SHRAPNEL

(April 16. 05)
A gunmetal blue morning sky, April has reached its middling. And I, the so and so that I am, still see fit, so it seems, to abuse Italics and bad spelling. A dictionary is of no help to a dyslectic, or a bicycle pump to Murphy or Watt. Now Malone, so I have read, is capable of forcing compressed air into the flaccid tubing of his pedaled conveyance, as he, among the Beckettian few, has a fair to middling understanding of reason and such things. I, however, having neither meter nor rhyme, watch as the air hisses from the crone of my tire, eyes crossing in as they see fit to do. My one hope for the day, among many I suppose, is that my hearing aide works without gibbeting stirrup and cone, as this, I confess, I can neither put up with nor endure. As Nietzsche said, in a moment of (un) syphilitic clarity, all we can hope for is to endure what seems so unendurable and terribly silly.
It is beyond my meager comprehension how the hobbled-masses get through the day without objecting to the very things that make their existence so sadly unendurable. Like bunting and curlicues stitched into the ass of too big trousers, or muscle-shirts that expose neither muscle nor brawn, but badly knitted tattoos and scabbed over tatting. Or, as I have seen, those with hirsute foreheads and nettled hair. Or pumpkin coloured skin that defies epidemiological description. Then there are those who masticate in circles, eating beaver-tails and hotdogs, applauding a dwarfish troubadour skinning a half-dead cat with a pocketknife and an impish grin.
(April 17. 05)
Morning’s scrims white as Odyssean sails, stoking wax and yellow paraffin in the cloves of my ears. I too will be deafened to the wails and whispers of the beckoning sirens. Ulysses has taken over far too much of my conscious time, tallow-poetics done with a pointy Joycean stick, an idiom unknown to man or beast. Perhaps in a moment of unconscious thrashing I hoped for a more; a rare treat of skillet-blackened kidney or a sniff at Molly’s soiled under bloomers. I would not put it past me to think such thoughts, conscious or not. A blue chamfer sky, jackdaws and titlarks, summer benches measured to fit the seat of your pants. Latticed, skinned smooth, tailbones folded into origami cranes. Mother Nature is extraordinary, fucking beautiful one might say. Marrowbones, those used for soups and rues, evening’s solstice on hook and crook. And in a faint glimmer of grainy sky, a million skips of light chasing fox and tortoise through Bloom and dale. Nora must have been an extraordinary woman to put up with James shenanigans. A father drunken on stout and Guinness, and a mother dearly departed but still cajoling poor James from the grave, ‘wed a laundress with pillowy breasts and wide birthing hips, now James, and you’ll be a happy, happy man’. And Lucia dancing mad-footed with veil and fan, like a fucking Dervish, brains scrambled and scabbed to the lobe of her head. Poor, dear madwoman watching like a scowl, as her patch-eyed father summons up the ghost of Finnegan, leaving her echolaliac in his wake. And Stanislov scrapping the barnacles from the pads of his brother’s feet, with pumice stone and rasp, forever paying his debts with foolish filial love. I too have a brother, with warren brown hair and beady eyes, who lives in house with a pool and a dog, a wife and a son, and just enough gumption to roil our father’s bitter temper with contrary notions on this and that, or that and this. No solace for the weak-minded and those always in debt, or those with bad opinions and caustic remarks, so seethe the lord, master of the roost. I have smoked enough cigarettes to bring down a ten-ton elephant, railing with emphysema and a choleric cough. So be it, be it so, so I suppose so I do. Silly conniving bastard, when will you come to your senses and give up this lollygaging nonsense? Never I suppose, not in a million fucking years and then some. Adieu and goodnight sweetest Molly, all covered in Blazes knows what and how.
(April 18. 05)
This is neither a story nor a tale told by an idiot, but a series of notions or ideas, rebuses some might suggest, with neither rhyme nor reason. So if your looking for something more, which you may, go fuck yourself and swiftly. An onionskin sky flummoxed with plump white clouds, wisps of them. (I’m not a lair; I just never tell the truth). The Writer’s Festival will soon be in town, a coax of lairs and storytellers sniffing glue and drubbing wine, whiling away evening and afternoon sharing writerly secrets and tales of penury and sexual conquests. I will not go, as I have neither conquests nor secrets to share, though I might be coaxed into lying, something I do with impunity and exceptionally well. Time for a good scrubbing and abrasion of skin, hoof and heel. Onward and upward go I, into a furrow of bluest blue sky, vaginas, labia’s, and all things sweet and savory, the nethermost of a Molly’s privy, bloomers cinching frayed and brown soiled. What a lucky man am I; better than the blackest black jujubes, or a jawbreaker sucked between tooth and gum. My day has begun, in abstentious glorious.
(April 19. 05)
The reddest red jujubes and a glass of skink milk. Like magic, the buds on the tree outside my window have budded. Today I will see if I can be less abusive and unkindly to the common Italic and bad spelling. Strange and unlikely things may occur, but just the same, I will see what I can do, or not. Scorn and unkindly words are an all too common occurrence, easy come, easy go I suppose. Like fucking alchemy, that most Jungian of adulterous incantations, the buds have budded even fuller since last I looked, my goodness how nature takes the lead without fumbling or dropping the ball. More, and even more so, they cut teeth and push skyward with a petulance unwearied and contrived. Nature, gods love Her to death, she has licked clean the grit and stones from the curse of my winter wounds. No better panacea will one find than a warm summery day in excelsior glorious. Admen Leopold and Loom, what more and more can one say, Joyce be praised, what a fucking glorious day. It is so it is.
Kafka’s self-castration was done in deference to his father, ensuring that he would never become like him nor of him. This act of self-inflicted neutering enabled him to write, and through writing, to recreate a phallic or totemic representation of himself while remaining separate from his father. Only as the neutered or castrate son was Kafka able to write what and as he did, if he were to have remained identified with the father, his prodigious creative output would itself have been subjected to a form of semantic or grammatical castration. The inscribing machine in the story In the Penal Colony is such a machine (following Deleuze and Guattari) in that its sole purpose is to re-inscribe the lesson of the father on the back of the son; encouraging self-mutilation and a totemic dephallusization of the father. It was Kafka who encouraged an oedipal insurrection, not the father, as is generally the case. In doing so he was able to amputate his own castration, and in turn, his fathers re-castration without incurring the shame and guilt of paternal desiccation. Kafka wrote with his father’s blood, not his own. His frail and childlike health notwithstanding, Kafka was a child all his life, no more so when confronting his own self-castration. The act of self-mutilation through castration is one of unmitigated defense, a defense against oneself, not the one to who the castration and self-mutilation is directed. In this manner, and perhaps this alone, Kafka could take complete control of his life, as he becomes the father of whom his most bitter and fearful invectives are directed. Once he becomes or appropriates the rights and priviledges of the father, through self-castration, he is then free to castrate him, thereby doing away with the father or paternal altogether. One has to become or appropriate what one fears most, then and only then, is one able to rid oneself of the fear of castration and self-mutilation engendered by that which one fears and detests, the father. As such, self-castration is the supreme act of willfulness, a way in and out of the Penal Colony. Time to leave the Hunger Artist behind and engorge myself on my own willful castration. Good night new Pope, and may it not rain on your homily.
(April 20. 05)
Gods’ morning to you all homilies aside, so and so. I managed to make it through the night without re-castrating myself, thankfully so. I purchased a ten-pack of pivoting razor blade refills yesterday while shopping, of course, and to my dismay have discovered that my razor does not pivot or accept pivoting blades or refills. Fucking mercenary drugstore, I will neigh ever go back, not even for apothecaries’ soaps or toe-corn pads.
(April 21. 05)
Try as I might, and I do, with all my might, I cannot figure out how a camera works or why the Canadian Mint doesn’t just print more money when the economy goes south. Perhaps such things are to remain a mystery, or well-kept secrets know only to the Alchemists amongst us. Jung would have known, and perhaps still does, continuing (as he does) to sully and menace the collective unconscious from the relative ease and comfort of his cuckoldry. Dirty Swiss bastard. We Freudians are none too hospitable with our oedipal invectives, morose cunts that we are. There is some species or phylum of bird eyeing me, chirping, from the branch of the tree outside my bedroom window, a titlark perhaps, or a thrush hermit. Fucking mercenary birds, never a moment’s rest from their constant twit and warble. I hope (as I often do) that one doesn’t knock off the spring buds that have appeared mysteriously on the branches and crooks of the one tree I have growing on my lawn. If one does, I would no doubt snap it’s fucking neck, sending it careening to the hard gray curb of the street, syrinx crushed to smithereens. That would certainly put an end to all that fucking twittering and warbling, without a fucking doubt it would. Fucking Jungian birds, not one’s to know when enough is fucking enough. With a knowledge and understanding reserved only for those with ornithological wherewithal, a bird-snatcher or a watcher, the two being so often synonymous, one sniping with eye, the other with net, a bird is a bird is a morose fucking avian menace. If I had a pair of waxen-wings like Icarus or Dedalus Bloom, I would surely take flight from this sordid worldly mess and soar skyward with chirping delight. But as I do not, I will simple sit in the nest of my drawers singing the praises of Molly, dearest Molly, warbling forget-me-nots in the cones and stirrups of dead and imaginary ears. Surely its time for bed, sleep abreactions, as some say. Menacing cunt that I am, perhaps sleep and abreaction are all that I can expect from such a doleful and miserable fucking end of day.
(April 22. 05)
I have no right to discredit birds nor beasts, nor human beings for that matter, none whatsoever. I best mind my manners. That fucking bird is on the branch again, staring and chirping, fucking stupid manners are for chess players and shut-ins, not unmannerly miscreants such as I. I slept like timber last night, being poked and harpooned with pike and pickaxe. Fucking Courier de Bois with cowheel jackets and mukluks. Scornful so-and-so that I am, I will leave the bird to it’s twit and warble and let the world unfold as it may, fucking Leibniz and his ‘best of all possible ones’. No wonder the world is in the mess that it is, with zealots and childrapers unaccountable and above punition. No Pope I know of would allow such unspeakable acts to go unpunished. But of course I am mistaken, as always. Mitered heads see with no more clarity than those in wool-cap or tam-o-shanter, only hatmakers and haberdashers know the difference, not you or I.
A perineum of night sky folded into the barrows of a whore’s skirt, the rectory that separates the piss from the shit. It’s either all or nothing, no in between or halfway. Either one shunts or jimmies in one fell swoop, or get the pointy stick jammed into the soft white sclera of the eye. Retinal detachments are murderous, so I’ve been told. Fucking useless Italics and shunting, I’d much prefer a tartan tam-o-shanter or a monk’s peaked cap. Having had my fair share of zealotry and bad-manners for one day, it’s time for sleep, teeth ground into puce, millet and sugary dust. Good night dearest Molly, Stephen and Bloom, neigh a stick in the eye or an unspeakable act.
(April 23. 05)
I rainy flint coloured sky, my joists and collar will no doubt scream with deep-marrow pain. A Nova Naproxen taken with roiled oats and stewed mutton, to ease and soften the digestion of inflammatory and analgesic. A spoonful of so-and-so, good for the osteo-arthritic grinding in the ball and cuff so I’ve been told. We need the rain, so say the gardener’s, spade-heels at the ready, to nourish and coax the world back to life. Fucking selfish cunts, who needs flowers and green-grass when children starve and shrivel with Aids and malnutrition? This, I fear, is the sorry state of an even sorrier world; more Italics and bad spelling and a pointy stick jammed into the white of a myopic eye. That should get they’re attention, and if not, at least blind the cunts and detach a few retinas.

Veteran’s Dream

Mr. Dickson, my neighbour,
Who saw the last cavalry charge
Of the war and got the first gas
Walks with a limp

Into his helmet and khaki.
He notices indifferently
The gas has yellowed his buttons
And near his head

Horses plant their shods.
His real fear is gangrene.
He wakes with his hand to the scar
And they do their white magic

Where he lies
On cankered ground,
A scatter of maggots, busy
In the trench of his wound.
Seamus Heaney

A simple thought just came (an alchemy, perhaps) to mind, what if there were no starving children, poxed with sores and colicky bellies, what would the WHO’S and WHAT’S do with their time and bad manners? Just a thought, of course, nothing more or less I suppose. Head cocked to avert a good drenching, I will skip like a Dervish, whirling, into the cool spring rain, I will, I must, so I will go on, I will, go on, as I must, go on. No birds twittering or warbling in the tree outside my windowsill, just rain teeming and bullying a cold gray mid-afternoon sky. Fucking inhospitable world, not one to know when enough is enough, fucking bad manners and dross.
I went grocery shopping today and bought neither fruits nor legumes, nor red meats or fowl, but puddings and macaronis, and Kleenex and cream, and milk and a truncheon of French bread, nothing more. I will probably starve to death or chinch-up from malnutrition, the ambulance man scuffing chocolate pudding from the corners of my mouth, a jujube pilloried on the scup of my nose. What an unsightly sight, stark white with farina, starch and bad manners. One could make rue with my blood, thickened with allspice, cumin, anise and clove. Sleep, and soon, before the thrush-hermit and chickadee awake and begin to warble and banter like winged devilfish.
(April 24. 05)
Crawfish, gills and flippers sculling watery air, cuttlefish with incontinence, shit-bag appended to gill and bladder. A cold rainy afternoon spent cock-footed, arms akimbo, skulking as I wait impatiently for the next bus. One came, but never too soon so it seemed. Geysers of undrinkable water conspiring to thieve me of what little patience and pleasure I could muster from the day. Fucking rainy days and sewer-water give one the chills and a good case of the trench foot so they do. Matted and tussled hair tonsured and peaked on the cap of my head. Not even a good scrubbing with Pantene and hibiscus-root (redder than blood or jujubes) could repair the damage and splitting. Fucking hatchets of cold April rain cleaving the bald spot on the tiptoe of my head. What’s worse, I say, stone deafness or a pointy stick in the whites of the eye? Neither I suppose, though if I had to choose I’d take the stick in the whites any day. I will stitch and weave a woolen-cap and cinch it over the holes of my ears, to prevent further stone deafening and eves dropping. Sleeping might pose a challenge this evening, as my feet, cocked as they are, will no doubt seek refuge in the skirting at the bottom of my duvet. Fucking cocked feet and feathered blankets, never a moments fucking rest. Sleeplessness is like incontinence, never any when you want it, too much when you don’t. Shit-bags and rheumy-sheets, two things I could most certainly do without any, fucking day. Good night and may gods bless.
(April 25. 05)
Pearls and swine, who would have thought a morning sky could look so fucking ethereal. I, I suppose. Hatchlings slinging yoke and albumin in the pix and feathers of my nest. Beak and neb lopped off with a machine used for prying confessions from those in dissention of the rule. Kafka is everywhere, so is Beelzebub and his cutthroats. A puce gray sky, a larder of clouds waiting for the chance to rain on the world’s parade. Fucking mercenary. Somehow as yet to be determined, I have scuttled the soft-tissue abutting the hasp of my rectory, skillsawing the fucking life right out of me.
(April 26. 05)
No two buds the same, no two birds of the same feather. This persistent door slamming will spell the end of me; cones and stirrups calcified milk-white. A simple yet complex algorithm: conniving calculus and vectors. I was none too good at mathematical equations and plus and minuses, if not for dear patient Mrs. Walker I’d still be sitting in grade ten math class sharpening the lead of my pencil on the cuff of my trousers. To this day I still struggle with subtractions and simple divisions. If there is a God, He is a sly outmaneuver’er, as the compulsion and obsessions to count and recount, even the simplest actions and things, is murderously paralytic at the best of times. So be it, I suppose; fucking algorithms and slamming doors.
I have a merciless headache; a hatchet kilted to the thalamus. Fucking Scottish sissies, knock-kneed and neigh a stitch of underdrawers or leggings. It’s a wonder they own land, let alone distill scotch whiskies and stuff haggis with corn, mutton and testicle. Shit-bags the lot of ‘em. And Robbie fucking Burns slaying poem and lyric like a fucking Scottish Nankeen with inkpot and quill. Some days are better than others; others are like a slow march into hell without a tam-o-cantor to keep the rectors from chewing the ends off your fucking ears. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano cantered his way through life without a wearable pair of shoes or a weekly paycheck, pyretic-teeth pilloried in the quail of his mouth. Even then, he wrote such gifted melodic prose, Cervantes himself would have been proud of him, of that I am certain. I now have two potted plants gallowed from hooks threaded into the ceiling; one is a spider, the other a clump of Verde knolls. Much like vectors and calculus, I’ve never had much luck with plants or living things, slaying devils or eating with my mouth closed. These pose not only a nuisance, but also an inordinate wasting of a wastrel’s time. I have neither time nor patience for such mollycoddling, choosing instead to flint ashes and scrod onto plants and living things. Such is within my mien, I suppose. Another day dulled into a calumny of sleep and bad manners. Not giving a shit has its advantages, but it doesn’t make it any easier to find comfort and haggis in the kitchen of life, not by a fucking long shot it does.