38. bloodied pilgrim

my wife my harbor










for there where syrian television cannot be picked up

even if

the hostel master told me “over there, sir”

and there is nothing that I can find over there

and certainly not the proper tv set where one can pick the syrians

that are the only ones

I was told yesterday

that would carry the soccer match I would gladly see today...

there then I’ve been sent

on my own as if on a crazy goose chase...



and over there is all crowded up already

and even if from a door a bold strong man

appeared and he must have heard me

because he asked me in catalan

if I were a catalonian

where I answered beaming in the affirmative

upon which the herculean man acknowledged the answer with a nod

“me too” he said

not dourly just matter-of-factly

and left me with my right foot in the air

for I was taking a step toward him

but he’d already gone inside closing the door...



and then shrugging I went down the corridor some more

and must have found the other “there” there

where I must have been supposed to be

but always so crowded the nook

and the room I thought was mostly meant

already with two guys cramming it somehow

in such a tiny room with such a big mess of thrown things about

with each of the two not too fine smelling guys flopped

on two narrow hammocks hung in the middle of the tiny hole of a room

one hammock over the other

and no room for anything else

certainly not for another bloody pilgrim

and no bathrooms anywhere that I could see

and me already with the ominous stirrings on my lower bowels

and their minuscule television set set not on the syrian channel and my match

but set on mute on some silly varieties shenanigans

and me saying to the one guy that looks my way

the other probably too pissed with booze or hashish

“listen, sorry, but I was told by the steward that this is my room

and listen, tell me, do you get the syrian television channel on your tv set?”

so the fellow who could listen jumped over the slop

a slob over the slop

and came my way

pushed me a little so he could go through the door-gap that had no door

and went directly to the kitchen with me following him...



communal, crowded, and with nothing edible about

the kitchen was a bigger mess yet and the guy got hold of the steward

and asked him “was it true were I assigned to their tiny nothing of a room

already so crammed?”

the steward saw me as directed by the slovenly guy’s gesture

and told me forthwith “sir, I told you your room was this one”

showing me a not too clean corner bench over there on a corner

of the kitchen itself

no privacy, no curtains, no bedding, no nothing on it beside filth...



so the slob went back proudly to his shitty room

glad maybe that my “room” was much shittier than his

and the busy steward had disappeared meanwhile

and I was left standing there in the kitchen

the stewing kitchen

with children and women semi-naked all and doing

their necessities, culinary and otherwise

inside stinking cooking utensils...



I threaded back my way to where my wife had her room assigned

I knocked softly on the shiny mahogany-colored door

I pushed in

she was in the dark

the curtains pulled over the window

she was on the bed inside the sheets having a nap

her bed was quite capacious and the bedding quite well suited

and I saw immediately that she had in a corner of the neat room

a quite proper tv set now off

she was smiling beautifully at me

I said “honey, can I use your toilet? they have put in a corner

of the kitchen with nothing about but noise

and lots and lots of people cooking and shitting in the same pans

one almost would say indistinctly...”

her smile a little bit wider now she said “be my guest

and after you are done come and crawl here inside besides me

there’s space enough

and you’ll be warm and cozy

and maybe you’ll even be able to pick up your match in the syrian channel

if you don’t put the voice on

and you don’t get too crazy celebrating the goals of the catalonians...”



my beautiful beautiful beautiful wife

always the one also with the best room of all!

another end of the world at early mass with the insidious depravity of dust...

a mob of outlaws... the hilarity... clustered together... breaking taboos... the nastier most ferocious species... frenzied, bewildered, stricken with loathing... loaded... sated... with hatred... their psycho pastor wallowing in adulation... announcing with smooth rudeness preposterous ruin for those that don’t comply literally enough... oblique traitors, their cupidity is usually attributable to the agony of the impeccable infamy of the abyss their vertiginous calamities hurl them in... glacial degradation of their faith in apocryphal arguments when they peruse superfluous haphazard speculations that elucidate nothing while with forked tongues the anathemas rebound around from the walls of their circular prisons... are they themselves frantically shouting...? or those whose shrieks roaringly resound belong to the bestial watchers in their heads...?



what the hell are we doing in church, Lezi...? I hate churches, those ratty leaky quonsets where all is agony... each time again is early mass in another packed end of the world... with the insidious depravity of dust knocking at the armor of your skin...



there’s the melting moon pouring milk on the breasts of the mountains, Elzi... another dawn with cloying wings of sorrow dutifully burgeoning...



felt assaulted every time by the same damned irreversible hallucinations of toothy wincing flying animals orbiting the pecky insides of the shallow sphere... how many times as another overspilled ditched orphan I’ve wept underwater...! while the obsolete unfathomably ignorant magicians, well-manured toads all of them, feigned their dirges and litanies of unbearable scurrility and hatched their deathbed diagnoses as serpents with a foul mood (that one would have avoided above all if at all unpushed by cursed disciplinarians) their malignant eggs of pestilence... a butterfly, crippled, like a taciturn blob of slippery bleak debris, loitered thereabouts, and then was aloft and... it sped, it horribly sped... round and round, like a jet, an airplane with all those rear tubes afire and smoking... and its earsplitting throbbing made me shout and therefore taste the bitter cane and the sanding and hammering of the underhanded blows... where do I start...? “shut the fuck up!” (he murmured, the nasty guardian, and he was pinching my thighs and backside to tears... ravished by orgies of meandering hideous lame dull ordeals...) farther to the left the cute grocery store clerk slept through the proceedings... recently unfrocked due to... too rash mood swings... his mind under strobe lights through gauzy dice... irascible contortions on the tremulous screen... he’s venting his spleen like a blasphemous firebrand... and now he’s insipidly reciting hagiographies idiotic beyond contempt... here he would lift a lizard’s lid, wink, separate his hands over his fly: his cock would fly up to the ceiling... he looked like a degenerate athlete... with saucy truculence... he was unfurling his white gloves as if they were sheets on an inviting bed... his cock, never shriveled, had fangs and a frightening dead eye... the gloves rustled... antsy skittish heady, I saw myself deflowered by a whole shark... its smooth pale skin... milk of a scarecrow under the microscope...



churches, Elzi, I know... we hate all the evil deviltry they represent – gods and saints and intercessors and the rest of the silly figurines – dry shits, turdy coprolites in the shape of malignant imps... promiscuous statuettes, what are they good for if not spying on our intimacies... infectious dildoes often enough... but, hey, say it unabashedly: from idolatry to dolls – no gap – same thing... meaning: idols and voodoo dolls... ha, too funny... “let’s pinprick scour afflict burn harm hammer the hand that hammered them that didn’t belong...” and then... those damned erasures where the secretional spermatorrheic stigmata used to show...! I thought we had relinquished all rights to a sylvan saccharine voluptuous look ahead of desolate ravings in the brazen marquees of heaven...



we had the inbred premonition simmering in the semidarkness that... among the corny slugs bathing in bureaucratic flatulence on the pews, the swarms of yeasty greenbottle flies ran amok... crabbed nagging dreamlike, they hovered like a magic wand whose heterogeneous rusty frailty spelled remorse and distrust... the grocer’s scut gallantly cried in blessed fulfillment... while my heart, pierced by the sharp tool of an obtuse insect, crept, unfurnished, along epochs and chronologies with one spot inside the rank foliage always shining through, though, as if a thaw, a glacier, grew in the middle of the interchangeable jungles... under my skirts a puddle of sown seeds grew... my knees uncloistered... precocious, my singed cunt flew with therapeutic juices... I had turned the tide... my handkerchief looked rather like a tablecloth after some productive debauchery... musks of the slut... furtively, I stuck it in... slouching, I moved toward the lavatories... the senile giggles, the pernicious aphorisms, the sententious disdains, like a raw pneumatic fat mudworm followed me along... pointless rows of random traits on rows and rows of accidental faces... I staggered on, unknown... plummeting, as if drunk, down the sheer descent... a well of pimp scents and mired grimaces...



slurps ill-omened like a gut glut gloating – every virus, deadly – the flood of the faithful, specky, woeful, unfettered flak of twerps peppering the murky landscape...



the chalice held wine! I was thunderstruck! this, hoarse said the priest, little girl, is the piss of Christ; and you be a doll: a special doll with bones...! we were, I remember, on top of the vanity coffin... the hearse scene had been really nightmarish... up the footpath, the filth and the roots and the loose rocks... gave it an ugly rhythm... it had to topple... the jade couldn’t regain its composure... fell like a lump... the coffin broke among the turds, bees by the thousands escaped from the corpse... damned foreigners; irrelevant, inept, and devoid of shame – the priest swore... and your name, little girl? – he said, wiping my ass. I said, moved by my cartoonish fancy: “Publicilla.” Publicilla, mm, he said to the crucifix, listen, that child’s a whore, and she’s got the name to go with it too...



we’ve come – she sashays – to relocate Satan’s minions... in our evangelical state of grace, the frayed negotiations we’ve lately had with... hospitals, outhouses, nuthouses, jails, armies, bordellos, and cemeteries... have yielded nothing but unsuitable subtleties, mostly the morbid fees of regurgitation... we are within earshot of the yells and slurs and shudders wreaths and birdseeds and barren confessionals (where violence brews, not solace) eject or like stinking effluvia sputter... If the mafiosi disclose their crimes here, why not also the shrinks that would have us shamefully committed...?



what about god who sees it all? – I said, astride the splintered coffin... god sees all...? – he said – and better still, little girl... why what is good for god to see would ever be bad to be seen by its creatures...? especially its special creatures...? the body is the mirror of god – god did the bodies in its own image – so, if you see a body that god sees as good, would you say you are sinning...? how silly could that be...? rogue musings, I thought... “tinkle yer bells when any illustrious naked worm passes slithering under yer deluges or sprinkles and other spittings...” he sang, and the fundamental beauty of his ballast made my eyes thrill... never again would I regret the stagnant gaiety of the castrati... spurred, my throat, wiped clean of phlegm as my very ass, let a fanfare of royal loyal mirth ring to the hilt... the sundered skulls of such cockroaches enhance and heal the flaws, scars, and sundry feuding bumbling borrowed gasps and gulps plague the stupid innocent... their lugubrious fangs inject joy cheer courage... I never went back to the stench of the pews and their shriveled shabby carcasses...



delayed again the onset of the ultimate blaze... the end of the world... a topaz belly startled into a magnificent fart... that clarion fiery scintillating... by the way, did you swallow, Elzi, all of his load...?

on crumbling paper those fading stigmata

Old text on crumbling paper – Reggie Morell’s biography









They brought him to earth and everything went smoothly until he banged his head and notched his skull and his left lobe got mauled. That happened more or less at the same time when he was three and a little brother was suddenly also there, and envy raised its head and bit him with a bite that would endure forever.



At six, some in his immediate family came to visit, and he took his two girl cousins into an empty room and he made them strip as he stripped also, and then the older of the girls (she was six months older than him...) he started fucking her on the floor. In the middle of the proceedings, the door flew open and ah, the shouts of horror and so on. Grannies, aunts, mothers, all the crazy screaming, “the obscenity, the viciousness, the boy’s the devil, such indecency, no fear of almighty god!” and he snatched his trousers and, under a rain of blows, ran out the main door of the house and down the stairs. He tripped and fell, and at the end of the run of the steep gradient, he banged his head (the right lobe this time) on the metallic edge of a bascule that happened to stand at the bottom, near the door to the street. Before losing consciousness in a pool of blood, he heard his grandmother saying: “Ah, how fitting always is god’s punishment!” and “Indeed, and how well deserved!”



That unfortunate happening marked the end of his shared sexual life for a while. He masturbated like a monkey, though, and using many types of “filthy, abnormal” subterfuges, until when, at just 23, he managed to ask an old banished whore that loitered in a narrow dark alley near the France Railway Station in Barcelona, where he went to stay for a few days for literary reasons, for a session in bed. Where the acquiescing whore got him, in a worse hotel still than the one nearby where he was staying, he mainly acquired a dose of crabs which later obliged him to shave all his hairs (minus those on his head) and continually rub (for a couple of weeks) the extent of his skin with DDT.



As he was sent to school, he managed to avoid the official fascist institutions where almost everyone else who was allowed to study (thanks to their parents’ monies) went. The teachers he had, happened to be unapproved Catalonians who, though they taught all their classes (save French) in the commonly abhorred and ridiculed lingo of the invaders, talked in-between classes, and shouted and beat the crap out of the few children they had under their ferule, in healthy Catalonian. Going to take examination in a “free” condition, he passed his grades very irregularly, often having to repeat over, now a whole grade, now a particular matter. The last two years before University, thanks to an improvement in his parents’ fortunes, he was sent to a boarding school handled by religious “brothers”. He saw immediately (and wasn’t too bothered by the fact) that this “brother” business, like most of the religion shit, is just a cover for pedophiles. No problem – though the obvious connection of homosexuality and religion was already intriguing. Now, in this semi-official state, church and fascism interlocking so disgustingly that at the time could hardly be distinguished which was which, he passed all his grades with little or no trouble.



He was seventeen when he was accepted into pre-med. That was the year, a little after his entrance into the University, when he realized once and for all that what he had been fed all those years (pertaining to matters religious and so on) was garbage. That what on the surface seemed that everyone believed, was in fact, deep down, only pretense, an ugly façade; that actually nobody believed in any of all that shit about hell, heaven, virgins, sacred offices, gods, souls... that the whole fucking cesspool of sanctity, and reward and punishment in an afterlife, the whole fairytale caboodle, was just a cruel despicable charade. He wasn’t sure up till now; he thought maybe all those faggotty church fathers and beards and sages and whatnot, with their ruffles and skirts, and hats and crosses and miters and shits, with their airs of laughable severity, their ponderous enunciation, their damned phoniness... perhaps... it could be... they could really be unto something. No! He saw that it was all garbage, that nobody really could swallow such loutish criminal filth. He got the shock of his life. An “existential crisis”, so-called at the time, the anguish of living without other purpose at the end that having to die and disappear into oblivion for eternity. He wished he had been never brought into that malignant cage, the earth. Ah, for abortion! To be born into death, what a luxury! Nobody should be brought here who is going to be told all that amount of swill, as if injected or vaccinated with juice of turds from the word go, and then have the truth hidden and forbidden, and being condemned for even thinking about the truth – talk about torture, shit! All the sanctimonious ignoramuses who are allowed to produce litters and litters of little sanctimonious pricks! How nice for a massive suicide at birth! Maybe there would be less of us burning in anxiety. Such cruelty: to poison a child with all that slop.



[By way of illustration here’s this little episode that “they” claim to have once taken place. Morell is in the hall where the marriage must be celebrated later in the evening. There’s his son Marc-Antoni. There’s Marc-Antoni’s cousin, the girl that’s getting married later on – she sits on a chair near the table where the plates and cups and glasses and napkins and whatnot are already laid, she’s being combed by a faggotty barber. There’s her mother, there’s her grandmother, both fussing about the table – Morell is eating some scraped carrots from a small bowl, Marc-Antoni is having in another small bowl a few spaghetti daubed with tomato sauce. Now Marc-Antoni, who is only six, takes out his camera and attempts to photograph the bride – ugly and in fact ludicrous with her hair all in a crested bunch. Ah, what is he doing! The screeches of the mother, and the grandmother, and the girl, and the barber – the fucking faggotty barber! They are all trying to snatch the camera from Marc-Antoni. Morell tosses his bowl of shredded carrot into the garbage bin; he tosses also, with Marc-Antoni’s small bowl, the big bowl with the nauseating spaghettis stained with the tomato sauce, and he rescues the camera, and he shouts boldly above the fray. “A faggotty barber telling my son what to photograph or not! Nobody tells a child what to see with his eyes or not. His eyes are for seeing, unimpeded! Nobody tells a child, less than to anybody else to a child, what to see or not, what to photograph or not! No fucking body, okay, no!” And with the child and the telling camera he storms forever out of those stupid peoples’ lives.]



Now, with the raking crisis on, he wanted to die. He was a victim, he thought, and no possibility of redemption whatsoever. A defenseless worm: like any other thing alive. Thrown into a passing maelstrom. A blow, and gone. A toy in malefic paws, a discordant instrument blown by vicious death. Soon to be annihilated forever and ever. And, to top it all, suffering. Suffering no end. Why? Why the suffering, only stopped by annihilation? Who wouldn’t choose the shortcut? A fast goodbye to it all... but how? How does one cross over, to total oblivion, to absolute absence? Lurking underground in reeking galleries... do you fall in front of an arriving engine? The shame afterwards. Your body, the bowels, beshitted, all spread; the obscenity, the people gagging, retching...



He lost weight. He got dangerously thin and frail. There was no reason he could find that would justify going on living. Nothing whetted his appetite, not even literature, that from very early on had become such a delightful refuge. Also literature now under the sinister pall of death, of transient worthlessness...



Everything dying all around. Family, famous people, the animals continually sacrificed, eaten, destroyed. What’s the point? There was no point. There is no point. There will never be any point. That’s it. He would have wanted to be daring enough – commit suicide in a heroic enough way; but that was dreaming; in his sickness not even strength to do away with himself could he muster. He was committing suicide in a slow painstaking way, through inanition, with despair eating him inside out.



There was in his town a psychologist who had recently opened a clinic. Reggie Morell went to see him; the psychologist told Morell that he could make room for him and that the single student union, the fascist union, the only allowed, would nonetheless surely pay. The physician filled all the forms, readied all the paperwork. Reggie went inside the clinic a few days before he was eighteen. He stayed there during the whole summer. He underwent coma after coma, nightly; first through a few ineffective, too abusive, electroshocks; afterward through the insulinic treatment, much more successful. Slowly, all his pressing anguishes got erased. Superficially, but the relief was noticeable. Not so nervous now – just the remnants of unquiet underneath – ready to inflame the blood now and then (as soon as some creep thereabouts spouted the patriotic shit, the martial shit, the religious shit, the bureaucratic shit; as soon as some drops of the creep’s sanctimonious, revolting, pap rotted, by salivous contact, the integument of his renewed spirit). On the outside he donned his slightly amenable mask; his piercing eyes, though, vigilant under a serious, rather unmoving, countenance. Birdlike, taking it all in with a fast twist of the neck. Better like a sphinx. No reason to fluster, to ruffle one’s feathers for such piddly stuff. And, after all, isn’t everything just as trivial?



As autumn started he came out of the clinic. Everything looked new – the landscape, the trees, the little brotherly animals... And each of them had its own immediate value; all had their right to exist during the short passing span of life to them allotted by the cruel circumstances...



Tossing away as molted useless skin the immense vanity of pretending to have a special soul, some type or other of little light different from the little life light belonging per se to each natural thing – a tree, a newt, a bug – Reggie Morell had become a full-fledged atheist, and a convinced communist to boot. From then on, he hated and loathed with all his strength the vile sellers of barefaced lies – the priests, bishops, all the damned hierarchy of malignant clowns turned exclusive representatives of evil gods, treacherous, monstrous gods, on top of whom Morell now defecated (and would continue defecating for the remainder of his life) without any kind of letdown or afterthought, and whom, if ever he’d been given the chance, would have squashed underfoot as the worst most poisonous virus must be squashed on sight. Still worse, still more worthy of rebuke and revulsion he found to be the cowardly so-called skeptics and agnostics. [What is there to be skeptic or agnostic about? There is no fucking god, there is only malice made thing. If there would ever be a god, it would have to be the most evil thing ever by matter devised. Inventor of all sorts of excruciating pains, and of death. Damn the butcher. Know him by the rotten fruits he yields! And pity the poor crushed nobodies tortured and murdered by the religious machine.]



Only the atheist is a dignified enough person. That’s why he came to approach the communist idea; as a system, at least theoretically, it sought to right and level the field against the injustices created both by society and nature, where some gained privilege by depriving the rest of a chance at enjoyment, albeit mild, of a life without lies. Communism postulated the only praiseworthy progress: the scientific one, of course – the scientific progress whose target was the conquest of space. With the caveat, alas, in the last analysis, that as with any other political system, it also allowed the usual scum to rise to the top – the unavoidable bullies keen on ordering about the lives of others. So, what on paper looked so fair, once in the paws of the authoritarian and the martially-minded, became soiled, and the injustices didn’t get quite mended, with the bottom-dwellers ending still working as hard as ever, and the top-brass, as it were, ruling and imposing their cankered will. At least, however, communism had the advantage over all other systems that everyone in it was an atheist, and, at least from scratch, could be considered a whole person.



For that’s something Morell never quite got. The fact that there apparently could be so many people whose brains were so degenerated as to imagine themselves to be in any thing different from any other animal with eyes on their faces, and bowels in their bellies, and holes to shit and fuck. It was beyond him that anybody could be so foolishly conceited and also so extremely dim-witted as to think himself in any way superior, in any basic trait, to any other animal – saving the fact that humans, due to evolution’s whim, could have a cerebral capacity that could exceed the one had by practically the rest of all known animals – a feature that, properly used, had to be put into function in the scientific discovery of space, and never, of course, in stupid religious ideas in the final analysis only valid for creating new recipes for murdering others – the so-called unfaithful, the unbelievers, the infidels, etc... Ah, unmentionable, the amount of worthless shit!



Ah, yes. The horror and the loathing that inspired in him the assholes that believe in books written by a few faggotty fanatics – all the garbage in bibles and qurans and “sacred” writings, all the murderous injunctions big and small produced by the repressing shitty queers! These are books for whom a much better plight would had been if used as bumpf to wipe first thing the asses of the ancients to whom they were recited or for whom they were written – murderous fairy tales; malignant, infectious texts better wasted in the latrines – the lots and lots of mental crises that humans would have been spared to suffer; and the crimes, the piles and piles of crimes avoided!



He has it tough, Morell – an atheist, a core communist, an exile. He’s got no place in this world of deceptions – deceptions and what else...? Practically nothing else. And, on top of it all, he’s of the opinion that there’s nothing that deserves to be own. Knowledge, okay – knowledge helps you to get it, is a great help to get by as you go along. But real contact with those humans alienated, already irretrievably poisoned at primary school, steeped in ideas so crazy and asinine as the belief in gods and souls, and fatherlands and flags – in all that vomiting produced by a bunch of fanatical queers that wrote religions and wrote and write national constitutions and laws to bully and control the habits and behavior of the rest of the deluded people, and all based on lies and empty concepts polluted by the incredible stupidity of old farts of old – all this takes him elsewhere, out of reach; he sees behind the masks, he’s already gazing across, discovering the rotting skeleton, deducing from all the shitted shit that pours from all the assholes the ashes of bodies that melt together in infinite nothingness. That’s why he’s got to be apart – a solitary, taciturn, saturnine, awkward estranger.



He learns the ways of access, though, also that. He runs and walks, and often without having to take any train or vehicle whatsoever. All machines he hates, he fears them, he flees their smoke, their noise, he thinks they are useless, only invented to annoy, bloody thought-interrupting, lung-polluting machines – all except those that point toward the proper progress – the progress toward space. The worse machines, those used for productivity – “productivity,” what a dirty word, bringing to mind all those appalling obscenities: bureaucracy, lethal numbers, repulsive commerce – spreading the sickness, fostering the deadly vanity.



To the shit piles with all the vehicles, then. Instead, with nimble strong legs, let’s cross the sudden bridges that sprout here and there and have become handy shortcuts. And he doesn’t stop, on the contrary he increases his pace, sidewinding, like a supple nice snake, he has no patience, no, passing without looking once, he can’t stomach any of those beeches where the indolent roast themselves. And never goes near the hurly-burly of big feasts and big cities. [And yet, it must be said that as soon as he had saved enough, so that he could emigrate; as soon as, after performing a row of “base” jobs (for, medicine, he had abandoned after his stay in the clinic – the sick human body too horrible and anguishing and premonitory to behold), he had gathered enough money, he went to Paris. Ah, liberty at last! In exile, but free. Paris, London, Hamburg, New York. He never returned to the country of his birth, devastated then, as is still now, by the insufferably loathsome invader.] [Never returned to the invaded great city neither (where he had belonged for a while to the few that were the liberating vanguard). Why are the invaders shouting louder and louder, and the mumbles of the locals are getting sparser and sparser, and also fainter and fainter? Why? Well, everything must go to pot.]



Literature he enjoys, even from the earliest years, no longer melancholic when he reads. I’ve already stated the fact. (Include here the traumas suffered when seeing his library burn, and that twice – first time, he’s only twelve, his angered father burns his books; twenty-five years later is his wife’s turn to burn, too piffed, his books. Ah well!) The consolation of literature always there, almost up till the very end – reading, the instant stabilizes itself, the brain becomes properly synchronized, the world acquires meaning. He had taught himself German and Russian. He had figured that with “everyone” knowing French or English, some other translations would come his way – thus he manages to set a foot in a publishing house. Translations indeed come his way, also from the English now. Wide opened side doors to literature. And the knowing of tongues – what a blessing! – not to be ever at the mercy of the ecclesiastical and fascist (same thing) garbage the invading castilians have as sole pseudocultural serving! From quite early on, he discovers the fine, enlightened, authors and writers of books sold in the Rambla for the lucky tourists. [Something always did he then possess (for him a grave ethical infringement), a certain quantity of books. But was that “possess”? He thought maybe books counted rather as essential nourishment, and anyway as easily burnable, fungible, as other evanescent staples. And yet it is true that losing them hurt a lot. His sin, no doubt, he jokes.]



Besides, as I was saying, there’s nary a thing he considers worth possessing. And less still women, of course. Volatile stuff! You can’t own what flies freely. Ununderstandable any death provoked because somebody sought the exclusive possession of some female! Passions are manifestations of extreme silliness, of a touched brain, of simply unfathomable foolishness. Women are free entities, their cunts are hairy insects that love going from cock to cock, as bees, drinking now from that flesh flower, now from that other lovely flesh flower. You can’t possess such ethereality. And anyway dreary mister death is there loitering with his sticky damned net – he will bag the bug sooner or later. Why the fucking trouble, he wonders.



Instead, friendship is the answer. Friendship with loved woman – loved, and free – let’s never forget the “free” item – that’s the secret – let the bug drink wherever the kind wind takes her – the point is to wait for her return. In friendship. And don’t forget to befriend also the sparse atheist and the good communist (never authoritarian, never martial), no matter if he’s to be counted among your kin or not. And keep your friendship with trees and the brotherly animals – they are your own kind also. And be friends with the landscapes – extend your loving gaze over the impeccable wasteland. Never forget your friendship with satellites and planets and galaxies. And that meteorites (and the sundry stones whose history and secrets are all-important) are your friends. That the whole universe itself you hold faithfully in friendship – no silly friendship yours, of course. A friendship renewed with every passing instant – for it won’t last, as you know – death’s loitering, okay? Death’s about to take you away – and they, the animals, the trees, the landscapes, the stones, the women, the atheists, the communists, the galaxies, the universes, all your friends... will continue dying, living (is all the same thing), after you are gone – minus your friendship, them, but still going strong, the memory of you perhaps a fast disappearing indentation and no more.



Ah, and all those disgraceful parasites, the fanatical crazy queers that follow the bibles, qurans, constitutions, flags, fatherlands... all those foolish miasmatic specks of tainted dust that delude themselves into believing themselves to be so fundamentally, vainly, unique, with a soul that shall survive no less...?! All that sad ugly spread on the surface... pestiferous, fetid, fungous...?



Those...? Nothing; I won’t waste a second more thinking about them – too minimal, too fleeting, an easily wiped repugnance stuck on the remotest bit of skin of a dear old planet. The wind of the years shall wash it away; they shall vanish without a trace – all their lies turned into the flying paltry ashes of an anonymous mummy.



Well, and thus ends Reggie Morell’s biography – he died, or had died, or will die... smiling. Everything elapsed so fast... everything elapses so fast. Sidewiping, like a nimble snake, never too taken up with the stuff already learned; sniffing new landmarks... until the landmark became a dark wall where the joke ended, his smile suddenly gone. Bitter now. At the very end, holding some hope, you think...? No, none. Perhaps wishing to die well. He was decaying fast... sicknesses in the blood... Ephemeral, transitory... An old text already half illegible, and crumbling, melting... And then...? Good night.

they started drawing with their scalpels thin lattices

fuliginously silhouetted against the penumbrous corridor, she tells me: a swath of lit Möbius strips arose around my discarded clothes as the doctors made me strip... I saw the obstetricians eagerly hoard some of them... as if those twisted strips were any worth to have or relevant at all anent their diagnostic criteria...



later, they tarried, mumbling amongst themselves... as I showed obvious signs of discomfort... they pretended then to already get to work... they started drawing with their scalpels thin lattices... thin bleeding lines on the random fields of my exposed abdominal skin... ellipses mostly, they drew, oddly enough... the axes of those ellipses generated, with the gathering blood, shiny carmine drops that now looked like cones, now like cylinders... or else, as vortexes or spirals now... all the topological surfaces... somewhat polarized... painful medical procedures, all told, that... I found no clue as to what purpose they were having... I wanted to raise my concerns about... the whole set of shenanigans the doctors were engaging in... their tools, for instance, normally used in garages in order... in order to mend automobiles... my brain activity... showing now signs of utmost stress... my reflexes less automatic than... you... might have wished for...



expressions of extreme disgust were, I'm sure, facially appearing... not only facially... also on my whole façade... shifty shades... shifting summits of scowling... of snarling... of nail-baring... subtly demonstrating that... I was perhaps desiring the death of the butchering bunch... they though... kept trifling with my innards... damned interlopers... talking meanwhile their pusillanimous garbage... bland pablum for the abulic... all my bodies in a state... sieged by piddling anomies... nothing to write home about, I thought...



suddenly... a shout arose from the archaeological ruins of my forgotten self: "get rid of the fucking fetus already and quit immerding around...!"



their paws spastic like those of a constipated dog while dropping hard tiny turds on the unyielding ground...



then the blustery blowzy peroxided nurse... massaging with long-drawn nails my anus... she said: it improves your range of inner vision, speeds up nerve movement, increases air flow through the bowels... all of these boost your ability to either battle it out... or give in and compromise your survival rate... the individual organism, whose adaptive value is well known amongst the more cognitive of scientists, fears naught beyond the biological...



are there onlookers up in the dark bleachers of the operating theater...? why is she become another arcane signaler...? keeps on wincing and prancing toward the missing audience, I notice from the corner of my right eye... she says: behavior of this sort suggests that the amplitude of both distinctions is one of half a degree if even that much... so, though it matters a lot for the individual's survival, it is on the other hand neither beneficial nor pejorative in the broader world of social and non-social phenomena... (a dimension to take into consideration and nowadays being thoroughly investigated...) that the woman shed or not the evolving parasite that replicates at a furious pace inside her most kernel-like membranes... she mutters against herself... her prattle includes miscues... she's said too much... "the evolutionary mystery of why neuroscientists ultimately fall in bulk prey to the same manias they try to extricate from their patients... are findings that will have to be disclosed at a later lesson..." the surgeons are about to trample her... her heels all scrunched-up already... floored and minced by military boots...



she flees, crying... her sensory functions impaired by the pain and the shame... she doesn't go far, though... dives head first into the whole body magnetic thingamagick... the scanner... whose whizzing and burring betrays its extreme irritation... inimical device, whirring... from idle gone to hysterical gone to insane... "positron turbines..." "raving mad frequencies... hopping on the spread spectrum..." the scanner fries your brains... you always come out, if alive at all, mentally diminished... she probably deems she deserves that kind of cleansing...



lame aphorisms are being tossed about my head... I'm laid out over the moist warm table... my body a swarm of trapped bees... and outwardly innervated with new abnormalities... them buzzing... green-cloaked buzzards feeding on carrion... they kept on jawing, nasally, about spontaneous mutations... rare syndromes... brainstems branching out... I was cool... observing it all from above, unconcerned...



once, twice... here it is again... I remembered the sensation I had being born... I say: here I am, at my birth again... time and again... those trite ephemerides... nonetheless engraved in my old brain... are they, the rummaging intruders, reviving the old groove...? I guess they must... it lends credence to this supposition the fact that I'm aloft yet unsupported... whereas down below... a woman's legs are spread... and a battalion of hands are ramming in down the broken doors that lead, raggedly, to her all higgledy-piggledy torn, tortured, womb...



I squirmed... the bed was creaking... ominously... battalions of crooked, prickly, ripply hands stampeding inside Elzi's bodies... a-quiver, I tossed the quilt; I stickled pugnaciously between the sheets... how to unstick them... took umbrage with the whole layout... rocketed the bundle against the wall.

all the suspicious characters are men disguised as women

it must have been the worst cognac ever... like licking a rat, I was thinking... and... getting laid, what a waste...! and then, to top it all, that thing, that hellish beverage...



it threw me for a loop... I went... like a Götterdämmerung monkey... fast toward the sink... hilarious... almost broke my neck... I had to gargle something... the fracid water for the tap... much better than the sulfurous cognac... he... that over-male writer, the Stanley Baker type, in the darling film Eve, with glorious Jeanne Moreau as the ur-fatal female... only that, instead of a "bloody Welshman," the stellar oaf was a no less bloody Catalonian... a writer of sorts... "working for the cinema," his words, undersigning his twisted, fancied, productions with that juicy, or maybe just farcical, name of "MM···WW," which must have made, let's say, the curiosity button, of a few potential employers, itch... "what's this MM···WW thing...? is that the name of a machine...?" "no, just a writer... he also wrote for such-and-such... a film..." clever ploy... the guy perhaps not a total imbecile...



now, the fellow himself, a poor performer indeed... getting laid under those conditions, yeah, what a waste... but then, worse... his cognac, yikes...!



I came back from the sink... we were in his garret... his garret, a narrow venue indeed... not ripened into a pigsty yet, but never so clean either... the charwoman herself had been there while we were chatting about "culture..." not a bit too clean herself either... full of blotches, her face... those red and white blotches caused by a state of depression... she came in limping... dragging her heavy shadow like a corpse... she hanged around... with the little skips and dodges of a clumsy thief... she had no success in unhooking any of the jealous grime... faithful, dogmatic grime on the chapped fake porcelains... whipped despondently at the chaos about... carved a few meager scarifications into the dust... smote a few worthless rags into submission... all her utterances were loud sighs of despair... and then she was gone.



said the writer: she was worth a few fucks last year, wait, two or three years ago... but then his family fell apart... a lot of oblique abductions... some obese characters that burst somehow... decimated... an outspoken boy killed by the cops... the sky falling on the whole family concern... the scheme in disarray... I put her in one of my stories... I made her a disaster of an authoress... never managing to sell a line... even to those shitty religious comics... and then she's killed by her religious would-be publisher... who makes of her a quite successful authoress... she manages to sell now many, many books... she's been gruesomely butchered and her dainty flesh is now being used as little tasty bits packed in tiny books... affordable, mock-refined gifts... her flesh turned into choice morsels of bait for fishes... also, as selected treats for cats... she's a scream now... fishes and cats crazy for the stuff...



back from the sink, I had an item rankling... in my mind... I said... ah yes... something about the gods... "Götterdämmerung monkey..." he had been showing off... much like the writer in the film... only that where Stanley Baker says: "I love all women - six to sixty," he said: "I love all the cunts, from four to one hundred and four..."



I said "one hundred..."? I said "four..."?



he smacked his lips... he said: those pouty lips on the cunts of the little girls... why would god make them like that... if not to entice the lips of us men to give them moist kisses, and the more Frenchified the better...?



I said "god..."? I said "men..."?



he got my drift... ok, or rather not god... that damned usurper... but the goddess, the goddess, yeah... goddess Nature... anyway, why would she make them like this...? if not for us human beings to kiss and revere...?



this talk was throwing me off... he must have felt... the freezing settling in... my side to him quite frozen... sending waves of animus... poisoned quills... his creepy words being a deterrence... he blushed bluish... became uxorious... melting into a swamp of effeminate warmth... this fragile plot of his threatening to crumble...



I thawed... he had gorgeous eyes... burning... black.



he was telling me about an outline now... a thriller... a terror thriller... so intensely... very involved... his eyes burning holes in my integuments... seizing power, my throat constricted, my eyes tearing up... he as possessed... so full of passion...



sham passion... but a woman with a wet vagina doesn't have... too keen a sense... about rightly feeling... what is and isn't bogus... she is busy otherwise... no time unwrapping the convoluted wrappers of pretense...



in the outline, all the suspicious characters are men disguised as women... but, at the upshot, the real culprit... the cruel loathsome killer... is a woman disguised as a man... too predictable, I thought...



I was deflating again... he went into some unashamed capers... "darling, our brief epoch will crystallize into a wreath of unforgettable vignettes... with you as a model, my writing shall become divine..." plenty of slavering rubbish of that tenor, caliber...



and then he drilled me... just fair...



I got up and went to fix me a drink... took a morsel from something bitter... tasted of leather... was I chewing on some of his blinders...? I heard him snoring... I drank the cognac... the scream of horror and disgust must have awaken him... his visage betrayed now a frayed exhaustion... as if his skin had become moth-eaten... failure showing through the gnawed skin... but as I was running like one of those monkeys... the failing gods... and stumbled... he laughed... sonorously...



I said... I remember now... something about the last embers... the dying evening of the gods...



"your plots," I said, "all male chauvinist shit... why don't you... become a woman... disguised... operated... and then... make a killing...?"



"a woman...?" he really looked spent.



I spat onto his bundled clothes and, slamming the querulous door, I breathed the nocturnal air, still with a mingy, pissy, taste in my mouth.

cruel play: deaf divinities of death

males are on the wane








we went to see a play in which the dire dictator of that empire had his teams of soccer duly maimed... the field players rendered armless... so that no hand foul could be committed... while the door-keepers or goalies had had to have their legs hacked out so that they could only use their hands in blocking the shots... and scanning around reflectively... the peoples on the bleachers... both in the play... same as those seated near us... looked like (or rather already were) mummies...



we came out of it rather disgusted... all those hissing green skulls at the end, roaming among the vestiges of empire, raving... wallowing in sewage... sewage... its dreadful stink... apparently running like sores on the stage... and the gory mummies, with their perfidious muzzles aflame... coming up to the audience... masked with glowing skulls.... telling each of us on our bewildered faces about what awaits each of us... the hole unlimited... the hole without end of blackest asphyxiating death... death... death... and luridly titivated... like dying whores... stabbed here and there by the slivers of decay... bleeding... or oozing ugly tacky... glaring syrups... staggering among the smokes and the fogs... vitrified notched skulls, green, phosphorescent, telling us... death... death... their foul breaths... exceeding themselves... no man in the audience reacting like a male... a gaggle of geese... cackling... quitting... giving up all resistance... retreating... tails high... taking those excesses up their asses... beyond decency... my nails eager to pounce... angrier by the second... imagine us proper ladies pandering to such filth...! suffocated, Elzi, only yesterday back from the sanitarium, had taken off her gloves... bad choice of show, I thought to myself, recriminatory... she meanwhile... all at once... she moved it up a gear in order to pummel... unmasking the deadly portents... the death portenders... a tigress... she got herself a trophy... a plastic skull sickly refulgent in the sick blinding light... a gangly asthmatic boy behind it... without his shell, helpless, weeping... as if his harpy of a mom were excruciatingly rebuking him again... we won't have no more of your nasty wetsies in your didee...! a scuffle ensued... somebody, a giant, shoved us down... humps in our crania... kicked out of the theater... now rubbing our lumps... disgusted... walking slowly... not elated after having taken action... voided... defeated... all that constant waste...



a deep depression slowly settling in...



home, in our chambers, Elzi, robed as a specter in a dungeon, from mirror to mirror, very self-conscious about her "insect" visage... with that cruel smile that couldn't be erased... with the insight of a knowledgeable louse, she insinuated... knowing more than she could comprehend... while life persisted in its tireless ruthless siege... her gills or cuticles or plaques heaving nonstop... look at the bloods, the lymphs, the goos, beating with an unstoppable monomaniacal... nitty gritty... obsession... again and again... pacy or apace... toward... toward...



I was afraid she would start asking "where..." I jumped, all spruced up, so bogus, optimistic, a triumph... I said, listen, let's fuck, let's forget about the shitty play, about the humiliation of the veins and such, about the horror of the outside... And then I became joyfully censorious: what...! fornicating during daylight! what a fucking sin!



she laughed... I was so relieved... I dove into her cunt... I licked the slender topaz above the entrance... sobbing with gratitude... she came in an explosion of giggles and yells... after a little while I heard her snore...



back with wobbly legs from my spelunking junket... I took to speculating about emulsions and emasculations... if... I said... if... a poisoner be the worst sort of murderer... what about the poisoners of our minds... all those preachers of self-hatred... all those worshipers of death... the religious creeps surrounding us like the infected rats of an ultimate plague...



I remembered the arcane arcadias elsewhere... how we drove the cattle safely into the mountain refuge... how the trucker told me his name... name's Ac Ac, he said... he added after a pause... a pause pregnant... "ac" means "shit" in our language...



perhaps he expected me act affronted or shocked, meekly tickled, sillily ticked off... instead I said: I guess it is as well to be... a double shit... when the rest of us are just a shit anyhow...



"I see you are an understanding lady", he said, the mongol guy... he had taken his tawdry worm out for me to have a go at a rocky suck... it is so poignant, isn't it...? women are as dumb as fishes... allured by the luring effect of the wiggling wriggling revolting worm... their mouth waters as soon as they see the soft lurid hook of the pulsating bait...



he was pleased with me... all the mongols in the convoy fucked me afterwards... I said: if scrawny Maura can fuck millions to exhaustion in a day, why couldn't we fuck a few less also with no detriment to our constitutions...?



afterwards their glances glanced off my skin all but reverentially, I'd say, obligingly... kind of shy... with awe... they were all exhausted, etiolated, ramshackle... and I as nothing... as fresh and dandy as a mountain flower just born... a fountain goddess... wiped clean... insofar as the squandering of one's juices went, mine had on the contrary probably gained in volume... whilst their levels had fallen beyond the red line... they felt empty, and somewhat hoaxed also, incapable to go dribbling about... their ponderous tread on the pebbles not arousing the smallest suspicion of a skip or skit or skid or scuttle or... spent... almost dead inside... the cattle meanwhile frowning, unattended, untidy, the sacrificial rehearsal unapplauded, without public... their play of death ignored...



overnight... with a single rolling of the dice that were their balls... I had become their totem of worshiped inviolate flesh... I woke busy... first inning on, I said, I'm hungry... thread the fangy needle of my thoughts and kill me a bull... I feel like a few steaks...



I chose the ballsier of bulls... I went to his perking ear: no use praying to the deaf, earless, divinities of death, buster; never any use in the event of impending deathblow, I told him... besides, males are palpably on the wane.

two jaunts through tarry pipes

angry moths were emerging from the dark abyss... I was peering into Elzi's cunt... an intrepid scout enkindled with the thrill of sundry discoveries... all those quaint nooks and coings... and then I sunk deeper yet, fathoming the obscure zone... and it had happened: the sudden fright of those screaming moths big as bats... behind the batty cloud, an embryo... an embryo who, barely skipping a beat, from the size of a polliwog had risen to be at least a mighty prawn... prancing and squirming, the prawn grew to be a hippopotamus weighing who knows how many tons...



at its peak, a womb is a lopsided microcosm where simulacra either gambol happily or scrap by, depressed and half-suicidal, whilst certain quotas of determinate shapes are filled by the sedulous work of the tiny cellular employees whose decline would announce the end of the world as we know it... bribery of acquaintances and mysterious bureaucrats will carry you only so far... the rest is up to you... you alone, my darling strapping tyke, against the uncountable cruelties of the natural world... for instance... try to avoid like the bleeding devil the ravenous hunters... the army and its burly uncouth minions, always hunting, on the infamous prowl after down on the doldrums young bums... poor guys... ventilating with dirty gills, their collapsible ears utterly collapsed... the depressed clueless youth... and the fangy hunters bribing them into becoming legally-shielded murderers... and ultimately self-murderers, of course...



we women so strange sometimes... squeamish about eating bugs and beetles but delighted always to swallow the slimy spunk of a man's spout... a man's spout... an overextended clitoris that, in insectoid bursts, oozes now and then some disgusting excretion...



the dream was becoming silly... we women "unctuously constituted and thus more inflammable for pyral combustion..." – a memorable line, as I perhaps had read last night... women as cunts and wombs always... and fatty subcutaneous flammable stuff under the shiny hairless carapace... eggs in women’s shapes... carriers of an alien massive virus called the embryo... the hype and the upheaval of maternity... but in the end, all said and done, nothing but flesh subdividing into flesh... all that amount of soft pink becoming hard pitch black... a blood denigrated...



or, again, strangling a dick... murdered, bruised... crags appearing along the shaft... vessels bursting... who’ll suck on this...? the grotesque faces of the taunting tantalizing men... conceited hero (he raw)... erstwhile so self-sure down the avenue... and now look at him... rag-and bone, wretched, drenched in irrelevant goo... a busted groin and, in its middle, tortuous, covered in the tacky fuzz of fire-damp, the lame dick... hornswoggled by the scraggy snaggled teeth of a witch...



cobwebs of bile criss-crossing the broken-down lift... flawless nomad, though, I kept hard sledding... ripping across the pinker and pinker wrinkles... seeking the light... until...



but then I woke up... tried to tell Elzi about the dream... the journey up and then down the tube of her adventurous cunt... but I was by myself... I bridled at the thought... but here it was: the truth... begrudgingly, bitter, I remembered the irking accident... “be thou a survivor and thou shalt reap nothing but guilt...” somebody must’ve have said it already...



Elzi wasn't there of course... she was chez les fools... at the asylum for the insane... locked in...



all the fun we’d had...! and now...?



went to the window... looked down at the overgrown yard... a monk was there, standing, his eyes raised to the window behind which I spied... he was old... I payed heed, it behooved me...



I pictured him under the puce uniform... instead of a sphincter a prune or its pit; each cheek a peach pecked at by flees; a navel of novelty sequins and allhallowmas sweets; for ears and nose, cottoncandy and acrid saltpeter; no balls but tealeaves; a crushed and yet hirsute artichoke for a merkin; shins and chin of grape skin; anchovies for lids; the mammilae two resilient bumps of snail spit... the limbs... the limbs of hoods and weeds... and he’s back from the woods on his flowery skis... there he met the morbid dough, keen for treats... he became the creator – again, another...! – damn vice of men... – and the clumsier the more adept to try his klutzy paw at the impertinent game... – he contrived for eyes for the creature two chickpeas; for a loose tooth a bit of onion; an empty rind of gherkin for a wee-wee; black-seeded halves of watermelon for feet; for eyelashes apple parings; exploded mangoes for teats... medlars, toadstools, rotten eggs... with expertise he fashions thus his teeth... a tongue for wibbling made of quicklime and mercury... he strives to accentuated the perfection of his creation with the invention of a mind all of thick smoke... when the pudding’s thought to be as toothsome as you please, he realizes that all along and underneath he’s been seasoning his granny for the beast... it’d been, his great creation, it’d been... another granny disguised as by another priest...



“the fuck you want?” I said, opening the window.



the gargoyle looked terrified, timorous perhaps that I’d be so bold as to bother to come down and... as if I were to come down and ride him... too frail for farther ministrations of that sort... already hag-ridden as by his so-called virgin...



I’d be a mendicant sciolist whose poignant emerods, layers and layers of them that accrete with the seasons, make skating up or down my rectum the scraping of a wound the pain resultant of which the unraveling of the hurtling galaxies could never equal, he said, a glint in one of his eyes betraying maybe a humorous disposition in one outwardly so dour...



is alms you are asking for...? said I.



is that a brothel...? Have many babies been sacrilegiously inhumed in this oddly scented garth of yours...? answered he.



be a good monk and lift your skirts and show us your spinneret, I commanded, showing him a coin in case he acquiesced.



he did... typically, as any doll of his build, he lifted his skirts and his knob, an inch all told, propped up... as promised, I tossed for him to catch the fulgid coin...



also he did, alert enough, with his shambolic teeth (catch it...) then, as he put on his wonted far-away look, so fake... a yearning caught at the crinkles of my hollow... I almost fell for him... but then I checked myself... I’m not that hard-up...!



as with a swagger he turned tail to go, though... I screamed, stricken with desire... wait!



but again, before he turned his head, I had closed the window and drawn the shutters... now in darkness I brooded... having lost the purpose of my quest... my mind wavered... who creates whom, I wondered, appalled...

a motherly teat with a set of twelve hands instead of a set of nipples

we were a bit top-heavy after we won a prize at the raffle... cavorting down to the town at the bottom of the canyon like two amazing amazons... we glad-handed the passers-by we our fake twelve hands that propped out, as nipples on a teat... the strange object we had just won at the raffle...



we were feeling pretty happy... dismissing the ostentatious auguries of an ugly sky menacing to burst... in an allegedly depraved mood, we had been yawing adrift for a few days... visiting the fairs and funfairs... drop me here, would you, buster, we'd say to the peasants who took us for a ride around the dry thirsty plains... we taunted them a bit... rumbles ensued, of a sexual nature most, but one or two obnoxious brawls also occurred... we were tough, though, and at the end not the worse for wear... I had lost a pair of trousers but a good farmer's daughter had some flowery flowing skirts of her that she wouldn't use no more and lent them to me...



now we were on the tricky slope down to the town... I remembered that coming up we had seen that poor old tottering guy trying to put a foot in front of the other, and not managing every time, neither, despite the help of his gnarled stick...



Elzi had warned me... see the creep...? never approach the bloody leper... ebb out of his unlucky shadow like from a shark's threatening fin... he... he used to be a nasty cop... protected by the law of the land, shielding like a brute and a coward behind his shield... he took to beating and murdering women and blacks, hobos, and the destitute, the poor and needy, and the petty thieves... your typical nazi gone to seed... he took to torturing like to sweet drink...



keep away from old bastard cop, she said... he stinks... and fragile, they are liable to pin his corpse on you... he's about to kick the bucket, might drop dead with a whisper or a breeze, a draft... wouldn't be near him, no sir, madam... giving away a whiff of death... you can smell him from this distance... gives me the willies... and she shivered demonstratively...



then we climbed to the plains... and looked for the fairs far and wide...



now we were approaching the town... martins flew in and out of their high-rise little octagonal abodes... the rabbits coughed at the door of their warrens... from the weirs wallowed already the whirligigs... the sky roared... its eructations nearer and nearer...



a dirty dust floated about... a storm brewing, no doubt...



and now we realized that the slope near the first road surrounding the town was grown with a new substance... like a growing of tall yeast... a yeasty growth... the footing wavering on it... the ground so slippery...



and at the side of the road there again (or there still) the old bastard cop... still trying to reach somewheres... but with such mortifying slowness...



look, the damned creep again...! Elzi seemed utterly repelled... I think I'll bail out a bit farther... over there... can't stand the rotten devil...



and then, as she took off athwart... I saw her back... her back diminishing in the horizon as the veil, unfurled, of a vessel at sea... and me at this thoughtless instant... I slipped over the strange substance... that somebody must have dumped there overnight... a dump of mushroomy fungoid stuff... sandy, gritty...



on the road a gray car passed lifting a cloud of dust... and then the avalanche caused by my sliding down the incline... the spillage of mushy sand caught the old crummy man underfoot and made him flop down...



another yellowish car passed and now instead of dust it splashed that disgusting ocher porridge over the fallen disjointed puppet... I was really sorry for him... a discarded broken doll, full of vermin and shit...



I reached the road and went over to assist the geezer... Elzi nowhere to be seen... migrated elsewhere... I went to the little crinkling decrepit old fellow... he'd fallen badly down, all crumpled... obviously dying...



and then... I heard it... delightful... there was music coming from within his head... through the huge hairy opening of his right ear... he'd fallen on his left side, me gingerly propping him a little with my left arm...



and the music pouring out of the hairy opening... I asked him nicely: what is this music...? is so enticing, heart-warming...? "I hear nothing," he croaked, "don't hear a thing..."



it was a marvelous song... a 1920's crooner's or chansonnier's... a mild and joyous melody... but he wouldn't hear the song in his own head... poor stinking bastard... I was full of pity for him...



so... I had an inspiration... I neared my face as much as I dared to his straining teary eyes... I'll sing the song, I said, raising my voice and enunciating most carefully... and this is what I did: I didn't sing at all... actually I didn't say another word... I just pretended to sing to him... opened my mouth and mouthed the words of the song that came from the hole in his ear, and I added a twinkle to my eyes and I brandished harmoniously my head... to the engaging rhythm...



and then the miracle... he smiled... he heard... I hear it now, he said, brimming, as if illumined... transfigured... for he heard the music from his youth... all the beautiful memories the song brought back landed, softly laden, on his conscience then... and he smiled... he smiled... like in a train... looking out the window... the passing of all the delicious images of his youth... the gentle rocking on the rails... as the music played and the singer bewitchingly sang...



he died in peace... a poor little old man...no longer corrupt.

back from the old carousing

... it was getting dark when we were heading back from the concert... stranded now... after being dropped by the drunk nitwits... and neither Elzi nor I with a penny left... we decided to hit the road and hitch a ride...



a truck stopped to take us... but the guys inside refused to take us both... one is all we can handle, they said, you both look like trouble... I told Elzi to get in... I said: I'll wait for the next sucker... we'll meet back home...



so she went with the two truckers... and I waited, and another truck stopped and the two guys inside took me in with them...



it happens every time... you hitch a ride with those fellows, they will fuck you... we were not properly raped... so tired... after the excitement... the jumping, the quarreling... we knew what we were in for... we actually felt like it... we always do... at least I do, in those occasions... sexy... and then yes, I was ready for a bit of action... felt like having the... delicacy stroked... a bit of getting the skittish pussy appeased... a bit of the good going...



you practically never feel like being raped... not a bit... raping... not a bit, no... a bit of rough treatment, rough and nice... that's ok, fine... goes with the territory... but generally this... just the tickling down there made less... less itchy... and the fact was that... I didn't really know about Elzi at the time... but normally she's friskier, randier, than me... so... so, she probably was also eager to get... to be given the right cunt treatment... the worshiped cunt, that object of adoration, being rained over by the mists and the dews of the worshipful eyes, eyelets, of the one-eyed, monophtalmic, shapely little totems... I mean... the intriguing worshipers propitiating the niggling gadfly guarding with its magical key the entrance to the temple... some masterly thrusts are in order... that's the image...



anyway, my guys, my truckers, weren't what you'd call totally unbecoming... one of them... even somewhat fetching...



while one drove, the other one drove his drill home...cramming his tool... his screwdriver driving a beautiful releasing thankfully long-lastingly enough screw...



the problem was later... the long drive... night all dark in front... downtown still a long ways off...



one of the fuckers sleeping peacefully behind... me blinking, winking with sleep... wishing myself awake in case we missed the right place for me to stop and disembark... and then the guy at the wheel... starting to talk... a sinister tone... a creepy feeling crawling up my bruised spine...



and him somber... darker by the minute... and starting to rant, with a hollow voice... frightening now, really... a nightmare of sorts...



he once killed all his family... the wife, the kids... driven crazy by the night driving... truckers prone to such agonizing breakdowns... of course: all the terrors seen during the night... the specters, the accidents, the dead... the dead crushed... splattered into so many pieces of torn flesh...



and then the apparition... middle of the road... over all the mincemeat, the cadavers... an overpowering foul smell... the rotten archer... blind... his skin in tatters... the caverns instead of his eyes full of pus, oozing, a green rot... his teeth a shambles... the quiver slashed, punctured... the arrow splintered... pointing straight at the eyes of the nocturnal driver... you've got to become crazy, if you have any sense, if you are sane at all...



he arrived home... in the middle of a hurricane... trees uprooted, shutters flying about, babies smashed against the walls, rabbit cages colliding into each other... lost in a vortex of screams... a maelstrom of crossed purposes, frustrations... a raging battle of crossed wills and winds... somebody coming down the stairs... he shouted over the din... I won't be a night driver no more...!



he took his rage on all of them... the kids... the wife... tossed them into the storm... see how it is, driving by night... the constant carnage... the constant carnage... the constant carn...



he, the driver, the trucker-fucker fell on the wheel, his countenance one of utter despair...



hear me screeching... worse than the tires on the dead pavement... see me trouncing him out of the way... me pulling the breaks... the truck madly skidding...



I want out, I want out... my voice, hysterical... the sleeper waking up in a panic...



pounding me out of the way... managing to open the door... kicking now the suicidal fucker out of the truck altogether... and now him... the providential substitute choking the wheel... battling the inertia... the momentum... what have you... we were about to fall... the truck about to tumble down... there is... there is... what...? one can't see shit...



and now the shock... the guy stunned... the vehicle dead... the doors stuck... I'm aware of everything but can't really move... the oppression unbearable...



the apparition then... I saw her... it... the rotten archer... the rusted arrow aiming at the center of my forehead...



there was Elzi visiting me, at the hospital bed... as ever, kind to a fault... we kissed... damned fuckers, we said, bad guys, they don't want only your cunt... they almost took a life that time... are they ever really satisfied...?

everybody suspects it's just mild platonism

... but no... it's real love... is like that time when people... people were all in a line, waiting to exit the real swanks' protected enclosure... they were waiting for the iron door to open, so that now that it was a sunny morning they could get to the business district... to... to operate...

not one of them saying a word of rebuke... to the fucker... the fucker who kept on ramming Elzi...

I went behind him and... started strangling him... hard, hard, the nails of my right hand boring into his windpipe...

and he was smiling, the fucker... and I was smiling... and the people on the line... no effect whatsoever... just looking bored...

who probably was not smiling was Elzi... Elzi... under the straining body of the massive fucker...

... the smiling... his and mine... the smilings going on forever... the queue not moving at all... Elzi under his hardening hard-on... the extreme monstrous hard-on of a dying smiling brute...

the struggle... the struggle...

everybody who cared to think other stuff besides the business at hand... thinking probably what a mild pantomime... a harmless little bit of "happening" theater... a silly prank?

we had... we had entered the rich folk's compound under false pretextes... we had... we had gotten hold of an amphora... we had pissed in it... Elzi and I laughing all the time... nice white wine... and perfumed... n'est ce pas?

there was a fat important-looking burgher trying to enter then... we two fast behind him... pink as him if not pinker... and the doorguards mum... we showing... making a show of... the amphora and the very expensive wine inside... entering on behalf of the impressive bejewelled burgher... probably having a party tonight... needing such expensive select assorted wine... as that... that one we carried... our piss... sacred stuff, shit.

once inside... the burgher's feeling sick... he excuses himself... wraps himself with a blanket... starts... with scaring wheezings... on the lintel... dozing... while there appears who... his son...?

a muscle man... he tries the wine...


... calls us whores... that's not a proper wine for a... such a rich exquisite family as...

... he slaps me... the amphora breaks... it cracks, really... lets the sacred wine leak off... and...

he takes Elzi from behind... pierces her asshole...

... he's a jolly good fellow... he laughs and smiles while slapping the whores or buggering them... you get slapped or buggered willy-nilly... in spite of the poor protests...

... cruelly... cruelly, he was taking Elzi from the rear...

I went behind him and I started strangling him... he was retching... but smiling... and pumping... pumping in his death throes... pumping Elzi's asshole...

to our dingy whereabouts we retreated afterwards... two more insensitive money-grabbers added to the exiting queue... the brute's jizzm getting stale in Elzi's rectum...

hiking, she and I, down the creek, toward the bullet-riddled walls, the burning mattresses, the flee-ridden clothes, the... vice suburbs... home... where we hid for a while

applying remedies... I was... soft creams... to Elzi's rere... so tender... bleeding... I was smiling... as when the strangling had taken place... such a rewarding image now in my mind.



 

when did it happen?

ah, yes, I remember now... It happened when me and Elzi were in the bathtub and we were cavorting and enjoying ourselves, splashing and frolicking... when, unbeknownst to us, he had entered the room... like a bloody psycho...



the shouts... the fright...



he said, the fucker, said, sorry, I didn't mean...



but since that day my heart sputters, the patterns of its spitting and its bizarre pitter-patters are worrisome, and my brain... my brain has quit functioning as per regular...



and Elzi... Elzi had it worse... now and then me and the fucker go visit her in the crazies' asylum... but I've never allowed the fucker to be seen by her again...



his monstruos pate, imagine...



I only hope that someday Elzi's as well as me - who, pretty bad as I am, at least I'm better off that her, brain-wise, I mean...



so, I was going to add something, I had intended to say something deep, but explaining the reason of my slow going, neurons-wise, I've forgotten what... the... hell... I...



ah, yes, the shower and the great fright...



no, it wasn't that...



it was something else... else... Elzi... the commotion... the bathtub... the fucker excusing himself like the shit he is...



no... not there....

37. aboard - abort - aboard

from dusty platforms onto the shabby railway cars







my trips getting shorter

hardly begun

and done




my baggage as soon

nonexistent

not even a magazine at hand




can death

– ever the destination –

be too far now?

36. tacky fingers and all

As I exit toward the light








does it show – is it too obvious

my distaste for swarms anthills...?



cast out outcast

filtering the saccharine garbage

the parochial sanctimonious fecal prurient rampage

of snorting blurred shapes

that scabrous ambiguous lurked.



the angry giggles that snaggedly flowed from the dumb assholes

the toiling maggots underground

their meaningless jottings

their pinguid pigments splattered on the pungent spice of the floor

as they shuffled and shuffled along

chatting and chatting no end.



also the girls – their wombs

their wombs – uttering those excruciating screams

of weeping sarcasm against the teeming crotches

and then the blinding objects foolishly deemed to protect them

those bogus wedges athwart their transpierced chests

them chorally groaning against the weight

of so much unuttered script above their thoraxes.



agape and thrall-less their sparkling cunts

crusading in a barrage of squeals of blasphemy for the ultimate victory

of their outlawed god.



breathing hard now

as my polished cock boldly thaws

all their icy scorn – layers upon frozen layers

accumulated over centuries of forced burial

and accelerated spoilage on bended knees

shivering for fear and...

for fear and cold

crushed on the corners

on the corners of the underground.



fiercely bombed

we fought with our backs against the ceiling

listlessly wooing disaster

tottering tortoises of a doomed world

speeding toward an exploding sun

but no

our wills won – here it stood unscrambled our ceiling

our dissipated traits

as though after a too protracted orgasm

collapsing into the faces of gargoyles...



they muttered first and then openly barked

fingering my marmorean face that “I’m too willful
aloof” the censorious women

rebuking my stance – their udders steadily pawed during the alarms

now deflated by safety.



no longer dazzled by their meretricious beauty

chug along worthless rake

and lift your cyprian eyes toward the exit

from whence the sky hangs...

for there’s nothing else for you to do down here

now that the bombs have stopped and the women won’t pawn

their replenishing vitality for a bit of skillfully provided venting

of their jammed triggers

the haven has sunk to the sorry sight of levels ordinary

I’m too bored with normal people

this subterranean setting

formerly if fleetingly so exciting now lacks all...

has no...

lacks all kind of enticement

has got no lushness and no...

goading nor spurring nor...


I came out of the bombed tunnel

ran shrill the cats – no longer awed and silent

and I had left my dad dead

leaning on a wall of the subway

he had become suddenly incoherent

talking about almonds – his rambling phrases

how it was not entirely proper to eat almonds in bed

the gnawing the sticky crumbs

I realized he was dying – I had opened my questioning mouth

he was looking at me without a trace of recognition

and as I went to hold him he was already dead

a lump leaning on a wall

with the oblivious women crumpled all around

yearning for hands

for thirsty eager hands

and me slithering

a cat silent and industrious

to a fault...

35. wept the wind

So easy then slipping into the smooth







Behold at the mirror the executioner

or else stay

behold instead the bookish fellow

as he shuffles his way down the plank

or is it up to the gaping gallows

or flat and bumpy to the shooting wall

or is he laid already atop the dying scaffold?





He was certainly happier while he wrote

(what nobody ever read).




He sees himself again

a haste of paws

tentacles from a morbid vessel yearning for voyages

the guts of the compass rose rose to face the storm

the guts spread

dissolving

nasty exposed clams

whose catagmatic glue the melancholy drift can’t keep other

than asunder.




Magnetic were the slumbers

in the idle darkness

exhausted regrouped the airy martyrs

whose corpses such cravings

erstwhile all exhibited.




Crudely folded

the sails knocked about like papers swept away

squealing against the ambush of the winds

shipwrecked.




Fading into the lower depths

while the hypnagogic voices wailed

no hindrance spooky enough to

with its writhing tentacles stop

the everlasting intrusion into the...




Squiggles

“just jottings” – the bookish fellow tells them –

“the darling swirlings of the smoke.”




To death he clung

in dark forebodings of death sunk

forebodings of death

to whom he clung

dearest friend above all

above all his imaginary friends

in broodings sunk

doom loomed

dumb womb of his hammering head

his teeth ached all the time.




Why the heartache?

people die all the same

such matter-of-factness dying

terrifying

brooding fiery diatribes

in soliloquies that were damned morologies

by dint of sheer will

in his ultimate pyre burned

while flung by wind-swept hands wept the wind.

34. amoebic

a dearth of stamina in my pushing







for want of pluck

I’ve been abandoned

and now I’m also lame

and the two fat women pity me

and the effeminate artistic boy

is concerned that my letter-box never resounds anymore

with the dropping of anybody’s missive

and I’m told furthermore that the landlord is after me

his intentions angrily plain: eviction

eviction for my debts.




lack of funds to want of pluck added

make

a sorry happy go-lucky marginal nobody

out of me.




with roughly sixty percent of my organs still in sync

I tell myself: you bastard, enjoy

enjoy your freedom

nobody else around can say the same:

abandoned lame avoided evictable...




never now all those lunarian flights postponed

what a wealth of health

still to spend

aloft and elsewhere

where the storms are less fierce

the women never run away

the removal of tawdry veneers as easy as a flush of clear water

the obnoxious flairs of the knowledgeable easily dispensed with

and afraid, afloat, the several objects strewn by the roaring waves

the wind buffeting hither and thither the tacky superfluities

the moons and satellites hilariously bumping into each other

the whole wreckage such fun?

33. Better uncounted, unaccounted

Count yourself out










Count yourself out

or would you rather be another bloody darkening figurine waning in that short night?



You see

power has it seems this mandatory flaw: it’s always falling into the wrong hands.



Only violence solves that grievous problem.



But the powerful kill for less than nothing – a mere stir in their cup of tea.



And don’t you dare intrude into their hunting grounds.



They’ve got on their roster all kinds of cool killers called cops

and judges

and priests.



They pay them not too much but enough.



They – those murderers – are told how necessary they are for the well-being of all

how what they do is approved by society and “god”

how it is society’s and “god”’s bidding they accomplish – this the more gullible are told

though there are plenty among them who are not easily fooled

and do the authoritarians bidding with full knowledge of cause

with a clear conscience

deeming – they do – that that’s their lot

that if their actions are just aiding and abetting the owners’ rage

so be it – life’s too short to bother splitting hairs too thin and so on.



Should one include the stupid minions of the press among the abettors?



But of course – cops judges priests and propagandists: the subservient operators in the gang

they do the dirty deeds

just as told – they are just following orders – the orders must be followed

the word is...

the world must have order and law

law and order – their daunting task is to maintain the fiction

that law and order bring justice

when in fact they bring peace sure enough behind the ramparts

to the powerful

those whose hands are wrong

their hands are poor and tremble – too weak – unsteady – at fault –

and must shoot

must shoot fast or...

must shoot before the opposition

who has a much better hand and is a clean hand

has a chance to play – the winner must be killed beforehand.



The loser gets the power – it falls as from the heavens into his wrong hands.



The violent the aggressive the choleric the psychotic

the dispossessed who perchance would want what’s coming to them

here – I tell them – for I’m their doctor –

you’ve got two ways to go about it

rebel and murder and get shot – get even for a speck

a very ephemeral speck

or...



That’s what we do here

We reward guys of your particular type with free television sets!



Unbreakable armored unwieldy and inviolate.



With an unreflective screen – for we don’t want you inside

or believing that you are yourself inside: that would really be sick.



We tell ‘em – too eager guys of your type

ready to shoot and get even and so on

we tell ‘em: “It’ll do you good –

vent your anger against it

shout and bang at it

and shoot the fuckers inside.



Shoot the fucking figurines that swim inside

all those cops judges priests propagandists

the patsies of the powerful.



I know

it makes me a lot of good

it helps me vent my anger

it...

it keeps me alive

that fucking unbreakable television set I’ve shot so many times already

looks like a fucking colander

with all those disgusting dark dead fishes inside

go ahead

do.”

32. let the street be for whoever walks it

let the street be for whoever walks it








let the street be for whoever walks it

the road is steeping up and my father used to be a great decapitator

so if you got a problem identifying heads by all means ask me

I’m not even tired and the cars parked at the side of the road

damned rusted wrecks if you ask me

I avoid as the devil

so slight and wired and muscular and fast and lissom

am I they bother me none

and if you ask me all those children still alive should be

more or less safe in some kind of refuge

I don’t think any of them is capable of such devastation...

so much destruction

the beheadings and the mayhem

are the fruits of a horde if you ask me

some alien horde that passed this way last night

as nimbly and rapidly and buoyantly as me

I’m passing up this street

kicking heads like flighty balls

and scoring each time with each trick.






Step aside creep

step aside

care not a whit for the spirits of all those hederated heads

I’ve swallowed hairy hurdles bigger than those

of omens forebodings maledictions from the thrones

from the heroes from the nagging bureaucrats

the ludicrous prestiges of the rhetoric-choking pundits

the baggages of elderlies and other degenerated sovereigns

the tremblings of sentries

the blunt steel of audacious fetuses

the rocketry of moot civilizations

the toilsome tread of monsters and antediluvian beasts

let me swither about something else

the void for instance

those blithely stabbed bodies

and then their heads rolling like burdens unbearable

the aim of the intruders

of that I am devoid of ideas

indeed.






I know who did it and how

but why

shit

but why

that I can’t fathom

perhaps my dad the old decapitator could

but now tough luck he’s dead.






I love the wind

the swifter the better

lifts the girls’ skirts

and with them my spirits.





Let the road be mine

their genitalia such nice whiffs

such dainty chemistry I’m agog the thingamabob hasn’t been used more often

as an ambassadorial tool of magical proportions

so many close shaves so many pins and needles

agonies vexations griefs

irksome undertakings

could have been avoided

nothing bestows peace as cunts that are clean and eager to please.





But now I’m approaching my target

sob little ladies for the lifeless beaus

I’ve got more and to spare smoldering in the lessen caves

where the prisoners were kept

fists and claws dulled and enfeebled

sob sob

sob

while unavoidably the circle widens

while I harvest in unease and bathed in afterthoughts

the fuckers of tomorrow.






Let every walker claim his share

stake his won piece of sphere

call his own the street he walks on

and as he deems right

over his hard-earned ground let him rule

that’s how wars are won

and let’s hope for the wind

the swifter the better

as I sift every trace of reason

why

as I sift every trace of reason why

and the wind teases my sifting

and perhaps sends it to lands unconquered

of little consequence

lands where my reach won’t land

my scope won’t span

my span won’t reach

for I’ll be sleeping the sleep of the just.






Nothing to be done

but to stake my claim

and stick each head above each stake

while the ponderous thinking gets done

and my running’s still viable

in bursts of sudden joy

as I kick the heads

as I score another goal

between the stakes planted

by the others.





The others

the horde of alien others

whose heads I see rolling of themselves as rotten fruit

down the steep road I traveled

once upon a time

and it was me

it was me damn it was me

who told the investigators I know who and how

but not why

for I had the experience

my father was the old decapitator and if you ask me

I can tell you

only that then they said: Pass!

31. the fourth man now

By-passing the onslaught










The first man forgotten

discarded at the side of the road

the second though relentlessly behind me

burnt to a crisp

a filthy piece of brittle coal and yet behind me

relentlessly

obsessed

intent on “getting” me.




I went up to him

such a sorry sight now

burnt to a crisp

burnt by the sundry conflagrations from the many traffic accidents

fiery crashes he’s been involved in

plenty plenty

by now plenty indeed

and roasted by the sporadic bolts of lightning

and stained black by the smokes of the heavy trucks

and him undeterred

without compunction

nothing doing

as yet as hipped as ever on getting me

and thus whirringly

annoyingly rolling behind me

relentlessly

a bolt-blighted scarecrow

a hurricane-trashed dummy

perfunctorily preposterously

precariously

mounted on a rickety plank with scratchy castors underneath

his knuckles crumbling on the pavement

and insisting

a doomed damned maniac

on getting at me

on getting me.




I grew fed up with the bowel festering and the stomach rot

of having him all the time stuck to my ass

a saw-toothed rat gnawing at my ass

persecuting bothering stalking

stabbing wounding infecting

went to his cripple’s cart and

kicked it

threw him skidding into the middle of the road

let the heaviest speeding truck get him

smash him once and for all.



I had taken his monomaniacal pursuit at the beginning as just a joke

but now it was telling on me

I was jumpy

not myself

a wreck

I said: I’m going to the cellar to get some more wine

but instead I became the fourth man

I disguised myself and escaped through the kitchen door

into anonymity

into fucking anonymity

far from the other men...




Dressed in a tight black disguise

as if burnt to a crisp

I ran into the night

and he nowhere to be seen

perhaps still with his burnt night-black face

intent on the front windows

peering inside with the dead holes of his eyes

and the hunted haunted third man

left nervously imbibing with the guests

and joking emptily

and fussing with the goodies on the table

and watching his back

watching his back all the time.