Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Maracaibo Zulia

Its late into the morning, those wee early hours when mice and troubled writers scamper round in the darkness; the mice looking for a deeper hole, the writer’s belly bloated with ribbon ink and words. ‘…off with your hat you scoundrel, the whores have all gone to bed…’. Maracaibo Zulia threw his hat to the floor, ‘…to bed you say, well we’ll see about that…’. Nothing more was seen or heard from Maracaibo Zulia, belly bloated writers having no place among genteel ordinary folk.

Feast days came and went, biscuits and spilt wine littering the steps of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner (children playing with sharpened sticks) the sun barely risen above the Waymart spire. Away you scoundrels; away with you! The rector’s assistant, his surplice threadworm tattered, angled his way past the congregants, looking for a quarter-moon biscuits and a swig of spilt wine. The blast furnace scowled under the gables, the smell of boiled onions and coke dust fallowing the post Mass air. Feast days were known to coax the worst out in a man, charming an otherwise slow-witted man into a brainless idiot. A man’s best friend is the sword he lances himself upon. The dimwitted and the enfeebled, the after-feast leaves no man unspoiled, not even the cutter’s assistant. He addled his way through life, so they say, a frail weakly man with a crumpet pocked face. But on feast days he came alive: the moon as calm as a seamstresses’ hand, the sun as sharp as a snake charmer’s tongue, the day his oyster, the congregants his time trusted friends, the rector’s assistant, his surplice spliced in two, feeding him biscuits and wine.

Today I will buy a pound of pickled calf’s tongue, a loaf of Quakers’ bread and a pint of cottagers’ cheese, thought the man in the hat, then wile away the day feasting on heavenly spoils and earthly delights. The lamplighter, setting the gas valve to 27½, lit the last lamp of the night, his fingers blackened with soot and oil.

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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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