Thursday, April 16, 2009

Ludovico the Magnificent

…a scream came across the sky! The legless man tautened the strings on his stump-ends, tucking his pants’ legs under his tailbone, the loose fabric frayed and threadbare. He wend this way and that, stopping briefly to pick up a copper from the mud-rued pavement. He said hello to Fionnbharr Goodbody, the proprietor of the Clara Offaly Offal Co., he and his sons, Finbar and Colm, responsible for picking up the trash and litter that circumnavigated the town. Then he ran into Santos Arequipa, the sole heir to the Arequipa Gravel Pit, Santos offering him a country ham and a bottle of Corkers’ lager, the legless man saying ‘…men like you, my dear Santos, are a blessing…’. Next he ran into Ludovico the Magnificent, with whom he shared a few stern words; the legless man finding Ludovico too absurdly flashy in manner of dress and comportment (in 1958 the legless man and Ludovico the Magnificent ran into one another at the 2nd annual church bazaar, Ludovico purloining the last Pop-siècle placement from the harridan’s sister; the legless man beside himself with greenest envy). Having had enough of Ludovico the Magnificent he punted eastward, the blacktop hotter than fried eggs.

Out of the crease of his brow he espied Karben Hessen leaning up against the Seder grocer’s storefront window, his face ash-pale. As he approached he could hear him bellyaching ‘…cunt left me bedridden and cankered…’. This was not the first time he’d got Mycobacterium Kansasii, a gloveless whore giving it to him in 1959, nor the last, as he had a proclivity for recklessness and unseemly behaviour. ‘…how canst thou see, Rancho…,where it makes that line this mouth…that thou talkfest of...’ said Karben Hessen speaking for the cankered and bedridden of the world ‘...when the night is so dark that there is not a star to be seen in the whole heaven...?’

Fionnbharr Goodbody and his two sons, Finbar and Colm, spent the summer months traveling the world looking for Offal companies. They visited a factory in Droitwich Worcestershire that dealt exclusively in curbside trash, the owner exporting other people’s castoff filth and throw-away. In Ústecký Kraj they paid a profession visit to the Kutn Hora Offal Distillery, run by a stout rare-skinned man named Stredocesky Kraj, the owner having taken his name from the city of his birth, the post stamp on his letterhead reading, 88.101.153.# (XDSL NETWORK-ADSL). After that the sky fell, taking out the littlest dogman and a swan.

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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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