Sunday, March 01, 2009

Gråbrödraklostret Orphanage

The Franciscan Ystad Roskilde slept on a wire cot in the Gråbrödraklostret orphanage until he was ten years old. On his eleventh birthday he went to live with the Cutter Van Dom Van, who had three thumbs and four ring fingers. After that nothing more was heard of him, his life just another torn page from the Childhood Book of Forgetting. People like Ystad Roskilde come into our life and are quickly forgotten, giving us something other than our dreams and sorrows to forget. I haven’t enough thumbs or ring fingers to count how many such people, faint glimmering stars, tailless comets, fall in and out of our lives, leaving behind nothing more than memories of our own dreams and sorrows, triumphs and defeats, coming and going like a warm summer breeze, no, a hell-bent wintery storm.

Friedensreich Regentag and Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser live under the Shoreditch bridge. While on vacation in Csu Cēsis, Friedensreich there to see Portico del Mondi, Dunkelbunt the Hackney Hippodrome, they discovered they both shared a fondness for tomfoolery and milquetoast. After a ribald evening of drink and whoring, Friedensreich spending the night with a lazy-eyed Latvian, Dunkelbunt choosing a swayback Prussian with the whooping who kept him up until the wee hours of the morning, both men went their separate ways, each with the knowledge that someone other then they had a weakness for tomfoolery, milquetoast and whoring. (No sooner do we lower our guards, our guards, dear author, then in you jump with this dross and piddle. How dare you!)

Soon sometime soon Friedensreich Regentag and Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser, the man in the hat and the harridan, the legless man and the alms man, the harridan’s sister and Dejesus, the Witness and the friar, will meet under the Waymart clock, tick tock ticking, the littlest dogmen setting the day on fire like a Roma candle, Oreias tootling from the trumpet of her ass. Such will be the beginning of the end, not a soul knowing the difference between a tootle and a clang (not even the choir master) the church bells ring ringing, summoning the little ones to come out from their hiding.

The man in the hat met a man in a hat, both men admiring each other’s hat. The other man in a hat exclaiming ‘…goodness, but what a fine hat you have my dear man…’. The man in the hat, his eyes on the other man in the hat’s hat, saying ‘…yes, and at a cutthroat price…’. ‘…might I inquire…?’ said the man in the other hat, ‘…where one might find such a fine specimen of a hat…?’ ‘…why of course…’ answered the man in the hat, ‘…at your finer men’s haberdashery…’. ‘…yes of course…’ said the other man in a hat, ‘…my apologies for asking such a brainless question…’. Reaching into his coat pocket the man in the hat pulled out a business card with the name of a dentist embossed on it, and handing it to the other man in a hat said ‘…a man who wears such a fine hat as yours, my dear sir, must attend to his dentistry…’. The man in the other hat, thumbing the card between his ring finger and his pinkie said ‘…right you are dear sir, right you are…’. When the sky falls, and surely it will, a hat will be a man’s best friend.

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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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