Friday, January 16, 2009

Farmacia Picciola

The legless man sat under the Waymart awning burbling to himself, ‘…the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, tossé dort on théier Égly mûrs…’. A man standing within earshot said gurgling ‘…lithiné Éperonne Aarschot, du dort théier Égly mûrs tossé…’.

The man in the hat’s hat was Tight As Dick's Hat Band. Next to the Farmacia Picciola sat the palazzo Hotel Victoria, home to pariahs, vagabonds and troubled lovers. Stuck between the mattress and the bedsprings, stippled and half-torn, the man in the hat found a love letter dated January 12th 1941.

My love for you allows me to pray to the
spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness
mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down
under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck
you up behind, like a hog riding a sow,
glorying in the very stink and sweat that risesf
rom your arse, glorying in the open shame
of your upturned dress and white girlish
drawers and in the confusion of your
flushed cheeks and tangled hair.[1]

He read the letter twice (stopping to repeat the words stink and sow) then placed the letter on the desk next to the bed. Loosing his cap, he left the room the way he’d entered, through the window facing the street below. Once on the street he clapped his hands against his trouser legs, pillows of dust rising and dissipating into the sky, and headed towards the aqueduct where he had an assignation with the littlest dogman who claimed he knew the whereabouts of the missing whore’s glove.

Kyongsang-bukto Pohang sisters were in cahoots with the Dartford Kent twins, neither the sisters or the twins knowing who they were conspiring against. As conspiring was fodder for the trough, the sisters and the twins accepted conspiracy as part and parcel of who and what they were. They conspired and schemed, plotted and connived, cooked up and hatched, never once questioning why and what for. The twins and the sisters lived in a walkup with two rooms in a ramshackle tenement house across the street from the Farmacia Picciola, where one of the twins worked as an apothecary assistant. The other much smaller twin stayed home cobbling old shoes and making paper boats out of castoff greeting cards she ferreted out of the trash behind the Waymart.

[1] James Aloysius Joyce, Love Letters to Nora Barnacle

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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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