Portrait of the Artist as a Fender Princeton Guitar Amplifier

May you walk wrong. May you never sleep again. May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat. Go astray a hundred times. We point the bone. They will arrive this evening or possibly tomorrow. If I call don't pick up the phone. Let me leave a posthumous message. I've always wanted to do that.

- Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

Mercy, mercy me...I recognize you, I believe...

XOXOXO

Curtis Troy and Katrina Plowhurst, Double Date, 1990 [Victimage]

On the Monday before Katrina Plowhurst was shot dead in the streets, Aya and I were waiting for her with Edward Gershwin in the front hall of her small one-bedroom apartment. Aya stood perched underneath a frail arch of hallway shadows. Her hair half up in the dreary low lights, done in the way of which I am most fond, that, to me, suits her most perfectly. She had a distressing mock-grin on her face; the one that tends to show itself in times of most anxious inner stirring. I recall this vividly, for it always leaves me shaken; the apparent beginnings of an emotional transposition. Aya can be chilling. Edward was listening distantly, as if for sounds in the street, signs of life. We were waiting for Kat to find her purse. The not topical typical. She had been off in some unseen room trudging about for a long time. There was the resonant sound of fluttering plastic, moving objects, the occasional spattering of blasphemy—the rhythms of her frenetic, double-thinking footsteps betrayed a mounting anxiety. We began to doubt that any damn purse was going to be found anytime soon. Edward took a moment to glance grudgingly at his watch. I lit a cigarette. Texas Lights. Small red and white package. My favourite brand in those days. Some sort of a natty pastiche about them. They had a whole kind of a thing I was into. Edward began talking about the war again. His voice seemed to hold for a discontented moment in the air of the tight hallway space; it quavered and shook—he was saying Now—I mean, anymore—you can assume so very little. What we are told no longer carries any weight—you know?—We have been conditioned by all of the—the intellectual periphery—against mass medias—and companies—corporations particularly—and governments. Our government could be doing really great, significant work out there—they could be improving global conditions and they could tell us about it and—and—and we would doubt them—we would assume it was lies—or at least severe manipulations of the truth. Even if it was true. You know? And we’d be right to doubt. I mean: that’s just the thing. Now we’d be right to doubt. I was half listening, eyes fixed on Aya, her pale face muted by the blackness of the shadows. I was wondering what Edward thought he meant by “global conditions.” Settled on the taut curvature of Aya’s composed and obsequious body, watched her wait, not without a familiar longing—unifying continuity of blah. Desire in the last muffled muzzle flash of the last screaming half of this century has become a significantly difficult swallow for us chaps, I reckon. We’ve been taught by all teachers, within institutions and beyond them, to fear the gaze and its brink, to loathe our own lusts and carnalities; all remotely dominant-replicable desire, associated with the father and his doubles,  becomes corrupted somehow. We have been left so hopeless because we understand this to be abstractly veritable, better you believe. There is a sickness and a violence behind the auspicious eyes, the wandering ones, Edward and myself, gambolling their sly appropriations, our eyes, fruit fly fay on the intangible recognition of certain inherited hungers, beastly tactics believed to be on mothballs, closeted away. We hate our sex. We cannot, however, stop ourselves from looking. Especially not in an apartment hallway wallpapered with discussions of War. And Katrina comes barreling distractedly into the dark sans purse, over the cheap rugs covered in cigarette burns, passing the tacky Dali and Klimt prints hung slanted on the wall, her red dress wrinkled and gaudy bohème. Our dizzy dimple-cheeked dish-o betrays a wistful girlishness. Her eyes beat her voice to an apology: ’can’t find it…somebody will have to cover for me.’ What does Edward study? What is it that he knows about war, about whoop whoop? The Japanese always saw desire as the root of all suffering. You are grasping for right conduct, right intent, right speech, right knowledge, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. That’s where they dropped the fat man and the little boy, like blimpoid acid-raindrops of hex. Japan. Japanarama. I focus on the glowing embers of my cigarette. Red-dressed and red-headed-Kat is putting on white shoes over white stockings. She is the colour of my cigarette package, the Japanese flag, too, and I take fleeting notice of this, classifying it as a kind of flyby irony. Edward and Aya are sidestepping toward the front door. Edward is not talking about the war, he is complementing Kat on the quality of her dress. Kat thanks Edward distantly. And then we are out in the anemic white fourth floor hallway, moving quickly toward the stairwell. The elevator is out of order—it is always this way. Each of us knows this and nobody has to be reminded. Entering the stairwell, I shuffle thoughtlessly through my pocket for car keys. It takes a moment for the memories and cottony abstractions to settle and register within the glazed disconnection of my forebrain; my car is still parked outside Edward’s apartment, we are walking to dinner. I forgo my rummaging. Time and time again: I catch myself drifting—I think back and cannot remember making choices. There in the stairwell I make a promise to improve this ethical deficiency; but this is a promise I have already broken beyond imagination, over and over. Edward half-kicks, half-nudges with his shoulder the door to the lobby, hands in his pockets, sort of scrimmage-style. We all filter through in an absurdly linear procession, one after the other, our assortments of nice clothes and night-out-on-the-town faces, each individually documenting the space upon which they be encroaching. There is an old man using the telephone at the eastern most end of the lobby. He is wearing an old grey suit and a dismayed you-think-you-know-who-your-friends-are-and-then-suddenly look on his shapeless putty face.  I do not ever want to be this man, slumped over, aging, in some cheap apartment building with rugs being pulled out from underneath me over a pay telephone. Outside it is just that time early in the night when the streetlights begin to make white dress-shirts and passing sports cars magically phosphorescent. There is an intangible urban electricity in the air. I am meditating on the innumerable occasions when scatterings of harried human rise from underground to behold bomb-ravaged cities and all but nothing where there was once their whole world. Unknown faces reduced to newsprint hysteria aerosol. I feel Edward's darkness and he feels me feeling, bobs on his loafers uncomfortably. Where are we going to eat|? How the fuck have we not yet reached anything like consensus? We're literally on the sidewalk and walking to dinner! So where are we walking?! We know that this is a difficult question, one that might take hours to answer if treated in a certain way, each person holding out for a workable proposition from one of the other presiding abstemious. Everyone is afraid to choose, or even offer a suggestion, when it is on behalf of the collective, nobody wants to seem in control. For me, I feel like to be eager or to care would be like having a learning disability. I tell everybody we're going to Spagliano's. So there. These chumps smile they chump smiles and it's all up to me. We head off south, down the storefront coil of Grande Street, in the direction of the market. Lights everywhere. Aya and Katrina begin discussing wedding dresses they see in a shop’s front window showcase. Edward and I exchange knowing grins, cognizant of the fact that the women are mostly teasing us. I cannot for the life of me remember the specifics of the relationship between Edward and Katrina. Aya has explained it to me, but I did a poor job of storing it—I wonder if they are friends or coworkers—I wonder if he could be fucking her. I look at Kat. She’s involved in voluble, highly expressive discussion, arms flailing about freely, face grown girlishly animated, the red of her dress flooding her roundish cheeks. I look away and look back and Kat and Aya are suddenly giggling like younger versions of themselves caught in a tame transgression. I turn my eyes to my feet and count my steps on the pavement. I avoid treading on the cracks, forming a child’s game of it, concerting considerable effort such that I am able to make it between each block of cement with no more than two steps. One step is a triumph! Soon I am caught up in this, and am unknowingly far ahead of the others. I am playing in my mind, over and over, a section from Honnegger’s 3rd symphony as rendered by the Berliner Philharmoniker. I am gloriously absent. Suddenly there is the sound of twisting and colliding metal. Shouts of anguish and alertness.

...

The street has come raging to life, grown a new face, more fierce and vital. I turn to see two cars practically grafted together in the middle of Grande Street. The occupants are quickly abandoning their mutual vehicles and approaching one another head-on. I look back to Edward, whose face has gone to ice. He is fervently awaiting the first punch. Kat and Aya are still, all but illegible. A large barrel-chested Italian in some kind of funky oversized suit, coming fresh from a smashed-up, sporty, red number, is hollering You fuck! You fuck! Do you have any fucking clue how, what? This is a motherfucking new fucking car, motherfucker! The English is far beyond broken and the Italian comes on flailing his tree-trunk arms like proper weapons, sweat poring down off a wadded brow. The other fella has a less flashy car and is young, white as whole milk, and significantly less built, but something in this kid’s eyes suggests danger, a ragged disregard for others, physio-criminality. He just watches the Italian coming at him. He appears to be unmoved. A blustery showing from the Italian will clearly not alone cut it. All of us in the street are huddling together in tight, silent groups, preparing ourselves for a coitus, a cathartic explosion, release from the street and evening. This fight is for all of us! I look around and it seems that there are hundreds more here than a minute ago. They have come from adjacent vestibules, places of shelter, from bellow ground, why not? Bordering neighbourhoods! Who the hell knows?! We are converging on the scene! It has commanded our manifold attention! The bestial approach of the Italian ceases suddenly. He’s confused, perhaps dismayed by the conspicuous indifference of his sketchy adversary, and, no doubt, by the escalating scene of which he is suddenly an unwitting focal point. The big guy gives the smaller man a peculiar look, eyes then darting briefly about at his growing audience on the sidewalks and in the street. We all inch back upon being noticed. Big guy fixes his attention back on the kid, who remains in the same spot. The Italian gives him a look that says, you know, Well? The smaller man is weighing out his options. He seems altogether snugly at home in this situation, entirely business-like, used to stuff going wonky.Well? He finally opens his mouth and says, with a gloriously plainspoken delivery: If you touch me, you will not walk away, pausing a second before adding calculatedly, you will not walk away. It is difficult for many of us watching not to be impressed. I even find myself grinning. My goodness, why?! There is an indefinable wonder here. It takes the form of an invisible aurora and it finds a complementary phantasmal interior colour in the fantasies of each witness, each newly present man, woman, and child. We are secretly rooting for the crazier littler guy, whether or not each of us has had time to notice this about ourself, whether or not we have had time to compute the incoming stream. A few women gasp and gush. They are impressed by the coolness of the man’s words, the way he rolls it out and rolls with it, and, hey, look, it is impressive! The Italian senses that he is loosing the audience’s favour. His eyes tighten and his fists clench. He resumes his charge. The smaller man has been expecting this and shuffles backward around the front of his car with his left hand anchored to the hood, then, making a quick fake pivot, backs up directly onto the sidewalk, audience parting to permit his impetuous burst of movement. The Italian is disoriented by the smaller man’s footwork and succeeds in ending up flat on his back, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. There are actual bursts of laughter from within the audience, plus a few jeers. Many of us turn to exchange good-humoured glances and smirks. The smaller man knows that when the Italian gets up he will be super angry, so he looks around for some surrogate tool of assault, something to defend himself with, latching himself ultimately onto a large half-wood and half-metal garbage receptacle, bending at the knees as he hoists the hulking thing up above his gawky, shivering form. The Italian sees the kid with this large, ponderous object of considerable mass and, for a second, appears genuinely terrified. He inches backward on his knees, possibly frightened, as is much of the audience, that the smaller fella’s about to crush his skull like a walnut. But instead of crushing any skulls or indulging in any nutcrackings whatsoever, the smaller man has a sudden flash of brilliance. He carries the metal can—or rather lets it carry him, dizzily, crazily—in the direction of the Italian’s flash red sports car. There is a brilliant slow-mo instant where we all realize what is about to happen. Oh, man. The young punk arches his entire spine and, snapping himself forward, allows an unearthly force of inertia to send the garbage bin straight through the shiny, reflective windshield of the ostentatious red vehicle. As a massive crash comes descending through the urban night, the Italian’s wife somersaults wildly from the passenger door of the red car, wailing, totally incomprehensible, her face hidden by a mask of black, silken hair. None of us in this flurry of mad activity had even noticed her there in the car, and now any pity we harbour toward her, or might be inclined to harbour, is wholly eclipsed by our near-erotic awe; it is the kind of thing you have to wait for later to get to letting it start to kind of bother you, you know—it will have to wait for all of us here on the street later—in our solitude—our focus right now entirely on the spectacle of the exploding glass, the crescendo of noise, the sleek and slender red sports car, hollowed and despoiled, strewn with garbage and remnants of what was once a windshield. We are fascinated by the Italian’s high-pitched wailing. It were as though he’d rather it had been his head smashed, just not this, to be so publicly dehumanized, humiliated well above and beyond, to have such a superb piece of machinery soiled along with his whole sense of himself and probably his world too. He crouches in the road with his hands over his eyes. There’s a chilling noise emanating from somewhere deep inside him. Never was there such a hopeless sound, so empty and unrelenting. Yikes! The smaller man steps up to the vanquished foe and looks on with an air of bemused conquest. The whole thing was your fault, he says. Then he walks back to his car, gets in, tries to start it. The engine fails three times before he gets back out. He stops a second, then turns and gives his car a walloping boot with his right foot. Before anyone has due time to respond, the crazy young punk is already sauntering off down the street, looking back only once to be sure the Italian hasn't decided to follow along. The Italian, frankly, cannot move. He is still on his knees, whimpering, face cupped in massive, frightening hands. This man is nearly broken, friend, in no condition to follow his adversary off into crushing darkness, into the dimly lit and all-of-a-sudden-unknowable corridors of the city. 

...

It took some diplomacy of sorts on my part, I suppose you could say, but I ultimately prevailed, persuading the other three to forget about the whole crazy assault-and-battery thing and continue on with our walk to the restaurant. The other three were convinced that something had to be done, but were unsure as to what that should be, what with their being busybody dolts. Aya was positively sure that we were obligated to explain what we had seen to the police, presumably to facilitate in their investigation. She continued along these lines for a bit, saying that such things are ‘integral to being a good citizen,’ or whatever, to which I flippantly reacted, for better or worse, by asking why now (then) was the time to become a good citizen, to which she had no audible response. I secretly realized that my friends were driven to remain by nothing more than a love of this colossal titillation. They were kidding themselves, fabricating stories about false responsibility, Aya especially. She always gives it up for the wavering ambiance of a consuming energy. She wants to be lost in ordered madness. The other two were simply transfixed, I suppose. They wanted to hold onto their tenuous kiddie kicks, the vibrations of the what-had-happened as emanation of an emanation or a contact with a phantom contact, to forever have the setup of the street and participants etched into their minds and available for glitchy replay, perfect material for some Weïrd Sisters barroom bromide in the distant future, an anecdote to relate to the grandchildren or simply one to just echo in the general weave and sway of amassed incidentals. They were drunk on the fallout of the whole thing, the street was flooded with like-minded mill-abouts, wounded ants, trying desperately to gather up their sundry minced bits for distro, retelling the the thing like a game of telephone gone haywire, cleaning up the fray and making more fray out of the clean-up. All that Edward and Katrina needed was a Come on! I am hungry or two to land them back in the reality of the task at hand. If they seem partially drunk, in a way, it was I, alas, who really needed to get good and obliterated, presently, no tolerance for further obstruction. Back off down Grande Street again, fuck’s sake, southwards, we walk in silence, our faces bemused but more stunned than we can know they show. There is us. We have just seen something liberating, or whatever, and it lingers as a mild intoxication as we beat our course for the market. We’ve grown more appreciative of our position within the grinding urban potentiality of the evening. Our eyes dart up and down the street. Are we waiting for the aftershock? the sequel? Edward is suddenly not so comfortable, not that he isn’t naturally very nervous and fidgety with the wet eyes of a puppy. He begins talking the whole thing out, the street fiasco, insulting the two participants for their loutish inhumanity, glancing around distractedly like they might be there and primed to smack him upside the head. A war going on, he is saying, and these two irremediable heathens are tossing fucking rubbish through windshields—they should be soldered to US bombing targets—or something. Enough, Edward. I will put on you on the pavement and fuck your silly ass up, Edward. University students are like tacks in your shoes. I tell Kat about Spagliano's because she's never been there, and then we're there. As we are entering I sing the words I am the very model of a modern major general a little too off-key. I screech, to be honest. Kat says she has a bone to pick with the municipality. Aya is feigning interest and presence, so like her, always the crisp placating collaborator with faraway eyes, the safe harbour, agreeing, nodding her head, tossing back the occasional lazy question or rote opinion. The walls are trimmed with traditional tapestries and paintings of Italian migrant workers, Tuscan farmers, photographs of colourless Rome cityscapes. The predominant colour scheme involves the reds and blacks of Monsieur Stendhal. The waiters are all decked out in cheap tuxedos. It’s the same Spagliano’s. Maybe that weeping guy from the accident will come in later, says Kat. That's funny, I say. You're funny. I don't put out the cigarette I'm asked to put out. Because it's Aya who is asking and fucker her. We follow this grinning maître d' into the remote recesses of the restaurant to a circular table for four in back, the protracted passage availing me ample time, sufficient to sum up the rest of this evening’s clientele, or those currently to be directly accounted for, all superbly typical of such a place, nobody standing out. I do, however, recognize a table of fellow law students from the Uni to whom I submit a polite nod as I sit down next to Aya at our table. The Sicilian lights our candles and I take off my black sport coat, draping it over the chair. Edward likewise unburdens himself of jacket. We are brought bread and water and asked if we would like some wine. I grab hold of a bun, ripping it in half, smothering its sectioned halves with indiscriminate globs of very yellow butter. It is at this moment that I notice, with an appropriate mixture of terror and abhorrence, that we have been seated next to a ghastly family of four. The two children, one male and one female, are significantly overweight and seem to live in a perpetual state of obstreperous bickering. I first catch them out of the corner of my eye as they send spoon-catapulted volleys of pasta and sauce flying over the table at one another, squawking up something awful, plain-faced mother turning to sonny and issuing a hair-raising, atonal, Dwiiiiiight. We all cringe. The waiter takes our drink orders. I ask for a litre of the house red and a gin martini, lots of olives, for starters. Everyone wants the same except for Kat. I’ll have a glass of—let’s see...well, a nice—a nice dry white.’ Perfect, says the waiter, graciously disappearing. I hear, from beside me,  Dwight, for Christ’s sake, do you want to wait in the car, hunh? It’s the mother. Pa pipes in next: Go out to the car, and I’ll be there in a minute to sort you out. Would you like that?’ Dwight doesn’t budge, but clearly he don’t like it one bit. I turn to see him give his sister a familiar look-what-you-gone-and-did-now look, brimful with intimations of future violence. I put out my cigarette on something or other and cram a mouthful of bread down my throat. Look what your Sicilian friend did, Aya, I tease, mouth filled to excess with bread, stuck us back here with the flip-flappin’ livestock. She laughs at this but gives me a look suggesting it’s not struck her as charming. I playfully distress her hair with my hand, which is very much not helping, and the waiter reappears with my martini, bless him. I’ll be right back with the wine and to take your appetizer oysters, err, orders, he says. I pick out a few olives with a miniature blue sabre, consuming them theatrically. There is nothing I have found on this earth like a martini olive! Then I hit the martini itself. It spins and interlaces warm webs throughout my head and around the base of my spine. Even my testicles are a little impressed with the martini. Edward’s been reading Mishima. He pipes in about isolation and honour, ‘ruptures' in the ‘social body,’ the sequestration of the ‘imperial soul.’ Annoying dreck! At any rate,  Aya is nodding and Kat appears to have no idea why anybody would want to talk about or listen to any of this malarkey. Edward’s reading of the oeuvre of Mishima does not sit well with me. I lay into him and am being a little crazy about it, I admit. I am speaking freely and far too loudly about public acts of self-murder. The waiter has reappeared and is filling our glasses with wine, but truly because I don’t care and am only ever bumbling through any encounter anyway, especially this one, right now, because I guess I am feeling especially impatient...well, I have a bad feeling that at some point tonight I am going to say something nasty and devastating to Aya.  We all sit back, looking at, in, and through our wineglasses like they were somehow suspect. Edward picks up a bottle and examines the labels. I tell him that the best poetry is written on the back of wine bottles and I can see for sure from the look on his face that he's growing to hate my guts. We order our appetizers. I want the lobster bisque. It came down to the bisque or the tiger prawns and I went with the bisque. The others all want the Caesar salad. I finish my martini and have some of the wine, which I am just positively crazy for. I sit there savouring it for a minute. Edward is explaining to Kat just who Mishima is. She don't care, dude. This could not be more clear, Edward. I am thinking about what the word wine sounds like rattling around forever in a single human skull and about my dad and his love of the stuff. Perhaps it is wine-appreciation itself which is the horror of my existence. Yikes! One of the law students from the other table comes bumbling drunkenly across the restaurant toward us, a stocky guy, suit all displaced and worn into the ground; at some point this motherfucker has seen fit to undo his tie and let it drape over him like the day’s kill. In his eyes can be detected something fierce. It’s in the eyes but really it’s in his blood. He is very far gone. A series of unrefined movements find our legal beagle inebriate half-draped over our four’s table as he barks incoherent gibberish from somewhere in a badly-done-by gut. Aya’s mortified, jaw agape, as she struggles for words, raises fretful hands of hapless condolence, faint dismissal or defence that fails to make any impression on the large legal student, or at least nothing recognizable as such. Katrina and Edward have dropped Mishima and both look properly dumbfounded, which I suspect is their resting state. Ha ha. I can see that the family at the next table has turned to watch as well, and I almost feel bad for them as I realize that they would have to have missed out when that whole fucking insane Grande Street fracas was going down. Mostly I’m trying to remember the name of this psychotic boor who is launching lava language like burbling Luciferian contagion. I can’t fucking grasp any of these clucked utterances. Even the isolated syllables feel like jagged outer space stuff. Roswell, New Mexico. What is any of this? No. Nothing makes any kind of a sense. Then, in a flash, there it sort of is, like a broadcast made through the static over an appallingly bad feed—I’m picking certain things out of the fray. It starts with my name. I hear him say Curtis, my name and possibly my cipher into the basic logic of this drollery. Something to start with, at any rate. Surely it don’t get more familiar than the given name. Then I realize he’s saying the same thing over and over, like some demented broken record, though he puts a little variety to the English on it each go-round. Then it's perfectly clear. This nice man who can no longer talk is, in a gracious and hospitable fashion, offering me powerful drugs. No shit. He laughs and teeters, everything a total lark, daffy as shit. Sweat beads amass on his face, snot drips as he snorts. Pulling a piece of foil from his jacket pocket, he proceeds to open it up and empty it of a thick glob of blue-white powder, which spills all over the red tablecloth. Snort this! Snort this! he cajoles, this man whose name I cannot at all recall. I know I know him. I think.  What in God’s name is it?! Edward shrieks. Guess! answers Aya abruptly, and I cannot look her way, because whoever does is going to get a death stare, I damn well know it. She looks around the restaurant conspicuously, and I know it, though I do not confirm this by redirecting my own gaze, as that could prove the end of me, of us all. The family at the next table looks away, collectively, as a unit. Ha ha. They don’t want to be accessory to any drug crime. Duck out of all responsibility, skirt all eye contact: a fine motto. They resume their discussion of Florida vacations, tennis lessons, who’s hosting Sunday bridge. The kids are only interested in the noise, but they turn away also, sensing, it’s clear, that they are being made privy to some sick, adult secret. Which is not wrong. Probably. What am I about to do? I am staring at the powder on the table, thinking that snorting it just might be the only way to get rid of this boisterous dummy. He’s explaining, as far as I can gather, that it’s a mixture of coke and mescaline. And maybe, uh, cayenne. I did plenty of coke and hallucinogens late in high school, when I was living with my dad, and I’m assuming I can handle them now. Frankly, I’m still a guy who likes to get high at this point. Too much so, if you ask Aya. The last thing I need is to be outdone by this lummox. Look at this beastly abomination! He reeks of total collapse! Besides, this is a night-on-the-town! Is it fucking not? I ask you. Lord T'underin' Jesus are these not the free and heedless days of blithe can-do-no-wrong youth? I roll up a twenty dollar bill sitting loose in the pockets of my best pair of quality pants and cut up a line with a salad fork. Heh heh. As I am snorting the long, incredibly thick line of curious blue-white powder, Kat is asking this law student oaf ponderous questions he’s in no shape to answer. Where are you from? elicits no motor response of any detectable kind. I figure I've made this guy's day. He's making a kind of cheerful noise and rubbing his hands together vigorously.  I’m sniffing crazily, rubbing the residue on my gums. I want to get up and move around but I know that’s a bad idea under present circumstances. Turning to Aya, I find her staring at me in disbelief, jaw stiff but hanging, kind of, a harsh hinge, disgust, anger, general wretchedness, and morbid stupefaction writ upon the whole of her mooning face. We're all going to die I say philosophically. I don't give any of us more than eighty-five years. Let's order. A man out of nowhere and nothing sets down my fucking bisque. Perfect timing I say you piece of shit. We would like to d’odeur.’ He looks at me like he knows all about it, and so I let my mind drift back to the house red, which has been waiting patiently, a wine over which I’m just going plum mad. God, glorious. The main course arrives. Fuck all of you. Hilarious. All sound has concentrated itself within a small block of my mind and spine and my god-knows. There is little time, so little, I love it, shit, just look: so, so little, co cute. I feel a ghost-clock ticking away at the base of my, uh, my, what’s the word? I sense a coldness in my other thing. It’s more like this, now it’s more like that, evolving, maybe, I guess, changing, certainly, maybe. Decorating the entire restaurant is: gastric neon sludge. I am running out of what little resolve I have towards the being nice to people and looking like I do normally, which, you know, fuck’s sake, has always been too exhausting to fathom, and I really couldn’t even tell you how the hell I manage. Man, dude. Looking down at my pasta, my plasma, red plasma pasta, gelatinous like human insides, my gag reflex haunts me, or maybe it’s hers. Who are you? Why are you looking at me like that? Dolphins. The one at San Francisco, the dolphin, would never. I tell you: Never! Off to my side, from the family’s table, I swear I hear someone say Dwight, you ululating mutant-fuck. Either my repressed whatsit returning or the other peoples’. I am praying for the latter with increasingly limited hope. Edward and Idloo have decided to ignoo me. I look at them but have trouble making out their words and faces together. Something inside me is scrambling the codes, and then I can’t put the word to the face without smearing the words all over the faces, which is, admittedly, kind of funny. There is some talk of youth, summer cottages, real or imagined: it’s hideous. I think they might be talking about Rashomon, an old samurai story about iron and metal twisted into infinity on Grande Street. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, wineglass, this precise wine glass at this pretty nice moment. I take a sip from it. Nothing, it’s not working. I am hearing unfathomable horrors from the family next to us.

Very, very, very messed up. I was super duper messed up. Dig it or don’t. The next morning, as I awoke in Katrina Plowhurst’s bed, I knew everything had to change in my life. I mean, look, it didn’t, not at all, but still. She was sitting funny on the edge of the mattress. I was certainly going to be hungover, the room was spinning. The television was on in the corner, glaring green and blue, flashing images of fighter-planes, horror-stricken faces of half-real victims, folks left in the rubble or having arrived somewhere once familiar to be met only by rubble, simple and very personal worlds wrecked; children in video purgatory, make-shift field hospitals. Cathode-ray tube, sententious news correspondent voices, stats and lists bleakly impersonal. The discouraging thing about all of this was that I had in no way the previous night attained blackout. Recall was good, too good. I played it back over, serially. You’ve got to—brain basically does it on its own. A table overturned, a fistfight in a gin-smelling nightclub, bad dustup with Aya. Oh yeah, it was all there. I could walk that walk of indiscretion the exact same way again, and God knows I probably would. I had only been living with Aya for a few months, no more. I can’t say that I felt all that bad about ending the relationship by fucking her best friend or anything. It’s just that I, you know, couldn’t believe at that moment, lying next to exceedingly capricious Kat in her own damn bed, how little control I had over myself and how fucking susceptible I was to screwy paths nobody of sense would take but which I’m somehow unable to avoid. It’s not like Aya was all that innocent, in this affair or peripheral affairs or whatever else. She played various parts and played them good, really. Our contemporaries in that horrible goddamn Canadian shithole could be expected to give this comely cutthroat a pass, pretty much always! No tenterhooks for this naturally quiet, careful fiend, too smart to ever have to spend much time feeling especially miffed. That night I went and fucked Kat after we duked it out at Club Zero over the whole drugs thing and the whole having my hand on Kat’s thigh thing, Ida just went back to Edward’s studio apartment and boffed him anyway, didn’t she? But it’s easier to judge me, isn’t it? Oh, he’s such a dick, hey? Aya skips and I get the chair. Fuck that. Same old human comedy, more or less pathetic. They fall into bed, as the idiom would have it. I don’t really know, I don’t really care. To each their blessed own and leave me be, please, I beg of you. Somebody killed Kat soon thereafter. Shot her in the face in traffic in broad daylight. Very weird. I know one thing: that Aya, she was a freak and she was fucking craven. I cannot say for certain she’s a killer, but, shit, you know, I might be a very lucky man, you know? Hard to say with a crazy bitch. And between you and me: that pussy weren't no good. 

 

Patternicity

Patternicity is the tendency to find patterns in random or meaningless information. But since statistics only ever function at the level of the social/societal, too rigid, thick-witted, and servile to baser demands to do much good when the chips are down, the thinking machine on the surface of its home planet, not wanting to just ignobly die, had to take the proper, prone state of Bey's quantum observer, the particles scrambled into the molecular fuzz and the waves coming in sequence and sometimes in nasty blasts. You look for patterns and portents so that you might survive and perhaps even flourish. That you may go mad should go without saying also. The word "event" in its quantum sense suggests encompassing periodic worldly occurrences where to one extent or another something implicit becomes something that indexes a much greater entanglement but also shifts, jostles, and shoves the direction of world-historic affairs in a general sense, all over the surface of the planet, leading to the 'phasing' and 'sequencing' of both Time and History. Imagine an ouroboros that finds the twinned principles of Time and History wound, you helpless to do much to sever and/or clarify. From Nietzsche's perspective, human species activity produces different kinds of time, in historical phases, as it progresses on its foolhardy way.

What of the snow and the molecules and the particles and the dark materials required by the math so the whole mess might add back up to itself again in the end?

A joke from an old friend: the Higgs boson particle walks into a bar. "Hey," shouts the bartender, "what's the Matter?!"

Clearly, the superabundance of overhanging psychospiritual burden and general malaise is evident everywhere around us right now, with the epidemics of depression and violent psychosis covered again and again by indefatigable septuagenarian philosopher and gadfly saboteur Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. The endless gall of the pillars of high finance is surely familiar to most every cogent person with an eduction and a job who's not getting a cut off the graft. Bifo himself, being a man of his generation, has close personal knowledge of what can happen when blithe and demanding middle class Europeans begin to countenance wholesale monstrosity on behalf of fake values that must continually be cast off or whitewashed. When states go rogue like Israel and its mule The United States of America, or like Russia, it is always a process of hemorrhage. Built-up sets of core belief and actual living political economies rot, burst, and release their foul contents, splashing this sour dreck all over the linoleum.     

The reason the French Revolution has proven such a great conundrum to French and German-language philosophers since the early 19th century is because it attains what Gertrude Stein later demanded of art and poetry: it appears to embody the living impossible. The French Revolution occurred all over France and in parts of Britain and what would become Germany without much active communication between disparate geographically dispersed agents and enterprises. This is actually something celebrated spiritually and emotionally in Jean Renoir's 1938 French Revolution masterpiece La Marseillaise, a film that radically situates all its many players within the context of a busy and mysterious simultaneity bordering on the sacred.

To actively and materially put our finger on the sacred character of our co-being is not necessarily a humanist gesture, but it forces us to think and act and learn to discern through trial and error. To think the event and pursue whatever shared interests we may have is to already start looking for more patternicity in your self and your world, all the while maintaining grounding in the sense of the electrical engineer and his carefully cabled networks. The body knows we are in the wave well before the intellect, should it ever arrive there. To learn to know your body through yoga and meditation is to teach yourself to listen with all your quadrants at once and primarily by way of the nerves. The word "pattern" may itself come on a little too rigid. Let us posit that before it is anything else, the part of us that stands in the immaterial wave and is actively apprehending the sensations is the part Antonin Artaud called the "nerve meter."         

Jean-Luc + Anna

By all accounts the scene in Godard's freewheeling and hella fatalistic 1965 masterpiece Pierrot le fou where Anna Karina walks along the beach complaining in an aggressively singsongy way that she doesn't know what to do with herself, gesticulating melodramatically, while Jean-Paul Belomdo sits in a stylish funk, his nose in a book and a parrot on his lap, does a very fine job of capturing the Jean-Luc Godard-Anna Karina marital dynamic, for what it's worth, and you can go ahead and look up footage of Agnès Varda saying basically just that if my read on the overall outlay strikes you as dubious. Years later, without much apparent emotion or evidence of sustained grievance, there is an interview where Anna Karina claims Godard would with some regularity claim he was going out for cigarettes only to return many days later. By the time of the interview in question, after appearing in Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette (1976), Karina had hooked up with Ulli Lommel, who was widely known to be an all but worthless cad with extremely good looks, and so perhaps Godard's eccentricities and seemingly unnecessary cruelties no longer struck her as especially egregious, especially since it was unambiguously this fraught and messy partnership that had unequivocally made her a huge international star. Indeed, Godard and Karina are among the most iconic couples of our time even if the pair were married for a scant four years and even if Godard made a few films that would largely seem to pivot on his inability to communicate with his wife (see also especially Le mépris (1963) and Made in USA (1966)). They are beautiful and colourful people, highly photogenic (whether captured in colour or black and white). There can't be any doubt of that. And once again, Agnès Varda figures here, as who could possibly fail to fall head over heels for the lithe, pantomimic couple as they appear ever so briefly in the capacity of silent movie stars in her morbid but also exquisitely floral Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)? I am reminded of a poem by the German writer Günter Grass that left a strong impression on me as a teenager, one in which the author remarks upon making regular trips to the park on account of his liking to watch the flowers die.         

    

I Was Jon Zebra [Victimage]

 

We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

- Henri Bergson 

For the time being there is only one alternative: to be the hammer or the anvil.

- Gilles Deleuze 

 

Befefe was dreaming about gardening and all the gardeners and about how both the good and the bountiful each ruin us of their appreciation before too long, saps that we are. Befefe is not okay. Part of the problem is that Befefe does not know when he is dreaming. He is not able to know for certain right away when he is, uh, occupied by enemy forces.

- Playtime. Down the hatch. Attaboy.

BEFE-FE-FE-FE-FIFI YOU FILTHY HORMONAL CRUMPET!

I have awaken from a dream of drowning so horribly vivid that I shudder just to think of it. Shudder in my bones, even before my mind can summon for me the vast indissoluble contents of its images lit to flame.

(Okay, that didn't come out well. That was a bad sentence.)

Images completely soaked through.

(Ugh, pitiful sentence.)

The dream threatens nothing and I am unmoved by the Anxiety. It will be gone soon, like everything. It will fade to black before close of coming day and I shall be washed of it all; a blank slate. 

… a sudden and brilliant continuation of all that which had come to pass, or so a certain passion swayed me to hold; a passion that as passions may sometimes be was only partially ephemeral and which returns to me still in the serene and gracious darkness of remembrance. I was in mind a new limb on an early and progressing fetus. I was moulded immediately into the biology of nature upon a fleeting crest of grey-white which sprang from December’s late and ashen sky and into the azure glare of the river’s cracked and jagged spine. As such, within the sturdy breast of a grand and sure-footed mountain range, I sashayed forth into the world amidst a fog of dust, roused up from dirt-topped roads…and endless trucks across their distances in iron wrath, sounding like men to battle; roads which curved into the luscious and sweet nothing of forested peaks and valleys like old languorous veins upon the skin’s pallid surface; partially my veins it seemed to me in passion, for I saw and perhaps still do see myself as…

But, alas, darn it, I cannot remember nothin’ and cannot be sure what I mean exactly.

ONE BEFEFE TOO MANY’S WHATS I SAYS! 

Aya who is maybe Ida, or that’s how it sounds, also believes that I have a gift and today she bought a Mr. Enforcer Pocket Rod along with the usuals so that she might harness it and smatter or shatter or shitter me.

-Fuck, she says, you have a gift and it’s mine, baby.

She calls me all kinds of names. She came in and it was Puck. Then Fuck, because everything is always already ‘fuck this thingamajig’ and ‘fuck that thingamabob.’ Sometimes Puck or alternately Fuck Kauffman with two fs like I just spelt (spelled?) it. Then she says Zebra and tasers me. But its Benene’s the name, friend. He’s bananas, scrambled, so they scrambled the word banana. Pleased to make your antainquance.

A pistol-whipping again. Alligator clips. Electricity City. Always with the same old dog and pony song and dance. Never nothin’ but the same-ol’ shock slog and pain drone-on. Aya or Ida or I'm-a: the Charles in Charge.

She is making me write. Write these ‘entries.’ And she is torturing me because it was her specialty since way back when men were men and women knew hand-to-hand combat.

Currently she is making me write the story of Curtis Troy. One of a pantheon of former boyfriend-types or cocksman swains of yore. She’s been trying to make me talk about them and I cannot talk ‘cause I am an idiot-fuck hooked up to a steaming hot bed frame upstairs in a mouldy old lakehouse most of the time with his shorts bunched and stuffed up in his mouth and electricity shooting through his sorry ass. So I must write and that is why I do so now, dear and patient friend.

-I must substantiate, Fuck [Puck?], my suspicion that you have a gift. In order to do that you have to write down what you were trying to say last night after we had dream-and-screen with the magazine. (Loading a corresponding magazine noisily into weapon.) Remember that I hate you, Befefe Frufri, and have no qualms ‘bout when in comes to blasting people apart that I hate with poison-tipped bullets. Crumpet. God, you’re practically vibrating, aren’t you?

...

Howdy, kissmate. Bite down on this leather.

Hello, it's-a Jon Zebra. Ida who is also sometimes maybe Aya appears transfixed by my writing and as I feared, really; it seems now completely unlikely I’ll ever be permitted to stop for anything short of a reaming from her ivory strap-o or to please her in some other completely unpleasant manner that I couldn’t and will frankly not even imagine to hazard to think about it’s that bad.

The new pills are taking effect and it has begun to feel as though I would be slave to this incessant writing now even if not for the presence of Ida and her arsenal of rank incentivizers and bag-o-tricks. I’m on some loop or something, cannot clear the walls of the images or pass through them unmolested like once was I remember the case. Can’t hold it off even to go down the hall and take a pee or a poo or a what-have-you without tingling and going into one of my attacks all clamped up and shuddering and pissing myself. And everything except the walls keeps fading out. Ida has not been in the room for fifteen minutes. Maybe it is safe to sleep.

Fifteen minutes?

One way or another I’m going to need it—sleep, I mean—if this shucking like mad in thin air is to go on any longer—

FUUUCK.

TRULY IN-CROY-ABB.

-Fuuuck, this is truly incredible. What you’re writing here. Truly incredible. Abracadabra ho, landlubbers! It even sounds like Curtis. You really have a gift. And it’s mine, babe. Hoo shit! ‘n’ batter my mound like a stonemason!

-Curtis?

-My God, Fuck, you are an idiot aren’t you?

-Who is Curtis, Ida?

-Never mind. (Pause.) Do I have to stick a quarter up your ass to make you write? Why aren’t you writing, slovenly idiot? Write more Curtis! Double time, stack-o-quarters!

 -Ida, don’t get mad, but why do I have to? Write. I don’t want—I don’t like to—I don’t like it, Ida—

 -You have to write because you are an idiot, Fuck, and you talk like a retard and say nothing and also because I’m about to stick a quarter up your stinking pooter if you don’t and that quarter means you better poot your potables, so you had better just do that or I’ll fuck your ass for an hour with no lube in order to dislodge the quarters and try again. In fact, I think I’ll do that anyway.

...

…men like he, my brother, and myself, who is himself his own brother in addition to being brother to his brother and ready to open dialogues with other potential brothers, met in passing, whether or not he is fasting, we who have amassed and gassed ourselves, the resale limbs of consummate brotherhood, we have known distance and silence, that is where we come from. Where we were born was founded on silence, because brothers stuff their hands desperately in and down the mouths of other brothers, aghast at where the bread went, and it was the last part of this hemisphere, because brothers had to tempt me and my brother over the sea, into brotherhood as from it. We lived at the base of a mountain, the snowed-in edge of the West, where rivers and peaks surrounded us to one side and the distant promise of Wheat Chief lurked like a Grey Scale to the Other. We lived within the imbalance of the unpolished barrier between. Between what? I don’t know, you know. Imagine a brother and then another and proceed from there. We lived in the last remaining dichotomy, which would have to have been the first one, too, but of course no old cuss around then remains here to offer confession now. The broken edge of a brother, a frayed history that frays in the binding, manifest in deafening ranges of Mountain and the West and Rivers which, far away from the austerity of our modest asylum, eventually posit themselves within the heaving Pacific squalls and the walls of Ocean…

ASSHOLE P [O][U]NCH O R SLOT Ey EYL EYELETTE 

L[O][N]G D[U]ISTANCE EYELET AYA IDA

FUCK KAUFFMAN LONG DISTANCE 

DUNCE DISSONANCE 

ZEBRA RECONAISSANCE

…my brother whose body was carted away by boat to a home that does not exist, maybe never did, then my brother who died while it rained, then brother that brotherdrank from the brothersea and brotherate of the land, that faltered, ran a fever as one runs the marathon, as a raisin est une raison… 

IDADA IDA ADA DI A YA

Ida takes a few minutes to fluff my mattress (poking at my various ignoble parts with a seething violence) and thereafter scold me (verbally and physically).

-FUUUCK, WHY AREN’T YOU WORTH A CHUTE?

IDIOT! IDIOT!

  

...

What do I remember of it? of everything before Ida? Jumpin’ Joseph! It’s, it’s…

Do I remember anything from my childhood? my mother and father or theirs in turn? the little fat lady who sang me to sleep? tucked me up in blankets warm and fleecy? the automated cities like ferruginated systems biologique? pastures with verdant vistas? the waiters and waitresses who have served and serviced me at mealtime? the nations of earth? do I remember what I have been through? where these bruises come from? lines across the skin netting its quadrants? put there by so many hours like ghosts indispensable? markings for nothing? the farm by the mountains and mosquitoes? 

Probably no to all questions.

Probably no, I don’t remember.

But what of this little fat woman I have invented? the brother? cowboy to my Indian? the very idea of a mother and father? whom I can see almost? as if they were only most barely eclipsed by some inner lunar obstruction or other? 

Can I shape any proof for a memory of them merely based upon my so straining for one as I do? already almost tactile? their cities and wrought-iron nations I discover over and over in the folds of my silences? on the walls of my home-away-from-homo?

There is nothing to be made of any of this.

I would ask Ida but I know what she would say:

Fuck Kaufman, shut yo mouff! You have no memory, Fuck! Take your meds and shut up, Befefe!

All Ida ever does is shut me up with a mouth full of pills, glass-o-whisky, or by sticking her whowho in my face and making me talk or hum into it or lap at it with my tongue until I can’t anymore even if I wanted to which I don’t, thank you very much, shaking her little waist and screeching like BIG PIG, KING OF THE SLOP.

Cute as a ripple in a slop pail, you Fuck.

Sometimes she calls herself this. Like a character she plays. She plays many characters, strange characters, but mostly plays Ida or Aya (?), calling me Puck Kaufman, only that, Puck Kaufman, but one of her appelations is ESKIMO PIMP-EEL. Watch out for that one! I have no characters beyond Fuck Kaufman. And if that’s not okay, you can fuck right off, man.

And I am beaten when I discuss it. 

IDAIDAIDA IDITAROD

I wish she would come home and put on a record. Any record. But mostly I like that finger-pickin’ record, it’s my favourite, the one with the one about the Christians fighting or something, which is the one from the last time when she put it on after I was done with my writing, and she came in with the music and she played a game with me—she—a good game. What it—what I—what she—what it—what it was, she, she ought to—it was a game where—where I—she said, where I—she said I ought to undress and she, she ought to would paddle my ass blue and teach me this word game, this word game where—where if I got one right, all I needed was one—ought to get one then, then—the—she—she would stop paddling, remove the harness, and I could get off. You know? Get off. It was a good game. I liked the music. That finger-pickin’ music. The getting off. All that. Ida is good with her hands. Whoa, Nellie.

I seem to remember this child, maybe my child from the past or maybe just a—a—an unreality, but I remember the laughter, and the kid, when he wanted fast food, asking to go to Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken. Screaming it out desperately, it was a gas. Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken! Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken!

It feels like movies. I’m screening secret movies on the walls of this house. I love movies as much as music. At first this is all I held to and for myself. These movies. But she knows now, and they aren’t for me alone no longer, she knows about these movies, knows of the inside, has learned to read it on the walls there with me, knows, just look at her, I know it. Why else would she make me write this down? why the pills? Will she really shoot me if I stop? why am I doing this? why is she doing this to me? I thought—I—she and I—

- Just, just, just put it in your mouth Fuck, no! no! Just, no! Just put it in your mouth and chew, attaboy.

She’s back from town with the Scotch, meds, blank video and audiotape, groceries. Ida. Currently she attempts to force feed me chocolate. I cannot talk and have no recourse, uh, to defend myself. I sputter and mutter and stutter and make noises like a dolphin or PAPA LITTLE MOUSE.

- Just eat the thing, Fuck.

- I ain’t got so much saliva as that!

Sure enough the ponderous thing just sits on the tongue turd-like, making the mouth frantic, glug, glug, Christ. My tongue stiffens and cannot handle the feel of it, the little shit wad, rubbing against the dry palate, no salivary amylase to work on the thick chocolatey thing, it sits there and the gagging comes on, be assured.

- Ah…ah…gargle, gargle…  

- Fuck Kaufman, shut your goddamn mouth! Eat the chocolate and let me dab some of this Amber on your wrists!

I go limp, I always go that way, Ida dabs the Amber on my wrist, I rub both pairs of wrist, uh, together like twigs not yet fire, the Amber burning on my skin like an unholy firmament abounds.

I reach for the bottle of Teacher’s Scotch.

- Tap water. Get me tap water. Something to wash the pills down and to mix with the Scotch!

- You don’t need tap water, Fuck Kaufman. You can take your Scotch as is. You are a man, aren’t you?

- Well, right, yeah, of course I am.

- And take some more of these, too.

She puts the pills in my mouth for me. This awful woman. She seems to be subject to an uncommon level of nervous energy. I wonder what is going on.

...

They're out there, Fuck. They're coming for me.

Ida, what's up?

- What is up, Fuck? Down, Fuck. Down is up is what’s up.

MAN HEIM HAS ASS HALL

TALKIN | IN

HALL I HELL

...

Ida has told me to write down the story of her two pairs of lips. So I guess that I must do so or else risk incurring her unholy wrath and a good beating on the ass to boot, not to mention the sparky metal things that make you go buzz buzz. She has told me to expect no more kisses from her ever. Only savage sexual domination. I have set the desk up before the picture windows upstairs so that I can stare out across the lake as I write. Nothing moves outside and I feel serene in my thinking and general affect. I certainly do not want to write the story of the two pairs of lips or any other stupid story for that matter, but, I ask you: Do I have a choice? No, I reply, I don’t have one at all. I am drinking Teacher’s on the rocks. It is making me very lightheaded, I must admit. It’s these new pills, too. They send me for a loop, everything slowing down and atrophied, disguised in smoke and brine, never quite anything in particular. Outside earlier I got to feelin’ just like a big old oak tree. No feeling of the breeze, the nipping air. No sense of moving or movability; just a big ol’ sturdy-ass oak standing up assuredly against the passing of time and the superfluity of things in their respective overflowing compartments. Ida says that in Turkish her name means on the moon and that it’s a saying just like if an American or Canadian were to tell you to ‘Get out of here’ when he didn’t want you to leave but rather didn’t believe what you were saying or didn’t want to or even didn’t want to even have to think about whether he believed it or not. What kind of crazy shit is that? Are you on the moon or something? Ida says she is very happy that this is what her name means. I don't know what Jon Zebra means. I have no idea. Ida says it means that I have cooties but she is always fooling. Still, it might just mean that I have cooties. When I was a kid it was said it was the girls who had cooties. At least I feel as though this was the case despite my having no memories to substantiate such claim. Watching television regularly with Ida it has become clear that it is boys who now have cooties. It is my suspicion that it was boys who truly had cooties the whole time, but Ida will not I don’t think allow herself to speak forthrightly on the subject. Ida’s two pairs of lips like two pairs of pears. On her white face sits the first pair. Funny and bruised and reddish pink. Sometimes heavy as lead and others like the fluttering of gulls. Bruised from the sun and a nervous habit: she chews them or saws at them with her teeth when something inside her, something terribly invisible, gets excited or nauseated. Often purple scabs form and she buries them in gloss and red/purple, thus hiding her first pair of lips right out there in the open for all to not see. When Ida was a young girl just outside a small prairie town, she used to cut her lips on purpose with her father’s razor, and having done so would burst into tears and seek out her mother for immediate mending/comforting. This became habitual for Ida and it worried the family right up until the time that she went through puberty and it suddenly stopped, mysteriously, never to darken their stoop again. The hunger skipped a groove. 

-Look, I'll cut your lips right this second, you smarmy no-account vagrant!

Ida stopped cutting her lips because you need them to sing and words pass out of them so they are precious and you just shouldn’t take a razor to something so precious and unsanitary-though-austere as a hole that spills words out of itself into the expectant world. Ida wanted to be a singer, she loved to talk. Mostly she loved to talk nonsense or sing senselessly. Ida’s father, Cohn Blackmore, was an ex airforce gunner who moved to Canada and got married to a local girl. He ran the special county newspaper, as marginal an enterprise as that was. Still, it generated solid cash flow in a place where everybody was destitute and basically criminal. He was known to be a large man of sturdy character who, if you happened for some little piddling reason or other to not add up on his internal human worth calculator, could have you run out of town in forty-eight hours with little more than whispered admonitions. Cohn Blackmore was a violent drunk like many small time newsmen. He was violent in general. I am Ida remembering his violence. The screaming. Thunderous shattering of vases. The horrible wailing in the kitchen at night, everything getting itself overturned and generally staying that way. Dad’s crude campaign of sexual initiation. Jesus, how many horrible fucking books have been written about that bedroom door sliding open at night. Trauma. The whole goddamn syllabus of the and then time slowed down cult. Why even bother dwell there? But still, the smell of cognac on his breath, his stubble. My eyes shut, I only hear him. And feel him. I can hear mother cleaning up the mess in the kitchen now. Actually, to think of it like this, so—so materially—I realize that I never felt him at all, only heard, grandfather clock’s presumptuous ticking and father slithering in, birds in the night, crickets, all of it so loud beneath whatever process is happening to this rank cacophony as it radiates through the hands I’ve clamped over my ears like meat. To die and continue sweating is the Ministry of Sex. And everything stops and fades to gum only to have the hum regenerated endlessly, proliferated endlessly at sleep time, all times of sleep, and whenever the lights happen to be out for whatever reason. Can you even sleep like this? For long stretches, one simply cannot. The heart feels it first and palpitates, the extremities tingle and there I am again, little Ida, prone and numb, but not ashamed, I’ll kill them all—I will show them—I could not be made ashamed by any fat pink pig with cognac on its breath. No, siree, uncle Boob. Not ever—not in a million yeasts. Besides, cocksucker got that peptic ulcer, the guilt of it probably, and I won anyway. So, fine! turn out the lights! see if I care! Mr. Baaadfuck Blackamoor was the first but by God not the last to apply pressure with his finger, tongue, and manhood to poor Ida’s first and second, much more southerly pair of lips. The ones that bled, betrayed a throat that tore and sizzled like bacon on a no-stick pan. Nope. Many followed, in dastardly droves they came, suitors to her Queen of Ithaca. They came like collection agents on a scent or maybe Basset Hounds. Like Tupperware ladies to a yard party. Yes, sir, hoo boy. Like pike to lure, Ida, like plastic-laminated-newspaper-wrapped-fish, witch, came the shaggos and horny blue-jeaned burnouts with nothing on their minds save their minds themselves, hazy figments on parade, awkward, passionless when conscripted for tawdry sexcapades, front seat, back seat, bad car fucks, behind barn and church fucks, right on the pew fucks, sloppy goddamn boredom every which where and way, every position, almost never anything human to hold it up and make it shine, only cold cuddlings-turned-cudgelling, Jesus, fucking so many men in the backseats of cars! Nothing like a human connection! Only leather and heaps of frozen spunk, coldnesses, a dry universe of nothing and less than nothing. IDA. FUCk. The southernmost pair of lips: site of abuses, visited often, remembered by few.

-That's it, motherfucker, your services are no longer required here. Trust me, Fefe, you have not yet known violence—true violence—

There is something inherently messed-up with you, and also your sex organ is not at all normal, guys talk about it, after, to one another, it’s widely known. You are only satisfied if you’re spreading social disease. That’s what you are: social disease. So, fuck you, ‘cause you shame us all with your vile syphilitic doings. For my memory-money you are my only mother and you have merely harvested a disease, haven’t you? You have no love for anything and you are rotting, smell of it, down in your sex organ, and also your teeth are silver atrocities—silver atrocities chewing the fossil. I’ll write about you all I want to write about you. If you can’t handle to see what you are then fuck you tenfold, you deserve it all the more. Like a bad dream you are a child’s nothing. I remember so much and also, at the same time, not so much, but definitely many faces, reflections of faces in other faces, but something lags behind. Earlier I could not speak. I could not feel the pain stinging with its steam, in the legs, as I do now, right now. I could not in fact make any mark of nervous function whatsoever, could do so for naught, you see, and now—now—now I am talking and in agony from the dressing you have botched of my wounds, and I am mighty sore indeed from the reaming I must have taken, and I can yes—yes—I can feel everything and can—I feel I can speak, but, dammit, now I cannot think, that’s right, yes, Ida! she is my love! she—she has her way with me! but—but she—and—and—and I—and I…

-Oh, for fuck's sake. Can we please flip the script?

...

I have been instructed by the good irreproachable missus to use as my program pod the story of “The Book of Jokes.” There are parts to this story. She told it to me but I keep getting it scrambled, which is what tends to happened with me—it is very confusing. The parts I am okay with—it’s these parts where—these parts become a story that I have so much trouble with, God. Somebody named, uh, Pilsner—or, uh, Pilner—he has an iron cabinet and the stories are in said cabinet, but when I look at the wall, well, let’s just say that the papers are spilling out of this, uh, brown folded paper package with this white note sticking out and this thing, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of the these little brown folded wrappers with white notes sticking out. They do not have jokes written on them, they have something else there. Rememoryanda, I think. Marry me. I ask Ida to marry me, she says to think of Pilsner and to unhinge her or something like that. You see, you have to suffer, or something like that, to see, Ida is convinced of this, and “The Book of Jokes” is—she’s figured—a kind of testimony—best to just kind of get to it. This is what the missus is saying with her eyes. Reach out and just take it. Right, sister? Shake down witnesses, plant evidence. Say a prayer. O, Starbright, how am I to read tonight? without any goddamn eyes? The movies of my home are a torturous ordeal; they have mushroom clouds going off over them, and the summers there will not be anything like traditional summers for some time. Gale-force winds, by God, steam from the floorboards and doors slamming in the shanty, the weeping willows weep and the birch spontaneously combusts, fronds crawl under grey-brown vine and crack the colour of swamp water out from the images in the walls as sticks and stones may break our bones, sick to death of the punch and the prayers. Ida will piss on my prayers, as though proud for her big Olympiad, me down on the mattress like a basin. That spiky-haired goddess is too good for prayer, but she had better cool off her jets, settle down, loosen up before they bust in here and start bagging up all our shit—official evidence—is she pulling one over on herself? in that fetching pullover? Ha. Look at her. I’m getting to her. Pull over and park, trollop. You’ve had enough. But not, hey, “The Book of Jokes,” it’s literally a joke book, but that’s not quite it. Let me get you started. A slice of pizza walked up to a fat man in the bad part of town. This is the man who wrote “The Book of Jokes.” He wasn’t Jesus, he wasn’t Job, but this man wrote the book of jokes—we figure somebody had to. This guy was a kind of professional sufferer, congenitally. He was not the type to make things easy for himself, but he was, it must be said, a person of learning. His first wife lied and his second died, he worked at the institute for higher learning, cataloguing the jokes of antiquity. They did not pay him well, he grew malnourished, moustachioed, had ulcers, and ultimately his kidneys failed. He studied all the jokes of the world and never laughed—not on one single reported occasion. Everything was perfectly organized in his folios and cabinets. He drove a sedan. Two dead wives at this point. Big, greasy city smells like a dead horse. Big greasy horizon. Nothing but jokes, everywhere. He drives. He works those thumbs. “The Book of Jokes.” IV scars, exposed by short-sleeve work shirt. Scars are spreading, he believes, everywhere. Sunsets and sunrises are not lovely the way people think they are, not at all, they’re a real horror show, or that’s how the man sees it, this man of the jokes, evermore. The ghosts of his wives, only one I guess literally dead, it’s a nightmare, but it’s him not being alone, also, because that’s what the word and the world are: it’s like a diabolic function at which nightmares and jokes incessantly cavort. So, Ida, an idea, she’s been bathing in all that bathos. Do they resent her? No joke, sure they do! That’s been the general trend the whole way, hasn’t it, my girl? Is she going to fuck this up? Are you, honey? Oh, you better believe it. It’s imminent: trust me. Shit, she thinks, what do they know? Right, baby, right. But do they need the knows when they got the numbers? When they’ve located the house? The people have stood united against you, Ida. All your life. I got no more wind in me, not that this is customarily what is used for writing, not that I’d know. Why do they despise you? You, she, the straw that finally broke the man who wrote “The Book of Joke.” Do they even despise you? I mean, we know the answer is “of course,” they do despise you, absolutely, but then it should go without saying that there’s a little more to it, as you know you and I know. You are the dead joke that continues to jerk the shift at the same time as its IV scars. Then you jerk your brains, or your brains jerk themselves, and it’s great, practically just in time for dinner. Your brains jerk to life, the thoughts heave and absorb their own collapse. Your brains are jerking back, jerking something maybe more like just a question. Why are you making yourself so nervous? Are you extremely nervous about the men who are coming to get you right now, already well underway, pretty much zero likelihood of delay? The death that counts down from the last joke spends every waking hour at the library. The jokes become more and more menacing as one approaches zero. They are painful to catalogue, the ciphers more daunting, and this is by no means a job for everyone. Chapters Such-and-Such. Chapters This-and-That. Now here is where we get serious, and it’s no small wonder that the poor woman’s complexion fails her. The chapter that destroys us all. The chapter about jokes concerning jokes destroying everything they touch. “Machino Killout,” the final chapter. Sort of. And this means: Ida, they’re gonna fuck you so hard. The killout spiral spirals and gnashes its calibrated teeth.

XOXOXO

BZZZZZZ

...

BE

FE

FE

ZE

BRA

(Notebook), Exit Escape Hatch (Plan) Now

The Future: a Present tense: and when the young one that I was allows itself to acknowledge the one that I am now Becoming, in this ghastly City that has long been captivating the meek and meagre senses, I suddenly forget the division and for a second feel integrated in the hazy crowd—the streets swell to Life from the feet up and course into my eye or two while the sounds give birth to minimums of duration—while for a moment I believe The Words and The World to be real articles of thing.

I believe out of drunkenness, This Word, This World, its Sanitation Department—but what manner of drunkenness is this that finds me free of alms and spirits, draughts, blessing not your wives-in-half, awake in my sober, rented room? What manner of drunkenness is this that speaks not of drink? I of past, spurt the seeds—seeds of the renting of this sober room. But I see all these white and black faces across the Grande City Wall, in flashing seconds, and in them I see a supernatural promise of faces in their personal impersonals, One which is the One that is mine. Mine face. I which they suddenly are or aren’t. I, into, like the quilt Marry made me while she was Dead, her hands turning over one another in silence, weaving us all together, tools poised, and not any longer Dying. But just imagine! How many hundreds of years from now is that? Marry is coming into Life. I feel her beneath the sheets, her hands are lighter than the silence and air, and terrified I grow at her touch softer than wind and chimes and the fledgling harvest. “Marry,” I holler again to no avail, never a-vail, and fall away from her back into the life that I live now here, in this mashed, psychotic sort of City. Cars and killer cars, its streets like so much hospital and elder. Psychotic elders with Depression Wages and Fall-Out from Neutron Conversations at the Hotel of Sheets, where the wives drink Clover Cocktails—men hatch wars as if these wars were the eggs of 

goldenhens—

Secret poisons they hatch in the hotel beds of spread and thatched wives on Sheets. 

Gurneys. Legs twitching as if hen’s legs twisted together. Marry was my Mother and Daughter and laughed like the Girls My Age. I would call to her but could not hear myself calling through her dancing—could thus not be sure that I was calling at all—grew frantic. And this City, which is the one where I discovered the empty room that I am on and in, found me outside the districts of decency and removed me from Marry by taxi, I that up, spat shit in their wind, but ignored. I, ignored in the dungeons of my Palace. Marry’s. 

They spat it right back at me, ignoring.

Ignoring the flow between the Men we all once resembled, reassembled. In those Waiter Places where Wars were hatched and Wives were hatched and Daughters were olives soaked in gin. Taste the lips and tongues they poisoned. There is turbulent fury in my room and it is in the streets as well—has grown the same as it was and is in my room, I, as vulnerable as amongst the whores and agnostics, their bloody knees pressed together beneath the rivers of Tenement. Look at the Waiter People stacked like concrete boxes, like panes of coloured glass smeared with decorations of the twelve naked dead, minus the thirteenth dad, who has rode off all alone to hang himself. They are always stabbing their holes in me and I am sick to the wick. Their skin is black sheep silence, total—the total black of the violence of chisel. Oh save us Lord from the blackness and the stabbings and the eating of shit; save us from the aborted children they discard with the rotted-clotted milk; save us from the Ones I am Becoming, We All Guilty of Travesty. 

You know this because you are the voice. Listen to us all. Listen very hard if you hear nothing. You will. You will. You will hear. I know it. I know it because I have known the being-you through accidents between our minds. We are a Hearing of Hearing. Can you Hear us being this Hearing? Because I feel This. I feel Marry becoming Life from her Death. Her gravestone grows like witch’s hair in my dreams because it is the light—exposure of all light. Feel Marry pass easily between the Life and the Death. Feel the Marry within the Me which had become the You. Feel the You which is the One.

I cannot yet leave the room because of the problems in this City. Marry is sure to rub herself lasciviously against the window. I hump the fire like a rat, licking the hardwood. Spit shit in their wind. They calling devils to task. This City is Flowing with the Devil Work. Magic is the Magic of Flames. I burn up in my room alone, as though I were in the church, their mad alchemy alight in the streets of this City, Marry arriving with reports, fucking me and lighting me up—lighting me up in the paintings I hung there—those that move and morph—

I sip from her proffered sex organ and play with the lids of her new eye or two or three, and lick her sex organ and its primordial bead up and down and side to side. Two pairs of lips. “Don’t scold me,” I beg, “for my report card. It is not I who broke those rules.”  

She beats me like a slab of meat, spits up my asshole while The City slowly returns and sucks me back into refinements, refineries. Marry’s Death stinks up the Parking Lot like a Dream of Buried Sex.

Hermaphroditic sex organs buried in enzymes, cellulose, twitching hind-legs hanging out of her sick lips as she swallows the whole stomach with one sweep of her neckline in slo-mo, Oh the One Lord Almighty, save me, Oh City and Marry, which have taken control of human dreams—processing and editing machines—splicing 

machines— 

Save all life forms from the collisions of video. I see them breaking up in the orbit, shuteye and I cry: fear and reverence. I do not want to: witness the Death of this City substituted for the Death of Marry who is already Dead. I want to: sleep like when I was a child and it made a difference whether you were asleep or not. I HAVE NOT SLEPT IN TWENTY YEARS. Either that or I have not been Awake. The City reminds me that I must be awake because it is Changing and its Change follows certain Rules. Transmogrification of the immediate horizon. These are not my Rules, for they are truly of the Without. When I am in The City, always out-valved along the ruts of the unpainted glass of my room, I know I’m not The City and that The City remains unregulated by me. Thus when with The City I must be Awake. Mustn’t I?

Soon I’ll be returning over the flaccid course: which is: that which is called the due course. I’ll be back to the very point of my having come to arrive in The City—at that point I’ll begin keeping a series of Notebooks I’ll hide under the ‘lectric, where there’ll soon be a mattress on which I will feign sleep when the LandLady comes knocking. The Notebooks will be: are: a catalogue of the City and its Rules. I’ll map its circles—ride it—give it up into the fold. I’ll be coming back, again and again—coming back to me back here, arriving in it like white water from the Elburz Mountains—like the pebble congress of Tehran—like where the Scorpions—the Caspian sea—

I’ll capture its Science, contain it in the Notebooks. I’ll bury ‘em in flames under the floorboard and the ‘lectric…when the Devils come to collect them as they already have a million times from now. I know their arrivals, written in blood as these are, down—written down—in blood—on the bathroom mirror behind which I hide the parts, the—

A matter—I think only, finally—of trifling—of hours that are peddled under the feet, One Almighty Lord, of streets—a Street is born to the eye of the Soul, the two eyes of the man, synchronous spasms of light. I’ve seen the flashing of the eyes under the feet of the Lord's Congress. I’ve seen Man emerge from his ancient prison and reveal himself like a Light in Marry’s Lips. Antiquity, Lord. Guiding him, us, still further onward in the—the lateral feast of the—the flesh that enlivens the—spurring him onward—his Journey—

That is the eternal story of the Death’s Head. That is the Fire Science of the Devils. Be it now also: Inkwell of Creation Herself and unambiguously Lord-sanctioned.

Listen to yourself realize that this is a World of Devils. Listen to the One in the swarming Many. Listen now to the Speaking Devils who are the Caretakers of the One and the swarming-forming Many. Devils who hold the world, tip of the glans, between panes of glass, prod with their Metaphysical Authority. Slip through with Serpent Minds. Save us, Beneficent Lord! Save us from the Snakes in the Grass in the Rules of The City! Save us from the Persecution of its Sanctioned Devils!

THE DEVILS

THE SCRIPTURES

THE ORIGINAL CITY

THE CITY

UPON HAVING

FIRST ARRIVES

Stencil this everywhere. Upon the basement folios liberated from the breaker room lunch boxes. Upon the next five minutes. Upon the “before they were to be incinerated.” Upon the “a pretty fantastic discovery the next time around, pending revue.” Devils in their trench coats, carrying their Talking/Listening machines around, spitting information into the circuitry. Brief birth of The City and its eternal ebb and flow, beneath the unwrit Documents, our Task’s Task is not to write these Documents but to unwrite their being unwrit. Benefactors and the Devils, enrolled, modern man, enveloped—his evolving intricacies, preceding the erection of The City but not the erection of Cities in General, however many may remain dormant—however many—which let’s say might sit on the mainframe like Ghosts. We write this now on a Computer that is built by the Devils. Our task is to breach The City. The Devils’ve made the documents concerning ‘em a Faith, I know this. The Devils were spawned from Marry like me and Marry was in turn spawned from me like Them. Again and again, thank you very much. Above the sky, pierced. Beyond any vantage of Hotel Innards or Computer Chip: the lens and scope of human referencing throughout the underside of the circuits beneath the beneath of The City—I know now for sure because—well, I know for sure that the pipes run straight through the floor to Them. 

We were ‘concepted’ and ‘intercepted’ in the Stars which still are being sucked into the Vacuum of Themselves.

I hear them whispering through the ventilation. I hear: huddled in the towering weeds: the campfires and Bluegrass.

Always advancing towards the prey and the kill-point—always—and at such speed as to remain unnoticed until the last second—like the Universe—always like the Universe devoured by the Seconds. Soon all the Stars will be gone, and such is the case with the Seconds, too. The Snows and the Dead of St. Petersburg. The Life and the Death on the Beam in Between. I’ve become versed: in: the language of Atlantis—me, myself—ne plus ultra of Hotel Management. Draw a Pentagram around one or the other of Whichever Pair of Pips and/or Lips. Marry and me, the language, the substitutions of symbols and numbers adding up to Tongue, allowing Me to Dissolve. 

Even now I use a grid to translate the whispering I capture through the vents. 

I would tape ‘em but they don’t sell the appropriate equipment yet, and it ain’t exactly like I can go out. It will be at least another Ten Years before they Do. If these Documents cease to serve their purpose, I’ll be at the very Godforsaken beginning.

I will have all manner of difficulty with This Grid. I’ll have to give it its numbers as if having been conscious, although conscious also there’s a trick I’m playing on myself. Just like tomorrow, for example. Tomorrow: I will: discover the soiled mat in the crawlspace where I’ve been discovering it serially, but I’ll be surprised and pleased by the discovery. The same goes for the photographs of The Founders: I’ll discover them absentmindedly while dismantling the floors. The photographs will show The Founders with their Garb, adjacent to their Machines and Horses. They’ll, the photographs, be burned and worn around the edges; they will slowly melt off of the paper leaving it blank as I remember. I will be surprised. When the photos become blank I’ll process ‘em and use ‘em to transcribe the conversations from the vent, which I’ll get to the bottom of without really knowing I’ve done so. They’ll speak about my room as though it were empty, but their whispers will have their doubts. And I, of course, shall be surprised.

Soon the Spies will arrive through the Five Windows. Five Spies through the Five Windows. Trench Coats and listing to the White Fuzz of their Talking/Listeners, this fuzz that will alert me. I’ll fold myself beneath the mat and wait for them to discover the photographs which will counter-develop them so I can fold them up, kit and caboodle, after translating the Documents and transitioning ‘em into file folders which I’ll feed to the flames when they reach too high, returning the Transcripts to the majesty of Grid.

I consult the papers: for the first time: copy and file them. I’ll decide the only thing that I know about the work of Devils is: that it is: the work of slowly through the infrastructure releasing The City like a Plague upon the Whole of Modern Man. Those who process the Devil Data cannot leave my room quite yet and wouldn’t be mad and executed outside the Hotel of Sheets where The City was “signed” in Full Knowledge of What This Way Cometh. I’ll leave only when Marry comes and puts her mouth on my floor while at the same time The City lights up in a sea of electrical, like, up from the storm drains. At this point: I will: begin to appear no more mad than anyone else. 

But I, unlike the lapsing mass, will be prepared, and while The City crashes to a halt, I shall masquerade as a Devil by Dawning the LandLady’s Coat and returning to the Hotel of Sheets, via the Causeway, carrying upon my person the first hundred folios which’ll be filled with papers, as bursting-like as the dream of Marry, lifeworld and the paltry orders of the Exegetic City, now reduced to Neurones, Trench Coats, False Halos of Fire. There’s a flash from the ‘lectrical. The mattress is gone now. In the corner of Continental Park the leaves twitter. In the wind: next to: the towering pines and creaking firs. I’m outside the room and dashing Hotel-ward, arms swinging, flaming seas of cobblestone spuming. Search the leaves, archway, the terrace of a French Restaurant. Search for like forms which are human ones. See the parade of tuxedoes and deaths by cummerbund. See golden timepieces swing from the mahogany. See them at equidistances, their minds smashed to dust storm.

Marry before her Delinquent Apostolic Mayor. They curve and cower. Under her, under them, broken as certain limbs are sometimes said to be, in another park inside of this one, before the statue of a Pigeon from which some emergent voice now cries for pardoning, new madness, GOD, yes, a ghastly furor of naming—

There is no time now to vomit on his penny loafers, GOD, not now as, GOD, as I speed like the back of a passing bullet into the dark archway where I feel electricity and the darkness and the light until at last united at last, in one sweep of Lordly permissiveness—cascade of 

wrist—

Ride, I do now

Actual Cascade 

Marry, Lips: Lids: opening—

A tour bus has pulled over in the lawn for a washroom break and accidentally spilled its nuns and nurses into the reservoir outside. A man who is wearing a blue hat skips along the stones at the precipice. A bolt of electricity destroys the hill and the man and his bus and all the rock and sediment come cascading down like Lord's decree and/or his thumb, burying the nuns, nurses, tour bus and reservoir. The earth is destroying the water. Folios: say what they say, know what they know, presume GOD knows. Where do circles begin? Perhaps this is the Exit Machine. I leave the park for the interior and its pavement—its mirrored towers— 

The City’s in the foreground and Heaven on the Lord’s back, a heavy load, a hand reaching back reflexively to establish it’s secure—the load. Follow the hand like Qin Ling to the white, watery graves of Middle Kingdom, Access Route Beijing, the Entire Entirety of the Chang Jiang, frozen like my cramping fists during a Brain Attack—

Movement is ultimately the essence of Grid. False movement. I look down to see that Continental Park has disappeared from my Field of Activation. I’m moving: will be moving: on the terrestrial freezer of Chang Jiang—swimming on cement, technically—Oh my God!—Marry—what happened to the Causeway!?

Doggin’ it, Jip, to bypass lost civic trestle, North-East of Causeway, reaching on out in Marry, galvanized, documents tucked firm, crafty drum or some such, feigning belonging to the ‘lectric current of walled space, cordons, estuaries of concrete, maneuver the city centre, coat protecting me from captors, take a line of cocaine in the mausoleum with a Devil answering to Brigadier General, snorting, now, lines up one snoot then the next, five minute intervals, finding myself incapable of remembering what nostril’s what, I let him show me the atrium where two orders of uniformed Devil burn Books synchronically, fire ever-growing, spitting crisps, papers, out into evermore, machine histories becoming just that, Histories, Machines, Flames, and I maintain a face and aspect of good will and distance, the fire tires, I’m tired but sped-up, saying something about knowing where the young dishes hide in a warehouse with the cockroaches and sailors, sell themselves to The City, legs spread, in return for a roof overhead, something to that effect, hot in the gutter, under the flashing bulbs above the high building with its one giant glass face I am wearing, weary, with the weight of my ancient task as the Devils follow the This and That of Grid across Channel, speaking our whole while in the past perfect, peculiarly fragmented grammar of which I feign knowledge, whole time covered and hunched, noble miser, legs shaking just to keep the pace, they moving as though some pulley connects genitals to asshole by way of feet which have set up roots in the silver earth, the crested cedar panel and the bones of a delicatessen, Holy Frog Leg or Some Such, where faces peer from behind counters, burned-out vistas, smoke rising still from their burning and counterfeit histories, alas, another flash from above the rim of the sector, this where the suits build their eternally building in offices and cement crawl spaces, closing in on Great Energy, beyond the Breath and Touch, beyond the Sordid Mind Space and its Creaking Steps, its intellection, perhaps not this at all, what is called sensing, fog of memories yet to be played out on the present stage, hum of the lines I’ve memorized, must presently act out, must speak into Grid already filled with words not yet spoke, but let them come, Lord, let the servants not forfeit service, ready to serve, guide me, Lord, through the unremitting familiar, through its flesh, The City through itself, let me speak my peace in pieces beneath the emerald rafters soaked in rainwater, nailed with leaves, allow me faith in my compass and in the folios tucked, still, out of view, hiding from the Devils my Business, Your Bidding, the room with its coiled staircase like a water serpent, dank with heavy bodies and their business, maintaining themselves in spite of the agony and the death of their walled spaces, landscapes, cordon in the grey, there, a heaving bustle like rats under a blanket, a smell in the air of shit, Her eyes are like Marry’s, they Look Deep and Speed Up the Valve as before Brain Attack, mine is the feeling, I feel such an attack coming, slowly and surely, feel its chest in my hands, the beating of my heart, in my hands and feet, blood, take her away, the eyes, face would crack like porcelain with the slightest touch, but the Devil has his Sorry Way, she shatters from the inside out, wailing, seen her no more, only the ‘lectrical bands of her, waves of it, a crying absence still and forever, it reticulates in the eye of my memory, very same eyes or more as in passing differences, the very last eye of the struggle, abandoned by hope in tempestuous circles, waves of circles, her eyes flash again, my eyes not flash and accede to know of it, that which was, through my entering here, the wealth of her body, the poor soiled kid, the form of my love for her or the form it was to take, writ in it, upon the pages of skin, dried, coarse, gestures, books aflame in the mausoleum, poor wretched beasts, these poor wretched beasts, my brothers and sister, our sanctioned histories, wretched, laid to waste in her, pages and monuments describing Our Having Dreamed, Our About to Detonate, having wept on a whim beneath the blanched and weathered shingles atop that wretched white room without a spectrum, monotones of that room, and then the flames and obstacles, Oh, Lord, save us, our bothers and sisters, Lord, no, no such luck, muscles twist and burn as I roll against a crate and clutch at a body with a clamped hand, banging and spitting, something asking after Her, asking me if I am all right, but my tongue is too heavy to speak, jaw froze, and I’m shaking violently, becoming a blur as my light breaks through the eyes, again with the eyes, dribbling from my every pore, sweet flow, heart has stopped, shaken into a blur, skin and wretched bone, marrows boiling, something cracking like porcelain, slightest touch bringing forth the deluge, oh, unsteady fingers clenching into venous palm a purple anguish, as with the throbbing of livid member t’ward its Marrys and Gloriettes, its bedazzled warehouse whore, porous and yielding to entrance again and again, at the flicking of her hour’s minarets and forked tongue, in my clutching and clamping there, in the superimposition of a great blackness which sparkles in turn, No More Brigadier in General, electrocuted and seeing visions at once, nor generally speaking a girl to be teased out and laid to waste on concrete bedding, only a blank blackness and a stream of new visions speaking, old visions from my room, from the womb, Marry, arms opened, falling, flashing out, Return of Gone Girl in Yellowing Robes, her legs wrapped up like serpents, sought and regulated, everything set aflame with it, every last dream of it, from the no-longer-predisposed blankness gives light like lover’s tongue in the sex organs there, on the walls of my mind, flesh-mined, indulging in the first last sin again, curdling in the cauldrons, fire in my veins and loins awash too with it, sultry liquor of being gotten to give, mind no match for the blood that it spoils, Lord, the Doing and Undoing Self, the blood-mind, folded, I come back around to The City in this grey, barred window, my eyes hurting behind my eyes, my tips soaking with the bread in the water and being stuffed up in my horrid mouth with a clump, still feel the phantom electrocution, there, bronze pan for shit and pissing, they’ve put me here, My Documents, They have Taken Them, I’m crawling through vents and ducts and tasting metal, rising to the roof and becoming it, tingling in one million twisted places, Brain Attack, Sold Away My True Identity, dust rising, breathing isn’t happening, or there’s insufficient breathing, tight space, crawling very quickly now, much more so, alive to my task, through Gridiron, rooms of Devils, Desks, Computers, air of iron or some such, tasting unbearable and heavy, searching with my eyes, again, alas, for traces and such, folios of Documents of Crush, this beast in its element, reduced to flames, Devils in Blue Arrive in Procession, open a casket of paper, see my photograph, or is it Marry?, crawling again, snapshot glimpse, nearest figure a fatherly face with its roughness, teeth blacked out by marker, and still with the electrocution vibes in the million-a-muscle, lead back out, around the others, the other side, around a girder with the photographs, eying them unhealthily in the shadows, seeing specks of eyes there, fleshing out the dirty secrets from my image on the paper, what manner of images these? they study so scurrilously of what manner of crime?, as far as they are concerned No time, Documents not there, hallways with Hospital in Them, Hotel of Sheets, moving and swinging arms at side, panting as ultraviolets race by, passing overhead, passing or becoming past, fast, Electrical Field, not differentiating passing and past, bending, coming up, swirling, body further inward, great burning fire lights up, more and more we pass through the Absurd Event, white coats appear over the white line cutting forward like a swell, a passage into her, I break and recoil in a flash, a pivot, a tilting, they are on me but I’m elsewhere, illuminated totally and blind to figures, fighter jet confronting pure light as they’ve got me down on the floor, fixing a shot to take me back out of circulation, spike to vein, I’m seeing them not feel me in this ecstatic light which tingles, rubs against the nerves there in their pieces—

A Flash

Flashing

My ribs are visible beneath the pale skin, my heart pounds under where it should be located, unleashing grotesque vibrations that are visible and which shake me into Attack, shaking inside but body will not shake, the room in the eyes, clear to me that I’m shackled horizontal, fan cuts through the air, ripples like my anxious flesh, this room, my body, no, that’s ridiculous, oh, madness, my legs are restrained, there’s a grip around my neck, no drugs, I’m screaming, suddenly its being clear to me I’m not alone here, there being Many Devils in White Garb, faces grey masks, breathing through the black holes in which I portend panic, feel the horror, once again, this uncanny stillness which is a ghastly familiar feeling, heart shall burst, shackled horizontal to a bed, Mother Marry is Delicate Blue, room and cradle huddled in the walls of wood I saw there, held to breast all fast awake, little heart there, its flutter with the prick in my vein, as well as the pricks on the Witness, Grey Mask Above Me in the White Room, decals connoting whatever Devil bonafides they connote, Big Black Eyes Void—

Flash

Flashing 

Marry in the light speaks Nothing if not the Marry, curvaceous and matronly middle, blessed I am wrapped-up in: held to a: limbo with her, sky is a grey through the windows, sun strained like water through the holes it supposes, like water damage, the feel of being child, or that of being with child, the moment makes an eternal promise of itself as I sense it, very odd, then gone, so often the case, older and wincing, delivering its sex only glancingly upon Marry, spitting and slapping mostly itself, cumbersome the weight of a body, connected with the forces of the ‘lectrical, driving An Act forward, making it Spell Out My Name, spunk she swallows, tables set in a graveyard, Tenements and Condominiums, street hockey, animated feature film after dinner, run away from home with a group of dispossessed boys, go back to Marry, humble her with tears, makes a Polish Sausage sizzle, Marry, I eat, as we translate equations by lamplight, hair and sky brown, one and the other, nothing left but the schoolyard tossed into the tureen with scowl while they all watch from behind the gruesome swing set, not there, she browns and no sky, a television light in the window advertising, Marry slips out the window with the blue light and dances in the traffic circle with my teeth falling out of my head, radioactive television set, naked in her bed but high enough to look down upon the streets, fucking the market throng, cascade of fucks, her tongue and then everyone, from within the body of whoever, a well-dressed salesman, say, in sneakers, who pulls his member out just before she can bite it off and a wave comes tumbling through the streets knocking them down, before I can drown in her bed, free of the Green Generator and the Scowling Boy, the schoolyard where Marry laughs mean and boys proceed to coax manhood, parlour—I’ver seized command of the Pachinko Parlours!—door’s locked so’s I run to Bakery, but cannot attain service, they’ve conspired to rob me of my shirt and shoes, torment, squat and excrete blackest tar behind a parked car, worrying maybe my kidneys might be altogether defective, car pulling away, revealing my thin, naked body, pale, five tangled wires with a crumpled up ball at the top and half-formed genitals drooping at the intercessory node, line of onlookers, Marry speechifying, boys who take off after me down the molasses streets, heart stops beating but I run all the same and wonder at the disarray in which I suddenly find the entirety of my system, running in one spot and not moving which is not too big a problem since I’m back here again anyhow and know the area, at least I know that, the area, the quadrants, the “would be,” face stained or misapplied, crouching between kisses of charcoal lips on a service elevator where the hired help resigns, the Dumb Waiter Himself, to obstreperous state of helping, bones and chamber pot and stuck to her person, hanging and dangling and clanging, greasy hair clenched by Devil hands as in Scottish Tragedy, Storm of Baby Piss, over-the-shoulder-shot, Lord, she’s dusting ashes in mausoleum, up and out, pardn’r, Marry baking her bread and soldering shut her sons, scowling face for each little fuck bundle and sterile cotton inch, fuck this shit, a dinner of parts of me, left leg ground-up into hamburger and served with girls and loaves, spotted pumpernickel, Ales of the Crema-tavern and the Fathers of the Factory Fathers and their Empty Town of Mined-Out Brick, oom-pah-pah rampage, drunken fat socksuckers, stumbling procession through what was once Main Street, May Day. Hey!, simpering by a father, little Stacy Redding, Duckface as we call her at school, plump in the midsection and dressed up in cocoon of hand-me-downs, browns, cheeks like Apples in the Snow, Clasping Dolly by the Bleeding Hairs as in Scottish Tragedy, white gown stained by Breakfast and Mud and Turned Around Backward, the eyes have it, ripped-up knees, she’s tellin’ ‘em, falling from the porch, exposing us to the charms, hiking up her dress just this side of ever so much, I and them and her, a kiss between fathers which escalates, and I get wet between the legs feeling guilty—wetness trickles down in rivers to the sores in my knees—they heal, I’m healed—a solid flash of electricity—we undress—

Flash

Flesh

She so very tender in my arms with her dress hiked, we’ve now subsequently undressed, flashed-out, her little sex organ throbbing in my pocket, my hands roaming there, every eye on me now, stiff, impact’s threshold before me, arms bent into pressure for grounding, her mouth all wet with me, disgusting and wonderful, bending against as they move in now, naked, precocious manner of sons at play, clutching their One Sex in Greased Palms—

Flash

There is the energy that imposes energy, that which is not the crowd but is issued from it, that which is the carnal air and interlacing of all lungs, synapses in the brain, of the One Sex in Those Streets, energy assuming itself by way of The City, byways of barren mindscape cast upon themselves and all they’ll’ve foreseen, each naked figure joins together in a great bath of intensities born of them collectively, disappearing recursively, exhausted by and exhausting all of experience, that which is shared, that which is where All the Fathers Meet There, Naked and Aflame, as One, as does little Duckface with her Schoolyard Tears Emblazoned, this energy springing out of its own self-awashedness as musics, all manner of maybe antithetical energies, forces indomitable cascading like musics, Opera of History, strands and broken fragments the study of which constitute the chalk in our bones, the telling of it, we essentially One energy folded, bones are exposed like gridwork, a strand ever only strand, truth sometimes truth but always still always on its way, Life, Process, O Irredeemable Duckface, tangential sex colliding in firestorm and flood, beyond crystal, meeting of Our Flesh before the Camera Eye our brains have conditioned us to Imagine, in the ceiling, flux of young skin unnoticeably dead, unnoticeably rotting, new skin as soon as you touch it, hiking up the dress further, squeezing off a little of that sex, what’s a little squeeze?!, nothing at all, she likes it, goddamn their hands and mouths, goddamn their filthy pig hands, bloody knees, just hurry on up and stick it up in ‘er, spit out my own body, if only, tasty little piece of tart, the wave returning through the cobblestone streets, spilling through apartment windows, emptying the rooms of their contents, sweeping over the Father of the Fathers of the Factory, the Actual Fathers of the Factory, poor little Sue Redding, Duckface as teasingly christened at lunch, her dolly, her knees, her chattering of teeth, Marry swimming away with her into the bending sea through Centretown, past gallery with resilient canvases floating, through front door of adjacent Butchery, not terminating there, sucked out through the mildew in the lower loft where the Butcher lives with his Wife and four Kippers in a Ceaseless Lunacy, candles on the empty shelf now also sucked out through the back with us now, out with the garbage and dead rabbits clumped in loose stacks, afloat now too, passed on the left by the naked vestiges of Marching Band, wind instruments up dry in the sky, past and passed, Polish General drunk on coconut rum conducting a symphony atop antique dresser, glasses snapped in two and his moustache soaked through—pitiful—sinewy residue, O Sweet Jiminy the Water, buildings through which we pass, against which we bust ourselves apart at speed, rising tide and flowing relics, espresso cups and burgundy tables of Sir Quincy’s, Butcher’s lungs collapse and he releases his wallet from his hand, which then sinks to the bottom as his wife grabs frantically for it with the hand which she is not using to hold onto the lampposts and window ledges for support, all lost, all thoroughly lost, lost, in fact, half a block back, at the bottom of the ocean— 

Why is there

Laughter? 

So much

Laughter

Flash

Over my shoulder: I catch: the crew atop a thick, squared-off plank, rigged with solid rigging, tilting maybe a little, the whole rig, ferruginous grasshopper, downward into the prone sea, rising slowly above the very last of the ancient steeples and evenly erected scrapers of sky, submerging, finally, even the topmost obelisks of the renowned gallery, streets having risen up and emptied out, we’re all of us together, the whole population here in the ocean together, that plank, that ferruginous grasshopper situated about nine hundred yards away, I’m guessing sort of approximately above the District of the Factory from which the men had been marching this very picturesque morning, this MAY DAY Now Completely Sunk, now, arms a-thrash-against, determined will of the raving and raging sea, thrashing voice, harrowing tantrum of all pressurized bodies of earth, rising now having fully Rendered The City, there upon the plank, behold: where I attempt to focus my vision: eyes ruined: and dry red with corrosive salt of the water and the work of panic: all those priceless premature tears: attempt to focus but: capturing merely: diffuse fragments: blurred bodies: casters of shadows: undifferentiated movements: moments whose images collide like pieces of broken, worthless stuffs—I hear the voice a second ago discredited and, Lord, forsooth: it strikes to the quick—horror is where we’re at, I’m shitting myself in the warming bath like a baby wading in the pool, part of a Great Big Twisted Fresco, drowning body, insoluble speck, frantic figment, wasted dregs, killer of self and selves, everywhere in transitory intercourse with bodies, choking, vomiting lungfuls of water, screaming with the most viral of fear, point of complete, collective breakdown, no meaning left, no sign nor wisp of the last lie pawned off, told, the here and elsewhere, the one and other, no city or debts or man/woman or woman/man, just the One mind One Panicking Mob of Wet, Water and Sky, bodies as far as eye or eyes might see, possessions have over-accumulated past and beyond all pressure, rackets, watches, chesterfields, patio furniture, books, clothes, bikes, trucks, empty helicopters, park benches painted with real-estate agents, stereos, cars, parts of cars, mannequins, all of this invisible to the Prone All of Us, my baby, my baby is dead, my bundle of fuck, Marry, Marry, Marry, hold my hand, remember the Almighty Practical Lord, remember the teachings of Lord, listen to the teachings of worthy men for it’s only They who may show Thee the Way, everything, everything sunk, done away with, torn from naked hands and fobbed or fucked off by unseen fists, everything everything everything lost and never—never this horrible—unbelievable—still I struggle—the weight of the water forcing me under for seconds at a time whilst—persist—still I hear him—on the megaphone on the plank, ferruginous grasshopper in the near distance, calling to the camera man now, to the man who pulls us into focus or is supposed to, to all and sundry belonging to the Camera Department—

Pull us into focus, motherfucker

Flashbulb

Getting down, making a fuck-up use of myself, your daughter, trying to ask but speaking nothing, these million screams interceding like stadium or shipwreck, a chill down the general collective spine, pleasure and pain roar alike, the roar has its own kind of biodegradable skin, geodesic layers, partitions, downward to the Very Seat of Incomprehension, one Soul and one Soil, at the gates of which there’s said to be waiting a large pearl in the open and extended hand of the Lord's holy emissary, saying “Happy Festival,” but that’s no good, nothing doing and no can do, Nebuchadnezzar, you see, I’m fucking choking now on water now, choking now millions strong, a million and counting—closing—form and file—spent lungs—hollow hollering—wasted now—great many souls bound in water and some electricity—centrifugal force—whatever remains of gravity—a coil—killout—shattered wordless bodies inside the walls of water calling out like ghosts in an old house beneath the wood paneling and from the tomb of the attic where there’s there what’s been there the whole while, darkening all ‘em doors and renderin’ to the Lord what’s the Lord's and that film crew on that there plank, a Crazy Large Unidentified Flying Object-V dartin’ ‘bout at impossible speeds, then hoverin’ motionless, then issuing a hum like overhead radial lights at Hotel of Sheets—like giant tinfoil cigar—now other flying Vs and boomerangs and even fish—all this infernal humming—flying Unidentified Vs appear to be enveloped in a neon gas—there’s these Pneumatic Orbs, hovering—bleeping and blipping Scottish Tragedy Cauldron Colours, Distant Stars Exploding a Hot Night from Naught—Heaves of heavens squeezed—Spongy ‘lectric—

The Man with the Megaphone on the Plank Corrals His Fools and Aims the Gear at The Man in Black with Them Cursed-in-the-Extreme Eyes of Brown, who, by GOD, is presently singing, in slightly-breaking, elegantly-pliant baritone:

 I’ll go find a gal that wants to treat me right

You go get yourself a man that wants to fight

I’m leaving now, I’m leaving now 

I’m a long gone daddy, I don’t need you anyhow—