Lucille and Maud (fourth installment)

Gathered soon into a blanket of oblivion, the climacteric looming with its ever-decreasing masterworks a fact every morning in the mirror, and as the rickety structure of my bag of bones goes to its sombre aftermath, bristling with warts, and with the glitter of the excrementitious flecks of fled parasites – a cheap tinsel I’d rather do without – the abominable icons, illness and death, reaching to touch me with their mummy, skeletal hands, I must take a stance. I see myself lost in deep tall caverns with walls, ceilings and floors of shimmering plastic and steel – and then the psittacine screech. I must be in hell. Otherwise... At other times, I lift my head from the pillow... Frugal, isorhythmic passages of dear old motets pass the scrutiny of wept resurrections in my mind too attuned to aesthetic atmospheres; a sucker for perfection; a weakness for elocution; the speech master’s life hangs for what teeters on the tip of that turd of a tongue a parrot has. Hard-nosed examples galore. Penning poems for parrots – proper enunciation a must... And then another impediment mars so much work...

Enough. Comply. Don’t begrudge me or I’ll be damned if I don’t come out and explode the whole conceit, there’s no more motherly mother load extant than the one I just this minute conceive. ‘Tis my empty contention that your building crumbles with the pivotal cyclopean stony die I once unhinged and pulverized. No, it isn’t. My contention is words to the garbage-eager pigs vagrantly haunting my mind.

For all that and more I’m bettering myself everyday I properly am by circumstances allowed, trying only to improve with minor repairs the manor of me and its rutting nidorous inhabitants. Wait, and if I’d be allowed to fancy-freely choose, why settle for anybody less than the finest draughtsman that ever existed – all that, of course, according to my own matured sentiment, which as it happends for the nonce is the only one that matters. Such an affinity I feel toward him, and this despite the incontrovertible fact that I can’t draw my way out of a cereal box labyrinth, that each of his sparse drawings, have I the opportunity ever to catch the glimpse of one here or there, or even, though maybe a trifle less, each one of his colored drawings (otherwise snobbishly yklept paintings,) seen occasionally hanging in poster or advertisement form from the oddest places at the weirdest of times, and especially this marvel of profundity on a simple small dun slightly streaked suspiciously soiled piece of paper flying my way yesterday and almost splaying itself across my spec­tacles, whorelike sacrificial offering, its effluvious middle agroof on my rejecting sputtering mouth, “–Ice Skating by the Gate of Saint George in Wheredahell,” awakes in the wuthering depths of my predisposed soul such pangs of recognition that tears of elation shoot upwards from the echoing vaults of my writhing thorax and, fit for the last odious trampling, the ends of my electrified hairs, overcome with longing, also rise in wastrel erogenous elation until it (the elation turned spikes projected heaven­ward) brilliantly jellies and hovers as another blessed’s aureole or rather halo over the beautiful many-talented replica that under­girds unbeknownst to the populace the acrimonious scarecrowy me that goes nonetheless humbly about his beeswax... Brueghel, I mean.

Peggy Lee, a painter’s, a forger’s parrot. Learning the words of the trade. Trained nicely, I mean, all the niceties about daubs, coagulations, foliations, alabasters. Mullers, massicots, sphinxes, barbicans. Which is fine by me.

Never could I impersonate but the artistic, that’s understood. Adhering to greatness, a discriminating limpet. Limpet: I hate my face and I hate my name – about the latter something can be, and is being, done, don’t you fret, no problem about the latter – naming myself’s my elfin foible, and it’s often indulged and satisfactory fulfilled – as for the former alas I’m allowed to relie only in my fanciful fancy, the frame must be always the same ugly inelidible niggetty one – the contents though that’s another whole kettle of still lives. Naturally enough, thanks to my physical wherewithal (no trophy tusks nor jabbing pizzles typical of the rhythmic for­nicator species jinxes me flaky frame,) I’ve never been drawn toward the brayingly repugnant, you know plain well whom I’m refering to, isn’t it obvious, my frayed feelers jam with seething contempt, fizzling rage at their sheer allusion, mention, let alone selfmurderous proximity – throng of bloated routine-ridden lice marching hitherward where the murky puddle of the end of the world festers with all the earlier cadavers, each plump vaguely anthropomorphical duff bleeding semenlike into its neighbor until no surgical stroke could cleave them – down the shallow sewer head­line they come, agonizingly slow-witted, snug, relentless, benumbed, soundlessly gainsaying the evidence of their definitive pitch and plunge, still nudging at each other to appear smarter at the stoned onlookers and photographers, down the inexorable sinkhole sunk, count ‘em, at the shabby bucket deathly gathered, pluck, pluck, pluck – the suc­cessful, the adver­tised, the exemplary, the clean-cut, the lofty, the ludicrous, the filliped, the above-notched, the wigged, the spoiled, the martially and crestly toggled, the laconic, eek, the parlous, the smug, the high-spirited, the gloaters, the sincerely hypocritical, devout, prayerful, ungrateful, the overmen, the judgmental, all those elas­tomeric pansies, the histerically steroidal, the musclebound, the maximal male, ravishing apes, taunting chumps, so manly men – meaning the faggiest of fags, of course – the shining charming rocks of citen­zenry, sartorially spin-and-spanned, and the ladies lapping them up, supposedly, by decree – the fashionable rebarbative media, by sappy asslicking suckers manipulated, thus decrees – the empty, the surface-swimmers, the never diving into the troubled darkness of the dust that is all – buildings of dust, hopes of dust – the destroyed at the first death in the family, the totally jaded, the recently bar­bered and perfumed, the spermous, the advancers, the leering, the sticky smilers, the swag­gering, the glowering, the job-driven, the cinematic, the tes­tosteronic, moronic icons for their foul enterprises, dime a dozen, the Creepycrap Corporations ditto operatives, the getters ahead, the ghosts, the inexis­ting, the walking high-lighted machine-twinned glamorous dead. No. Only the artistic free spirit sits well with me. The sneaky whoreson, the conscious, doomed sonofabitch, the hankerer after sordid hang-ups, the irresolute, many-wombed reaper of worthless snatches of melting reality, the mixed-up, liquid unstable among the caustic refractive rebuffing mucks of being, the garnerer of free snatches indeed, the poacher in your dreams, the undrugged, the sinister snoop, the reader of your secret diaries, the rummager of your treasured chests, the exposer of your dusty loot, the rapist of your spirit, the knower of your dust, the public braider of spangly braids of fumes spun from your most hidden velleities, the hated all-around, the scapegoated, the breeder of disil­lusions, the scourge of ob­durately repeated, reincarnated sinners plague this prison earth, the free-fligher, the uncrutched, the unco-opted, the naked, the undeludedly plummeting, the resolved unto death, the con­demned, the lumpy blib of an amebish always perfectible half-being, the outwardly tepid quietly embezzling the irksome craving itch of a smoldering explosive unbribable core, the dust raiser, yeah, the brooder of fell sweeps, the broom incarnated, you bet, himself the one about to be obliterated, and unsaluting to boot, for he’s asking after all why – he too, that’s my ticket, that’s my ilk.

Besides, I’ve studied since yesterday the carefully folded (never mind its redolent rancid condition now spicing my breastpocket,) the neatly creased bit of coinciden­tal newspaper where the reproduced drawing awoke in a flash my vocational inspiration, or froze into some type of braintissue the flighty gossamers of my up-till-then lost calling. A forger’s. One of note – for there’s nothing more genuine than a genuine fake, where the fake improves on the original, adds to the cultural implications undergird its treasure trove of an intermeshed network of references. Something like that – yawning, replenishable, subterranean, profound. I’m becoming a convert. The same effervescence, absorption. And ditto as to what Peggy Lee’s pertains. So skillful, attentive, on the ball... Wished Maud were so deep-intentioned, attention-bound. And the other seductive tykes, Madge, Myrrha, Merilee; rapt crows, staring at my eyes, or the Osiris eye of a dick exposed, thinking only about sex. Their brains murkier than an ape’s. “Fang feigns to be dumb, and gets a gardener’s place at a convent of women, who in sudden unanimity haste to lie and have remorseless whoopee with him.” Same stuff obtains nowadays in the field of art – the stupider the wiser.

Artists, we are fixed on forms. The insides repel us, we vow and vote for their annhilation and inexistence. Alien world of my inner organs – wish I never heard of that corruption of an enemy country ensconced in my foulest recesses, and biding its time, and preparing and mining and secretly approaching, incessantly bent on my impending destruction. No, the beetle’s beautiful, but it tastes like bowels brimming with sewage. That’s what we concentrated upon, exclusively: its chitin, its colors, its harmony, never the juices repugnant exit viscously from their crushed carcasses. Color of a muddled brain, crushed. Anyway, I was studying the forms, the shapes, the volumes, in my intimate ancestor’s (our ancestral) masterpiece, “Skating by Saint George’s,” and wondering did he catch me...? – am I there sketched, did he intuit my genial presence across the epochs...? – why couldn’t he...? – inspirations work in mysterious avenues. And if I got to be someone, I’m probably the creep that fell and broke his neck – that’s my klutzy luck in front of a chance manifestation of sublimity (that’s big enough, though, for who’ll self-deceive into believing in perennial fame...? let alone in fake vain immortalities...) – I sure hope I’m not any of the disgusting onlookers who, with no ramshackle iceskates on their feet, and safely (there’s vile contemptible bully-haven safety hidden behind shitty jeering numbers, and high and dry when others cope alone,) and safely propped on the bole of the marvelously formful oak, laugh at the adventurous sportive folks who dared and became – I mean became actors of some singular prowess (only the singular, the single-handed, really count) if even only for a day. Fie with all the pack attackers, the bulk traitors, the militarized, the base, the ganged, spineless but many-legged, the hazing swarms, the sanctimonious prigs, the oblique al­ligators, the coprolalic preachers – they only speak shit – the spewing lapidarian matrons, the vacuous, apotheg­ming, apothegmatic, addled-hump profes­sors, the malevolent hell-sellers all – frightening the toddlers and the toddler-minded out of their scant wits, threatening eternal dam­nations where the saliva is dust forever (and the bullying resentful envious “saved” above wouldn’t spit on you – anyway, even if they did, to no avail, for the spit would vaporize long before reaching your parched tongue, your molars in raging flame,) and all clarity’s gone and the fire eats at your blisters in neverending hormic ruthlessness, filling the enfeebled totality of your available thinking space with sappy stories of devils or gods, virgin births, rotten returns from the grave, and batty welkins where the crappiest go, after death, for hanging nails’ sake, unbelievable: after fucking dead! I’ve seen them, pitiful specimens of degeneracy viciously wallowing in the filth pulpits disgorge without end. All those monstrous women afflicted with the Munchhausen syndromal headfucks, the several lousy green ghouls pounding their ribs, all the cringing brainsick, interred alive in their own fanatic credulity, the puling blessed dickheads listening with fly-infested mouths, opened as canons of carnage, with which they suck what the criminal endoctrinators ooze off, off and away, a crude hodgepodge of hatreds and the awkwardest drivel – they are great at flinging invectives, though; always stalking, ready to pounce and ransack your thoughts, substitute ‘em with their dozy eggy tumors where they’ll cook and brood for ever­more – feel of a sudden their sweaty paws clutching your belfry, raping each and all of your resident wingbats, agog with fright; that’s their speciality, of course, getting at your limp goat and buggering her whenever you are younger or frailier, avengeful ges­ticulating savages; malevolently jawing away at you as if they want you arointed with the harsh terror of hurting words, and the corrosive little tales they inoculate you with, virulent trash you’ll never be able completely to shake yourself off of – from reeking cinders regenerated foo-foo phoenix risen again indeed, pfui, isn’t with this kind of sick snot-crap pap ill irrumating children are put finally to sleep...? – Here’s where I’ve learned a little and from where originally (before I wilfully balked, tore at the writhing ropes of paralysis and broke plumb free, all horseshoes triggered hurtling to the lowest surmisable brows) I’ve flung mine. Like crippling fat com­partmen­talizing itself on their wasted bodies, these in­humanizing notions store themselves in the ingrown talons, hungnails, hammertoes, and at the rotten meat horns of all the true, all the thorough­ly deceived frassful believers – the worst imaginable insult, believer – it defines perfectly all that’s shitswal­lowing – one can’t improve on it, no other name could be more offen­sive. But not. On second thought, not. I’m still peering at the eye-opener, I mean the photo of our glorious accomplishment on the paper, and now I’ve got it – if I remember the location and the scene, if I feel I’m actually there again, is not because I once was already there and protagonized it in any other way than (same now as then) in my well-developed imagination. I’m nobody and all at once they are all me. For I’m the master who depicted them all – the heroic and the mean, the despicable and erasable same as the worthy, the spareable, the innocent – yeah, all invention, all an art product out of our phantas­tic creativity, out of our visionary head – foreshortenings and shadowings, perspec­tives and prospects, bridges, arches, cathedrals, seepages, verdets, tin roofs, cleardarks, rusted barks, illusive dead walls, dizzying depths...

From pictures by the brain to pictures in the brain: all’s projection – he (the brain, and you know how tricky can the rascal be,) he makes you see (and hear and feel) what isn’t there, and contrariwise ignore what is – all, either outward or inward, is projection. And that is as was our projection (either realized on canvas or on paper or as an idea, all are one and the same) by choice. We alone, Peter Once and Peter Again, former and to come, quondam et futurus, out for a holy excursion in art’s sacred domain, on the loose, baby, every time we choose, and on the spot, wretched or sublime, we are painting or drawing or inventing this image perfected, spotless, sinless as the arts of art prescribe cum predicate.

As to what regards my share, no surcease shall blemish this longing intrinsic nisus of mine to excel and succeed. Though unschooled, I shan’t allow any sly cretinous subterfuge to sneak at my will and foster in it any doubt whatsoever where a chance to abort could ever find parodic lean-to or conniving harbor, for after all I’m somehow a natural and all this creepy composing business comes so mar­velously easily to me it’s almost frightening. I’m a hardened sonofabitch, though; I’ve been plenty weathered at the deranging fields of adapting metamorphing mutancy. And now that’s anyway decided. By spunky choice I’ve become Mr. Peter Brueghel Again, thine truly, and thine, and thine, sir, ma’am, child, crone, and with no inkling of being an artist other than by sheer redundant overbrimming volition. Hey, the nitwit takes the dew of the vast prairies for his own wetdream come. True come, dream Maud, mud, fang. With these thine hands the wet clay transform into parodies of paradise. The jizzm girdles the totum; the substance of what mattress, matters. With gristly ferocity I’ll stake my own, thanks much. Scram, my plot’s not for dibs. Furthermore brooks no greedy eying, no aspection, no surveying, no prospecting, no mad craving, no appraisal, no conces­sion. If I’ve got no hope for a hoe I’ll pluck at my orchard or at its weeds with any other implement comes handy; a frame wouldn’t be at all contrarian – I can’t miss, I’ll chrome-frame me crummy weeds... Not a piggin of talent with which to daub vague twilights of Rorscharschputtle rubbish on a paper napkin. At most I could as an infant sketch charcoal bulbous uneven blotlike tar­babies when happy in company of my foraging grandfather, and, when anxious and curmudgeonly, abused and at home, some scut­tering prehistoric stick woman umbrae, female specters with hairy mammoth slits short of unique and all-encompassing, terrifying slits like spiky-legged cock­roaches – with the shrinking limbs and heads of the stick ghouls soon becoming just added cunt hairs – or, alternatively, extra legs to the prowling deadeye bug... And having a nifty erection the whole of the way, as it most naturally and creatively pertains, all told.

Plainly it shines to the connoisseur, connoisseuse. Even grocers hanker for symmetry: eyes of a panther, two cans of cornmeal, two hams hung, matches matching, and so on. What about those ugly guys at the morgue. Sinister combs of corpses combing the starry skies, their aspect, their eyes. Blurry. Tom, Dick and Harry, in formation, bait for the art lover’s tainted moolah. Hear the howl of the prowler. Adquisitive. Since antiquity, up the well of ages where the wealth of knowledgeable wisdom slowly gathers, we all deep-thinkers agree, and in fact what makes you basically a deep-thinker (and the deeper the sooner you get it) is the ability to discover this unavoidable truth by yourself. Go up a mountain and by your lonesome self survey the naked transhumants shuttling noisomely feverishly aim­lessly – distortedly, no matter: head or rump or haunches, or paunches or feet first – observe them pitifully hop, like obese amputated all-abdomen camel crickets, or better yet: like humongous unwinged vulvaceous moths, from beach to tub to the pools atop the skyscrapes. Woefull, disgusting larvae. Exactly. Humans are better seen as masses of maggots – and the most despicable mass, that of the worst engorged maggots, the one you’d burn the first, also crawls, albeit with the help of thuggish attendants, but worse: scrawls, rewrites and complicates the daily scenes, scripts the scenarios and the whole behavioral shebang for the second most repellent and most slimy congregations, those of the actors who implement the tyrants’ morbid scripts, base singers of their praises, bootlicking scenifiers of their dreams of murderous gradiosities, their hirelings, the speculators, the soldiers, the pros, all those who’ve bought into it, the assizers, the seasoners and enhancers of the pie of blood and lymph and all the bitter poisoned rubbish, who repeat to exhaustion, and for the benefit of themselves and their unsleakable masters only, the dated taboo-ridden enmeshings of bygone terrors and new fake intimations of otherwordly intrusions, plus all the habitual and loathsome pomps and chastisings, enthronizations and crematoria, parades and trials, mock apocalipses and other masses, butcheries both actual and imagined, condemnations and obscene awards, medals and spikes, impalements and appalling aplauses, crucifixions and slick fixings, demotions, demolitions, successions, enraptures, all gaupedly watched by the third maggoty mass of maggots, the less despicable and revulsive, still pretty repugnant, and nauseating, mind you, still engorged, still slimy, still a filthy fetid bunch of eye-chomping necrophagous grubs, and yet the least corporated, the least buggery and stifling, self-deluded, treacherous, compacted, the least convinced of its own empty importance, the least realized, the most in doubt about what’s real and really touchable – meaning of course the last in the order, the slower, the loonies, the loners, the watchers: the expectant spectators, always loaded with patience, wised-up though, looking with scant hope for some kind of coincidental shortcut to a likeness of what should be substan­cially authentic, a chance shade on the wall that triggers some ring of veracity in their maggots’ maggoty brains, a fleeting puff of an inap­prehensible answer to their purposeless lives, a slight intuition of reason. Alas, all in vain, for maggots are only that, and try as the will they’ll never amount to much, unless... Unless their purpose on earth is to feed on the deep-thinkers’ brains especially, and thus in some sidereal concatenation of manifestations or other (let’s call it some great red evening, bat-ridden, of a purring vaginal dusk,) amassed together in some sort of giant maggot brain, vastly improved, all classes linked, they’ll, or rather it, it’ll be able, before it’s too late, to understand the universe, its pur­poseless vanity.

Well, that’s a call for careful observation if I ever heard one. Keep on heaving, peel your peepers, never fear, steady truck-truck-truck, and maybe (a minor bingo,) maybe something, just something, just this once, shall pop up. Ages elapsed, with a tail and a shriek, wading the asphalts, golem berserk, thatched heckler, bedraggled, ungulate, vouchsafing to salvage the shredded remnants of a screeching genetic pool that erst invented now forgotten fables of intentional creation. Apprised of which, we remain... none the wiser. Acerbic afterlife of remorse. The bigotry of a stooge driven to junk the lot of what is for the sake of scripture: scripted bumpf. A puppet with blinkers unable to withstand the brunt of the attack: reality.

And then... Dawn of the fire. The Sun burning on a perch above. Unreachable. Bristle the raw deals: blinding. Here we are, besotted, cringing, stillborn.

Couldn’t keep for long this sexless pretense; had to fuck them all, naked, wheylike, maggoty, enveloping, bland, slightly redolent of piss, eight to twelve being my preferred range, but also their moms..., if blondish and soft and amber-colored and without perfumes, nor make-ups, but with sweet-smelling breaths, both from their mouths and cunts. There must’ve been forty of them or so – offered, agroof on my body – completely stamped-off, tacky-sticky mazic cocoon of all-dick me, nicely surrounded by willing cosseted uncorsetted quivering, lackadaisically bruised fleshes of slushing female bodies – gently devoured by the most delicious worms, smug slug undersea unctuously fucked from every quarter – can’t help my gooseflesh outdoing, sublime, sublimating itself – each of its pores lifts up its pate like a clitoris; bristle the clitorises, or already snakes, and rummage the sweaty amphorae – I’m deadlocked, they are my girdle of torturing delight, the sundry pelvises’ em­pyrean flowers, both full-grown and in bud, are legion in every inch of my watertight bristly prairie, bald rocky fountains and wildly odoriferous tufts of tawny merkins slurredly perfume and embalm with their sobbing mucous fragrances the last tiny secret nook of the proud all-flint elevation of me varnished nose...

“–Mr. Again?”

All the clover’s blighted – oh, displaced hope, I don’t feel my oats noplace, been plagued with some apocalyptic ill-starred bane, crude botrytis, bromidrosis, tawdriness, viruses galore – or has it been arson – I smell the sickening vapors, the wavering flames, all thresholds are flung to the carrion-stinking winds, the mighty marbles of my temple-like construc­tions leap about transformed into awkward cheap rubber locusts carnivalesquely strung up from childish windowglass suckers – now even the glasses of my specs crash, the much maligned window-gazer himself is crushed, dust weevils surf the junk, by them I’m excruciatingly stung – “I’m broke, piss off!” I hear myself mutter – atop a grass-whip handle a gadfly sticks out its obscene tongue, the insolence curdles my lymphs, such aspersions, filthy potions flying my way: should I elicit some type of cockcrow tempering meaning from all this...? – no time to parse out, for sooth, gotta skip the incidentals, cast away the gaudy swatches and borrowed raggy clothes; only at home with the essentials: the bridge, the cleft palate, the philtrum, the sputtering teeth, sparks of foolish reasons searing the whites of my deluded eyes; with agonized snores, the bristles of its downy tongue turn ferrets and nimbly penetrate, and thus jam the naked springs of my neck so that reverted is frozen forevermore – wracked giraffe neck, sorry rubble, hurdle too stiff to clue across, unable to stirrup my heart’s burst – I’m crying tears of blood, here, where the knife ul­timately rests the pain’s too keen to endure – I’ve swung my head, under duress I glance insofar as the pummeled eye carries, the landscape’s gone haywire, the sick welkins only bode further deteriorations of the crazed orbits, and the sea’s gone dry, its coarse troughs home to swarms of weird reawakened beasts, me slug’s a sagging blur which with a startled yell I unwittingly have turned to more poison dust, a whirlpool of omens, dirty and shrill, thudding, huffing, reeking, chockfull with bundles of pre-emptive strikes, assault me fancy, though as her­meneutics go, I’m also subsuming squat – in albis – the periphery’s closing in, no, to the contrary: there are no peripheries left, I’m at the center of the burning hole, a hole that expands till all’s burnt – what a shit of a last stand; for that all the fracas, the wreaking fury, the untiring cunning, the unrequited spurring, the spurning, the engrossing, the crazy nonstop choosing of so much alleged living; with bloodshot eye I’m about to go irretrievably ape... “–Mr. Again?” – again the rattling distressed voice.

“–What!” – I recognize vibrant vital me. The beacons of my eyes glow, deftly, cynosures of quintessence. Welcome back, you deserving tripster, we were starting to weaken and bitterly emote with weary pining and impinging worry at your salt-rubbing wounded-deer tardiness.

I invigilate, make certain that the real reels on, unfeigned. I’m an artist – gorged on periwinkles, on all architectural wonders, and self-containedly, matter-of-factly, unaffectedly do I (don’t I?) (you bet, and how!) always own – or should, anyway, for sometimes I forget, or I’m not quite there, or indeed a sudden attack of embarrassment or misplaced modesty and spon­taneous shyness takes me down to the spit-crammed floor and turdy dirt, of which even we artists often have to swallow (washed down with spite and bile) vast handfuls (non-immunizing either,) doled by moneyed or authoritarian nonen­tities – own to an attempt to launching a better creation. Yet. It’s all well known, such a trite mechanism. I won’t manic-depressively spatiate on it. Glory-bound, with the unwitting rabble I melt, shielded by their tortoise-like carapace of ordinariness – I remember well, that’s how we Roman generals traveled on our way to dethrone the corrupt barbarian-induced orgy-addled forgetful degenerates who while wading and wallowing in the shit of their artificial paradises let the stark empire crumble – darkly reminis­cing on the ubiquitous foreshadowings of their fall and of our gnarled consecration, never a word higher than the next, cloaked in anonymity, sly and silent, always back from exile, the avenging juggernaut I’ve become trucks along... Damn the torpedoes and other derided knells. On the contrary, bleeding snatches, from scratch. Everybody admires me, and they are not even aware of it – lucky ignorance, though; otherwise how dost thou presume to tell me how should I avoid the slow ossification of their envy and consequently their crazy jaw-wielding mur­derous bouts...? These usurpers that arrogate for themselves the faculty to institute the standards by which the rest of us are constricteldly measured, namely, as I was saying, the bullshit-doling censurers, don’t get from me but the resounding rebound of the granitic wall of my unstinting but silent scorn desirous without rest to, once unespied, go along and coolly let crumble also a few crushing cyclopean square rocks over the verminous lot of them – they are wormseed, now conveniently mashed... Good riddance, chimes me.

Unchideable. At your peril. A lean dog too full of tricks for you, inapprehensible, that’s it, not for your pound, unbowed to your foul carrion-feeding dictator­ship, too slippery in my ever changing hide of many hues, as soon donning Nisus’s putrefying undershirt, as jellied all over with the soft cheese of the new born yet again, paranoid snake that molts spontaneously at will, its invisibilities undistin­guishable from the straggling wriggling ones in the humming gravy of the menstruation pits.

Keep larved at all times, it’s my self-disciplined unuttered injunction, and of course keep working, unseen insider, nibbling at where’s most concealed, for even we artists (not pandering to the high-falutin’­ly garmented – oh my precious, wild about tassels mantles miters foofaraws! – walking cadavers that be) gotta earn our life, and let the storm gather and work in vigilant abiding peace. Hidden amid the hustle, bustle and apoplectic swoonings of a plainful of pimply geezers, I went recently to the Amazon River, where all young women as soon as the ovarian curse’s with them go to a camp fire over there at the banks of the mighty Heraclytean current, cut one nascent tit and cauterize it immediately with nary a flinch. Well, far form the surly codgers, I was feigning some poetical quiet desperation one evening upon a riparian elevated rock, slickly disguised as an old impotent bard with longing soused, quietly weeping about the past joys with his now fondly reminisced romping nymphs, while all the while in point of fact thrice quietly pondering my long past, fairly proximate and just standing accomplishments as a furtive under­handed satyr with a knack for the clandestine deeply-felt bagatelle, able to pejorate, and nobody the wiser, a whole covey of vivacious girlies in ten lost unac­counted minutes flat, and all at once trying to catch, from among me fingers, behind me Sun specs, beneath the visor of me shading baseball cap, some of the dazzling tit for tatting squalid natives, even as children already consummated promis­cuous sluts, always alas giddily drawn to the arbitrarily illicit, when what was my surprise if bludgeoned with a light tap upon me shoulder – frozen with fright at first I wouldn’t budge, for doesn’t the old saw decree that a succinct snare packs more bite than the most longifluous of boisterous tattoos – and with a wry neck finally reverted behold plumb in the shattered troth of my unbelieving eye: it was only just another doozie of a vision, you bet, and this one much less than a foot from my itching quandary of a bashful (and yet eagerly chomping at the bit of unzipped fly scarcely concealing it) peepee, whose tickling fingertips brought too far by their sudden forward momentum were starting to wilt, uprooted, and die. Her scalding respiration on my nape: “–What’s this,” she sweetly scolds, “are you asleep on the job...? You’ve lain slumped as on the can now for hours on end.” “–Sorry,” I answer with bated rancid breath, “this, to which you pay protracted attention, is aught but the unwilled manifestation of an occupational disease. Dereliction blues. Too much equipoising between the right doses of verecundity and impudicity. Soon and in holidays subsumed you don’t even know where you are any longer at. My pegasus re-emerges unscathed and raves against the sick consciously misleading prognoses that indeed did send so many upstanding citizens to their self-appointed executions, or else distractedly roam now as coatless ghosts in bughouses and hoosegows. We are not anointed with the criminal infal­libilities that suit those hardly disguised murderers that with their flowing robes and oozing odium judge the rest, damn, no! Troopers err grievously when, (so-called) succoring the victims, add the insult of their dirty necrophilic lecherous paws rummaging into the injuries conjured up by the night dreamers, no way should they get so easily off the hook, feeling always above the suffering crowds, the doomed crowds not in uniform and consequently uninvested with their myriad immunities, their filthy frailties exonerated with the slightest of finger raps, if even that...

Virgil’s jay – green, red, white, black, yellow, blue – had a vermilion beak, and the wattles, not, the caruncle of a turkey, and it knew all languages and he was an unequaled master for remedies – never erred in its prescriptions. Brother Joy bought it to offer and thus court Sister Pleasure, whom he had already impregnated when she was asleep. Well, hello. I enter into the old mortuaries, and get busy putting to use the old arts of burglary – artists’ prerogative. The average clod, led by the nose on behalf of those least on the know, come in doughty droves, like sheep to the block. The sister throve, her girdle swollen, her breeding unimpeachable, her teats abrim with milk... They are amazed, expectant, suspending the applause. Suddenly... End of the world. The magic white crow sole guardian of the word that would stop the ultimate calamity: universe falling all over itself. Deflating fast. Everyone alive calling the name of the magic crow to utter the word of salvation. Pathetic end. She’s been dead for ages. Killed at the beginning, in a surfeit of polluted lead: bullets of the bellicist poisoned the wild life. No crow, no word, no world, no salvation. Niets.

She twitches and blows. The plane hasn’t seen in all its existence such turbulence... Here I could be run over any instant, crushed in my corner to carbolic powder. Shit yourself, rather: that would be the sane thing.

The weight of that monster must be insupportable. A giant parrot, and me hanging by a feather, a speck of grime. Indeed, indeed, the plane itself refuses any longer to comply, balks, stalls, will crash, has lost all its buoyancy, its shaky breath falters: hear it grumbling. Pitch the flounder-prone ballast overboard, lambaste the utterly fucked horror, send it to feed the tiny delicious saw-toothed fishes, to choke to timely death on earth the overly gluttonous sharks over the deserted ocean, make her walk her last plank packed and all as they go, in its crate of seats, in its bag of bodily liquors, in its box of fissured dry starch, in its whalebony cage, “– The plank, the plank,” we are shouting in unison with the intelligent suffered craft, no reserved hiding place for her any longer here with us, a class onto ourselves of humbly attractive (mutually, we mean, inside our own little phalanstery at least, yes,) participative citizens, what, time to fold, there is too much of a bad load, you know, obstinate visionaries...

When again I caught myself biting my thumb in dire punishment, then I knew I was behaving sillily, pretty obsessively too. Whew, decidedly, I was seeing those hostile clouds, impending scare-ninnies, where...? Not barring even the sky, everywhere. Clumsy obstreperous humongous parrots aloft, like maimed storks, mechanical metal cranes about to cave in with the roof of the craft over my head no less: disturbing symptoms. I was succumbing to the baby-anchored primitive believe anyone was still bigger than I... Even the alumni. But that is not finished. Wait. Even now, today the flaying feeling I have is not all that different – though older, of course, I, so travelled, so experienced – consider, anyway: an endearing symbolic syndrome. What, the perceptive reader should love me all the more for it – so much alike himself, yourself, hello, I had gone looking for my fortune and to my immense inquietude found it sooner than I cared to: always one’s curse, eh...? May that I were born in Lilliput, that’s the proverbial straight hit I am launching myself continuously to accomplish in my careful outings in a world too narrow after all, with the wrong landmarks (always the same, it looked like already, and I was only two or so of age) always popping up too. My sights in fact are righted much, much higher – the universe, toward what must be really appealing, manageable, friendly to one so specially self-created, room enough to choose, I expect, even for the uniquest of the lot. Would that I lasted till the fast approaching age of the astronomical cosmonautical explorations. Vanquishing hordes hurled through the flourishing void. Worlds flattened and hoed, and seeded and reaped by vertiginously swift heavy war tanks, totally perfected juggernauts. Here we come. Inside the witless bigness, there must be a happy nook for us, busy-busy buggies, discovering lice, conquering mites, civilizing fleas, hello, are we all here: we are, a few, I know, the sagely, wise fearful, nicely hiding in the misleadingly tough centenarian hides, and so forth, wings and valves. The man facetiously knock-knocked on my skull, brought me too a napkin, a handkerchief, a whatjumacallit, and a couple of sugar-cubes, “–Very well, my girl,” she muttered, and I was so grateful, felt accepted after so long an awkward stretch of roaring solitude inside the whale’s, the cow’s, the proud you-know-who’s grazing manure-heap of a gizzard. “–Maud, Maud, where art thou at?” Pierced the infernal din, all riddled by sparks, the coaxing voices of my dying mom, the stolen shrieks of my kid half-brother, gone, the rapturous jackal-wauls of my parrotified dad, “–Where art thou at...?”

Am I, tem­porally reformed and all, a repulsive number from the morals squad, then...? “–Exactly, thou betest, child, and let me assure thee, I was not relishing the thought. Burdened with so many sins, my senses unbidden about to take forlorn discretional awolish leave, no match for my guilt, lately titanically grown, thus deathly hindered in all my advances, I was quietly con­sidering doodlebugging my cranium, or else becoming a monk.” The wild native beauty, my vomitive persona notwithstan­ding, granted me a savvy wink, smiled with most of her teeth, and exposing with a limp extending arm the whole swatch of her inchoate nugatory fledgling fruits wrapped in skins with suspicious blemishes galore, told her pickled picking line: “–Let me hit you with a drivelous alluring proposal, hey...?”

Claiming to be a virgin not quite nubile either, then proceeded to offer herself to be raped for free. What! I was dissembling like mad, me tongue hanging, for a mile, already lengthily shooting my wad with no need for a single caress, larding my stuck zip with crying gobs of thick relish, privately gaudily enraptured, publicly blowing up my lid, though, really and hairily enraged, my unacknowledged cryptic prestige at stake, and I’m stomping on my cap, nailing with a vengeance at the ulcers of my newly reappeared stigmata, whipping myself into a foaming lathering ter­magant, else for liberty athirst exulting at last because the vane of suffering turns, and I’m bathing in the bloods and lymphs of the long-promised untested uncut never-seen Spring vespers, an explosion of wigged heads grass-whipped and suddenly tumbling down in a game of skittles where the cut-rate finally cut to size the cut-above.

“–Listen, urchin, I resent thine unsavory glibness, ok? Don’t give a hang for thy gratuitous yet worthless bestowings. Let me forestall the verdict and invite thee to squeal and quarrel with the contemporaries erst registered at thy cradle-ledgers; as a lagniappe or yet added tret, let me furthermore direct thee to go play with thy tiny cronies in the pudenda-reeking coastal crannies of this doomed female-infested river. Me always on prophylactic guard, ok? I snub equally the non-nubile as the ripe-enough, right? Immune to the charming legerdemain of any kind of floozy – strumpets stromp my trumpet floppy; let thee back to the Stygian stratagemous black waters, consort rather with thine piranhas and candirus, alligators and bald eagles, for I’m always the unreached – else actually alas the duffussy poor guy nobody, if caught, would dare grant clemency; quite, for if I durst sign the receipt of thy unfairly enticing trade-off and joined this cult of thine so many skill-proof saps fall prey to, the gossiperous ugly fat skeletal gristly wives would vulture my liver in less than a second flat, and who would slipshodded­ly be crashing right behind and terminate the devouring but the fucking cops...? Don’t I know them, and thine, and the pursy matrons, damn it, do I? Stay, no. Curb thy enthusing, I know I’m dressed with a body of shit. Besides, girlie, even if I rated ever so slightly above the scarecrowy, still nothing doing; I go with the scheduling – other­wise my cover’s shot. Sorry, don’t ever stray from, always stick to, the stric­tures of what the travel agency scripts: that’s me to a crossed tee. The dot on my I properly says: (reg.) – unwaveringly walking the appointed line – period. Call it quits, tear me up, crumple me bad, throw me away, down with me, I’m waste.”

Whereupon a cavalier push squired her to the hazy brumal whirlpools under­neath, where she landed without a hitch, with nary a splash even, falling it seems agroof amongst the erst eavesdropping soft playful porpoises of her no longer whispering but loudly derisive friends, wee males alas included, those last moreover enjoying themselves most rambunctiously – graces of life all to my damned shade denied, forever out of my ken and my repute.

Thus I became outwardly still more wretched and withdrawn, while inwardly I was guffawing harder than any of them nudie idiots snorting at my unwashed feet. For in fact I had almost instantly smelled the rat of a federal trap – their sucker-ridden tentacles reach all over the globular blobs of the suspected universe, even into the spiky leg-munching much-cadirued vaginas of the foreignest mythologies and back, always back to central headquarters, last and first refuge of the killer; fucking hypocrites, military and otherwise dis­guised – entitled and medalled, allowed to slay and plug, and rape and plunder, and safely “investigate” (more impunely even than gynecologists) the alleged felonies of less endowed, meaning talented, in fact just less well connected criminals. Be it as it may, as another lying swill-spewing classic said: –Get at me with a burning stopper. For escape again I did.

“–Mr. Ag. Mr. Ag-a-a-ain,” once more my feeble, feeble-minded wife.

“–I’m an artist, shit!” – this self-assured, evident statement generally makes her shut up. No luck now though.

“–But it’s getting late for work.” I won’t disclose my eye and injure its new morning innocence with the baneful apparition of the looming shrew which in hokey abnegation enamels my oath. Spooky nuisance at all times flitting in and out of my morbid demented conscience – feel when she approaches to broach the issue of my rancid oversleeping like I am precariously tilted at the edge of a breached cemetery niche; her funky germs fidget spermaceously at the delicate entrance of my unvac­cined nose, her marooned guts treacherously slither and sidewind to rape my isle unconquerable, of ramparts unspoiled. For she’s a dish alright, an apocryphal petri putrefying one. Exactly, I’d rather be present at a botched autopsy – whatever wafted from the brutish chisels toiling at the old boneyard remnants certainly wouldn’t be so deletereous to my bereft sen­sibilities.

Won’t even take a gander at the more and more disap­pointing and embit­tering eidola she furiously reber­verates with, the crusts of lava of my dry lippitudes protect me virtue – as well they should, while the illusory roulette of me mind takes deadly aim and me heart mellows, of course. She’s the dead duck floats at each of the stagnant squares of the wattled swamp her breath and heaving heft inspires, each of which niftily corresponds with the cross-hatchings of the gun my resentment raises in contempt and muddled-headed catharsis. Shoddy wreck of a multiplying dummy, bang-bang, bang, let the evil funfair shooting range overlord fuckface freak foist as many as he can muster on coldblooded me.

I get a christening creative germinal kick out of each of the whistling obliterations I rat-tat-tat relish in doling out; with a whispering disembodied vault-dwelling voice I tell myself: Way to go, champ, from creaking nothing you’ve extorted the explosion of galaxies, upon which you then have fostered the procreation of dumb species upon which you immediately have gone ahead and shown your right unprovoked dutiful wrath and wreaked all kind of saintly havoc. And the lithe relicts they exude, like extruded poison pips, mock souls, stink clouds, among the fogs of gloaming and gloom, bang-bang, dead too, and no cop-outs, murderous janitor, deadly easy shooter, every airborne decoy had also a target painted for a head, with the fall safe of a self-ig­niting bomb instead of a brain. Harm overdone, that’s when it’s more toothsome. With the zeal of a gourmet cutthroat proceed to slice into the thinnest prepared specimens, to be forthwith analyzed with a minimum of slobbering, before tearing away with frustration, disgust and dull shame, getting it all mingled and conglutinated and crumbled, and already gobbling it all up – glad you made it, gulp.

Of course, she an Ockham. Lucille Ockham, me undermining wormy nemesis. Fucking family of stingy goose-stepping razor-wielding thugs. Behind their permanent mask of derision, fester the dead-set eyes and the incisive tweezer-teeth of the monomaniacal giant earwig eager without cease to cut at the root of all the strings bollard my brains to the crypt of my nonetheless monumen­tal body – not a cenotaph for rent, indeedy to be toilet-occupied with the too-simple simple-minded hypostatized simulacra of their obstreprerous choosing. They would pare me to a moot point short of extant oblivion. Want me one-dimen­sional, no future, no horizon, no attributes. “–But do I wist of anyone creepier than meself...?”

No, I mercifully don’t.

So they have their work cut out. Try as they might, they’ll never cope in tidying me up, they’ll never cut me down to their paltry measure, I’ll always exceed; as each spoke of overripe wisdom leads to another seething hub of further bungled snippets, where hapless woofs and warps don’t weave but the chaotic webs and sickening medleys otherwise plenty haphazardly slit bloated abdomens of cruelly spiked spiders would eventually suppurate in their dying pangs, I’m at any once too many to easily pin down and mutilate.

They are always at a loss as to where about precisely my nice excess shall now explode forth, as it inexorably does and with prosperous luscious most healthy methas­tasied growths simul­taneously sprouting at opposite poles – it rains it pours, he spouts foul frothy broths from every pore. Forget it, you’ll never manage to keep up with the leaden-loaded extra luggage I ceaselessly secrete – I sweat bullets, I’m crying sandarac, I bleed boiling tar and spent axle grease, I breathe umbrellas swept open and bolt-stricken and pulverized, I’ve hives eruptive as the farthest-flung of moonstones – a conniption-fit of mine sends sucking cups rival those of the most bombarded bat­tlefield; as I dig my heels in and get ready to crap, have no qualms, better call ipso facto the insane pry-happy locksmiths of your lousy universe for this here stifling space, right on, shall sure crack; but let me not sneeze, the wispiest wisp of muck deluges and thus usurps the pride of place the last most fiery entropies thought to hold, and if I resolve (just a whim) to ejaculate, well then, perhaps the zoomed rennet seeds of my jizzm shall sour and spoil for all your descendants and forever more (and such a blood-curdling horror also) the pointedly flocculated, many-sidewindedly glomerular, all hurled-together vertigines presented by the erstwhile rightly legen­dary milky way, now again definitely toothless and dethroned – imagine: A blobby- blobby blob blobbing everything away, the whole sky just another oozing con­tagious all-encompassing septic duct kind of disease spreading without end... For without superfluity we drown in crinkly barren dust. The substance of any entity is always ultimately nil; only the modifying accidents that to it accrue matter and afford matter – and only matter is of the essence. The rest is projection, ethereal, thus: insubstantial, dreamed – for only matter dreams – dreams never matter, never concretize into matter, never materialize into re, thus into what is. And however they dream me, I’ll always be yet different. Even if they dream me all substance, meaning dead, while alive I’ll still be delving among many waters. Undetectable but in a few of all my varied copies. Irreducible, then, unreductable. To what do you reduce an inexhaustible bloom...? Prune till you drop, behind you I’m still brimming, untamable; dissect me also, as much as you are able, but the quaint queerest organs reproduce full tilt, the yielding couldn’t be more feracious; search madly for the core, but the core is empty, the too strophiolated seed’s elsewhere; building ziggurat peels on a void, the onion me keeps on fleshing outwardly. She says, Maud, the mad free ion with no ancestors ever gave birth to her nor successors will ionize anyshit with. Ever.

You are only engaged in a fast looming defeat; while you try to save a part of your threatened body by madly slashing away, you endanger the next maybe more crucial bit to invasive death. My perennial pulsion to disap­pear has to be met only on my own terms. I eschew the clashing presence of all gauntlets: what a flop the silly challenge; if any, and just before dying, I’d nip-pick only a little quiet wild flower who were about to bud, alas but not quite. I’ve been transported into a world of nothing, and now I’m so weary I’m ready to give up my ghost – nothing to nothing. Plus, in ceteris paribus, the hell I know. The hell...

The staminated dawn had turned into acid revulsion. My esophagus was feeling discarded, wrinkled and disgustingly throbbing, like the spent apron of some sluggish scumsucking orderly in a filthy hospital where also the dusky skinks bask in infection. I hate my own guts, and especially their paltry excrescence. All what it makes me think rankles, and destroys and nullifies its less driven neighbors. When the steelyard goes limp, the solemn spell goes broke, the bags of unnerving granulated despair void down, spilt-spoilt, like the sickening contents of a suddenly slit stomach – soon kneeling fungi’ll conjure it up into poisonous vapors. Revert once and again to the unspent flux I had already swam (regur­gitation’s the operative word,) chew the cud more’n once... Select and pull out: another (even rejoice: it could be quite a new one) excuse for living on.