Saturday, August 28, 2010

Vomolbo the Sluggard

He went to bed thinking of summer days that went on for ever and ever, his mamma standing at the foot of his bed saying ‘get up, the day’s half over’, his da laying the new sod in the half-yard, the sun burning his shoulders hot-chili red. Georg Ludwig Trakl lives in the house across the street with a half-mad dog. The half-mad dog runs in circles in the back yard. Basel Zarathustra passed away on the 25th day of the eighth month nineteen hundred naught zero, his remains interned in a butcher’s box in a garden overlooking the Overnight Asylum. When not sketching still-life’s, which he does sequestered away in the smallest room in his cottage, Basel Zarathustra tends to the half-mad dog’s evacuations; the half-mad dog’s master, Georg Ludwig Trakl, too busy tending to his own to bother with the dog’s. Féin Aust-Agder spends his days watching the half-mad dog running round and round in circles. Georg Ludwig Trakl’s claims that half-mad dogs are more human than people. ‘babies need they’re shit pulled out of they’re crap-holes, dogs don’t. And dogs make they’re commode crouching, not sitting on a seat’.

The sluggard Vomolbo sits all day looking out the window of his cottage, his peach-plump hands holding up the hammock of his chin. He watches Féin Aust-Agder watching the half-mad dog running in circles in Georg Ludwig Trakl’s half-yard. Across the alleyway peering through a fissure in the fence Féin Aust-Agder watches the sluggard Vomolbo watch the ½-mad mutt kicking up dirt running in circles, neither aware that the other is watching the other. Dogs shit and babies shit and men and women and morons shit. But dogs shit standing, babies and men and women don’t. Morons shit anywhere they please; sitting, standing or crouching in the corner. The man in the hat felt a cold coming on; the skin around his eye sockets achy and red. He didn’t care whether dogs shit standing or crouching, all he cared about was his achy red skin.

The man in the hat stood looking at his reflection in a puddle of dog urine, the dog halfway down the street running in circles, its tail serving as a lightening rod or a ship’s rudder (who’s to know which?) Across the street leaning unsteadily against the Seder Grocer’s doorpost the Witness handed out blue and white pamphlets, the dog circling his bellbottomed trousers. Standing on the corner, his feet shuffling like thrown dice, the alms man held his alms-cap out in front of him, the cap sagging with washers and wooden-nickels. Her skirts hiked up round her waist the harridan’s sister makes her way across the sideways, the sun striating her forehead with red lines, the dog raising a hind leg and pissing on the Witness’ leg. Watching from the middle of the street, the dog’s urine inching closer to his foot, the man in the hat let out a sigh, and removing his cap said ‘the dead do no one any good, especially the dying.’

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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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