eUDAEMONIST sPOILAGE

Dogwood Wooddog

The dogwood tree outside my bedroom window spawns the greenery of late spring. Fucking stupid tree, weevil knots and heartwood, pensile roots and that fucking thirsting. Gangrenous olive grayish greens, septic with fecal purulence and douse. And the wind, so fucking mercenary and bad mannered, enough to send one hi-tailing it to a less inhospitable clime. Leaves like box kites, shaped into withered hands, prawn with arthritic knots and bone curd. Gonorrheal gray, a livid supernal excrescence. Sermonic nonsense, a down right shame of nature. A tree is not a Eucharist, unless, of course, it is the breadfruit tree, a fine exemplar of cornmeal eudaemonist spoilage. Fucking sugartrees, all that boiled pitch and lynchman’s noosing. I much prefer my dearly deceased aunt Alma’s raspberry tarts, sopping with drupe and the sweat off her brow. Uncle Jim, of course, saw things out of one eye; the one left after the sawmill saw cauterized the other one shut, suturing it to a bloodied orbit.

A fine and blustery day for corporeal mortification, a slap whisk to flagellate away the desire to have desire. Tossing a clog into the desiring-machine, stopping up the whole mess. A joint of lamb, sprier flat, dressed out in all it’s finery, the augur of a slaughter, laid out on a bed of greenery, shallots and zucchini peels, unction wine and a spirogyra of allspice and cumin. A portend of rain, slate grayness, a spectacle unto itself, a study in the study of study, a studious study in studiousness. A rat’s breath of wind upbraiding a sky menaced with rarebit and toast heels, not a marmalade pot in sight, no jams, jellies or compote of legume and schizocarp. Thinking thoughts without a tinker to sledge hammer notion into coition. Toques mitered to form the shape of your head, kilted to one side, a fluke bone without a central nervous system. Welcome to my world, a world chalked full of nervous energy, spoil and Gauloises’ ends, a syphilism of carnage, carrion and coition.