Wednesday, July 02, 2008

The Pigwash Dogmen

‘…he’s a patsy…’ yodeled the shamble leg man, ‘…a real patsy bastard…’. Dejesus looked up from his sandwich and frowned, the corners of his mouth cobbled with pickle salt. ‘…we should run the patsy bastard out of town…’. Dejesus frowned a second time, his face red ruddy. ‘…we could pole the sonuvabitch, stick him downside up in front of the Waymart, show the lousy cunt who’s boss…’. Dejesus placed his sandwich on the bench next to his newspaper and sighed, ‘…no use in causing a kafuffle…’ he said, ‘…especially when it’s the day after Ship Day…’. ‘…fuck Ship Day!’ hissed the shamble leg man, ‘…and fuck Dory Day and fuck Tugboat Day…fuck ‘em all, lousy bastard cunts!’ At that exact moment a grackle fell downwards from the sky, a mumbly peg caught in its throat. ‘…for the love of it…’ yipped the shamble leg man, ‘…its getting so as a man can’t feel safe anywhere, cunt bird almost took my head off…’. Dejesus rose and scooped the dead bird into the cradle of his arms, the bird’s throat wadded and taunt, the mumbly peg sticking out of its beak like a dog’s tongue, blue and yellow, and red where the peg had got caught up in the grackles throat.

This is the fifth time you’ve done this five times, opening a tin of crackle-fish without plugging your nose. One more time, a sixth fifth time, and you’re done for. Let the mumbly pegs fall where they will, diem doyen, four for a nickel, quim-bread butterside up, a chill tat tatting tat up his backbone settling in his jiggery. The man in the hat’s Hippo-Socratus had fallen on poor times, leaving a stoic trail of naught and not naught.

A bluer blue sky; some say the proofs in the tu·reen, crispy crisp round the edges and filled with custardy me·ringue. The man in the hat preferred his pudding fat sloppy with mincemeat and Cantors’ jelly, the runnier the better. His grandmamma stove-boiled sloppy pudding in an old coffee-tin, skimming the boil from the top with her favorite wooden spoon. On special occasions she’d sieving icing sugar on top with a cardamom grater. (This is the seventh time I’ve thought this seven times, one more seventh and it’ll be seven seventh seven).

‘…oh the humanely…’ said the legless man humanly. ‘…I dare say, dare I, this is crazy, crazy indeed…’. Dejesus picked up his fallen cap, twisted it into a bolo, and let out a sibilant sigh, wary of the Witness who had crept up witnessing behind him. The Witness bent at the knee and spat, forging forth and firth, his eyes red as scabs. He felt a queering in his belly, his ribcage separating from his breastplate, an itching itch at the base of his spine. The dogmen arrived clod clopping into town, backs weighed low with juniper berries and whistle grass. The dogmen slept under a canvas tarpaulin and cooked jessant hare and bitter-root tea over an open cooks’ fire. They washed in the aqueduct and boiled the fester out of their clothes with rainwater lye. The biggest dogmen was called Big Dog and the littlest Not Big Dog. The man in the hat feared the dogmen like a child fears a barber’s straight razor, the slightest twitch ending in a swallowtail cut or a torn ear.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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