CARTESIAN TALLOW

Ball-metal Shims

And now what have I, I have a sclerotic goiter hulled on the milady of my neck, breastplate (ed) next to an awful itching and new Copeland shoulder, resurfaced with ball-metal, Elm’s epoxy and shims. Wittgenstein took a shot at it but he never came close to an exegesis on pain, the solipsistic, non-relational, concupiscent nomad’s land that is pain. I will tell you about pain, pain and agony and the charnel ache that scuttles the skirting of the neck to the wooden wheel of the scapula. Pee in your trousers kind of pain; pain so merciless and ill mannered that it makes one think of ego-cide and dissolution by drowning. I could tell you but I won’t, because even if you were to listen and pay heed, it’d surely go in one paraffin-ear and out the other. Lash yourself to masthead and be done with it, no dilly dalliance and moot pointing round here, we’ll have none of that now will we (you not me, certainly not me, no never not me, never). You could, should you so choose, jam a ballpoint pen into the quail bone of my shoulder and I wouldn’t flinch a bit, a damn crumb. And that damnable Joycean file clerk giving me the once over, drawing a bead on me like a monk’s peeler bethel in glass oculars and wiretapped rims. Smoking, incessantly, helps assuage the pain, so I have discovered through persistent proofing and solecism. Smoking and bitter, lye coffee trounced with heavy creams and unsweetened, not a dope of aspartame or Demerara cane for me, these two simple invasions seem to do the legerdemain. If Oedipus were to have met Dionysius, let’s say, at a Marxist workers fry-up or an ophthalmologist’s quibble, the outcome would have been diarrheal and none too pleasing to the eye, purblind or not. All that cloacal self-importance would surely have driven Freud to self-castrate, on the skein of his cuckolded wife’s tatting needle no less, no more no less than more no more. I have put a temporary halt to writing poetry, as it tends to gird up the cushioning in the racio-Centrex of my thinking machine.