mAN2*7

Another man with a pear-shaped head, hair matted in cornrows, spun a tale of abuse and maltreatment at the hands of the police, a litany of beatings and sharp invectives. Paranoiac gibberish, a cacophony of inarticulate voices, word salad, echolalia, he spoke in riddles and hexes, like a Skinnerian child in a wooden box, a Bedlam outpatient. Men with boxthorn hats, some molded out of crepe paper and glue, others pilfered from other men’s heads while they slept. Globs of dry sputum, nightsticks batting in feeble skulls, faces pockmarked with blacktop and yesterdays throw up. What were these men being sheltered from, certainly not spoil and privation, as these were all too common occurrence, a sort of impecunious insolvency, torment and misery, wooden boxes and shattered skulls.

One morning the man in the hat awoke abruptly, his heart racing, neurons firing like cherry bombs. He clutched the bedpost and waited for it to stop. It didn’t, it never stopped. Mr. Potato Head in sackcloth and Birkenstocks, feet conniving the void between agony and ecstasy: Skinnerian boxes, impecunious insolvency, torment and misery, sanctuary for the paranoiac and feeble. The man in the hat longed to see the beauty and genialness in things, not ugliness and want, which he saw against his better judgment, a judgment that wasn’t better after all. He yearned for joyful smiling faces with orthodox habits, teeth straight as arrows, hair glistening with gel, reconstituted from straw and fallow. He didn’t, he saw none of this, these things. He saw poverty and disfigurement, noses sharp as whittled sticks, eyes sunk deep into concave sockets, ears like curds, fingers bent into arthritic pretzels. He heard bawling children clutching threadbare dolls, heads shorn from necks, hair frizzed with constant thumbing, mothers with more ink on their bodies than words in the Bible, teeth chattering with inner cold. Corpse gaseous with cut-rate perfume, sanguine, freakishly pleasing, yet disturbing, insolvency, a discrepancy between what exists and what is dead, funereal wood. The antagonism and bitterness of savages, no way out of the circle, the enclosure, an imprisonment within one’s own body, a choleric transubstantiation of body, mind and essence, an existential famine. Everything is allowed, but nothing permitted.

A man with a shamble leg, a deadweight he dragged like a cursor, ate nothing but birdseed and apple skins. He coexisted with animals and rain. He ate from birdfeeders and trash tins, fighting off crows and gulls. He drank from cesspits, hands cupped and drawn slowly to his mouth, a cockroach with a fleshy mandible.