29. subterranean funfairs / plastified droppings from the helicoptered candidates

Thou anew with thine fair ticket aloft (for the return trip)










Tidying everything before I’m gone

Something to remember me by (I thought)

And now it seems they remember me by

The endearing sobriquet of “the tidy guy.”



Picked up all the papers

Piled them up in tidy mounts

Picked up even all the discarded underwear

From the secretary girls dirty after their parties

And saintly debaucheries.



Now I was loaded with my goodbye packages

The street a bit slippery

The metro station the wrong one

The corridors dark

Some of my little suitcases misplaced

The funfair underground labyrinthine

Its shops darkening and almost deserted

And the criers not even bothering with the shadow of me.



Luckily I met a friend of old

Who hadn’t given up

He was back at work hard as nails

And he put everything to rights

With a sad face though

Because I was surrendering to pressure again

Bailing out retiring to pastures green

Alone and naked and empty-pocketed and so on.



Little consolation he gave me a few mementoes

For my collection of trifles and worthless trinkets

From the city back at home in the sticks.



Took from his pocket a few electioneering badges

And match boxes (three or four)

That he’d found on the floor

As he was walking today and he’d thought

About me

For which I was very

Very touched.



We said goodbye there at the dark platform

I see still his hand waving goodbye

And gesturing showing which way the right way

To get to the good station that would carry me

To the station

Where the train would carry me home.



Such perfection of organization the world

I was so touched

My fingers still smelled of the girls’ crotches

The train was lulling me to sleep

I had a slight erection

Peaceful pastoral home beckoned

And my trinkets joyfully tinkled

What a perfect world indeed.

28. clues on the angular walls

Angular walls of the fortress hotel checked for clues
















Ah yes the hotel

Well it was full and we were bound to stay by the window

Looking at the snow

The hall was teeming thick with breaths and smoke

I told my son as soon as you see snow anywhere

Scan the landscape

Wherever you are in a train a plane a coach a hotel

And be light-footed enough so that you take your place

Near the nicest available girl

The more well endowed with chest material

And ass substance the better

For the hours shall be long

And nothing warms a heart or a body as a nice big chested big assed woman

Son at your side.



Keep your ears pealed she’ll tell you soon such intimate details

As about the time she pissed herself and had to hang her underwear

Well wrung on the racks of the communal bathroom

Or... But you get my drift – as I was saying substantial stuff indeed.



The wind was blowing outside

The snow afloat

The trees surrendering

The bears hungry.



Scheming or running

The runners and the cheaters were scurrying in and out of doors.



I told my son never you fret

Morning comes always soon enough

Often your are caught by its light even in the middle of your endeavors

And you are puzzled and amazed

And you scream to the forces unseen that hey you weren’t even half finished

With you secret delicate nocturnal chores

For only in hypnagogic vision one guesses enlightened

That there is truth and that there touches one reality.



I remember now in the tundra

When we were stationed in the abandoned mine

The frozen torrent had to be dug up in order to find some of the soldiers

That had died during the previous war

And had been buried in there though nobody knew exactly where

At which point all along the intricacies of the stream

Buried in sewage buried in which type of taxidermic reptilian sands

Or in which sludge I mean or slurry rather

That their moving corpses shriveled to weirder shapes

Than when they were just tidy dudes aching for action

In the dancing floor of the massacring grounds.



There then where the fortification at one of its banks ran in zigzag

Arbitrarily letting in inlets or contrariwise encroaching on the trench itself

The immemorial water had drawn into the rock

There we dug and well look never mind

The conditions were infinitely worse than now.



In fact of course everything evolves always to a better stratum

As stuff adds its modifying thrust

The outlook improves

And the definite glory you know what it is?

Is dying

Dying when your work has then been done

Once and for all – ah then yeah the sighing the blessed letting go...



Meanwhile though our hands were so frozen our arms so stiff

That we had to feed each other

We soldiers paired face to face with our stiff arms clumsily fishing

Into the gritty pond of frozen food

On a plate all told in front of us

And then we lifted our arms and the fellow in front

Of you fed you with his stiff arm as you fed him with yours

The frozen muddy dollop of incongruous potato at the end of your glove...



And then almost of a sudden

Wouldn’t you know!

The Sun would always explode

Everything unfroze

The torrent flew the dead exited disguised and unstuck

Their lids unclung our arms jumped alive

The flowers popped all over the field

The birds were ubiquitously heard they had resuscitated

We started to sing songs much as oarsmen do

We joked we slapped our reciprocating backs

The cook danced a jig with his ladle aloft.



I never forgot those days

How could I and how could you now son

Look the snow is the page where all is written

Indelibly don’t you agree?

Forever extant and the Sun explodes only in order

That the page be renewed

Where another episode of our epic should appear

Splashed in such magnificent clarity

Our eyes at the beginning smarting

And we rubbing in consequence our lids with some alacrity

So that the phosphenes should add a few more protagonists

Disfigured and all to the queer proceedings on the stage.



Then the snow outside turned red

Arson is the fulcrum where snow finds its leverage

Is also the setting in where the incubi delve

They are blushing as their alibis are shot

They are accused to be accessories to asphyxiation.



Beneath the old soldiers smolderingly slumber

But do they fume? Only when the Sun’s too keen

Its explosion unwarrantedly muscular

The processes meanwhile push on the landscapes puff on

The rampant smuts offer their syllabic gambits against the eroded walls

The ramparts become flatly synthetic if bizarrely stained

With a language I don’t understand.



Every entity this side and that of the glass gets imbued

With the fiery madness

Macabresquely prostrates itself.



It’s too cold again

The son’s trying to disentomb the father from the snow

The father unfound

Unfound as yet and surely for evermore.



Useless frostbitten undertaking son

Scan rather the apparatus that suddenly takes off

A revival of sorts

At it then courageously.



Virtuous after such debauchery wallowing

My eyes not clinging unclogged

Under masses of snow.



But why the elegiac tone?

Scan scan the landscapes

Now

The protruding forms behind the wondrous

Angles

Do though take care it doesn’t pay to scrape one’s shin.

First of Covershame

The green limpid waters of the African isle. An airplane rests with its wheels on the shore, bathed by the pellucid wavelets – the hovels are bunched together along the coast – smokes from the cooking that takes place here and there waft the way of the walker – voices galore in prandial chitchat and fun.



He thinks: Language is for whoever uses it, and how he sees fit to use it – the point is: are you being understood – or at least half understood – can anyone hope for aught better than that...?



He peeps inside a hut that has a “door” like a tent. He bends up a corner of the flap and peers through the murk. Across the floor of the low-ceilinged hut a cactus at its sharpest. He coughs. His bothering lung again, irritated by the smokes. Pelts and then a few small, dead, as yet unskinned animals hang along the side aisles allowed by the cactus. He is cautious now. A parrot once did its best to rip his nose off his face. And he’s heard a whimper – as of a parrot itching to attack, mayhap? Is the word “mayhap” more sailor-like than perhaps? Well, maybe.



He runs toward the shingle on the shore, a dead end. He relives how the wreckage came about. He was afraid of falling from the tempest-tossed ship into the sea – unclaimed forever. Two brothers were fighting, one had a heavy leather bag of letters with him, the other one wanted to grab it but he only got the blows of it for his pains. That second brother was blinded by a bloody band across his eyes – he never really knew (though he could always try and intuit it) where the blows were coming from... Were the letters their last treasure...? Was the wounded mariner (wounded at the eyes no less) trying to save himself with the last reason for living – a bag of letters of identity which at the same time could have served as a saving raft...? Were the letters from the missing girl, now presumed dead...? She’d fallen from the gunwale’s rim as the ship first got snagged by the craggy shallows.



Crimes of the wife, he thought, that someone still might read about – betraying also your last hope of persisting even if only as a specter: a damaged memory, or a ridiculed name, or just another cuckolded and poisoned figment. In spidery retreat, the laden brother left the blind brother who slowly, realizing he was now alone, unwound. He breathed down, dumped among some unclamped cans, sprawling, slowly falling asleep. The peonies of his daydream were blossoming like blots of blood upon the band above his eyes. “Ere the man Eimeric Despuig arrived, all was well...” – he muttered, and the man, Eimeric Despuig, suffered a fit of coughing – he’d been disgustingly retching all day; he had gagged with a bunch of hairs ensconced in a glass of water that he had tried to gobble up just as he had waken as the ship kept now more loudly sliding to one side.



With the voice disguised, pretending to be one rough sailor, Eimeric Despuig started to sing a hearty shanty. “Ah, those poor bastards for me to hove to... Hey, and blow me to the birdcage where the five-gallon jar a-mourns...” He said, and seeing he knew no more about the song, he started now with a martial ballad, more terrestrial than briny stuff, but what the hell, the point being only that the blind guy wouldn’t recognize his cough and feel further aggrieved. Bad enough as it was for him already, poor doomed mate, and the boat all but ready to capsize.



“Admit it and that’s it, a clean slate...” – the blind guy said.



Eimeric Despuig looked ashore. The lie of the land, bereft now of warriors, looked itself like the corpse of a corpulent woman, all those glutei and tits, a hairless squaw loosened in repose, after all those long hours of drudgery.



He heard his general again. “Clean slate.”



“Shit happens, my friend. You won’t pull me into this asshole theory – ok? About me being bad luck. Death comes to the best of them. No albatros me – fuck you.”



He left the blind witling raving. He decided to slip away tonight. Bound for the African island. And if he should be eaten by sharks on the way so be it.



Now he heard the general admonishing, rebuking, but with the same breath granting a modicum of reprieve, his own fault (the general’s) at the carnage bigger than Eimeric Despuig’s: “I don’t want you to feel sorry, ever, for any of your actions. Actions undertaken under the heat of battle can’t ever be gainsaid, regretted, deplored, taken back... What was done was the best under the circumstances. Always. Ever. Forever. That this particular action caused such mortality with the troops, such mountains of fatalities, is only a sad accident, an aside of little consequence... Grieving is for shits. Crying is for bragging catamites. We martial types are never guilty of a fidgety conscience. Vanish the jitters, man. Loyalty, tenacity, to these we cling... The rest’s flabby turds’ pluckless weaving and embroidering. Under the more fiendish of tortures, we adduce amnesia – same here with the fucking press. All those coffins, we’ll claim, are fraudulent. On the podium we’ll screw our eyes in order to see, not a farty stuffy chamber with a few assholes with recording machines in their hands instead of their tired pricks for a change, but a horizon of knights, a worthy scene of heroic proportions, hordes on the march, wonderstruck, due for glory...! Forget that bundle of silly puppets, whining for our condescension, shitty yokels, a swamp of cosseted clerisy toiling after their cute articles, trying to put in a harsh nutshell how much they hate the military. You won’t be my scapegoat, you hear me...!”



He stirred at last, like dough stirs if it wants to grow. He said: “I’ll do whatever you command, my general.”

“We’ll put on their whachamacallit, sepulchers, whatever the tricky epitaph that our propaganda corps can come up best with by shredding their noggins, all sticky with tacky ruses... Don’t we know them, scumbag scalawags. Nonsense, brittle forgeries, exaggerating the pathos, the camp, the kitschy froth, though not too much of it either, all done with a certain style – beware of blunders – that it not be a strain after all, too much cream and foam cloying the palate. With velvety fingers, not full of the corrupt muck of the grave-plunderers, Christians and Jews and A-rabs with angels and scythes and torches and shits, no, copying instead from the more inferred, taciturn, strict Romans, plus the Etruscans, the Stoics, the Spartans, the Soviets... All those great fearless ancestors. Tapping the ancient layers of epic discourse, and baroque flim-flam. Or even something less obvious. Something on the order of the famous shorthand myths written on the spare tombs of the nastier crazier saints; nothing Egyptian, pyramidal, in unreadable spiral steles, no, fuck, something Homeric: He died flayed..., something like this, when in fact everybody but the chaste, inane rabble knows he died flaying my prick...! Reap and you’ll sow, the dentistry of holy-grailty, the host, the holy ghost, tawdry unkempt billowings from the abyss, howling tombstones, stifled by the coquetry of hate, you can’t wean the populace from the joys and orgasms of their split mind: We want blood but tears too. You can’t bilk them of one or the other, they got to have them both, steady doses... Tears – blood – blood – tears... Nothing else diddles their minds’ clitorises as zealously. Know what I mean...?”



“Sir, I do, with a thud.” Eimeric Despuig answered, irksomely perplexed. He wanted to ask: “What about secretions of the semen-y type...?” But abstained. Enough rubbish already as it was.



Already gone underground the lewd grubs themselves who had been busy under the burel antimacassars that covered the corpses, once the corpses themselves had been removed to the charnel house. And now imagine all those clandestine sinewy goings-on that must be going on underneath...



“Grylli and the rest of the callow patsies engraved over the vortices on the armpits at the columns of the mausoleums: bah, the quick inveigled into carrying the load for the deceased... Not in my watch!”



The man dismissed himself from the presence of his phantoms terrestrial and briny. With the pouts of the waves hissed at his feet the angry glue of the sea. Lugubrious stew, he thought, hungry.



Perhaps he ought to retrace his steps – go back to the huts and tents where the cooking went on. Those savages looked all like flakes and weirdoes. Their ruffled feathers, their organized religion, their fucking devils to whom the food had to be consecrated – the zinger being that whoever touched the offered viands became sacrificial prey instantly. Eimeric Despuig had seen an owl immediately plucked. And a ruminative large animal clocked with a rock and skinned. Its skull smitten, its brains added to some soup in an ebullient caldron.



An apish runt of a fairy godmother was approaching – her invincible drool speckled with dots of tar from the fires. Eimeric Despuig felt cowardly – abruptly, looking awestruck, almost sunk in gloom, he unplugged himself – suasive enough, he leaked out a slapdash apology. The ape caught not a word aright. Her features, of a dumb rapist of a predator gone seedy, turned greedy.



Eimeric Despuig saw himself part of an instant raw meal. Burning with anticipatory grief, he struck at the witch. She must have been seriously flawed someplace about her skeleton for she dismally fell sprawled over the grit. Overweight Eimeric Despuig, whom nobody would have any longer pegged as an old warrior, shrugged diffidently toward the gallery. He had bated but a slight push, he seemed to say, steeped in itching and flabby virtue.



But the people at the village were mildly cheering him. A steed whinnied in what sounded like an elongated fit of weeping; a goat sneezed. Afloat, a case succeeded in landing. Under a broken slab, Eimeric Despuig picked across the foil that lined the objects the case held – a row of twisted arrowheads used to replace those busted at the tips of the harpoons the whaling crew threw at the backs of the frenzied monsters.



Eimeric Despuig’s mind flew back to those gleeful fights that with forks and knives for all parafernalia took often place both among the soldiers in the field and then among the fishers aboard when it was time to cut and share the bacon. All quarreling bastards being akin, no matter the spot of contention. Dislodged underlings besmirched in their severed soul by the searing sparks of the myriad possibilities of a too spacious horizon, where no beacon of constriction flames nonetheless strongly enough.



Always, when the stars were too appalling in number and depth, a convenient brawl ensued. Once even captain Eimeric Despuig got knocked down.



A riddle to his minions, now he erupted in wrath as an dynosaur embryo upset from his egg a little too soon. Incontinently, on the sly, he slunk away, and disappeared behind the latrines, where the thrones were fancifully decorated with art not worth a fart, and where one usually reigns, total master of his body for once, he surreptitiously wrote a poem with a few alien turds.



The man was deteriorating fast. A bitterly bickering retired general of his acquaintance mugged him good at the hospital – the indecently whittled edge of the retired worthy’s crutch wedged itself nothing benignly in the feckless captain’s shorn nape.



Then captain Eimeric Despuig appeared mesmerized by his words of wisdom. The sage Savin Covershame, the reputed, revered abortionist. He tarried for an instant, no doubt gobsmacked by the clarity of the old fellow’s thinking. After such a murderous personal defeat, and now the compassionate old soldier trying to put a spotless shroud on it, and with such keen skill too... It was understandable.



“Sir, I’m sick.” He said.



“Okay, dismissed.” Said the general. And in his mind he started plotting Eimeric Despuig’s court-marshalling, flimsy demoiselle, a dud.



In town the water, though rationed, was free for all. It was a beautiful town, sunny, whitewashed, where the youth were all so clean. The general endeavored to throw in a lecture or two to encourage them to enlist. Brother, the mistrust, though. It was dawn next day before that swarm of rogues hexagonally ensconced in the luxuries the mayoralty afforded at the long last yielded.



“Our civilization,” he had said in his speech, “is a bulwark, epitome of the flawless kernel of excellence, and yet, alas, a last monument about to be demolished by the barbarians. The harbingers, the scourge, the plague, the ash... The complacency clogging the arteries of progress, the flaccidity ripened into a blob of disgusting slimy stinky fried fat... The aim of youth being zilch... The phantom of Armageddon stalking the stodgy, ponderous bourgeois... Too much weight meaning a deeper crumbling...”



All the truisms were there... The scant public seemed well fucking terrorized.



“Our enemy expects from us an immediate unconditional surrender. And we can’t dodge them rescuers, they want to carry us willy-nilly – en bloc – to their tarry and inflamed heaven. As a youth I also swore: Never give an inch. We have a tryst with the succouring devil, soon we’ll we welded to a keener rock in hell, hail of carbons falling on our flayed twisted bodies, our naked thews and peeled sinews briskly pulled until they snap. We are lost. Look everywhere. Afterimages of fear on every marquee.”



Eimeric Despuig, the convalescing captain, was crumpled in the very last row, in a corner, his half-dead lurking; his sickness so apparent, a ghoul now. The wardens in the prison a chorus of witches praying, in crumpled unison, for his recovery.



Suddenly the general barked an order: “Captain Eimeric Despuig, stand up!”



He rose, tottering. His wife, his daughters were there. So pretty, so unnerving, so unmanning.



“You were recently responsible for the death of a whole regiment of our cream shock troops, three hundred thousand of them blown to pieces thanks to your error in assessing the strength and proficiency of the piddling enemy. You were caught eating shit. Was that some type of a worthless pitch at attonement...? Who cares? No dice. Those images of extreme horror can’t ever be erased, not with shit, not with faked folly, not with more blood. Not quite, not for me. I know about those deleted stuffs you dirty parodies of a soldier in the rearguard try to pass to a stupid public for the genuine dirt. I’ve been recently hobnobbing with the less addled of the famous and influential, the cream; talking with them with all frankness; they acknowledge to me their fears, their ills, their hidden cancers... There’s often a party later in the courtyard... I have no hose to freshen the dirt; I only need, though, to take out my prick and sprinkle the whole yard, the rush and push of my piss covering at least twenty yards all round, and the night approaches and the tables are being laid, and my piss serves immense purposes... Well, anyhow, they are confessing their inability to understand how a man such as you yourself, guilty of such an inconceivably large massacre of our own and finest, are, I mean, is still able to go freely about town, with you decorative family on tow, the dainty daughters, the flashy wife, the heinous nauseating monkey-like critters that pass as your venomous dogs... You ought to be shot forthwith, sir; you ought to be made an example of here and now, in front of all those clean youngsters who know the value of rationing... If you’d be a man and a superman, ergo, a soldier, you’d shoot yourself with glee, in front of everybody, so that something you’ve done in your wasted life could at last be applauded by the dignified, commendable masses, witnesses to vastness and greatness – as modestly typified by myself – but also to meanness, mischief and depravation, of which you, alas, are the uppermost representative... You goof, you gaff, you fugging specter of mischance!”



Eimeric Despuig was at a loss, obviously. Under his breath he chewed this loaded word: “Bully...!”



Then, under the sudden ramming-horn of some sort of epileptic fit, he lifted a tiny scarecrow, the garish ungainly diminutive body of her youngest daughter.



“Gladness, yes!” He shouted. “That I’m no longer a bloody soldier. That I’m not a licensed murderer, suffered, ney, encouraged to act crazy, even rewarded for it, and sent abroad, and far and wide to terrify pell-mell, armed to the teeth, dressed as a ferocious clown, in some childish tacky make-believe disguise, unhinged by your reasons for the wars of unreason you wage at all time, just for a fart, or for an imagined fart, suffocating armies, full of carnivorous zombies, all a bunch of ravaging, ravishing vandals and outlaws pretending to righteousness, fucking filthy word you’ve made of it, warty crawlers all over the cratered earth, whacking at terrifying phantoms with the faces of the innocent... But now I’m alive, and she’s my source of vitality. She wants to go potty, yes! I’m going potty, and her eyes are filled with yearning... I shall yield to her needs! For I am human! She’d been bullied, like a soldier, humiliated, put down, horribly hazed all those days at nursery school... I reviewed the little movie the school had provided – and you know what? I noticed immediately that it had been tinkered with – at least cut in several places, and spliced; but I could reconstruct it; and now the phantom images betray the young teacher, prancing, naked, cruel, laughing at my daughter as she tries to go potty in her empty receptacle of a drink carried from home...! She’s being tortured, like a soldier unto a soldier: no quarter, no pity! But she’s just a tyke, a timorous infant... She can’t go potty in public; she needs her privacy... But, ah! She’s been discovered trying to be herself by the young, irremediably indoctrinated teacher, and now she’s being betrayed, ridiculed... Gutted. The lying images of my daughter happy, and at ease, hide the images of my daughter stressed, anxious, in agony... Caught, ashamed, indicted, insulted, mortified, branded, laughed at by the whole cruel class... That’s not what life could be. I’m a military poet: strong, disciplined, understanding, helpful, running nights in long fields full of snakes... My calling would be aiding the others... The famous moribund in particular... Deferentially admired by the young girls as I do my deeds of beauty...”



He remembers with a wince of spiritual pain how he went on and on, rhapsodizing. They had him on tape now, ranting, crazy, antipatriotic... A few erasures here and there and lo, la-la, lo – another basket case for the firing squad.



Like a pokerfaced jar, akimbo, the general at the lectern let the slime of the young captain’s craven words flow on the slippery slip of his shiny surface. Indeed, the old general’s skin outshone even those on the thighs of Eimeric Despuig’s blowsy younger daughters, from whose bewildering groins bizarre whispers grew. Like the shimmering but straightlaced figments spawned by the general’s martial will, those whispers talked of opalescent eggs about to be smitten like the crania of foes or like the sparkling dishes with the faces of a dumb pope and his wife, ornate with a garland of Victorian ribbons and flowers and a chunk of hairy raw monkey meat to be dumped on top. All girls by nature are fascistic – their vaginas lathery, sweating like lingering toadstools for the neat, straight-backed, tough-talking, uniformed commander, so provident, such a prospective suitor of a trump card up one’s sleeve, an unfailingly brutal protector, who wouldn’t need one just right now...?



With a fell swoop of his comet-like hand the old general wiped from his eyes the paradise where all those little girls were so vehement about his masculinity. Due to some internecine long-nailed fights, some of the houris had been lately limping coming down the grassy slopes to meet his aspersing thurible or, more pugnaciously, his shedding rapier whose clout indeed, though long in the tooth, which in itself who says that that’s a downer, still was no trifle.



“At the foot of the spartan chimneys ricochets the scarred gore, and the smoldering tendrils of flesh grow around the sudden orchids of benzene... We laid waste the land of inconspicuous swarms of people whose main concerns before we attacqued were perhaps how to stem the seductive younger rascals from catching charwomen’s gonorrhea, and of course how to knot down the burgeoning prongs of the cocoon of dearth. Now what have we done...? The girlish girls won’t again skip over the snaggled flagstones of the discouraging graves, full of purpose after their freckled sleek idylls, past the rusting fences. Heartbroken, they won’t again have any of those sweet blatant rueful insights as soon as, after they’d been the prettier half of one those loathsome pairs of newlyweds, the fleeting tearjerker of their farther trajectory had billowed and echoed in the bedraggled tangles of the jungle like the cries of the spurned hyena. As we slobs slog through that new hellish desert, in the midst of the whimpers the prosthetic weeds of our bogged down machinery of death send to the deaf heavens, let’s realized that if we had to act, it had rather be against the invincible specter of our own image. Hatted and popular, we belong in the middle of the road, joking and bragging and pushing away any interloper, alas, always undislodgeable, at least until the earth itself has not been charred and eroded into an unlivable no man’s land. For we can’t stomach anything foreign, eager perhaps to partake, lurking at our imaginary borders.”



He remembers, yes, how he looked up now. Nobody placidly loitering behind the balusters of a non-existent round-the-ceiling row of chairs for the audience – no telepathic redhead nicely commiserating, not belting obscenities in a tantrum, not stymied either, but clinging to the banister, her glossy luscious mouth mouthing the magic word “acquittal, acquittal...”



“...for we are nothing but churls and bullies, harnessed in pitiful self denial, striving to botch, wicked lousy faltering mammoths incapable to recant our past crimes, full of chicanery, hiding the old crimes with the new ones, always new ones, always some enemy at the door, always a victim to kill, always an atomic bomb to hurl at..., always ready to rearm, rely only on profit, and the paltry-padding conning sanctimonious evangelical thurifers backing you – ah, so much worthless pablum to burn...”



A younger general, till now seated behind the old one, jumped up, as who wouldn’t, and said: “Enough! Are we just the flunkies of another kakistocracy or rather the buffer zone spooks of a racy taboo state strewn with miscreants? I say bequeath and be one on whom of the bequeathal is bequeathed. I say that there is room for rosy idylls beneath the never niggardly orgies where whips run rampant and the imprimatur of purulent wounds are plastered by ditto bishops on the fleshes of virgin boys whose specter sphincters splinter as did the plumper of my comrades in captivity. I say, and to repeat, that there’s always room enough for hope! We only need to redeem ourselves by casting the rabid shifty pusillanimous apostles from our midst. Let the slanderous slugs harmful to the flock be smashed like splattering sputtering scumbags. That the nauseous splash be the branding of the beast. For they threaten to blow the whole concern to smithereens, do they not?”



I heard nobody objecting, the wrecked sailor silently opines, a finger up his nostril, as the surf splatters on the rock he rests on and the spray rains on his moustaches.



“Am I lying...? They indict and finger-point, and suck the more velvety of the piano keys, and blow our tops and whistle-blow, and murmur of, and yell at, the servitors of the state, and impinge into their endeavors, precisely at the dutiful servitors of the state as they go about accomplishing their tasks, fulfilling their sacred blood-drenched chores... Aloof, as encrusted chiggers, they mutter amongst the interstices of the ruins. Enormous holes, full not of real soldiers now, but of substitutes, of wooden Indians, of dummies full of enormous holes again, created by the underground grubs, empowered by mistake, temporary, provisional, as if wrongly imprisoned, amateurs playing ball, a disgrace to see... Our colossal works now sabotaged... Enormous holes, enormous busted-sphincter holes... In between a horrendous shambles... And then, endemic, those gigantic snakes, a few small ones, asps, eavesdropping asps, twisted, dry, butt-ugly, trying to bite the big ones... The big ones, who erst could’ve swallowed an elephant... Isn’t it ludicrous? You are not going anywhere but to the shooting wall, Eimeric Despuig boy. Awesome glamorous cellophane enveloping a stale tinderbox, you creep, ready to be lanced, due to be cleansed... Damned arrogance. Trying to swallow an elephant indeed!”



He remembered. Was that what? A play in a prison about a hospital. A play in a hospital about a prison? This play with Sade and Marat. Murders justified through plenty arguments.



“Killing – good at nothing else...!” Captain Eimeric Despuig broke in, as well he might. “Slaughtering, and then lovelorn, nancy strong boys, nestling and cooing, and pampering and petting, as scruffy warmongering albatrosses comfy inside a pile of usurped weapons that shall bring doom upon those soulless simples held already in vassalage. Slaying, and then lecherous after ordinance, all those duplicate discombobulated pieces of jagged virtu, you ruefully, so maudlin, engage in sex with! Your murderous sexual exploits etched in brimstone; there you are: imprinted in hellish tones, your cap flew off, its fringes a mess of meaninglessness, your breasts carved with incandescent lungs boiling with rancor, and your iron pricks an anomaly of never properly pistoning machinery. Are your right arms raised in perpetuity? Raucous cries, noisy rallies, choruses of equine viruses squirming in painful unease – you’ve been ridden all the way to your horrid little place of burial. Yes, sir, and who rode you, now gets rid of you, you corroding inconvenience: you killed for him, and he wantonly, even grudgingly, disposes of your by now mostly metallic (and rusted) carcass. He’s made it prune it by some other flunky like erst yourself lest some piece of equipment should still be echt and prolong its time: maybe transformed into bullets with which to mete out injustice into the blameless natives of all those foreign wars...”



“All that sickening hub of lies!” The young general, apparently beside himself, came charging like an impudent behemoth. Neither wry, nor self-effacing, nor cohesive at all (like who would in a fucking court-martial,) he pounded upon the easel. “Heroically circumventing the hail of bullets indeed! Overcoming the charge of dynamite bursting inside your guts. Like Hercules in the guts of the whale: to explode it from within...! Heroically, and unrewarded, unguerdoned, for it is impossible to repay such prowess, we know, and yet here we are, heroic enough, more than enough, superbly heroic! Unacceptable whilst unrepentant, and unrepaired, and yet hard at it... In the bowels of the inimical beast. The miraculous spate of overwhelming resurrections from so many sham suicides, of course. The bereaved, the distraught survivors, like untongued and blinded chameleons, melting in the mud. The excruciating wounds, the insurmountable jitters, the rat-filled stomachs, the constant weepings... All sanitized wimpy fables, all grotesque decoys, this is how it seems, but not a smidgeon of how it was, all gaunt pallid fabrications of poet historians – and not two of them – what’s the likelihood – coming up with the same concept or the just word to define the same fact – rapidly waning – on the contrary, like car racers, each of them trying to outdo the remainder with their worthless inventions and characterizations of what really transpired, not even the carrion stink of it approached within a mile of approximative truth... I was there! All those small pretty towns spared in spite of such sorrow as can’t be measured against a horizon of never-ending skeletons. How quaint!”



“Talking about the nice little unscathed toy towns indeed!” Eimeric Despuig remonstrated, and tried to start anew. “If I could embolden myself into a few auspicious phrasings...”



“Shut up!” The old general said (and every one present cheerfully concurred,) for the disgraced captain was overstepping the boundaries of decency.



Now some of the sharps tips of a few of those hooks intended to replace the wrecked ones at the end of the harpoons, were piercing his palms. For a second, Eimeric Despuig came back to the scene of his last refuge. An empty feeling... Most of the savages had returned inland, to the fields, or who knew, wherever they went to gather, or hunt, or till... He would not have been able to recognize one of them for the life of him – afflicted with acute prosopagnosia in anything having to do at all with the inferior races.



Maybe the crone he had stunned or killed...? Mm. Was the witch still there, asprawl on the shingle, in such a style as to bring to mind a whiff of cryptic artistry...? A touch of garnishry dangling from the neck of a buxom anchorite...? Yep, a lambkin’s dainty reptilian skin wouldn’t improve on it. With the head of a medusa, a harpy, an angry gargoyle, a disturbed naiad...? And indubitably dead.



He had staggered overboard, as erst – but is the word “erst” more maritime than earlier or formerly? Probably not – as had before the flirting girl for whom, or at least for whose bag of letters, the brothers fought, to serve the span of his natural life (how did the formula state if?) in this forsaken African isle full of dangerous nobodies. After he’d survived the execution squad whose wild shots had miraculously misfired – the rifles too old or the shooters, or both, and unsteady to boot with the diseases and the sickening pills. The dalliance of the pretty girl a pain in the posthumous ass of the cuckolded brother, namely who of the both of them...? The blind fellow in regard to whom nothing good could be said, or the other one, the cruel one who always ran such a tight ship, as the old general did with his drumhead court martial high jinks in the subterranean holding halls of the hospital..., until everything went bust, as all has to too eventually.



The nasty brother would had been wondrous in those off-putting slums where the harridans seemed to run the show. With his heinous catchpoll soul he would pinprick their spheres of pride as with his truncheon he would also no doubt their no less rounded croups. He wouldn’t came a cropper as I would, captain Eimeric Despuig thought, shamefully bespattered by the collapse of my former career, shunned by my own family, always erroneous in the lurking witless eyes of the blameless shit-headed lunks, my neighbors and other wounded compatriots. But he, the good nasty brother, must have perished with his bag and his vessel. Swallowed by the ocean beasts.



He had lifted, hadn’t he, a corner of the veil (it felt morbid, like a thick slice of cartilage) at the entrance of the tent of the sacred maniacal parrot. His reception ominous even here, unfortunate, boding but further shit. He had known previously about ambassador parrots – representatives of their simple-spirited lands in the sanctioned international venues. They wore their hair – their plumage or tufts or crests – when in official business, tied neatly at the nape of their necks. No flounces or headscarfs or colored bows like other representatives of the inferior races. Parrots are a lot smarter than that. Was the parrot I met on my arrival the chief here...? I had staggered overboard, he thought, went off in a little dinghy loaded with stolen trinkets...



He came back at the loathful scene of the evening of his disgrace. The death sentence was about to be pronounced. A few of the stalled putty bystanders crumbled in a puff of fetor. Not me, thought he. Before farting mouthwise with the stench of his crippled opinion, the presiding judge, the old general, with his court of younger asslicking ones in tow, aped the close-knit jury, which had gotten up as a weak hirsute wicked man to hie itself with due permission back to the privy. Eimeric Despuig took his totemic cigar out and soaked up smoke until the knobs of his knees reached their goal, which was to bleat like blisters pouring out oodles of balm. He felt dandy all told.



Next his testimony postponed, the proceedings adjourned...? Not a chance. He’d turn into a dead man today, true enough, soon enough, no delays, that’s the stark healthy military way.



Now, again, wrecked sailor Eimeric Despuig took in, squinting, the seared horizon, inwards. Rere the dire shrubs down there, there were mingled beasts and men, the men behind the beasts, in acts of buggery, it appeared in the clearer distance; with a frenzy, there they were, plowing. A squadron of plowing peasants. Atoning, as all peasants, for their misdeeds of past lives. Such fucks!



Eimeric Despuig tried to renew then his brilliant impugnation. He perorated as follows: “It coheres when society’s pretty towns and other soothing accomplishments are by the good and virtuous weapon-tottingly safeguarded... About that I’m in agreement. But then with stupor I witnessed, for I was (secretly) stalking the bumbler commander, how he threw caution to the foul winds of defeatism and handled things as bad as you could. Where I was for caution and letting things rot by themselves (they always do,) he next took the brakes off and assaulted the enemy. I was horrified. What in bloody hell is he doing? He was indeed demolishing our own army by intercession of the self-implicit counterattack...”



How shallow sanity! What’s the point of arguing any point...? All’s predetermined.



There’s no telling them apart – they all look like stinking females full of tacky secretions, some more bulbous than others – a few sick and scrawny, with faces yet of deeper horror. His hands were all sharp shiny hooks.



Who am I? And where am I landing? That’s not the isle promised by my Faria. Wasn’t the name Faria that the count of Montecristo...? Eimeric Despuig looked askance at the whole topography. A mistake of nature, surely.



He sang the song. “The river flows under the bridge, and our loves, let me remember: after the pain always came the joy. Here’s the night, the hour strikes, the days flee, I persevere. Our hands entwined, our faces facing each other, let’s remain so, while under the bridge of our arms flows the wave so heavy and weary of crossed gazes. Here’s the night, the hour strikes, the days flee, I persevere. Love flees as flows the water, loves flow, ah how slow living is and how fierce is hope. Here’s the night, the hour strikes, the days flee, I persevere. Gone are the days, the weeks, nothing returns neither time itself nor the loves, as under the bridge the river flows. Here’s the night, the hour strikes, the days flee, I persevere.”



Apollinaire had been his guide to hell from where the sage Savin Covershame would then help him off. Thus is how it happened. Eimeric Despuig had been a wittol in a previous life – such it seemed.



A wittol, a skimmington, acknowledges that his wife is preeminent. She’s the one fucks away, the one brings the bacon home – she’s the man. Eimeric Despuig, the poet-soldier, had no trouble with the arrangement. He’d been a night-shift armed guard in a weapons factory. Now, with some of his wife’s savings, he’d been able to open a little shop. He was selling cheap regalia for fetishists.



The tropical Sun enlightens his memories. Marguerite Despuig, what a woman! My wife, she’s somebody, she travels the world, she appears, and highly praised too, in the Herald Tribune; with some of her savings, yes, I’m able to open a little nostalgia shop, where nazi memorabilia and such items, like war-dilapidated objects, militaristic paraphernalia, and army accoutrements... – true, such shit as this gets easily sold to creeps and crazies. I only sell the genuine article, though. I’ve been in Amsterdam recently, only to acquire a nazi helmet, a general’s, spiked and all. For secret displays and sadistic court-martials. Mock trials. Unfortunately, upon arriving home and researching the item, I realize it’s a fake. Oh, well. I’ve destroyed it. A helmet made in Hong Kong. The helmet proved a dud, but who isn’t fond of nazi memorabilia...? Plenty of lords and ladies selling big chunks of their posh British states only to fill covert rooms with the forbidden objects – ah, martyring implements of torture – chambers of horrors, why not, nothing posher. I had trouble keeping the little shop open, correct. People not tolerant at all – smashing it with bricks and cobbles; hooligans with gasoline and matches, with home-fashioned little bombs having their whims... It was fun for them, it was fun for me.



After Eimeric Despuig’s convenient trip to Amsterdam, once Pompeu Kigolla, the Lithuanian professor to whom his Marguerite was so devoted, had already gone back to his soviet paradise, the wittol asked, drivel at the ready, “And how did it go that time?”



She’s still dreamy. “He brought me roses – a huge bunch.”



The thoughtful professor, a huge bunch of roses, a huge shlong, and an eminence in the field of economics. Shit, I’m awed, you bet, such a luminary, and pleasing the wife and making her a puppet of complacency and obedience, and...



“Did he ask about me at all?”



“No. You are nobody for him.”



For whom is he anybody...? Captain Eimeric Despuig contemplated the sea whose half-closed red eye was the Sun, a churning as of tears concerted made red mountains on the horizon. He thought he saw a man-bird: was it an incarnation of the sacred parrot...?



Such regalia – couldn’t sell it in his little shop of twenty years ago. The clients, the customers so lame, most of them. Looking for the bloody wrappings from the war wound on Apollinaire’s head – more valued and valuable even than the sudarium of so-called Christ, the Milan shroud, and as bogus too. He flew over with ease – found fake “classical” nazi helmet – destroyed it – made in Hong Kong – not worth to sell – don’t sell fakes – only originals. Shop’s doors always tittering – difficult to prop open – or close – the barbaric “antinazies” always aggressing it. Non-fucking dames the dames that came to buy the trinkets. They never paid any attention to him – as inexistent, not there... He’s got to vacate his matrimonial bed every time the knight-lover, the economics warrior, comes back from the arid fields of monetary wars in the restricted hedonic area where the soviets wallow. Who ever cared at all for him? Ah, yes, his little daughter, Eunice. Just three yesterday.



Marguerite said: “Oh, Pompeu and Eunice became such close pals! He gave her a bath every morning. They went together to buy the croissants. She astride on his bull’s neck. Such domestic bliss! Who would’ve have thought! Your daughter will not recognize you either. Tough luck, meek lackey.”



Or something to that effect.

27. well and why not

Have you found the yellow sign yet?










of course that’s the deal

if the dream is feasible and plausible enough

I’ll make it happen and the hell with it

alternate realities or what have you

the point it is a pleasant enough pursuit.



but if it is too ugly or impossible then what

nothing I’ll skip it.



I dreamed last night that my coffin was yellow

all yellow – a burnished shiny keen yellow

well and why not

and now I had to think hard

either I had already the coffin and then I would paint it the same sort of yellow

or as it proved that among my scant belongings I owned no coffin

I had first to buy or make me one

and then paint it yellow

that was the deal

and a welcome one too.



but I also dreamed that then two thugs

while I was unawares cleaning something

some weeds and burned candles

at the corner of my office

two thugs had been been busy at my back

clearing my coffin

stealing my appurtenances therein...



as I confronted them and saw their nonchalance

their hated indifference to my questioning

their malicious matter-of-factness as to what pertained

to their hideous activities

and in my anger I punched one of the thugs

the fattest and thickest

in his fucking gut

and the other

his hands loaded with my stuff

had this frightened face...



well all that I couldn’t make it happen

unless two thugs really materialized thereabouts

and proceeded to rob me

that’s to say the contents of my spanking new yellow coffin

while I was employed on tidying the corner of my office

which effectively held a profusion of burned candles and tiny nascent weeds

as I realized when I kneeled down and started sprucing up

the up till now indeed too neglected corner

of my office

which is all so apposite

for who would’ve thought

that ancient ceremonies would still be represented as relics

or what have you archeological vestiges

oozing up to the floor of my humble office and then even

imprinting themselves as acid effluvia

on the palimpsests of my dreaming machine

the head?



thugs be warned though

I punch thugs’ guts easily enough

when so provoked and instructed by the oneiric shamans

of my archaic memory

and never cowed neither

for I know that the consequences are already written

in the simmering histories of the skies.

26. burning like squibs

Palimpsests on the nuns’ tummies










I’ve seen the iron-willed pencil

with which my busy umbrella striates

its delirium tremens on the tarnished buttocks

of all those clouds so pregnant with malice

– all of them rostrums embellished

with twee tackiness and average abjection

from where stultified heads of preachers preach

their claustrophobia into spirals of pocks

that rain on earth and roam the men’s-rooms

where mopey moan the moraines.



Pocky are the morbid buttocks

every pock a stemma that oozes semens

as if it were another Roman nun’s navel.



Ah the semens – nemeses of my mama!



Would she pester against the establishment!



An establishment that allows the demeaning of the female

whose vulnerability

(like the podophthalmic antennae of the crabs that haunt the merkins

the stilted gems whose meaningful wet samaras fall

like omens on the ludicrous wobbly cobbles

where the manhoods of men trot larval and writhing)

an establishment vile enough to wallow

on the ruins of the vulnerable female made then as labile

as the dry striated semens the nuns umbilically store

stunning sluts seen from a distance...



Wiry by the wayside

sheltered by some rusty eaves from the slums

tried as an awkward obstetrician to read the new wisdom written

by the pencil of my umbrella on the bankrupted marrow of the sky...



It was like trying to read luggies and snot

collapsed on the hilt of my hand

a semen cru of a dispirited vintage gone to pot.



My mom was right

musclemen emboss with their fist the welkins

as if the welkins were the walls of their dens

where they mate and sputter

and scatter the entrails and whittle the skulls.



And the morbid clouds are the foolhardy buttocks

where the fists collided

the teasing asses

harnessed in poisonous chill where the noses snooped

and later the mops erased the names of the mimes that came to cry

their semens entanglements of resented writings done

with pricks that were fists.



Pops like a van carrying fireworks and exploding midway

a bolt of lightning.



With this

(my eyes on stilts burning like squibs)

to nil comes my cavil

I only know that

the sky’s the puppet ass of a worthless fat whore also.

25. the rot is on

How hard again the transit










Caretaker in a girls’ boarding school

I took care of the feminine bodies

With hand unnoticed.



I washed their dirty clothes

I cleaned their bedrooms and bathrooms

I counted every item of clothing – checked carefully

That the tags stuck – counted holes in the meshes

At the barriers on the boundaries explicitly surrounding

Our hallowed ground.



I appreciated them being always ‘round.



There were no dead

There were no strikers

No internecine becrippling of the sweet-smelling troops.



Gravely I used to fondle the mud

How well I remember now the mud

The soft malleable mud where their buttocks and their piss had lain

Smilingly beckoning

Evocatively dreaming of creation.



How well the tasty mud

Now that the ground is unyielding

Now that the dead and the strikers sinisterly come sidling to our side

Sick snarling brutes

With evil intentions of mayhem wreckage thorough extermination

Now that the pillows are nails

Now that the eager sores are never asleep

Now that the torment lingers

Now that the plague rules the roost

Now that famine is ubiquitous.



There’s no clean water

The mines are crumbling on our very heads

And the strikers don’t strike with the paltry sticks and the makeshift flint shovels

At the stony marbled coal that hides maybe the pure torrents underneath.



We are trapped in those galleries

Dive into whichever side and the sharp griddle of raw bord cuts at your wrists

The hard strata of ore surly draw farther prisons on your scalp

Shines the blood on the shiny carbuncles.



We are all in transit

Make fucking do!

I shout to the strikers whose baseless uproar threatens our work

We are husks borne by the draft of the revolving doors of renewal

Don’t you fucking understand?



Because they were appalled that I wouldn’t allow the dead to be properly buried

What the fuck would “properly” mean

I shout

It is the fucking same

It is the fucking same

It is the fucking same!



Buried or not a corpse is a fucking corpse

The rot is on either way

The flies the grubs the maggots and the bugs

The patches and splotches of liquid rot

It is the fucking same “properly” or not!



So nice that those girls were

The fuzz in my guts (grown ferocious

With extraneous eyes and fangs

Devouring each other – the more proximate the first)

Even the fuzz infallibly yearns

That buried or unburied

Rotting away all the same

The strikers and the dead were already one and the same

As the ugly and the beautiful were for me the same

Indiscriminate I in my attentions

To the scrumptious hulls they so carelessly and adorably left behind

Anonymous underwear which my wounds healingly did wrap

The counted items so deeply inspected before they went into the washing machines

The molted meltings so cherished

The abandoned themselves that they so blatantly forgot or even despised

In their transit to the paradise

Of a future sure promised

Yet so long to really come by to

As witness

Alas

As witness

Our plight

Where promise gurglingly beckons indeed

Though indeed so very faintly now...

24. soothing the cruelties

Cruets at the ready









Near the river

The quotidian fights and the ghastly torture

Pimps dogs servants whores

Harsh beatings swift murders...



How easy to turn one’s head toward the geometric gardens nearby

And peripatetically expound upon the landscape

With a friend who also wants to avoid trouble.



And how comforting to apply the cruets of Dalí

A few drops of olive oil over the wounds of pain

A few more drops of the wine vinegar of the sarcasm of his wit

To comment also on the uncouth happenings of the evening.



The heroism of the haggler

Who educes from the gaudy figment hell-bent on slaughter

A meager reduction of the fee

The whore made of sawdust who coaxes the devil

Into yielding some of his flame

So that she might explode with glee

The enchanter who to his tongue’s hilt emits

Those siren’s sounds of wasted velocity

The knots on the necks of the sorrowful lackeys and attendees

Who can’t rightly discern among the umbrages and the felonies

The indelible impact of the fact that we are not there

Not we.



“Gotta be outside

Can’t be in

Could be in

Only if unseen.”



“Them the dapper and the known

They have the run of the place

We the unsightly and the wise

Are banned from the light.”



And now?

The night steadfastly impelled by the shrieks of the dying

Bestows its dark blessing

The river ekes out a reasonable current

Propelled by its recent affluents

The new bloods that the gutter brings.



The dumb chorus observes the utter darkness

And mumbles damp sentences among the boles of the trees

Vertices of the labyrinthine garden

Where dawn is bound to drip

Drop by drop

As from the cruets into the crudities.

23. gods - the posthumous ones

Crawling gods hairy dark unkillable












Giddily slither the bugs

With their lily-like harpoons their beady eyes

Their many legs hairy and black

Their mottled glans

Their puce prepuces

Their bleating mouths

Their unctuous invocations

Their vicious hearts

Their wrinkled assholes from where volumes

Are shitted of quivering stinking platitudes...



I’ve been a secretary to a dentist

To a clumsy dentist I might add

I’ve seen pain

I’ve seen faces scorched and flayed

Unwrapped

The faces you’d see when you opened the iron maiden’s door

And the fellow inside had been pierced through the nose

The eyes the mouth

His bowels topsy-turvy

His organs every which way

And burst you bet

Susurrant seeping garbledly gurgling

Telling one to pull the chain on it all

Once and for all

The deed done...



I’ve been smirking high on a booster seat

Fronting the circus

I’ve even had my courage briefly rubbed off

My heart lumbering

My blood whipping

My lungs yammering nonsense

When for pure pukka tiptop deterrence a beast jumped on the bleachers

We keen on aucupation

A hawk feeding on the filthy wealthy

Extracting its tithe on the eyes of the onlookers:

There is something as having too much fun...



But those bugs

Those bugs were unkillable

Did I try to stick up their asses a stick of dynamite...?

Did I ever!

But no

No event so singular that could end them

Not even a nuclear bomb making a dent

Their atoms undetachable

Tightly bound with an inexpugnable glue

Are they gods...?

They must be

Probably the original ones

Or else the posthumous ones

The gods we left behind

For that’s the only way to kill them

To kill the unkillable bugs or gods

Shadowy presences nibbling gnawing

Ratty rotting

Fraying scouring

At the dusty corners under your bed

Thereabouts ubiquitous

Scrunching freely

Corroding your corns your feet

And beyond

Your innards

Your soul – membranous tattered torn down...



By wiping your conscience clean

Tabula rasa

Die please die

Die...



And thus kill the gods.

22. eye angelized

Angel eye










He approaches - a fish out of water waving his filamentous fins

His breathing hands sifting the desert dust

And he’s got a knife he’s got a few sharper ones too stuck in his sash

Armed to the gills

After the gelding I’ll be much better than a man he assures me

I’ll be angelized.



Dove into the swamp

Swam until I became a riddle of slugs soft weeds bloodsuckers teeth

Ran through the jungle

The freezing reef I climbed like a skulking ascending glacier

Then I lost my foot and my alibi

Fell a wreck at their cataphracted feet

Blindfolded and gagged they had me quarantined

A luminescent amoeba now-defunct enkindled the bleak sojourn

She was a tiny parasite in one of my eyes

She saw my suffering

She remembered my childhood

When I was such a stud where all the old patricians croaked with envy

That I'd better be made better than a man soon

My prick showing the proud depravity

Of a lean never lame boomslang

Agreed agreed their jealous rusted voices croaked

And the amoeba clung

And made love to my eye

My all-seeing eye

My angel eye.

21. fates frantically webbed

Crisscrossing lines of fate on alleys quite frenzied










One wonders

Why the rapidity

Isn’t it better to stroll along the road?

The procession of cars with the rushing nuns crammed in

Shall collide with the procession of cars replete with the flushed heavy families

That speed on the contrary direction

And what a bother all it shall be

The shambles the smokes the conflagrations

The bodies the bloods

The sirens the hounds

My car was stolen long ago – by thieves one supposes

Never owned that damned annoyance a dog

Never had therefore an “accident” provoked by such a pesky overgrown bug

Now my friends’ house

The same I used to crash in up to the day before yesterday

Was also stolen – by the cops – or the state – (same thing)

Now I see them coming back on the opposite side (my friends)

Across the river of crazed vehicles

The friend in front waves the papers – it seems their legal or judicial

(Or whatever) steps in the city have been successful

Their efforts to reclaim the property paying at last off

The replevin papers in order – waved dangerously aloft where the current

From the accelerating vehicles gathers and eddies in little maelstroms

The friend behind looks more harried

He doesn’t rush with the same alacrity he lags he sags he staggers

He gestures to me that I ought to go back with the joyous friend

Than he is due behind

He has a more urgent matter now to take care of than the retrieval

Of one’s house

I signal that no way

That that’s my goodbye for now

There they go sweating and floundering up the side of the road

Me leisurely strolling down the other

The middle unassailably taken by the blur of hastening crisscrossing traffic

The nodding friend whose whole craving (gnawing yearning) is now

To touch back his house detaches himself

Hangs back the second one hassled disturbed

The opposite traffic darts against him

As my opposite traffic rips against me

That’s why I can’t get the gist of what he says or even gesticulates

That much I gather

That he’s seen some of his family on a train due incontinently out

And he’s conflicted

What the fuck to do

The house successfully reclaimed

The family going away forever

He must go back he’s indicating

He must catch the fucking train

The house be damned

That must be goodbye forever

He sweats he thrashes about he’s about to collapse

But he keeps on walking fast taking my direction now

Overpassing me by far all on the other side of the noisy track

He looks despaired

He fears he won’t make it

There he goes what a distressing marionette

What a discomfort for the eyes

What an embarrassment of a puppet disheveled frayed shabby moribund

He is madly rushing against traffic in the opposite side of the road

Where I’m also leisurely strolling on my way to the same station

Where sure I’ll catch a train

I’ll catch a train or other

That’s a given

Never you fret.

20. such ugly remains

Dancing on the sward










From the aging mansion where the youngsters are wont to commit

The most horrific suicides – they

Electrocute themselves high in spiky towers

They hang themselves with chains at the end of which wolf traps snap

They disembowel themselves with kitchen knives

They sedulously maim and amputate themselves

They go at it always with a keen intent

And succeed in making such messes of their own corpses

That picking them up it seems – I’m told

It seems to be really disgusting.



From the crumbling sumptuous melancholic mansion

Where awed shamble the doomed

The manic fervidly set their complicated self-killing contraptions

The degenerate mechanically ensnare their own wasted bodies

It’s good to be just the gardener

Always outside – (never been in

Who’d be so crazy to want to?)

Always semi-busy and about trimming the paths

Always married to the deep green of the plants

And the deep blue of the sea that peeps up where the sward

And the turf gently slope

It’s good to be just the gardener

Occasionally musing at the pink rain while shacking

In my shack at the other end of the huge garden

My holy sylvan abode

And when the old woman of the house

Ancient survivor in the old rich mansion

Comes out to dance a few steps of a minuet on the vast lawn

It is good to be the gardener who reaches out his hand for she to hold

During her simple pirouette

Alas always before yet again she is summoned in front of another ghastly

Suicide

Last of the bloody brood already – not many more left

Let’s hope

House without youngsters house without angst.

19. trouble at the cage

Wrong passport







First I hate crowds

Second I hate lines

Third I hate bureaucrats

Trite trolls ensconced in their clotted quonset cabins.



Now the times presses

It is becoming too late

The runty fairy takes my passport

I make a few remarks

Notice that I could’ve move ahead with the notables

And the other shitty v.i.p.’s

But I’m one with the people..
.
Hate prerogatives and privileges you know...

Must be mightily pissed off by now the damned spook

Too tired with stamps labels countermarks that kind of garbage

Nonetheless he fucking takes his time with my passport

Don’t he.



When the syrupy hours elapse my head collapses on the counter

I take a few exhausted winks

The mob thins

The din subsides

Somebody else – a lowly woman – elbows me

Hands me the passport He had not enough

Space (leaves) (pages) to affix his afflux of notes

What...?

My passport all smeared with multicolored provisos

And mainly with insults innuendoes questionings

Plain frontal assaults regarding the state of my sanity:

I’m not only crazy I’m also dangerous

I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere for a span

Of more than a couple

Of closely watched days – and at the least slip I should be committed

I’m frothing with anger

If I’m so crazy mayhap I’ve got a license to kill the turdy

Son of a bitch...

Only that he’s out to lunch.



I’m pacing outside at a loss now

I’m sizzling inside

I’ve got to destroy that fucking state (state of things) dares deny

My rights and moreover officially makes a walking disaster

Out of me.



I’m boiling mad

Roaming without a clue

Even bathed in the afternoon zephyr

I’ve been rumminating along that narrow street

A tub

A tub precariously balanced at the edge of the curb

Placed to be picked up by the garbage people soon due

Gets a furious rear kick out of me

It comes loose

It rolls down gathering speed

It will crash into traffic

It will cause chaos and mayhem at the crossroads

Against which the ally abuts

That’s why I’m running down some handy side street

I see the sea at its end

A marina where in floppy idleness the well-to-do

Use up their last one hundred sixty-two days allotted

To live.



How am I to mix unnoticed among them?

No sweat

First let’s cross the torrent separates me from their tasteless luxury

The torrent skids down along the solid rim

I’m running on.



It’s all sham

Decoration put on

The open sewer goes to the sea

Near the sea it gets canalized it sinks into a culvert

Under the flat pier it seethes

Under the flat pier above which I’m walking nonchalantly

To mingle with my worthless peers.



Am I too conspicuous

Too conspicuously a branded crazy

A patently non-allowable...

Who’s to say?

Can’t I stroll also with a certain flair flaring my nostrils

Lifting my head tilting it so and pinching my lips

And tut-tutting myself

My image on the shop windows

Faking it maybe a mite too much

Not that anything ain’t faking

On the contrary all fakes in a fake setting

It’s all bunk all bogus

All show off...

The dying (and the living) taking place always elsewhere

I’ll melt all right

I’ll melt and wait for the coming smelting

Where I’m bound to fall also in a few

More escapades

At last going in full consent with the current

With the current down down

Another dead smelt borne by the smelting.

18. almost caught

Running to catch the last train















Always so hard to get into that last train

The annoying goodbyes the emptinesses the aloneness

The realization of nothingness implied in any broken packet from the past

And then the flight

The climbing of the iron steps full of piles of recent defecations

Over the old ones – and those last over what one might call already the coprolites

Your skill in avoiding the shits

And now the running along the decrepit ones’ sinister street

With all those coquettes of a few old women without teeth

That concomitantly laugh and defecate only lifting a little their wide

Beshitted skirts

And now where would you put the emphasis

Of your slipping soles that add commas of shit or quotation marks

On the text of recent defecations on the gaudy street where the dying strut...?

For you’ve come to the brink of the cliff

And now but fast the big decision

About what to do then about that road that stops or ends abruptly

Whether you should jump for the ledge to the left

Or the ledge to the right

Both ledges so bloody narrow

The drop at the lip of them so steep and deep

Lethal

The ledge at the left looking more worn out and greasy

From the steps and hands of previous passers...

The left it is then...

But the drop is so fierce

Your heart is dangerously faint

Oh and now here you fly down the precipice...

Your death before the last train’s arrival certainly certified...

What a pity

But wait that your hands have managed to grab the railing

Of a balcony belongs to an end shop of a lower rung ledge

Where the people are younger though maybe meaner...

The termagant of a shop owner wants you disengaged

She comes a-poking with her butcher’s knives

She wants you down she wants you dead

Hooligan! – she’s shouting – Damned hooligan!

But the lady customer imprecates in your favor?

Well maybe she does

She’s lifting her arms to heavens and reproving the boss

Telling her to mind the eyes of the hanger-on

Look at his terror look at his outrageous fright the man’s a wreck

And anyway the bump you complain of

The bump at your window it was made from the inside

Not by any outside hooligan but by one of ours it was...

So the miracle is on

The boss’ heart softens

She turns her back she allows you to climb up the railing

And walk down the gallery to the next floor...

From that flat deserted floor full of rain and ruins

Through the neck looking down toward the lower rung

At your peril you must now traverse

The gangs of younger and younger thugs...

And then the unending useless works

The works impassable

Where the workers look at you with irrepressible hate

And their gigantic machines of raw iron dressed in loose concrete

Would swallow you whole (are they even yearnig to?) with a gulp

So you better turn legal

You better turn into the normal way of access to the station

You better alas try to make it through the worse gang of them all:

The cops – they don’t need any excuse to harass and to murder

They are the fucking law...

How they poke at you with which haughty stupid loathing

How they pretend to look for drugs or who knows which other shit

Inside your gullet with their filthy monkey hands down your choking

Mouth...

Finally a cruel cultivated captain – a nasty fairy

Lets you go forward into the station per se

He recognizes a fellow skeptic

Only that down on his luck

He sees a kin after a fashion a kind of compatriot

One of them with the scarred hopeless disbelieved soul...

The trail trembles becomes white hot

The train is in abeyance sighing like a dragon in the last throes of sleep

You’ll make it yet

You’ll make it

Relax

Relax...

17. taut ribbons

Companionship of pullers








We tried to save his life

The boy was sick and in bed

The bed high on the hill

The bed his deathbed if nothing were done

Before to impede it

The bed his carapace of burning brimstone

Of red hot iron

His Nessus’ shirt.



Long ribbons white and red

Were brought down to the road’s rim

So that all that wished to could also pull

And hard.



We tried to save the sick boy’s life

With long ribbons doggedly pulled

By all the stopped automobiles’ drivers

Striving toughly on the road at the foot

Of the hill.



Unfazed disease

Idle effort

All to no avail

Alas

Another instance

Of the ah all so truthful saying

Everything comes to nothing

After the striving.



Taut ribbons

Totally ineffective

Futile struggle

The sick unmovable

Soon apt pasture for the vultures and the rodents

And such.

16. bullet through the intruder's head

Loving the morning










I love to belong into the early dawn circle

Even if only discussing

The earlier fires that ravaged

The small businesses

The big businesses wanted ravaged

In order for them to build on the ravaged

Grounds.



Love to belong among the pestering sobbers

And the blubbering complainers.



Love to belong for a while in the circle of humanity

If only commiserating with those that lost

heir earnings and their little businesses

If only cursing and railing against big business

And the big business thugs

That disguised as arsonist thugs

Burned down the whole row of little businesses.



I love to disengage myself from the depressing circle

Grab a friend

And walk together on the roofs

Munching toasted slices

Of bread.



I love to peer into the two windows

Where my old humorous drawings

Are exposed on the walls

My old humorous drawings

Funnily twisted little guys colored

With colors bright

And sensible nonetheless

.

I love to stand at the door of my house

When the rows burn.



Love to defend my property

And my friend

With a shotgun and a clean shot

Through the intruder’s

Forehead.

15. parsnip in her narrow beak

All by instinct ruled










Somebody wanted to kill him during his sleep

He had parried the blow with the hot brick

He had said to his wife

–One in your family tried last night to blow me with a whack out of the map

By instinct alone I grabbed the hot brick and smashed him

First before he fled.



Or she fled – she said.



–Anyway he must be sporting a nasty bruise

By now on the head

Or the face or the shoulder you know

Please be so kind as to in a discreet manner

Ascertain then who might it be.



–You are too friendly with the woman folk of the household

Commenting too favorably on the color of their dresses

And insinuating how healthy and appetizing their bodies look

The man folk don’t see it with such leniency as you’d hope for

And then there are the jealous hags

They feel spurned and affronted if the praise coming their way

Is deemed to be somewhat of less import than the one their rivals get

Or there are those that reckon that you are coming on too strong

Too aggressively...



–Me? On the contrary no way

Unfailingly too gentle

For instance can never approach the heteroclite spread

Or the blackening pile

Of any suddenly offered bargain

Never dare or care to push away the eager strangers

Vying to get a piece of the shitty loot

Truth is their touch alone repels me excruciatingly...



Soon the abode was in turmoil

His clothes were always wet

His cushions and his bed always wet

His pillows teemed with untamed oblique quirks

Burned films of horrors past

Soot swerved about from new prickly tiny craters

On ceilings and walls

Enigmatic sounds of fetters heavily drawn

Along narrow passages he surely heard

Filtered through the partitions that grew like mushrooms overnight

Lewd anchorites burgeoned from erst homely nooks

They frowned defiance upon the foreigner

He was heckled as any defective too ugly neophyte would...



He screwed up his courage and readied his suitcases

And started his journey at a break-neck pace

Endless vaults and new alleys appeared in the building

New crannies new stands new shops...



A vertigo was his that blatantly unsettled his wits

His reign he was relinquishing bit by bit

He was a pharaoh doomed

He had embarked in that druid business and now he was alone

His acolytes flagging

His vestals and nymphs swooning hither and thither

The unholy mirth of the enemy closing in...



He scratched and growled

Rent were the slimy curtains

Scruffily sighed the imps

Whoever dares impinge into our realm

They whistled

Anyone who crosses the jinxed causeway in deadly earnest

The lost soul that strode over the unquelled worms of our corpses...



And so on.


He was worn off

In the throes of despair when he found the door

To heavenly outside.



He fell agroof over the flagstones.



Flabby scared on his soiled duff

No longer personable and smooth

He had been just zapped

By the clammy law.



The residual chaos of himself bemoans

Almost instinctively the unfairness of his luck.



His wife

Still alive

Peers from a garret orifice

She seems to hold a parsnip in her bill.

14. you bet you animal

The animals you bet









Animals always so busy

Their busyness dizzying.



I told my family I’d only come if carried

But when we arrived at the foot of the scalinata

They left me slumped in my wheelbarrow

Wrapped in my blankets

Not for lack of charity as sundry a tourist must’ve thought

But because they were fed up

With my childish attitude.



I got up to the dismay of the charitable ones

And took the little wheelbarrow where I erst was crammed

And filled it up with clayish mud

The result of last night pouring over the seven hills

Surrounding the city.



I brought the mud into the riverbank

And emptied it there on the scant strand

Then I gave away the quaint wheelbarrow to some ragamuffins

Who were elated with my gift

On the shingle of the shore its wheels rang

And its metallic body boomed.



Next I went to see my friend’s little gipsy dog

And took it for an eventful stroll along the rear

Of the row of the fairgrounds permanent shacks

Fronting the river.



Behind Madam Magician’s gaudy shed

We met a little witchy cat

Boozy and breezy and so cute

With whom my gipsy gray doggy

Both played and slightly fought

In a deep muddy puddle

They wallowed and frolicked

In the end both were dressed in slime.



We went up to a ramshackle badly leaning faucet

And washed away the muck

Luckily it was a warm afternoon.



Now we encountered a makeshift memorial

That had under the cross two tablets

One with solemn easy verses

The other with some cartoons by a skilled hand lovely made

About a soldier who in spite of having had

A quite ordinary youth

Had to go down in battle at such a tender age.



We went back a bit morose into my friend’s shop

He said I didn’t know you had taken the dog

I said You were so busy at the time

And now I went behind the counter

And prepared myself something to eat

For which I even paid

A client came in

He had a thick dog on a leash and on a little string

A painted rodent

I said to him Is that a rodent or a very small dog?

He said A rodent

A fashionable rodent if you please

Its pelt has been shampooed

Barbered and colored

As you see in orange and green

And do you know that I was asked by phone

By so-and-so

(I said I know him!)

To write an article about that type of rodent

And its domesticity for his magazine?

I said He never pays

Does he?

The client said He did though very little

I said This is how he became so rich

Damned impresario

By not paying his flunkies

Didn’t I know!



The animals meanwhile were going hither and thither

The shop was alive with the movement of animals

The shack

The fairgrounds

The earth itself

The universe loved it.

13. the roar of stardust

Help from above









Who whispers foul play

Is awfully wrong.



The numbers he ratchets up

The beautiful stranger

At any game

Be it physical or intellectual

At strenuously jumping or sitting in thought!



He amazes the pants out of everyone

Myself not excluded

(Though himself excepted

Sure thing.)



I’m just a coach for little guys

I’m saying to all and sundry

See?

See...?



What a great example

My extraterrestrial

Is!



He stirred

No longer dozed the giant

The roar of stardust

Was clawing back into his

Conscience.



He’ll fight the harder now!

May the public be prepared!

If I’m lying I’m dying

The fear upon the bunch.

12. dripping cheeks: blenched

Ample umbrellas









Here they were again

The jolly mothers

With the ample flowery skirts

And the wide-opened umbrellas

Flocking

Twittering

Voluptuously splurging at the soon not so crowded

School’s door

Arrived like a perfumed breeze

To pick up every eager and boisterous tyke...



Every happily puddle-churner of a tyke

Besides

The strays.



The strays

Rain drops on their dripping

Cheeks

Blenched.

11. all cross the river [one]

All cross the river (1)









Those that walking hug the side of the bridge

They peer from the balustrade

And down there are the waders

The swimmers

There are the bulges of those that drowned.



No parcels or belongings too big are saved

Just little stuff

The big items slowly flow away with the drowned.



On the train that running at the center of the bridge

Crosses the river

The cops are hard at it

They don’t want “nobody that don’t belong”

They wield the flat machines

Against which none is ever shielded enough

The machines that ascertain if...

If you then really belong

If you wouldn’t then be a damned stowaway

If you’d be then a passer of forbidden material

And then so on.



Here they come

They scan the blind man

“And what is this...?”

They snidely ask – (a thick sheaf of smuggled banknotes?)

(It rather looks like)

“Those, sirs, must be the observations on the beetles”

(Observations, piff!)

But no really

The blind man is an expert on beetles

He’s got them all carefully described

In them tightly packed sheets of rusting paper

He examines them (and damn the stings and acids)

By touch

Smell

Taste

Plus he has all the sounds they ever make down pat

Only missing are the colors

Every bug gray

Utterly gray

And the cops are puzzled

“Should we kick him down as the train moves?”

“Do we ignore him also?”

“Is there gonna rain another blind man

On the sedulous

River crossers?”

There are some rowdy youths

That divert attention

They are combating at twisting one’s limbs

Let those that twist farther without breaking

Be the winners

Ok but less loudly

The cops are against a woman now

“Smelling cunt and melting and molting and melding hard”

But a harmless joke amongst comrades

(Hey is she infected...?)

“What’s this...!”

With a sudden strike of his talon

The cop scraps and snatches

A lentil of blood

That was stuck on her body

“That woman has lentils of blood!”

The cops get busy

Snapping at the lentils of blood

Scrambling like rats on a body that’s dying

The woman’s screaming

And now she is tossed down into the reddening river.



How agreeably though in the beds

The few that cram them

Seeing the combats developing afar

“It is all like a movie”

The wives touching the legs of the husbands of others

The husbands likewise

(Or widdershins rather)

And the warmth enveloping one

The warmth and the bodies

The windows so golden

In the crepuscular light.

10. body or luminous arena

Arena of creation the body










The body is a round enclosed house

That consists of a vast core

And a thin outer layer inside the rind.



The body as a round house includes

Under the skin an outer circle

(A single long narrow corridor

That lit only by dim lights

Runs around the core.)



On the upper rungs of some portable steps

The director of the movie of your lives

Imparts instructions

To the lot of them actors that ever touched

Or approached you.



Everyone listens with a certain nonchalance

Until alas the cops irrupt

And all of you and your (the authors’) directors flee

Pell-mell helter-skelter.



The essential ones (the brightest indeed)

Save themselves coming in.



Inside the core a circus

A vast school of art

A vast and luminous and colorful arena of creation.



All hues and tints and implements

(Pencils of flesh of gorgeous girths)

Are there for the taking by the artists

Whose objects shall shine

Summoned from the hallowed halls of

Commensurate feedback.



Joyfully one wallows in the sand

Of the circus where the footprints

Of the moving peoples and the moving cattle

Won’t ever be ascertained

By the cowered police

For the entrance and the exit into the arena

For every intimate flock

Is always unforeseeable and anyway

The cops have always been properly delayed

And misdirected

While the flocks disappear and melt into the crowd.



The arrival of the cops

Is always greeted with amused jeering

“Get thee back into the sewer!”

The more lenient shout

“Craven rats riddled with vermin!”

“Slimy lice!”

While the arduous dramatists

Are apt never niggardly in their histrionics

Even to send the worthless trespassers’ way

Torn tussocks of their tragic hair

Where poisoned needles are stuck.



The cops are nobodies

Getting smaller by the minute

Our joy of living affects their borrowed pride

Their defects bubble forth

Their ineptitude

Their crude tactics

Their shame

For they realize that indeed they don’t belong

In our circus of love.

9. lights out for you, rather, you jerk!

Bobby Lightbulb, sluthdom’s top mistress









“Lights out, Lightbulb!”

Barks the dog, the god, the cop.



“Hate bromides, you punk!”

I reply

And shoot and kill

Without compunction

The interloper cum awful punster.



Came the aggressor

Through my bedroom window

That with brutal effraction he busted (indeed!)



“Bring thy butt into the bed!”

He commanded while I knew

Exactly under which pillow my gun fretted.



“Bring thy butt into the bed

As my bud develops into the bloodiest of

The most gigantic flowers that be, babe!”



“Bad bid, Bud!”

I’m thinking and

“Bloodiest and stinkiest your flower

Like that lentous and fetid great orchid

With orchitis and sundry suppurating orchioceles to boot

Which flowers once in a blue moon

I’m told

And the name of which I forget”

As I was making believe I was compliant enough

And therefore going to suck

His tacky flower like a degenerate bee

And my firm dry hand my fretting gun

Was feeling with glee.



The neb

The nib of his gun

On the knob of my nob

He notices some of my subtle shenanigans

Ah

“Lights out, Lightbulb...!”



“Hate bromides, you punk!

For which crime

Amongst others

Take that

And that

And that...!”