Sunday, December 14, 2008

The Lost Dogs of Hell

‘…its all squiggles…’ thought the alms man, thinking that if he could read he’d read one of the Witness’ pamphlets and see for himself what all the fuss was about. As far as sins go pamphleteering is a sin worse than kicking a lame dog or turning turtle on a blind beggar. Its never too late to learn a new trick. No stone shall be left unturned, so say’th the sodomites. Lazy troubled days spent counting coppers and half-dollars, broken cords and missed chance. Awaking from troubled dreams, someone’s calling, wait up wait for me, a yellow sun rising in a blackboard black sky. The alms man’s thoughts came out like greased lightening, faying, "You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite - not a woman!" Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure, like a horse throwing a shoe, braying. The alms man fell into a maudlin despair, his thoughts on capfuls of silvery change.

Winter solstice came early that year, no one save the legless man setting out into the day. Buckled into his pushcart, the stump-ends of his legs skimming the surface of his cart, he punted, skidding like a bandit out of hell. He saw the alms man cowering under a sheet of blowing snow, and to the left of him a man fastening chains to the bottoms of his shoes. Then he espied Lela stepping into the street, her face a karakul of snow, the lampposts singing. He saw a woman from Niedersachsen waving a placard that read God is the Pilot of my Ship and a man from Salon-de-Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, his lips atremble, singing an aria from The Lost Dogs of Hell. He saw all these people, and more, as he stepped out into the winterbourne wintery day. Thinking it was the day before The Feast of Octave of St. Camillus, the legless man pushed himself in the direction of the Church of Perpetual Sinners, hoping to get a choice place from which to clap along with the Flabiol Cobla Trio. As this was not to happen, as today was another day after the day before today, the square in front of the church was bare of people and hands clapping. He saw the Arauca half-brothers giving it to the Emilia Romagna twins, the fight taking up one whole side of the street. He watched the Bialystok sisters having it out with the Podlaskie sisters, the quarrel spilling over the curb, one of the Bialystok sisters tripping and falling onto her face. As if from out of nowhere a man with a bull mastiff raced into the fray, the dog snorting, the man chortling, the two, man and dog, acting as one. This had him thinking about his mamma’s porridge, fingers of dry toast and hard brown sugar, backhanded slaps and his da’s broken promises.

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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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