Sunday, February 01, 2009

A Porcine Sty

The Muenster family of Nordrhein-Westfalen made horsehair hatbands. The Muenster family were the only family to make horsehair hatbands that wasn’t related to the Heidegger family of Rheinland-Pfalz Trier Trier-Saarburg. Dejesus had a hankering for jellied pork and headcheese. All this nonsense, and nonsense it was, gave him a frightful hunger, famished for his ma’s porkpie cakes and ice-cold buttery milk.

His mamma and his da ate in front of the window looking out onto the front yard, his da chewing cobbles of porkpie cake, his mamma wishing she were somewhere else, far away from loose dentures and brown spat, far away from the window, away from mincemeat and terrapin soup, far away from deviled pork tongue and his da’s stupid jokes. His ma, Dejesus’ ma, hated plain things, things made with feeble hands and puffed out cheeks, ordinary plain things.

His mamma wished she could fly away to such magical places as Colchester Essex or to Riyadh Ar Riyad where the King of False Impetuousness holds court, or Genoa Liguria and Loures where woman wear feathered headdresses with cockatoo hatbands, or to Lisboa where one can discuss Infinitesimal calculus and complex algorithms with Augustin Louis Cauchy, or to Herentals Antwerpen for a lunch of asparagus tips and lemony sweet jam pie.

In a box of bric-a-brac, odds and ends he had collected over the years, the man in the hat found a letter dated February 28, 1858. “I find myself half way through life’s journey in Dante’s ninth canticle with Judas and Brutes, an amentia of gorgons and hellcats, a scurvy of traitors and swine, a porcine sty. The creamery’s in the eighth, where one can buy, at meager cost, a Pistachio or a rum raison, or a gonorrheal sherbet with a hint of orange rind and schizocarp. Hokum’s razor for the unshaven and tawdry, or a punter’s spar in the evacuee hole, an apostate with a disemboweler’s vizard. Bovine encephalitis, and a weeks worth of spat up odds and ends and ends and odds. No need for sackcloth jodhpurs or a lamb’s wool toque, this is a place of dirges and weeping, not a five star Fodor’s or Ulysses. And for dinner a most delectable placenta gruel, for the dyspeptic and those lacking in esophageal temerity, a gourmand’s wet dream with a post parricidal after eight that deliquesces on the tip of your tongue. Its not hard to imagine that hell is a place beneath the hell of hell on earth, a sub-hell or hellish hell. A hell of vassals and bondmaids, scullery whores with denticulate teeth and pyorrhea(ic) gums. A hell where crack whores, debauchees and smart alecks have money to spend, on such niceties as shoes, handbags and a balanced verdigris diet. A place where traitors and zealots, and men in mitered caps, don’t cast calumny on those lacking in grace, votary and fallow breath. Good orderly insurrection for the meek and misjudged, the drudged and begotten, the inculpable and gentle. But I dream, as I must, of an ecclesiasticism that embraces all who dare draw the breath and the courage to awaken each morning to this Dantean hell, without the aid of jodhpur, toque or Hokum’s razor”.

No comments:

About Me

My photo
"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
Powered By Blogger

Blog Archive