Sunday, October 25, 2009

Chakra the Choker

He threw up a sour bellyful of candy floss and two half-cooked caramel apples, his da admonishing him for being a lousy son. He stood in the corner of the tent with his back to the clowns, his shirt a gravid of candy floss and caramel apples. The Hogeschool Voor Elementary school, across the street from the Voor Hogeschool Grammar school, taught not so smart young boys how to mind their manners, the parents and guardians of these boys more than happy to pay a full-size fortune to guarantee their children were groomed and ready to reenter society.

Chakra the choker lives under an abandoned warplane behind the circus tent. It is here that he takes his mess and hand-washes his raggedly clothes. As a boy he caught the croup and was ordered to stay in bed for the first seven years of his despicable life. His mamma, a whore of a woman with maize yellow teeth threw her son out onto the streets on his eighth birthday, having no more cause to care for him at home. The day after he left she burned his bed in a bonfire behind the house with his raggedly child’s clothes and a wooden horse given to him on his second birthday by the doctor who delivered him into this miserable of all possible worlds. The day the circus arrived in town Chakra the choker was sitting on the street in front of the Seder Grocer collecting dead swatted flies with the scoop of his hand, the grocer rubbing down a brisket with coarse salt and minced herbs. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dejesus tattling behind his da, his knees knocking together like mallets, his da scolding him for making them late for the opening act. Pocketing as many dead swatted flies as his pockets could hold, Chakra the choker stood and followed behind them, his pant’s pockets abuzz with half-dead flies and bluebottles. Stopping in front of the flap to the circus tent he pulled in his stomach, forcing the air from his lungs out through the holes in his nose, snot sprouting from his ears and out of the corners of his eyes.

Hidden behind a mollycoddle of bushes and scrub sat a podgy clown wearing a woman’s dress, his fingers bejeweled with rings, his head shorn down to the white of his skull. Yanking on his da’s arm Dejesus asked ‘father why is that man so unhappy?’ To which is da replied ‘pick up your feet when you walk, you’re making a fool of yourself’. Watching from behind a bucket overflowing with stale, berry urine Chakra the choker reached into his pockets and pulled out a handful of dead and half-dead flies and bluebottles, and holding them out in front of him let them go, the dead and half-dead taking flight and storming abuzz over the podgy clown’s shorn white head, the clown not flinching an inch.

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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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