CIVILIZATION and its MALCONTENTS

Labia Majorca and Minorca

A gray ash morning sky, my eyes are open, labia Majorca and Minorca, but I have yet to awaken from troubled dreams. I may never, nor care to in the least. As long as I stay sleeping, eyes open, but mind fraught with bad grammar and thinking, I may just make it through another day, long and dreadful as it may be. As it will, as those that preceded it were, and those that will come after have a duty to repeat and uphold. After all, repeating is my game; one played in solitary without the aide of movable pieces or tricks up my sleeve. I leave trickery and slyness to foxes and hurricanes, and those with tunnel vision and thoughts off kilter, the sign of a faulty mind and poor intellectual habits. And the one on the bus, she had a doubloon size burn mark, or was it just bad suturing, on the keel of her neck, where the nape meets the clavicle scarp. I tell you this because I feel I have to, that it is important that you see others the way I do. The way I see others is not pretty, nor, for that matter, matter of fact, but rather with a jaundice eye for precision and things out of sorts, a molting, if you like. I see things in their molt, as they egress from something into nothing of importance. Once they reach an unimportance, I see them as they are, as they were and have always been, but hidden behind chadars and fine Egyptian clothe. I see the other as other, as the other that begets and bears the weight of the self, the other that is always a simple stand-in for the other self, which is no self at all, but a faint other of self and other. By no means is this simple, yet once mastered and inculcated into one’s visual acuity, one can see nothing else, nothing but others and stand-ins for others that once were self’s but hidden behind chadars and the finest Egyptian clothe. Perhaps cows, before the swing and stoke of axehandle and sledge, should be cloaked in chadars, to keep the flies from laying larva in their eyes. A fly senses death, the impoundment of death, and makes its play for a warm place to lay its eggs. The eggs lay festered in the caulking of the eye, feeding off maggots and other less hearty lepidopteran roe. Snuff roe, as in my dear father’s stand-in for tobacco and sweet, linger cheroots. The rectory parasite, he too smoked cigars and borrowed cigarettes, lolling the filtered end between the seam of his lips, where a curled toothpick stuck out like a circumcised wooden cock, announcing his annunciation into eternal hell. A caulking of mint gyps edging outward from the second scoutmaster’s prepuce lips. The seam of his mouth was far more unseemly, even though his worst crimes was one of omission and poorly executed knots. I wonder if the little girl with the sound box strapped to her chest had been invited into the marigold’s fold, brownies and nymphs and girls with tartan tweed skirts. All that yammering and begging of others to buy cookies, marled in cellophane and with pictures of shamrocks on tin and cardboard selvedge. And that cruelly cold February weekend, mired up to our hips in hard snow and ice, rubbing our hands till the dirt came off in brown shavings. Huddled like cattle around the mouth of the wood stove; the one we stoked with shims of wet wood and curled up leaves, dead and left trammeled beneath the tonsure of winter trees. There are more things unseemly than there are seemly, a reminder of man’s indifference to beasts, slaves and cows. Those were my poems you read, if read them you did, write and tortured from the trumpet of my ass. I learned ass trumpeting and writing from dear Alighieri, not Fedora or Nietzsche, or Headgear or Kanto.