I had myself original in my origins. Swallowing codswallop on all sides and then some, the proliferation of new amusements anything but amusing. My return to my hometown had not meant to preempt all possible futures. Disarranged furniture was the condition of conditions, cross branded into chest, of the beloved who fell into ill temper at the dissipated reverie and very real shoddy workmanship and unchecked hubris that produced me amidst the sawdust and street noise. I am the cloying man you met on the staircase. It was I they were investigating and you they were investigating too. It was outside of our purview. Do you remember my corset? How about my Yankee belt buckle? It was for me true that the problem for Noah as for Moses was hubris, this being the case also for innumerable public personalities as for me and for you. There is no soft touch in the ceiling of nature. No, my hand on your forearm right this moment is no soft touch neither. I folded the cabaret and pocketed the debts, sleek in my peacoat going ninety in a thirty zone on my sore-ass feet. You will milk this almond, madame? Who shall disabuse me of my shawl? As a child I was the notorious ‘Skateboard Killer.’ My prerogative was cheap thrills. I never go no empathy ‘cause I never got nothin’, which don’t mean you can pin no mangy beef on me, see? I remember the first head I cracked with my board and the kid’s house right behind him as I did it. I did not set out to find a mess but I never went anywhere I didn’t find a mess. On the island of Maui I got COVID and hallucinated a bad scene in which there were two women wrestling and a man officiating; one woman was unconscious and the other I guess thought she was faking and being a drama queen so she produced this futuristic egg beater-like device from out of thin air and started drilling into the thigh of the other woman who was no longer feigning unconsciousness or not feigning unconsciousness but rather screeching in agony and writhing like a fish on the deck. For us who remain suspects, trawling our corrupted worlds, is it not a matter of feigning unconsciousness, having always known that wasn’t going to cut it. Our heads are not concealed and they can be lopped off by any game cock. Nothing touches me except the pressure of what separates us in the vivid living disconnect. I don’t want to burry myself in your peevish esteem. I don’t want to glory in the thief’s festival or abnegate my responsibilities with my church group. Punch me in the muncher if you must, but I do not stand for lineups. You’ll have to beat me comatose and hang me there, an approach doubtless to brook commentary at the very least from attorneys and such. It is not for me to say what is to say. It is not for me to say it anyway. It is not for me to say...a thing...a thing. It is for me to stay and remain. It is for me to climb the stairs and collapse into the pool of black syrup to which I’ve been reduced. My clothes just there abandoned to the side a little touched with that flash of strewn stain. On the stairs I heard the lady with the poodle and her friend from the veterinary clinic. In the sky I heard the sirens and I heard a hatred too big for us to contemplate yet a hatred which had found us and which wants us and which wants us syrup. Baby, listen. We don’t know one another very well. The look on your face isn’t very encouraging. I can’t blame you but I’m not going to feel you all up over it either. Before they get here I need you to return your gaze to me and tell me that you see me and know me all so I will have known that I was known. I know it matters very much, but I never figured out where or to whom.
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