to me dwindling reputation, I’m ready, chastised, to lumping the slime mood on the edge of the worthless bile and whirl dervishly towards the surface where the moon shines.

The kea unravels her rant: rebound the eery channelings: stabbed throats, and a legacy of trashed scraps: the reprisal of the macabre eunuchs, the itty swirling clouds from a meltdown, the plummeting cinders – radioactive, you bet, love – stockpiled, seamlessly, the hecklers, their evil blepharospasms, their sickening ear-splitting murmurs now packed, gathering dust, in camphor and anti-moth pellets, waiting for next attack; caught unawares by the smell of opiates and mindbogglers the gowned criminal spray about, we fell for a frail instant... But enough, here’s Van­gong.

Though while I reel, I ought to conjure up... – bizarre images – let’s see: my moth, for mother, my “broth” for brother – nice, ain’t I – parrot-like with a speach impediment – and while I’m uttering the pricky words with the interdental dee, guess what, I’m thinking them with the other, lamer, faggier, speech-chal­lenged-like tee-aitch sound, the silly one goes with “both”, ok? – and it becomes them to a tee, like a reused condom and so on, for her tendency to discomfit me and nibble annoyingly at my threadbare fabric for the whole of my youth and early adulthood – till I was forty-six and half to be precise, when with the character-builder alacrity of the selfborn I discovered that at the unraveling rag of my ancestorless substance I still could stitch the towering per­sonality of my long-lost forerunner...

Death-calling spectral insect, how I longed to crush it during the eternal lonely cold nights vainly pursuing window dreams, door-crack apparitions, key-hole revelations, lovely and gory, macabre and astoundingly, salivatingly filthy, only that now the hour of release approaches, alleluia, hey hey. Hey.

As for him, muddling potty of a head, “broth” couldn’t suit him more, utterly deserved, for his tendency to stain with greasy messes and worse, and thus cheapen and spoil everything he touches.

“–Hold your breath till you’ve gone to a higher level.” “–You mean during like ninety seconds, doctor?” “–Boy, not rather; more like ninety minutes, duh; come on, you can do it; we can’t measure the brain’s gamma-hooch-betta-ching wave lenghts unless you reach that top garret plateau with a lusty sustained will-push that should put to shame even those bashful troopers: the pudgy whales that mimick submarines and other pesky contraptions that soak down the parched ocean floors for months at a time brooding over bombs or other disgusting budding absurdities, like eggs, or legs, or square round pegs... Are you fainted yet...? You’ll be one of the risen for sure: take heart!” “–But the reason for what...? Is there really a reason for my carcass to live on...?” “–What...? Not the reason; the risen, damn you, after you’re like reborn...?”

While skipping the aisles, behind each door ajar a cartoonish horror slide passes his litigating eye – would you believe, but would you. “–So what a-are you t-telling me with today’s menu; s-spiffy, eh...?” “–Not too bad this tennis balls soup.” “–Not too bad! Our chef’s pride de maison!” “–The balls taste a bit too much like live toads.” “–Oh, thanks, but why the outrageous pandering, I wonder, tricky Sam. I’ll tell him how grateful and congratulatory you were withal, and no feigning here, you said toads, didn’t you, meaning truffles, of course...” The jokey surgeon putting ‘em up, having his rubber gloves powdered by a typical cutish-brutish fuck-ready nurse, the sick desfigured patient sprawled on the table, eager to vanish, scared to death, fakely amused. Just close-by, next gurney up the corridor, enigmatic costly blue stones appearing under the skin all over the victim’s carcass of a rotting body. One could pierce and bury his finest brush in, and voilà: apt for a virgin’s robe.

After the powdering jokes, the nurse says something sillier still: “–Would you like me to buffer the syringe a little bit more, doctor?” “–Baby, would I! Hark-hark-hark! You catch me busy, though, with my pants securely and prophylactically up, hark-hark; luckily I’m a fast operator, I’ll be done in a thrice, let’s get rid of the stiff before the anesthetics wear off, he never was too sharp to begin with, but who’ll risk another brain-damaged zombie telling then on us, hark-hark...”

Hagborn, his gleamings, a sick hawk’s.

Me broth, that’s what he does, he’s the muck boss of the whole hospital, he empties every chamberpot or every bedpan – a pishiss, I’m told they call it here – all kinds, he’s an expert, earthen­ware and plastic, yellowed and purple, shiny, and cracked, moldy, with verdet and stuck with infections galore – spot him sponging the shits off the sheets... “–It’s only a piece of shit, bro, you are not frightenend of a piece of shit!” Well, but I also am, almost as much as of insects, bowels, organs, bullies, gods, bolts from the blue, shit’s brimming with evil digger bugs, both micros­copic and eye-poppers, both leggy and maggoty, both smooth and hirsute, I’ve studied shit all my life, very carefully, I must be the foremost shit connoisseur of this and the surrounding neighborhoods – by the way, Vangong, he’s an idiot, sponge on him: hock, hog a meal, that’s the main reason I visit, my friend... Perversely snared to slops, again straight to the blennorrheal trough, glimmering hawk eye, crummy repast; cadge a meal, weasel me, some crumbs – hawk me a regulation grub – while hawking, I’ll grab and hawk it – a gleaming hospital luncheon – not your common sorner, though; while munching, some elbow-room, with some elbow-oil – vomity pickles and dumplings, soggy, tacky, fracid – now for the same consistency on my discourse – the congeries of swills of my moth more or less anthropomorphical – to the hopeless ward or (in a bit of harmless word-play) to the mush room (every dying hostage in his casketlike bed gone irretrievably mushy from the wuthering tumors hissing from his frameless organism of a fast morphing body, each much as the one any decaying grostesquely-shaped soft mushroom would randomly take) – emetic – becomes the supreme emunctory hole – a notch below, coming up, other ejaculates, plus fecal daities assorted, and now for the bear-it-if-thou-canst dish, worst of all – visit your dying great mom, Cybele, Lucille, and blaringly loud: I’ll be blunt – skeletal ghoul-ravaged diseased carcasses – saprogenous slime – vortex of her navel – hot frizzy juice boils from... in and our of tubes, oozes without – E. Coli in all its specialities plus other cabbaggey brews – down the hatch – “–Trustkin sends his love.”

Deadly cestus of my (hard-rock orange?) – with a fell blow of my cestus – apotheosis of oranges and lips. Hospital: where the creepiest humans congregate to deal with their salivous perversions, exchanging at cut rates and fumbling nonstop with all kinds of dozy lumps, disgusting infected fleshes, and other viscous lymphs. And always keening and bewailing absurdly in the presence of the excrements. Terminal ward: senile patient being finished off realm of the pussy wizen denizens trolly froggy – stuffed cloakbag of dropsies, gooey blain – dead in the stagnant waters of the bed – battleground for all hospital critters and worse: the more virulent hospital viricides: bestill thy silent innuendo – fucking hag-pap for old hags, witches, women: fiendish gills more patent with every passing repast or lunch hour – I come pro forma and in hunger to spend – criminal nereid at the foot of the fountains of my aestrus, tentacular meduse, the evil muse of my vilest musings, the counterinspiration, the a-lyricist.

Back to work: me parroty customers crave me learning. Craftman athlete of the pen and pencil of the brain – draughtsmanship: sketch drawing, I’m painting that world erst created with a colorless mud: ashen kea, yeah, insistent: eating at your prometheic liver, mushy brain, too good I am, “sheepish” the word.

Sort out the rotting and bletted items if you have to burrow a little among the flies and their maggots. Sure thing, mac; and go suck on a slug’s blubber, your sister’s clit’s a greedy leech, your asstube’s clogged with limpets, your batty mother suckles raving hyenas, or viceversa, and whatever.

I systematically and instinctually hate and fear all kind of masters of the purse strings, and if, by one of these siderally improbable, incredible bricoles of destiny, I ever become one, well, I’ll loathe and resent myself also. Lucille the usurprix, the usurix...? No name for women criminals...? Quaint. Usurper, usurer, are always male. Thus I was musing, being of two minds again, and the while (how metaphorical, symbolic and apppropiate) smashing with my arthritic fingers a few handful blood-suckers, who for a change were sucking on the thick bubbling rust of my vegetables, or else they were eating each other, winged and larvatic, all drunk and entrapped in the moldering quagmires, when behold near the blinding entrance the scarecrowish unfortunate shouting above the further deadening loudspeakers...

A grimacing spastic baboon ass of a mandrill mug, your typical crazy murderous glint in his eye, everything was there, the face, the feces, a wonder he wasn’t behind bars for obscene exposure to even the least of aesthetic minds, pigeonholable from the mangey crown to the slimy ribbons tripping his excrement-bespattered moccassins and trailing from the grimy seat of his chaps, his colors and his choice of never fashionable duds making him the pimp painted by num­bers, the robber (not the robberix,) I mean, he looked despicable, understand, insulted a go-go by life and its brownnosed acolytes.

Black fellah, frowsy beard, ugly as hellion, surely deranged, spoke some type or other of spic, swollen tongued, with a mouth full of cotton balls. Repeating: “–Nineny-nine, nineny-nine...; I wah o de money on the bah” – meaning he wanted everybody to go fast, 99 miles per hour flat filling his plastic bag with all the moneys from the proceedings so far today.

We hid behind the big melons – melons, bananas, the smell, the shape of them, bell-peppers, aubergines, cauliflowers, strange penetrating fungosities, malignant vegetations, monstrous growths, give me travails, awake my suspicion, worse: make me drowsy as hell if too near my face – and yet I’ve got my angry nose stuck to a pile of ‘em, our big heads are too valuable. My shift-fellow, Dick Ratsheart, his battery-belt always on hand, sundry lethal rot-gouging implements hanging there but no prick to speak of, and still less courage; can’t even approach, can’t even smell the butchers’ horror side of the store, where the repungnant state of corruption gets multiplied by plenty, many bleeding fold. Bruises busting, worms pooped, crud-swallowing beetles raucously carousing, dead horses as circuses where the spiky-legged chitinous easily skunk the morbidly shaven, curs climaxing, ­­­vixens disem­boweled, cats skinned, ganders and drakes flying headless, spraying loathsome substances at which a few debouched cleaver-wielders indulge, hands suddenly lost, some taken-ill, vomiting wholesalers, falling into the grinding vats, goaded beasts from outside and smuggled road-kill, all become daintily-packed fetid mincemeat, freaked-out scales-technicians mistaken for fleeing as shrewdly disguised game, slain on the spot, im­mediately turned into cutlets, hocks, sweetbreads, and rumpy choice bits sold to peeved puppet women, fashionable, perfumed and made-up, waiting for the latest and juiciest at the door, summoned second-sighters and the other edgy crazies unheard of since this fateful crossing, and more adventurous or deluded­ly snared patrons by now amnesic and turned themselves too into grubs feasting with the live hogs, showers of shit and tainted lymphatic blood now and then overwhel­ming the place amid the jeers and joy, fake and true, of the orgiastic miscegenating swarm, among which you’ll maybe distinguish, as the most keenly affectionate in their sanguinary endeavors, as the most sedulously and sweetly employed of the entire chiggery bulk, hey, as the more-the-merrier exulting, and merrier and most ornate in tripes, the girdled sadists chiefs of maneuvers, in cheap pride chewing, not gum, just raw livers, slashing the while left and right, spilling the festering guts of the nearest more or less bulky organism they meet on their putrefying-earth path, whoever they’d be, and I point with filmed-over eyes at the sorely stung, pudgy rubes taking their pleasures where and whenever they find ‘em, and running with them, and giving back as good as they get, unrestricted evil caroming no end, fucking butchers, damned hole, ass of hell, most repulsive ever affair all over, that’s the upshot, into which tease us as they may we’ll never plunge, we humble unjaded dealers with the tamer blood of vegs. “–Hate blood, that’s why I always say: hang ‘em!” Bear with him a while, hear him out – better to sip some than to be a sap. He’s never arrived at the frosty realization that the fucking shop he so much loves is nothing of ours, but that alas and alack we are of it.

Obsequious shiteater for expediency’s sake. Splattered brains: pretty picture for you buffs of the rubbishy arts. All that has to have upset her no end, Dick Ratsheart, must comfort her; sentimental sap, let’s me and you elope; elope with me slithery shadow through the as yet unsealed back door – the cops about to rush in and guns blazing – out of the shambolic whirliwiggy wiggly whorl spins off a clear clean plume of independence: yours, meaning mine.

Rear door, allows me, on account of dying moth – avoid the cops and all their incoming shit – the scene is nothing interesting, not our compositional style at all. Ssplattered brains, squealing, extremly uglified females (their animality comes to the fore with the least grief, the anguished lineaments look like they’ve been stenciled with a hor­rifying deathmask, a specter superimposes itself on their face, a corpse of let’s say six to eight months,) what a picture amounts to, all that? No even a good still life, the greedy maggots not excepted, you bet.

Head of fruits, rub him right he’s pretty ammenable – careful here, though; aggresive disgruntledness always an almost sure-fire option, witness the rate of suicide: is very high among super­market workers – all day in contact with rotting stuff, caged in stinks, a routine fit only for stiffs, the bloody pointlessness of it all. We are not some kind of sublimated grocer, quite the contrary, rather. Pure degenerates. No dealings to speak of with just people, customers, loiterers, bulkers, retailers, unloaders and stevedores, salesmen and sundry product and produce represen­tatives, indeed a spate of peasants: county growers, local farmers, tiny cottage industrialists, do-it-yourselfers and their work-saving contraptions, and, concomitantly, a dispiriting plague of shadier specimens: cutthroats and, worse, the cops and “prote­ctors” organized against them and their lone wolves, rogue elephants, pack ravagers and syndicates, and then machinists and handymen, fractional repair guys, smooth-talkers and underhanders, chiselers, gypsies, in­novators, extortionists, wheed­lers, cheaters, debtors’ list en­demicals, shoplifters, food inspec­tors, and the lot, plus other maniacs and bribees, the whole floralia, and we, instead, not smelling exactly like live roses, for, when all’s said and done, apart on colliding with the rest of us zombies, damned nest of ants, short constantly the whole can of worms of going berserk, mistaking for the pervasive stink of rot our own pheromones, and getting at each other’s necks with our creature tweezers and earwig scissors, or alter­natively with our vegetable parers, whittlers and cleavers, and sharper box gouges, we deal only and shake hands with, or our fist at, fast decaying or for that matter already dead and long dead dead matter, at any rate with the wrong unsalable kind of commodity already feasting on and in it, meaning saprophytic life, naturally, not the resulting foodstuffs anyhow anybody’d care to crutch his way into the inimical lairs we loathsomely buzz around in for hours on end day out day in, and everyday with more incitements to sin, the cutting and mincing tools of the trade, the headache spheres of turning lights, the replicating udders of the gamy dowagers, fondling the items to soggy shreds, plus the yelling spoiled-rotten row after row of rowdy monkeys they carry, atop the blaring announ­cements, add the refrigerators’ din and the iron grids, much worse yet: the feathers, the guillotined heads, the bowels, the fracid meats, the liquefied matter slithering its way to the escaping holes, open impromptu sewers where all kind of hooves skid, the spontaneous fires burning my brain from all sides, resulting in a zoo consistently about to stampede, at any moment now, well, and that’s the nature of nature in its natural state, and it’s the nature alas of our accursed line of work... So put up with it we do, but shaky, ashen, menacing, and armed, always armed, reentering the ebb, batedly loathing ourselves, but swearing revenge next time we are up, and the locksmith flounders and the metal gives, or the metal melts, and our mettle explodes and our gouges arise and no locks barred and everybody pays, the fucking zoo goes to bat to commence with, so, to sum up, take us with tenterhooks and fluffs of cotton, we are fragile, we are tinder-like, we must be treated nothing glib and obliviously matter-of-fact, you handle us nicely, with all the world’s tact, like I do with that frightening numbskull Dick Ratsheart.

Hey, the key to what I am comes with my a.k.a. – Dahell Juno. Ms. Dahell Juno – meaning, loud and clear, “–The shit you know,” got your number backwards and front and anywhich way, I’m wise to you, I’m on to you, I know what you know, and you know shit, though you don’t even know you don’t even know shit. Most people talk, write, read, perorate, parrot and repeat whatever the shit happens to cross and sparkle for a sec the rot of their minds, and, by golly, they take a fancy to the notion, isn’t it spiffy, and snippy, and deep, and here it goes, here it sputters, plenty of pyrotechnics very often, and they stutter and utter it forthwith, as though relieving themsel­ves... But they know shit about it, all your drivel-selling profes­sors, and sermon-spewers, and the endearing slobberers: the tip-giving tip-getters, the cogitating under­takers, the flighty welkin-renters, the zealots and other gematriot with all the complicating abridgers toward the sanctorums where their mummified supremes keep a whole kettle of nothing, the silly-songsters turned bridgers upon the frightening skids, the eerie miracle-workers slipping thee another mickey of good-sense, the multipar­turient, their truisms the same as those babbled with the knifings on the side by pimps fighting for turf (actually for the cunts bovine that graze on that turf,) let’s not forget the slithering after-you-joint-our-sect lagniappers, the sinister out-of-jointers, the everlasters, the hooded besmirchers, the looming new-worlders, the presumptuous antiquarians, procurers of the profuse, the ponderous, the unwieldy, the farty vent-givers to hermeneutical diarrheas, would-be slave-masters all, the pervasively insane, the elucidators and interpreters of the finer points of sundry liturgies, the dogmatic commen­tators, and cur­riculum educators, and rabble-arousers, the bible-thumping, bib-wiping, asshole-spelunking, and ferula-wielding, all the pap-delivering soapboxers, the sop-spooners, the bleeding-heart flaggers, and father-figures, the sentimentaloid, the hominoid, the whole Babylonian hairdressing punditry, eek, the sinecurists and their lousy roving associates, the frauds, legions unnamable, all those crap-peddling creeps, the missionarilly positioned, the last-riters, their long-gargled oysters, and the gipsy bullshitters, the shovels of rotten manure of all their ethnic noisome shit, the trash and the rheumy hogwash from your crowned speakers and right featured talkers, and the chief-whores, the faggy chefs, the whole gamy gamut of publicists, everytime they vomit some “deep truth,” or parable, or haran­gue, or whatever the truly deep sensible shit, aporetically inquire: “–What the fuck!” Better still: answer softly, Dahell, on the side, Juno, at the margin, where the wild greens grow feracious, ferocious, tasteful, private, and free, reply with the lethal stick of your kept composure, not at letter more exclamative than the next, and, above all, your response’s a given, Juno, I know, again, stick it to them, reaffirm yourself by remem­bering the most sacred secret name, Dahell, the one to which you are sworn until you sigh your last, namely, ok, Dahell Juno...! Rather: Da-hell-Ju-no, Dahell, psst, quietly, unsnared, kicking up almost no dust, it was nothing worth a flare of anger, lost causes lost, and getting it on, Juno, woodsy path along, easy snag, not even a stumbling, just a leaf, turning a new one.

As to the etchers, which I realize I failed to include in my heart-felt, though on second thought too mild, too softcored diatribe, I’ve got to say, being as I am on their side: We etchers don’t lie; after all, what we do, it’s only a picture; people know that pictures are only that, we don’t put words on the figures we draw, we don’t..., wait a..., what tripe I’m trying to..., the gall. Actually we do! We’ve sold-out, with all our woeful strenght, as a guild and from the start. And actually the masses are maggoty – they’ll believe anytime any kind of pap, witness the millions upon millions of images for sale, laughers and laughing-stocks grotesquely and universally depicted, and no wonder I dislike both spine-chilling categories with all my might, a braze of clowns sanctified, eek, tacky devotions, gaudy halos and radiating lights, revulsion instinctual; and look at the religious, the political, the propagan­distic pictures in which we drown, they lie consistently, and no apology. Damn, I was thinking the bridges, the arches, the branches, the expan­ses, the rivers, the moun­tains, the icebergs, the oxen, the carts, the ramparts, the skates, the snakes, the birds, the clouds, I was seeing only the homage paid to these honorable constructions and dignified beings. Fuck, aghast. Shamefaced, biting the dust. Retracting, staggering back. Scratch all that then, come on. We etchers lie through our toothless gaps almost all the time. I know that almost don’t cut it, but almost is bad enough. We etchers, the shit we know. I won’t ever etch, other than in my mind. That’s settled.
Maud, sensitive sounding board personified, although try as I might want to be tough and unfeeling – an artist at heart alas doomed by fate to be more than mere mortal and furiously hated by them born-decayed withal. As either Kickarow or Whore-Ace was wont to spew: –Thou canst only imperate over this earth with the explicit permission of those that heigher up hold the bag of destiny’s strings. And thou canst shit upon the gods as much as the need arises and thou art able to comply, still they, being non-existent, massive resounding board like, will shit on thee all the harder. It’s like pissing at the sky a rainy day, like shitting upside down, your asshole throwing ignominious injuries at the raging clouds during some stormy, hailing, lightning-ridden night where necks are bound to be wrung.

A painter (painterix, painteress?) of the mind, all the action inside the private vault, room for myriad master­pieces, a sixth chapel where the conjec­turing has no jurisdiction, off limits to the rest of the concocting head, silent, inconspicuous, exiled, sly, unpindownable, therefore never more a suspicious charac­ter – too scalded a pussy, a pussycat, for these shenanigans any longer; for instance, during a previous recent unfortunate per­sonification given alas to often dream about the lost eden where infants frolic and gambol in the birded woods, feeling again the balsamic health-restoring smell of pines, finding once more the light treasures of softly perfumed variegated tree galls, running the gamut of delicate colors from nuts to berries to toadstools to the shady and sunny leaves, and thirstily drinking from fresh pristine mossy singing foun­tains – last Tuesday still, when Rob Kingsly Browning was my moniker (Mister Kingsly Bee for the intimates,) in hallowed remembrance of the greatest of bards, not forgetting the strict ancients and the curlicuing overbrimming vates – so here I was, suburban poet out for a des-intoxicating walk; obliviously stopping now and then to write with the wisp of a pencil fragments of lines on a bit of paper – cruel above measure, the idiot burghers already sic their foaming dogs, unsheathe their rifles and bellicosely, eager at the triggers, post themselves at the window sills, the killing children go rabid, the fat addled-brained all-day-shitting wives phone the cops, the despicable turd-minded snoops of the neighborhood-watches try to run you over with all and their intrinsic self-defeating clumsiness, the helpful clean-cut youths are liable to commit again and again the slight mistake of slaying still someone else for any kind of thoughtless misapprehension, and never any qualms about it – ‘tis in the nature of cop-minded scout-trained reverent trustwor­thy youths all over this land accursed – don’t know what the hell they imagine, so many generations of being fed the dripping suppurations of superfluous junk, probably they suspect I’m boning up on the situations, to show back maybe in the wee hours and bugger and burglar them blind, tough chance, who wants to add the likes of a collection of rotting heads on silver plates, namely the dreadful instruments of their quotidian selftorture – “–Aroint the churl!” they fuckingly shout, uptight shits with squirmy quim-mouths, all want to do you in, every right-thinkingly sanctioned implement of murder in tempting reach, until you take notice, of course, and your nape’s hairs rise, your balls shrink to nil, your bowels churn, your eyes turn myopic, your skin gallinaceous, and by and large you’re diminished to a borrowing rat wishing itself an armored fish hiding among the blades of Poseidon grass in the vast prairies at the bottom of the sea, and thus off you slither, for your life, trying to stir not even a speck of dust, sliding slick like a porpoise off the swamp, untethered into the ocean – by fear neutered withal; all my efforts at ex-pression of an otherwise too pressured numen rendered nugatory withal; by sundry venues aggressed, no leisure to unlock the crypt and spread on the bitty papers its treasured mysteries – you won’t catch me again, though, that’s the last time you play me for a sucker; figments of a nightmarish mirage, I swore and then snored them off forever, their war path never once more to be crossed, forgot­ten the convoluted directions, “–This way to the abattoirs,” eek, off me map, busters! – the unpeopled meadows are laid on the other side; even among the har­rowing citys­capes I’ll venture of a whimsical or more compelling opportunity, but you are to shoot at me no more, the ducky, sensitive poet’s dead and burned, and his ashes are spread thick over the minefields where the abstruse softenings that you-all are unaccountably grow – with a fetid puff you went, overripe stinkhorns, one and all in a fruitless chain last time you were dreamed: wily vapors flown.

Straddling the eras to and fro from fiery end to fiery end to the entropic empty expanses, the glaciers, the deserts, the infernos, the flagging suns, the searing winds, the poisons, the meteorites, the storms, the gases, the unlife. Shrunken, shriveled in a forgotten corner, striving for meaning – because after all cunts – albeit their nifty unripeness – were definitely not it. Unshrined, the vitrines smashed to smithereens, with the tasteless smudges washed out, the little unladen idols roam free. Birdies peck at them, not chomping at the bit, cavalierly, in loose tranquility, as when they peck at sandy pease, or scuff at wet firecrackers, and the fizzle slowly turns imponderable. All excess gypsum shaping limbs, lineaments and attributes fell off; then the worn out body cracked up, that’s the way the superannuated goodies crumble, the cracks broke down at the fringes, the railings collapsed, the stuffings protruded, became toys of the merciless storms, the aimless vicissitudes they were subjected to finished them off. Used up, dis­carded, disappeared, that’s the end of the cycle reincar­nators ride melancholy-bound and yet the while peeking abreast. Fate of bikes, remission to rellapse and back again; on the fritz now, soon on the mend; hope untrammeled, you bet, and plenty roads still left. Now I’m the bike, now the biker. I’m a bit drowsy, I think I’ll close my eyes for a bit. But now on the train home the soothing equations of motion muddle up if the coifed man with the big chin queries you about the ticket, or token. Hexed by a pug-nosed hag perched nearby, the massive rot zone veeres toward us. I answer: “–No,” twice. He brooks no arbitration: “–The token or bust.” Always discard ‘em, now I’m at a loss. A good chunk of his immense chin has been recently sewn up in a vain attempt that he perchance afterwards might’ve looked cuter, this I’ve immediately own, but, as I was telling, not a chance. As the bewildered shades conferring around our circle wane, and the train hugs the tunnel, through the hag I bolt. Where I’ve gone only the fey and lonely know. You can see the thighs from here and the females pissing in the toilets, and, through the comfy rug, for the reputed welfare of bedbugs, you relish the vision of the emblematic chamberpots under the bunks, for here’s where I’ve hidden: at the forlorn cellar of a wagon-lit. Where Fang gathers, and belongs. According to the law of the land, I’ve read someplace, anyone caught crying in the undercarriage – “crying” in this case meaning: “making his the use of the concealed master faucets” – and, much worse yet, if suspected of “spilling the nectar running therein,” by which dis­reputable act the crimes accrue (and incrementally the longer the spouts spout,) moreover if the randy use of the taps is against one’s own flesh – signifying I suppose when you insert them in some of your nether orifices and I don’t care to speculate about which other emergency room shenanigans – the punishment, and no replevin possible, is, if the paper had got it right, the suffering of the tanning of the wacky sybarite’s skin – the wider the patch of it, starting at two feet, the worse the degree of the crime, naturally, and the tanning, withal, performed by executioner tanners using methods (otherwise only practiced on pelts extracted from corpses) hellish enough to warrant mentioning in the Annals of Horrendous State Cruelties, of which more anon. Never would it occur to me to “cry” of the shit-carrying pipes, if only the law wouldn’t give one the idea, and also, by so hysterically forbidding it, imply that to top it all it would be so bloody pleasurable. So, I took to tinker with a spigoty contraption nearby when from an empty rusted tin of tea, a rat, its guts just overflown from the impact of a silent bullet sent no doubt by the sinewy gigantic mister Chin, the aforesaid train marshal – already, if the fleeting perfunctory peeking checks, wielding a gun with an opening enormous as one of his sputa of tar – nugatorily emerges, only to collapse anew, and pat at my nose. Plasticity be damned, the rat looks on me like his chin on him... Anyway, for continuity’s sake, I finally quit musing – and please observe my ass ap­proaching as I recede backwards, as an impaired snake, toward the last corner where a recess full of refused disabled berths are piling up. I can’t hear any longer the garrulous wives nor the grunts of the fuckers, here all is rat arty-farty yick-yack.

By and by, faint teary groans behind the thick walls of next car – the jinxing, hexcaster hag being questioned for complicity by throaty jerks, friends of the chief ticket puncher I’m damned to have athwart. “–This train shall never dock,” gyps now the feckless passage enabler, and adds: “–Yonder fen dismally looms more and more (for I’ve got the benefit of windows) as your final resting place (many fallen are felled and fall, happens daily all over the tractscapes of this land of secret agencies). Get!” The new bullet dutifully bricoles about, and dots, as lucky dies, even my livid cheeks, fore and aft. That’s no life for an already accomplished artist endowed with many endowments. Even my linguist’s intricate excellencies fail moi. Situation becoming absurd. With the mind’s elephant eye, I see us all together charmingly pooh-poohing away our nontheless avowed-to foresights of atrocious entrampents and the concomitant presupositions of the direst fellest deaths ever registered. “–We had some celiac belly-roarers, didn’t we, also sundry gut whipcracks; I almost shat my regulation armored undies!” – that would quip mister Charon Carrion, or any other of the uniformed Chins, whereupon (with somewhat tainted mirth) all would guffaw, haw-haw-haw, including crinkled-up me, who on an intimate dangerous dare (for if too out of their paltry reach would surely infuriate the touchy lot, unpearly pigs, or the arm will violently reject what the mind can’t grasp,) I sillily unfolded and thought – yeah, crinkly me could even spice it, good-naturedly enough, of course, with the odd learned touch (elegant in all my motions blest or accursed): “–Reme­mber, ha-ha, that a protracted nightmare not unlike this one befell kindly fellowman Atlas, a guy just like you or rather me, sappy, helpful, well-intentioned, a priggish pismire who, much as the gamy snails he patronized ever since, carries the sins of all with light fluty flighty fleeting feet, mirror of gentleness, never meaning ill toward the rightful shibboleth-keeping authorities and in consequence often misunderstood for a wittol and a petulant lachrymose piece of shit, please, I beg please, don’t hit me again...” – for I was antithetically picturing their logical reaction and the new pains, contrariwise, that also could be shortly wracking me instead. Saw then the sixteen anointed judges sitting in ferocious judgment, the hype was on; I had been rendered almost senseless with a whack on my skull with a butt, and, therefore with no struggle to speak of, rapidly smuggled by a bunch of my big fruity foes to the end – rickety car if one, the freight one, with the contraband carrions, and with the mail bags, and hardware and live cattle indistinct; once and for all, it seems the thugs have taken over, and about time too, no longer the excruciating waiting for their abiding power to become all-concrete.

Of a sudden, the truth dawns – dying always am­mounts to murder; I’ll fight for my integrity, I won’t be branded another gristly killer, I’ll ressucitate myself whatever it takes and whatever the number of tries, my only regret’s the present choice isn’t more heroic, resourceful, ruthless – another gun-addicted, muscle-bound creep, for instance, would do – I mean, just another of them, on the side of the surface winners for once, anything to spare the hide.

Where’s the veggie, witching hag when you need her? Disguised as another hoary throne-scouring drone, she could succor his fateful, now doomed, seat companion by chucking a few handfuls of styptic powder (or some such, maybe more elaborate, trick) on the beggarly tribunal ready to max out a sentence too action-interrupting in its unheard-of truculence to pay the pains to record here or elsewhere. Damn. Malignant cut-cutters, after the limbs bit by bit, so that at the end of this middling average half of the trouncing even the trunk’s become nugatory – and the heart beating withal. But no, forget it, no aid from this quarter: she’s also left me in the lurch, con­suetudinarian avowal, alas, story of my cancatenating lives. No Lucille, no Maud, no Polly, no Pippo, alone.

As chief indictor, Chin points directly at my left eye, the one more darkly given to phosphenes, and, when there’s light, more ridden with floaters and flying specks of dead absorbed gnats, beetles and flies – a frightful faggy swatch of balletic images is already commonly mine, I didn’t need the added owing of the modern-“art” delusions provoked by any so-proper law-ad­ministered contusions, thanks, I would’ve done nicely without, kind reminder for next time, if you’d be so personably amenable, I gamely pinpoint, good-guy policy, and so on.

He’s bran­dishing some sprigs of yew he’s pulled, by jets of sudden energy – windowwise? windowwards? – from the wild hedges run along with us. Seems he’s conjuring the ill eye I could’ve otherwise been cursing them with. But who knows. Later, cursorily, he deposits the sprigs on the table where the jury (still mute like the moot point of it all) scowl and sit.

“–Well, hello here, and how do you do? We lifted your nightshirt and pulled you some leg, didn’t we?” I’d wished he’d greeted me thus – instead, he invokes the sins of the son (or some other ceremonial piffle like this,) and, after vying a bit with the woman in bed (for every juror’s got his own and all are more or less vying also) in order to attain some sort of necessary trance, lastly, down the funnel of an histrionically evoked V (like he’s diving into deep waters or something equally cauldrony,) surprisingly (unless he’s turned my advocate) he kens the summum of laxity. What! – the uppity wrath of the grivously vexed queen of the bunch. She dwarfly stands on her bunk with no man, and, with a faint gesture of disgust, dismisses from the premises the big droopy fruit. Unbelievable.

While Chin’s dejectedly ejected, a sizable branch of exotic yew, much as a suddenly striken match, burns of itself, alone on the periphery of the elongated table behind which the jury’s berths so smoothly waggle. Through the car doors widly drawn open, the navy sky pours in. A little fleet of party-fishing boats graces with its coruscating white the aubergine surface of the lake. Staggering cloud formations call for resplendent insurrection; agog, envying the insects, like them hurtfully allured, I can’t but bend down my plucked eggshell-thin frail cracking neck. Damn to hell my adult drive to the barren high-falutin’! Wish I could be again a flying hero...

“–All hail Tarman!... From the demeaning shaming tar he’s constantly covered with, pristine feathers suddenly sprout, and his legs become thin sticks of black scaly steel, his talons and beak are now wildly mortiferous; he’s another bright keen-eyed dignified bird, glory of creation...” With a bit of angry self-generating heat I rise fuming from the grey tender malodorous heap of the humbled, the crestfallen, the cheaply dispensed with... From the middle of some of those sad growths of rot, which on closer look happen to consist of shambolic messes of hunchbacked ster­coraceous newly transmogrified worms the harrowing drudgeries, the iniquitous inequities, the criminal daily ignominies have compelled a few plain humans who once dared face the scowls of the powerful tyrans to turn disgracefully into, a blinding light with the body of an assassin bird is shining irresistibly forth... Among the excrementicious non-descript blobs a phoenix is reborn, magnificent, eficacious, flamingly lethal, proper as hell... “–Hello! now we are cooking, baby; everything is getting straightened out, the ill-perpetrating fucks know now, to their bodily and psychic detriment, indeed who’s boss; the avenging resplen­dent black bird with the wide stragulum of immaculate white feathers, and the ferocious razor-sharp nails of its wings and feet, and the fangs of its beak, astraddle on the two beaks of the moon, or the forks of the oaks, the arms of the crosses and telephone poles, injects the worst virulent fear into the hearts of the proud and the vain. Hooligan­dom, hoodlumhood, thug-thug-chug-chug, all the nauseating kingdom of the robotic, military-trained and the uniformed is in for a rough refreshing shake up, a whole turning over of the manure pile – and guano shall fly, guaranteed, for Tarman’s loose again, Tarman’s afoot, the tarmac mac with macadamia nut nuts is about to pounce, boo, and all the bullies do tremble, yeah, they most certainly do...”

You betcha, wish I were a dreamy little boy again: maybe then I’d dare to jump – “nothing risked, nothing earned,” the comics heroes’ mottoes ring and agitate for a second the ashes inside the canopic urn my cranium’s become. No risk involved, no risk incurred, responds the scaredly weakling I’m playing instead – necessarily, seeing who they’d prefer me to be, the lame hostage that wallows in self-pity and frantic apologies. Here at the dank fusty cellar meanwhile, helplessly splayed as a just smitten bovine, first (the splicing being somewhat defec­tive,) wink as you may, much as you strain, the layers of dark matter keep their booming assault up for a few adaptive beats. Keep your cool, the stale secs are bound to elapse. Add tret to tare and pay off half, that’s what’s needed, the right maths always cut the simmering down, else the tear and wear of a brain too hot soon shall have you worn out, torn to shreds, gone to pot – the new extra input weighs your frame down, unload one half to the back burner, come lighter to the front...